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Comment by gbrown | Hacker News Reader

> Which, it probably goes without saying, should scare the shit out of anyone who cares about the principles of the free Internet.

I worry more about Google et. al. killing the free and open internet by creating centralized walled gardens. I worry more about legislative attacks on encryption, about the overzealous use of copyright law and the sorry state of intellectual property generally.

If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.

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I worry about all of that as well, but the problem with your last point is you are opening the door for network providers to be the arbiters of what is considered radicalization or not. They shouldn't be the decider of that, our laws should. If the FBI tells them to shut something down with a legal order, and our society has concluded it is just, so be it.

In the limit what you would get is a world where speech is basically under the influence of people who, for all intents and purposes, are operating infrastructure services the whole world runs on.

Those downvoting me I guess feel they trust the arbitrary CEOs of a few large corporations to never deem their actions online of worthy of being censored. Just because you want to live in that world doesn't mean I ought to accept it.

Eh, curation and moderation is a valuable service that many are willing to pay for.

The issue isn't that service providers are arbiters, the problem is that there are so few service providers that one can meaningfully choose from due in large part to the difficulty of taking one's social network along with you.

If service providers had federated communication then it would be a different story.

I agree with you, my argued solution to most of the problems surrounding the Internet is regulation which will create emergent conditions to incentivize decentralization. The design of the Internet got us about 90% of what we needed, but we need our government to close the final 10% of the gap to realize the full benefits of the thesis of the Internet, much like anti-trust laws are a pre-requisite to realize maximal benefits from capitalism. (Not getting into an argument about that here, it's just an analogy in this very narrow sense of regulation leading to outsized benefits.)

What sort of regulation would you like to see?

I've heard folks suggest making it criminal to share or sell user data, for instance, which would be the death of freemium services.

I haven't thought much about the lower level network stacks but I think social media platforms of a certain size ought to have certain legal requirements to do things that incentivize interoperability or allow competing platforms to emerge (perhaps non-commercial ones.) Primarily things around APIs and data formats.

So a regulatory body that would enforce secure, private, and open sharing of user data between services at the user's behest? Sounds good to me.

Yep pretty much. If you support this, you should know that if this ever gets legs despite its surface level appeal you will see a lot of people not supporting it, because it's exactly the kind of thing that led to Cambridge Analytica. So that'll be a good time to truly ask yourself which side of this tradeoff is the one you want to make.

The big historical problem with this approach isn't "the arbitrary CEOs of a few large corporations" making unfair decisions (not to say that this couldn't be a problem now or in future). It's that governments (both good and bad) have pressured those companies behind closed doors to censor content governments don't like but which they haven't (or can't) go to the trouble of making illegal. This creates a huge accountability gap - these are government decisions in reality but can't be challenged in the same way they could be if out in the open.

Yes my argument isn't one based upon history so much as a recognition that the stable state of our society seems to be destined to terminate in one where most human communication is mediated by the Internet not physical space. So whatever power structures, incentives, and ethics we lay down now are likely to echo far into the future, if not forever.

>If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.

The fact that there is widespread support, let alone demand, for subjective, unaccountable censorship is frightening. You don't understand this, "war on domestic terror" will include legislative attacks on encryption? That bad actors always use, create and amplify perceived crisis to expand their power and permanently erode our rights? You can be certain that when the center of radicalization in Washington DC decides to whip up another war that will kill a million people, they won't be "deplatformed" (as opposed to those "radicals" who will oppose that war, who most certainly will).

There was this blogpost a while back which I can't seem to find, suggesting that the division is between:

* people who view democracy as a set of values, and if you do not share those values then you are against democracy.

* people who view democracy as the democratic principles (voting, representation, freedom of assembly, and so on)...

In my world (I belong to the second group) democracy is freedom of speech, the exchange of ideas, and coming face to face with values and opinions that you do not agree with (in fact you may find them abhorrent), and thinking that that's the whole point.

I found it an enlightening take on the situation, and thought that I'd share it here.

I agree with your position with one caveat. The people in the former category view democracy not merely as a set of values, but as a set of -their- values. If you do not share their values, then you are against democracy. Ironically this is diametrically opposed to the core concept of democracy - its much more like theology. Adopt their dogma, conform to their orthodoxy, or you are an infidel.

> If service providers want to deplatform centers of radicalization, I think that's ok.

The thing is: left-wing radicalization is tolerated by the platforms, but right-wing radicalization isn't.

The day the bulk of far-left idealists advocate violence and racism, they won't be tolerated either.

Indeed. On reddit, r/chapotraphouse was also deleted a while back because it was (AFAIU) a casual tankie forum that didn't mind calling for violence, or at least insinuating it

The bulk of the right wing doesn't, either. Your bubble is showing. If the right wing weren't so frequently excised from the public sphere, it might be easier for you to see the saner parts of it — but the private censorship we've been seeing cuts with a blunt scalpel. I think it's better to expose the worst of it to public contempt, rather than isolate them and let them fester together.

> The bulk of the right wing doesn't

Look at the parent I responded to. This is a question of extremes, not mere left/right spheres. The far right / alt-right is fascist, racist and violent by definition: that's what makes them far-right. No one said being a conservative is violent.

I think that's a tendentious and not particularly useful definition of far-right. But you're right that in context, your statement makes more sense.

Offer a more useful one if an obvious one comes to mind. Because the common denominator among banned far-right communities on popular forums has been the aforementioned characteristics.

The right wing is all over the public sphere. I have a pretty good idea of what they're saying and supporting despite having a lot of the usual suspects blocked on Twitter. I have no idea what you think the "saner" part is, but the saner part is no longer in control.

> The day the bulk of far-left idealists advocate violence and racism

You mean everyday?

If the projection makes you feel better. Groups are removed on the basis of that behavior, not where they lean. You'll never show an example suggesting otherwise.

Not remotely true. /r/ChapoTrapHouse was banned a while back too. If anything, they target the left more.

As an excuse for banning T_D and a bunch of other right leaning subs at the same time, and then blatantly ignored ban-evading r/ChapoTrapHouse2 for months. When they finally took them down for ban evasion, it was an excuse to ban another giant wave of right wing subs.

  EDIT: Original claim is left intact for posterity, but it is definitely wrong and I misremembered.

Reddit has its moderation oddities but claiming they target the left more is bordering on silly. r/WatchRedditDie is a great catalog of politically biased moderation.

No, it was the other way around. T_D was already dead. The mods had already locked it and moved to thedonald.win. Banning it was meaningless, they just did it to make the /r/chapotraphouse ban look more fair.

Here's a list of subs banned that day with active user counts:

https://www.redditstatic.com/banned-subreddits-june-2020.txt

Chapo was the largest by a large margin besides /r/darkhumorandmemes (edgy jokes).

And you are just straight up lying about /r/chapotraphouse2. It was banned the same day, as was /r/chapotraphouse3 through /r/chapotraphouse49.

I must have misremembered. They were flagrantly violating some rule for months, and the million variants of the sub name were part of it. But you misremember too. T_D had not been "locked", unless you're talking about the quarantine in which case you make it sound like the same people that did it as moved to thedonald.win. Meanwhile r/ConsumeProduct and r/GenderCritical were huge losses, with no actual rule violations to cause them, aside from a few AHS brigades.

No, people weren't allowed to post submissions there. That's what I mean by locked. I guess I should say "restricted mode" instead. From wikipedia:

"On February 26, 2020, Reddit administrators removed a number of r/The_Donald moderators "that were approving, stickying, and generally supporting content in this subreddit that breaks [Reddit's] content policy" and called the remaining moderators to choose new ones from a list of Reddit-approved individuals. About the same time, Reddit placed r/The_Donald in "Restricted mode", removing the ability to create new posts from most of its users. Since then, some users of the subreddit had moved to theDonald.win, a separate site based on Reddit's old user interface."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald

From Heavy:

https://heavy.com/news/2020/06/the-donald-subreddit-moved-to...

Reddit admins did the same to Chapo before it was banned too. They replaced a bunch of their mods, chapo just kept going though, with some new rules and stricter moderation to try and stay unbanned.

So, what I said then. You were making it sound like the same people jumped ship as implemented those policies, and in fact they were the opposite sides. And restricted mode isn't locking; everyone can still comment, there's just a whitelist of who can make new top level posts.

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