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Comment by kill-procrustes | Hacker News Reader

This is a really underrated point. This whole site is really "tech industry news" with some hacking sprinkled in, but its name at least is based on the idea of the hacker ethos. That whole thing about decentralization, distrusting authority, information being free? A curiosity for how things work and logical investigation rather than letting someone else do your thinking for you? Disinformation is a huge problem and I understand the impulse to grab for the easiest available solution, but this is fool's gold and anathema to what hackers and Western democracies claim are the foundations of their belief system.

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I really can’t think of anything more alien to the hacker ethos than, “A group of unknown people at a technology corporation should be the ultimate authority on what I’m allowed to say, read, or share with my friends.”

Disinformation is indeed a difficult problem, but there are enough smart people in the world to figure it out without resorting to authoritarianism. We can do better.

> “A group of unknown people at a technology corporation should be the ultimate authority on what I’m allowed to say, read, or share with my friends.”

Literally nobody is suggesting this.

It's about freedom of Reach, not freedom of speech.

Right now, at this very moment, Facebook and Twitter prevent you from sending certain links via private message.

They're private platforms. You can send those links via many other routes which would be legally protected speech.

As someone not familiar with what those routes are -- what are they? Is email sent through Gmail protected, or is that also a private platform?

Don't worry, you're free to speak your mind so long as you don't actually try to communicate with anyone. Please take care not to express your opinions outside of the officially designated free speech zones!

Don't be ridiculous. There are thousands of competing communications providers. If you want to share content that harms society or harms the platforms themselves then you might just have to do it outside of Facebook or Twitter.

> They're private platforms. You can send those links via many other routes ...

That is a complete non sequitur. You say it's not about freedom of speech. Someone responds that, in fact, blatant censorship is occurring. You don't even attempt to refute this point, instead falling back to pointing out that the censorship isn't illegal!

Censorship reduces freedom to speak. That statement remains true whether or not the speech happens to be legally protected, and regardless of how wide spread the censorship might be.

Removing spam could be considered a form of censorship. It is removing the speech of others.

Generally anti-spam measures facilitate rather than inhibit freedom of speech. A sufficiently popular internet forum without spam controls would quickly become mostly unusable.

In this case, doesn't censorship enable freedom to speak?

These aren't singular global quantities. Such censorship reduces spammers' freedom to speak in order to preserve that of the other participants. Spamming closely resembles a tragedy of the commons (overuse of the system to solicit sales) and anti-spam an associated regulatory action.

The problem with such an analogy is that spam is inherently off topic - approximately none of the other participants actually want to see it. That's fundamentally different from this case. Whether you deem it misinformation or political speech, many of the participants clearly do want to see it. In fact, they want to see it so much that such information is consistently selected by the automated algorithms that are designed specifically to maximize engagement metrics.

We should be careful not to conflate wanting to see something with clicks. By that metric, spam about free bitcoins has more interested participants than much of the political speech in question.

It's not a non sequitur. Freedom of speech is not the same thing as a (nonexistent) right to post whatever you want on a private platform regardless of the consequences for others or for the platform itself.

I never said it's not censorship. You can post links on a number of competing services (or start your own), therefore statements like

“A group of unknown people at a technology corporation should be the ultimate authority on what I’m allowed to say, read, or share with my friends.”

are the real non sequiturs.

> Freedom of speech is not the same thing as a (nonexistent) right to post whatever you want on a private platform

Again with a non sequitur - I never claimed that it was. I said:

> > Censorship reduces freedom to speak. That statement remains true whether or not the speech happens to be legally protected

It's really hard to have a good faith discussion about the pros and cons of a nuanced issue when one of the parties repeatedly fails to make good faith interpretations of claims which appear to challenge their worldview.

This is refusing to republish someone else's speech though, rather than refusing to let them speak.

I can't force you to repeat the things I say, that's not what my freedom of speech is

They also prevent sending links to known phishing sites. They prevent the spread of malware.

Yes, this Trump-idiocy is malware.

Yes, this oversight needs oversight in the open. A list of banned stuff, with explanation.

Also, not surprisingly alternative platforms quickly sprung up to serve that audience and host. Though they might eventually get kicked off Cloudflare, and so on.

It's a really good analogy.

HN is fairly equivocal on the concept of walled gardens as a safety measure, despite the lack of accountability. There's some consensus that it's perfectly fine for e.g. Apple to prevent you from installing something outside the app store, or to put up major hurdles to installing anything unsigned on MacOS, because Grandma and Grandpa can't be trusted not to do something silly and get pwned. "It's not a hacker device!" is the usual refrain.

Yet the consequences of having your brain be pwned are so much worse. There are people who believe the Earth is flat and that vaccines cause autism; some of these beliefs can cost lives. Maybe YouTube shouldn't be a "hacker platform" either, but a place where people can watch videos without fear of being led down a rabbit hole.

At some point you have to trust adults and allow them to make mistakes. I get protecting children from bad information but adults should be trusted with their own lives. We should trust them to have a basic level of comprehension and logic by a certain age. If they don’t we need to revamp the education system, not cater to the lowest common denominator.

It doesn't have much to do with age.

It's the same problem as the "both sides" approach to anything [0] ("my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge").

This inherently just moves the problem to decide who's informed (or equivalently what's the required level of "informedness").

Many jurisdictions routinely suspend people's voting rights. Due process and all. Of course when it comes to giving them back after they've served their sentence the process somehow slows down. So I'm fully aware of the downsides of this.

I'm not advocating for doing that to any concrete group of people, I'm advocating for working on this problem. It's not the first time this has come up in history, nor the last.

The long term solution is education. Yes. Is there even a short-term solution? Maybe not. However I'm interested in the details of best arguments for and against.

And I'm not convinced at all that just because someone is older than X years they now have to be "trusted". After all we should protect elderly people from bad information too, they seem to live their second childhood.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGArqoF0TpQ

That's to say that adults don't need antivirus software, nor password requirements, etc.

By virtue of being adults, they must always be making the right decisions and thus can never be hacked

> It's about freedom of Reach, not freedom of speech.

What a snappy cliche. If you prohibit certain people from using the printing press but allow others to do so, then in practice you are limiting their freedom to speak relative to other people. To imply otherwise is either disingenuous or profoundly misinformed.

Everyone has access to the modern equivalent of a printing press. Anyone can buy a domain name and a VPS and "print" as many leaflets as they want.

Publishing on YouTube is more like, well, publishing. There's a middleman. They own their own press, they have a reputation and an audience, they bring the eyeballs, they make the money and they give you a cut. It has never been censorship for a publisher to decline to publish something.

Youtube isn't infrastructure.

YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc (and to a lesser extent search engines) are the modern equivalent of the printing press in terms of the effect they've had on how we communicate. A domain and VPS are simply not a viable substitute for access to mainstream social networks; to claim otherwise is disingenuous.

They are not at all similar to publishing. There's no editor. There's no approval process for the typical use case, only a retroactive removal process. They don't have an audience in the traditional sense of people paying someone to curate information for them but rather depend on network effects to maintain a monopoly on their segment of the market. To that end, they have more in common with a dating app than they do with the New York Times. The presence of advertising revenue is the only legitimate similarity I see to a traditional publishing model.

In spite of your claim that YouTube isn't infrastructure, it appears to me to have far more commonalities than differences with it. That it isn't (yet) regulated as such is merely a legal peculiarity from my perspective.

(And the above doesn't even begin to consider the effects that dumping VC and megacorp funded free product has had on the market. Good luck starting a competing platform when there's no viable way to operate a subscription model and your direct competitor has a monopoly on the relevant advertising market.)

> A domain and VPS are simply not a viable substitute for access to mainstream social networks; to claim otherwise is disingenuous.

Nobody is claiming this. That's the whole idea of the "Freedom of reach" thing...

Why should you be entitled to post lies on Youtube?

There are dozens of competing platforms that will let you post these things, you actually don't even have to start your own...

> Nobody is claiming this.

The person I responded to did, in fact, directly imply this. Recall that I had compared the impact of modern mainstream social media to that of the printing press historically. Directly ignoring my central point clearly places your comment in bad faith.

"Freedom of reach" is nothing more than a thinly veiled attack on (cultural, not legal) freedom of speech (and liberalism more generally) for the reasons I've already articulated in this and nearby threads.

Original person you responded to here - I did not, in fact, imply this. My thesis is that your analogy is broken. We agree that having a domain and a VPS is a poor substitute for a voice on a major social network; likewise, owning your own printing press is no substitute for, say, a regular column in a popular newspaper. It's incorrect to frame it as forbidding access to technology, when what it really is is a middleman refusing to do business with you. We can debate about the precise nature of the middleman, but the presence or absence thereof is the defining feature. You CAN publish without Facebook. You CAN'T publish (paper) without a printing press.

It also bears noting that the gap in access to publishing technology has radically narrowed - it is WAY easier and cheaper to buy a domain and a VPS and publish your thoughts to the entire world without any content middleman, than it was to procure your own physical press and set up an operation to print even thousands of leaflets, let alone publish something with global reach. You have access to - pretty much - all the same technology that Facebook does.

So newspapers should be compelled to print every letter they receive?

No. Those are the very definition of publishers, not communications providers masquerading as publishers when it's politically convenient for them (recall the dance around Section 230 protections).

If a local newspaper ever somehow became the central point of communication for a significant fraction of the population, posting nearly everything they received by default with very little to no curation, then it would be reasonable to reexamine the expectations placed upon them by society.

The Hacker Ethos is to build your own media platform and stop whining about someone else’s (unless net neutrality is at play).

It's generally a good attitude to have, but network effects are real. Disregarding them is a mistake.

What happens next is your platform either gets zero traction, or it gets ridiculed as alt-right conspiracy theorist shithole, which is basically a self fulfilling prophecy.

Don’t forget plants/trolls. People that don’t like a platform will go there act like the worst human alive just to get it banned or looked down upon. How many news stories now use proof of what you said by using “one user said..and another said..” therefore we have proof that this platform is or allows xyz. Its effective.

I'm pretty sure being critical of efforts to censor information is part of the hacker ethos ("information should be free").

I think this is actually why the Twitter approach ("some or all of this tweet is disputed") is a good way to go. You're providing more information—links to people who disagree—rather than hiding information.

Misinformation is more akin to me saying that I want gcc to ship my malware. No one is saying you can’t ship malware, but gcc doesn’t have to be your vehicle.

This is a classic problem of "who decides?" Unlike malware, lots of things initially written off as misinformation turn out to be true. I'm not going to argue that YouTube doesn't have a legal right to do what they're doing, but assuming that they're specially knowledgeable about truth and falsity strikes me as an incredible act of hubris.

All of that said, I recognize that disinformation and misinformation is a serious and tricky problem. I think the American right partially has themselves to blame for throwing so much mud at the wall. I understand YouTube not wanting to be hijacked and used as a political vehicle. But at the end of the day they function as a commons, and I think society is worse off when they censor content like this.

The idea of what Twitter is doing isn't necessarily bad, but its application has been terrible.

No it isn’t. How many hackers can you name who built their own media platform?

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