Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by jpxw | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

jpxw

Regardless of your political persuasion, you should be concerned about this.

Massive multinational corporations having this much power over our speech is not healthy.

If they can do this to a sitting President of the US, they can do it to every single one of us.

View on HN

It's hard to read any of these arguments in good-faith.

A single person has enough power to incite a mob that threatens the life of our government officials. That seems like "too much power" to me. A mob consisting of .001% of the US population threatening our cabinet seems like "too much power" to me.

Until we have a better way to figure out what causes that sort of conspiracy-theory mania, deplatforming is a million times better than insurrection.

By that logic, we need to immediately deplatform everyone though, right? Since any single person has that capability? Why wait until it happens, kick everyone off now!

On a more serious note, if a single person can raise a mob, that mob must have already been angry and out for blood in the first place which points to deeper underlying problems than just "this one person has too much power". The real solution is to address the underlying cause for the unrest and anger felt by the mob. Any other "solution" is at best a temporary bandaid.

Why do you say this as if that single person and his enablers haven’t been revving up this mob for years? The mob is angry about totally counterfactual nonsense that only exists because it was deliberately spread using the platform. That is the “underlying cause”.

Don’t confuse what this mob is angry about with all the actual legitimate reasons there are to be angry.

Everyone concern trolling over these things always brings up hypotheticals in an attempt to debate principals while fully ignoring everything that has actually happened in the real world.

Trump won in 2016 because the "mob" was already revved up and angry at a lot of the unfortunate legislation and narratives that already existed. He just capitalized and preyed on the existing outrage.

Yes, he and Fox and many other grifters added fuel to the fire, no question. But it's a mistake to just write off the millions upon millions of honest and good people who have been shafted by the system and are rightfully pissed while neoliberals and neocons crap all over them.

I didn’t write them off — quite the opposite! A crowd raiding the Capitol because they’re angry about nonexistent vote fraud and child pornography rings run by the Democrats has absolutely nothing to do with the legitimate concerns you’re talking about. It’s deliberate provocation spread using social media to distract from the actual issues.

If there were legitimate leadership that honestly wanted to address the issues you’re talking about, we’d be seeing debates in the Capitol, not a crowd trying to set it on fire. This is the result of years of party leadership that just wants to stir up emotion to get people locked into irrational loyalty, rather than actually doing anything to help people.

Trump deliberately amplified the nonsense and used it to build a cult of personality rather than doing real political work. He’s the one disrespecting the people who elected him in 2016, not me.

A band-aid? It's more like a tourniquet.

Why are you so scared of people being allowed to express their political power? Words and rhetoric is how it’s always been. Are you for censoring all political speech? Given the highly partisan nature of the censorship, difficult to not see it being politically motivated.

Parler refused to remove calls to violence. Calls to violence are not political speech.

You've been using HN primarily for political battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of which politics they're battling for, because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for, i.e. curious, thoughtful conversation.

I hate to ban an 11-year-old account, but I had to scroll back two months in your comment history to find a post about ZFS. That's seriously uncool. Between that and the fact that we've warned you many times not to abuse the site like this, I think we have to ban your account and I've done so. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Have y’all considered suspensions (temporary bans) for people to cool off for a few months and reconsider? I’d be curious to see how many came back abusing right away.

Yup, I think it's a good idea and probably worth trying.

Why is it hard to take it in good-faith? Regardless of one's political persuasion it should be chilling to anyone, especially the hacker types, to see how easily the tech companies can snuff voices out of existence. Who elected them? Whose interests do they serve? They should not have such power. We need real solutions to the speech problem and I fear that instead this knee jerk, performant stuff is going to backfire horribly.

Yeah but as hacker types people here should be looking at the fundamentals of the problem. I don't support free speech just for the sake of it. It serves a purpose to make society better off as a whole. The market place of ideas.

We well now know, and you can see it play out since the internet showed up - that content The ideas that win out are the ones best designed to encroach on the hind brain and avoiding the parts that analyze using reason.

Cat pics out perform everything.

Images beat long form arguments.

Machiavellian emotional constructs co-opt human brains, and a lawyer level eye for rhetoric, or blanket, unhelpful cynicism is needed to protect you.

If you actually want that market place to work, now we know that we have to act on speech that destroys reason.

The problem is who arbitrates which speech is good. If you look back at history there are many examples of speech that was suppressed because it was considered blasphemous or immoral only to later become orthodoxy. I think we are better off focusing our efforts on building back trust in journalism and teaching and empowering people to be skeptical and good critical thinkers. I do not think repression is going to work.

I too thought the same, but because I like empirics, I went out and tested it.

Repression works.

You make a few assumptions here, which are important to examine.

First, it was centralized power of the church, which was fighting facts that were not in congruences with their beliefs. However, today the positions are reversed, it is faith in unreal outcomes that is asking for credibility at the same level as facts.

The people who stormed America's highest houses were there because they believed that an election wasn't fair. Nothing will convince them otherwise, no matter what the evidence.

This is the essence of faith, and exactly why free speech exists. To allow human beings to be governed by reason over unreason or emotion.

Secondly - we know for a fact, that emotion is the fastest way to co-opt logic. You can take a look at politics at home or around the world for evidence - wedge issues win, logic doesn't.

If you aren't going to exert a force to counter emotional manipulation, then your people will be emotionally manipulated. They will be manipulated the hardest, by those who find that certain facts don't work for them.

Finally - Journalism is failing because of other reasons than trust. It was an unviable market a while back. Their last source of income was the classifieds, and craigslist alone put an end to that.

Journalism which is beholden to advertising will always have to compete with entertainment. Meaning that if its not more entertaining than a sports channel, advertising money will simply go elsewhere.

I can only see independent, government or public founded journalism as the solution.

I don't think any future generations would look back at conspiring to hang lawmakers out in public as some orthodoxy that we were wrong to see as immoral.

> tech companies can snuff voices out of existence

lol what? I can’t even name a single person who has no method of communicating due to “tech companies”. Even Stormfront is still online.

If your voice is not fed to other people's ears through a recommendation algorithm, do you even have a voice at all?

Someone in another comment pointed out that Trump can release press releases or call a press conference if he chooses, or give a speech from the Oval Office. Let’s explore that. If he uses the old media tools and goes on national TV to start directing insurrectionists to the next target, what then? Do we agree that they have a responsibility to cut him off?

The social networks and now Google and Apple are faced with an evolving volatile situation where the tools they supply are being used to foment an insurrection. They are taking steps to get ahead of what may happen in the event of Trump’s removal next week. Time is of the essence.

There will be time for more nuanced discussion when emotions have cooled. Now is emphatically not the time to try to have those discussions. We need to get through the next several weeks first.

The real problem is not so much that they can do this, which is of course entirely legal, but that a few companies have such concentrated market power. People seem to regard Twitter as some kind of essential service, but it's just fucking Twitter. In the days when there were dozens of book publishers just in New York, if one turned you down, you could go somewhere else. Now there's four.

I mean, it's actually kind of nuts to consider that Twitter has somehow 'silenced' President [expletive deleted], when he still has a whole press corps at his disposal and could call a press conference at any moment.

Agreed, I just can't take Twitter seriously. I can see it's value for quick and cheap communication but it's always seemed like more of a quaint narcissistic toy...

I'm pretty darn cynical about social media in general though and I know my views are in the minority.

> The real problem is not so much that they can do this, which is of course entirely legal...

Not "entirely" legal. All these companies claim to be neutral, and while I think they genuinely try to be, for various reasons they aren't able to stick to that standard.

The point of contracts is that you give up certain rights. On Monday, I can't sleep in all day because I've got an agreement to work. I have to set aside some money for rent because I signed a lease.

What these companies are doing may be legal in practice, because of the difficulties in litigating, but it's never entirely legal to make promises and then break them, whether they're through contracts, terms, or even marketing claims and advertisements.

When they make those claims, they voluntarily give up their right to say anything they like. Being able to give a right up is part of having it in the first place.

Twitter could change their terms to say, "we will ban or block people we have political differences with, or when bad PR is making us feel uncomfortable." Then banning people for those reasons would be 100% legal, because they would have reserved that right.

As opposed to massive multinational corporations controlling traditional media?

I'd be willing to bet almost anything that the latter have been far more demonstrably toxic than all but the darkest corners of the Internet. Because they have a huge captive audience and have been operating as toxic bad faith actors lying and pandering to the prejudices of low information audiences for decades now.

We don't just need a conversation about Twitter, or even about Google. Or Apple.

We also need a conversation about Fox and the rest, and the fact that a tiny handful of corporations control TV content, movies, music, book publishing, print of other kinds, and so on.

In the bigger picture, Twitter is practically a small indie platform.

> Twitter is practically a small indie platform

Just to be clear, Twitter has over 320M users. That's more users than the population of all but 3 nations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

They are the massive multinational corporation controlling media, and a small number of Silicon Valley progressives should not be trusted with that degree of cultural and political influence and power over the world.

Its not even a corporation its literally 3 people ultimately as Elon Musk pointed out just today.

I'm sure Twitter loves to be seen as a small indie platform because then they can shift the blame elsewhere when in fact they have far more influence than is reasonable for a healthy democratic society.

I agree with your point about Fox et al.

Actually, I am pretty happy about people taking the threat of far-right extremism seriously.

Last time we didn't take it seriously, 6 million perished in extermination camps.

I'd like for that to not happen again. I think that is a bit more important than what apps you can run on your phone.

If you take the time to study why and how the Nazis became popular and came into power, you’ll realise why suppression of public sentiment is so dangerous.

Actually, you won't find anything of the kind. Only if you wilfully set out to misinterpret history will you find anything like that.

Hitler came into power because he was allowed to spread his message. Because he was given chance after chance to speak. Because he was given a platform.

the argument you're presenting, at its core, is "if you dont give an evil person a chance to be evil then they wont succeed," which is correct, except how are you to interpret who is evil and who will be successful at being evil? and how do you do that fairly?

it seems to be an impossible problem to solve from my POV and removing comms from various groups willy nilly because we're too scared that humanity is too stupid practice critical thinking and not give in to evil thought is a slippery slope. there has to be other ways?

I don't think that at this point in history, right now, there is much trouble identifying who is evil.

highly disagree considering how much bs exists posing as fact/information.

The NSDAP had plenty of rags they lied to the German people with

It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle, or at least getting uncomfortably close to it. That's not allowed here—it destroys the curious conversation that this site is supposed to exist for. When accounts cross that line (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for more explanation), that's when we start banning them, regardless of which politics or ideology they're banning for.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site for its intended purpose—especially now, as seemingly everything descends into the hell realms—we'd be grateful.

How about far-left extremism? 100 million plus deaths[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

This is a bit hilarious because many of the things were seeing today from the left are exactly what the Nazis did. They thought they were correct and morally sound as they burned books and stomped out opposition voices. They turned on a part of the population labeling them as the issue with their country. They banned guns and eventually one thing led to the next.

You need to do a lot more reading on what the Nazis actually did. I'll start you off with a hint, though: No. What "the left" is doing now bears no resemblance to the actions of the Nazi Party.

Silencing a large chunk of the population because they felt they were on the moral high ground is exactly what the Nazis did. I dont need to brush up on that part of history thank you though.

That is an absolutely nonsensical argument, that twists both the meaning of words and completely ignores large swathes of actual history.

Do better.

Wait until you hear how many perished under left-wing extremism under Soviet rule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

The point is, you can't associate violence and death with either side of the political spectrum. Politics is a tool, not a causative agent.

I think when one side, and one side ONLY, sends armed militia with pipe bombs to storm the capitol, then yes, you can associate violence and death much more with one side than the other.

There was no 'armed militia' this is hyperbole from the news. They were peaceful protestors.

The beat a policeman to death, man. They BEAT him to DEATH.

They set up a GALLOWS outside.

They had PIPE BOMBS. They had HANDCUFFS.

What the FUCK are you on about?

Inciting violence should not be defended as free speech. In fact it’s not considered free speech. Let alone the fact the usage being blocked violates the very clear terms of service.

Inciting violence is free speech, by definition.

You don't think limiting free speech to speech that does not incite illegal violence is not a reasonable limitation?

Any limitation to speech implies that speech was never free, by definition. So, there is no reasonable limitation that preserves the "free" part of "free speech".

Let's consider some implications of what you're saying.

- Slander and libel are restrictions on free speech.

- Restrictions on any type of public insult, racial slur, hate speech or other derogatory speech are restrictions on free speech.

- Any restriction on the advertising of explicit pornography or illegal activities would also be a restriction on free speech.

If your argument is that absolute, then no, I don't support absolute free speech without qualification. I can't prove it, but I would assume that the majority of the population would rightfully take the same position that free speech should not utterly absolute with no restriction at all.

It doesn't matter if the majority thinks like me or not. That's the point of free speech, to let people think and speak freely. If you're against free speech, you have every right to be, but don't try to justify it by twisting words. Just say it: I do not support free speech.

Before pontificating so very much about what "free speech" is, would it be too much to ask if I requested that you learn the most basic concepts about free speech, and also figure out that actions by Twitter have no relevance whatsoever to the freedom of expression as defined in the First Amendment?

> would it be too much to ask if I requested that you learn the most basic concepts about free speech

If you think I'm missing something, tell me.

> figure out that actions by Twitter have no relevance whatsoever to the freedom of expression as defined in the First Amendment?

So? What's the first amendment got to do in this situation?

Free speech has limits, does it not? The US Supreme Court has ruled that one cannot, for example, falsely scream fire in a crowded theater.

I would assume that calls for the violent overthrow of the US government in order to overturn an election at the very least should be considered as equally dangerous as screaming fire in a crowded theater.

If you think Trump incited violence, that is a crime which should be decided in a courtroom, and not in Mark Zuckerberg’s office.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think what Trump said was incitement, or even close to it. Irresponsible? Yes. Incitement? No.

I agree that this should be decided in a courtroom. If Trump wishes to sue Twitter or the US Government, he is more than free to do so.

However, I think both his case and yours is undermined by the very, very strong circumstantial evidence that after his lawyer, Giuliani, called for "trial by combat" and he said that he would personally lead the crowd in a march on the Capitol on Jan 6th the violent insurrection actually took place is a very strong argument that he incited the uprising.

Furthermore, the fact that even as these Trump supporters were occupying the Capitol he said that he "loves them", that also undermines any argument that he did not incite sedition.

This is why social media platforms are anti competitive and in risk of anti trust lawsuits. You don’t get to twist trumps words and then ban the @POTUS account just because he threatens to create a competing platform.

No reasonable person could take that as incitement. So the only logical answer is anti competitive behaviour, or political manipulation/interference.

What trump did was incitement using carefully constructed language giving clear instructions while maintaining denialability.

There’s no way you believe he was doing anything else. You’re basically pushing for the denialability part by pretending to be innocently surprised.

No.

Trump wound them up with lies and conspiracies and urgency two hours before they went to the capital on his recommendation. This is certainly provoking unlawful behavior or urging someone to behave unlawfully which is the definition of incitement.

The defendants will unquestionably be using the "Trump told us to" defense.

Trump violated the terms more often and worse than regular people who were removed from the platform. Thousands of regular people kicked off for violating the terms and it's Donald Fucking Trump and Parler that gets folks in an uproar? Over things that happen all the time? By long standing service agreements? What?

Strawman. Who is calling for violent overthrow of the US government? Even one person? And on Parler or on Twitter?

Here is a great thread on Twitter that explains how Trump did. https://twitter.com/sethabramson/status/1347908845281095680?...

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1347908845281095680.html

Trump has been calling openly to overturn the election every day from Nov 3rd until Jan 6th, including when he was caught on tape attempting to convince the Secretary of State of Georgia to illegally overturn the election there.

Lots of people. Here's one subset.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement

> Who is calling for violent overthrow of the US government?

Does the crowd storming the Capitol chanting "hang Mike Pence" count? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW718KRYDtU

The President gave a speech on Wednesday, to a mob, in which he called for the violent overthrow of the US government.

It has been three days.

Have you already forgotten?

.... That over overturned decades ago.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

Here's a quote from the article you cited:

> n 1969, the Supreme Court's decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio effectively overturned Schenck and any authority the case still carried. There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".

I would argue that the elements of Trump's speech on Jan 6th satisfy all the elements in the lawless action test:

- Trump gave a speech on January 6th, the same date as the insurrection.

- In this speech he directed his supporters to march on the capitol with his support.

- His supporters did actually march on the Capitol, then proceeded to violently occupy it.

Regardless of Trump's inner mind, it is clear that his followers believed that his intent was for them to march on the Capitol while the election was being certified and forcefully disrupt those proceedings.

It seems to me this is a very strong case that Trump's speech did in fact incite the violence that occurred that day, and the very short amount of time separating those events make it easy to argue that one was the immediate cause of the other.

We are not talking about trump. We are talking about Apple, who is forcing other companies to censor their user’s speech and acting as judge and jury on what is acceptable.

Ah, let's talk about Parler specifically then.

https://fortune.com/2021/01/08/parler-violence-trump-2020-el...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/05/parler-...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/01/06/trump-riot-tw...

Based on these articles, it sure sounds to me like Parler users are openly calling for immediate violence.

And this is for the FBI, why is Apple acting as the government’s proxy?

This is just the same lame four excuses [0] to justify censorship and mass surveillance. Just replace terrorism with “inciting violence”.

Now the government doesn’t even need to get their hands dirty to censor the internet, private companies enforce it themselves with with impunity.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocal...

> The US Supreme Court has ruled that one cannot, for example, falsely scream fire in a crowded theater.

Very few people seem to know the context of that ruling. That line of thought was used to justify criminal punishment of two socialists from Philadelphia for hindering the war effort in 1917. Their crime: they distributed anti-war leaflets. Elizabeth Baer spent 3 months in prison, Charles T. Schenck 10 years.

Goes to show the extent "yelling fire in a theater" can be stretched, and has been stretched from the very first case.

You are allowed to call for the overthrow of the US government. Sedition is protected speech unless it is calling for "imminent" lawless action, as a result of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio. As a result, you are allowed to yell fire in a theater (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...).

Political affiliations don’t come in the picture when it comes to sedition and insurrection. We should have been unanimous in praising this move but unfortunately that is not the case

Apple shouldn't be obliged to host bile, but they have cornered themselves by being the only way to install apps.

> Massive multinational corporations having this much power over our speech is not healthy.

Who has power over my speech? I have iPhone, Android, Ubuntu, Mac and other tech. My speech is not limited in any way.

I can write down notes on paper if I want. I can write down content freely today as I could yesterday.

What corporation out there has any power over my speech, much less "too much power"?

Edit: I seem blocked by HN temporarily (for opposing viewpoints? I don't know but I can't post any more!) so to respond to the post below me here is an edit:

Trump should hold a press conference if he wants to say something. It can easily be streamed on the internet.

No president before 2007 had access to Twitter and they could still get the word out online if they wanted to.

Let’s say Trump wants to send a message to the country using the internet right now.

How does he do it?

Think about it, and then tell me that these corporations don’t have power over our speech.

He calls a press conference, and Fox News, ONN, the New York Times and a host of other media sources listen to the press conference, then publish his remarks on the internet.

Maybe he should fax some people while he's at it.

Possibly send some good ol' newsletters to people's mail.

Folks, this is "get on the back of the bus" behavior. People in a free society should be able to use modern, first-class services if other people can.

It is very hard for me to see the President of the United States as an unfairly persecuted, powerless individual without the ability to get his message out.

He's not. But he loves to portray himself simultaneously as a "tough guy" and as an "constantly and unfairly persecuted victim".

You need to do some light reading.

If it's important enough: https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/practitioners/integr...

If it's not, he can call a press conference which will be broadcasted over the internet.

> If they can do this to a sitting President of the US, they can do it to every single one of us.

I've seen this exact statement on various other platforms from conservative commentators. And it's basically horseshit. Now you're concerned? Seriously? Google accounts have been locked out with no recourse for years, apple bans apps left and right and facebook 'moderates' posts based on some interesting thresholds.

I find it disingenuous to suddenly care about this when Trump finally gets kicked off twitter and a horde of extremists are blocked from inciting violence against the government.

You wanted free markets? Here they are. If you have a problem with it, move to a different platform. Build your own platform. Host it yourself. Nobody owes you anything.

And guess what? Because of the republican led FCC, the ISPs can block your extreme right-wing website. Total freedom for the ISP to do whatever the fuck they want.

Parler was created in response to Twitter banning several far right personalities. People are more than capable of overcoming the big tech companies and finding ways to get their message out. Maybe the leader of a nation shouldn’t continually question an election and encourage his supporters to commit insurrection?

Apple, and any other multinational corporation, is under no obligation to host inflammatory hate speech seeking to incite an insurrection against the US Govt.

So why haven't they banned twitter for hosting Chinese government accounts?

Can you link me to a Chinese government official’s Twitter account calling for an insurrection in the United States while spewing derogatory hate speech against minorities?

If I had a dollar for every time someone made this point...

The issue isn’t whether they have the right to deplatform. The issue is whether they _should_.

Of course they should. Why shouldn’t they remove platforms that almost solely contain hate speech and insurrectionist content? Half the stuff said on Parler could constitute a hate crime, and frankly, they should have been removed from the App Store/Play Store ages ago.

I would agree. I don't think apple should be allowed to prevent side loading. And certainly not accessing things from email. But by all means, if you're running a curated store of apps, don't sell tickets to the white supremacist show

What would you call this?

https://twitter.com/adbusters/status/1288193793267625984

That should clearly also be removed.

Parler refused to remove calls to violence. If I were Apple, I wouldn't want them in my app store either.

Right, but they just put a huge target on their back for something that was already an issue....being a monopoly/duopoly. Whatever you want to call it nobody can effectively compete in the app store territory.

This is true.

The latest from Twitter, claiming that by Trump stating he will not attend the Biden inauguration, he is somehow insinuating that Biden is an illegitimate president and encouraging retaliation and therefore cause for a permanent ban is completely contrived to justify them doing what they wanted to do.

This is nothing more than pandering to those about to assume power. As we all know Twitter, Facebook, Google/YouTube have been summoned to the senate many times to testify over privacy and such issues. I am quite sure they are working hard to ensure the future administration is a bit more lenient.

We should be more worried over the thousands of other vocal conservatives and constitutionalists who have been deleted in the past 48 hours. This is silencing freedom of political choice.

EDIT: Downvotes shows that cancel culture is alive and well.

Not really, you can still choose to have whatever views, you can walk into the town square and shout your views, you can pass out flyers, you can do a lot. You can still vote for whom you want, without telling everyone, you can run for office, you can start a petition, etc.

The newspaper was never forced to print whether was sent in. A book publisher never had to publish a book they didn't want to, and a social media site isn't required to host your content. They're no political freedom being taken here.

Pretty hard to have a voice during COVID times without social media?

A few thousand people just had a big protest, I think it's easy enough. Also, covid-19 will end someday. The hot takes here are getting rediculous.

I strongly, strongly disagree. The "free and open internet" is a farce and only existed decades ago because nobody had any idea what they were doing yet.

We cannot allow people easy access to radicalization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com