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Comment by traveler01 | Hacker News Reader

> As someone who works in “big tech”, I don’t think we should have this power, especially when so selectively and reactively applied. We’ve all already heard all of the debates and I don’t wish to rehash it all. I’ve heard a lot of great arguments on all sides of the issue (and there are more than two), but the purpose of my comment is just to say that opinions within our community are not uniform. Not many of us speak our minds about it, unless we agree with the mainstream perspective of “this is fine ”.

I'm not a Trump supporter but all this ban wave seems very selective.

Specially since I've seen so many things considered as "hate speech" on these platforms that were not filtered.

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Even in the 'best' of times, YT's banning and strikes system is pretty awful. It'll ban channels for playing random static noise in the background while letting children see some very adult content. And that's considered 'normal' for YT. HN is filled with such stories and data. Honestly, at the scale YT operates, I'd imagine it should be worse that it already is.

Obviously, YT's ban on Donny is not random or capricious, it's very intentional.

But the larger issue remains that YT is a bad host to begin with and has been for nearly a decade. Maybe the larger YT community, including advertisers, needs a better choice than what it currently uses. Or a better legal framework in which to operate as YT.

I'm not a Trump supporter but all this ban wave seems very selective.

I just don't see how to make it less selective. The problems here are categories like "inciting violence" which are just not clear-cut. It's not like a copyright protection case, where it's usually very clear that someone uploaded a copy of Pulp Fiction, and you can set strict rules for the edge cases by saying "fifteen second clips of videos are fine, sixteen second clips are banned, yeah it's arbitrary but it has to be and now we'll apply that fairly."

For "inciting violence" the problems will be like, someone says "Hey everyone get ready to take action on X date. Be prepared! Be at location X! You know what to do! Tell all your friends! Remember your second amendment rights!" And none of those statements are inherently violent themselves, they are all compatible with the sort of peaceful protest that we want to encourage. But the emergent behavior of a whole lot of communication like this can be, well someone is using messages that are individually innocent to organize violent activity, and in many cases they just totally know what they're doing.

In a court this ends up getting decided by a jury, "beyond reasonable doubt", there are rights for the accused, and so on. But nobody has the resources to start a court case over every tweet that says "Bring your guns to the protest tomorrow, I'm bringing mine!"

Hate speech is like inciting violence but even more subjective.

Personally I think we will have an "archipelago" where there are many different online communities with different censorship rules, each somewhat arbitrary. I think the current situation with Trump is a pretty extreme one, and I doubt we will see a similar situation to Parler for quite some time.

Exactly.

If such a ban were to have been placed on Trump, it should have come through at least Congressional vote. Not by unilateral BigTech action.

Really? So Congress can force a private company to publish the President's content against their will?

I think a better statement would be if you want to syndicate the POTUS or VPOTUS or SCOTUS justices then like any broadcaster (who, let's be honest, is profiting from ads on top of what they are selling as a partial public service.) They should be bound by a contract subject to some form of arbitration. At this point those platforms have become the defacto public square imho. They can't lash out on a banning spree and subject public political figures to the memoryhole without some form of legitimate debate.

Again, Facebook has carried multiple live streams of shootings- YouTube has carried plenty of abusive videos and videos supporting violence and terrorism.

From a political perspective they are setting themselves up for attack with this response. Like, still waiting on details but Ron Paul got kicked off of Facebook. How in the heck did that goofy little ol dude incite this?

I also am beginning to notice that with every major act of terrorism in the past couple of years, may God help you if the lunitics used your platform and you were not Google/Facebook/Twitter. If you were one of those three you will just claim oopsie and move on. If you were a small platform then the entire weight of the corporate oligarchy will come down on you while never picking up a mirror.

I also think Fox news and CNN should be held accountable for their radicalization of both sides- hear me out. You have one half of this country that is convinced Trump was literally Hitler, not only that he also was elected by election manipulation via Russia. You have the other half of the country, that lives in a reality where the election has been stolen from them and they're being censored on all major forms of media. They believe the election was stolen by the Chinese.

At some point the media has to be held accountable. Fear porn may sell, but it has a damned high cost.

Please understand I love this community, hacker news is one of the few places I can make a statement like this and expect reasonable and civil responses. And a no way should anyone take what I'm saying personally, I feel the system is broken- I don't think we can survive as a nation with a fractured worldview perpetuated by a 24/7 news cycle amplified by short-sighted memes and microblogs.

Thanks. This is what I was getting at. Free speech might be protected by the First Amendment. Congress should have say before platforms can unilaterally toss out someone. One could argue the "my platform, my rules" argument, but dismissing Trump and letting other radical creators roost is just them profiting from this madness.

Congress banning some type of speech is specifically what the First Amendment prevents. This is allowed because YouTube's decision is the decision of a private actor. I'm not saying I like YouTube being the arbiter here, I just think the first amendment has done well by us, and letting Congress make some speech illegal would be worse.

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