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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

One can simultaneously roll their eyes about slippery slopes, argue that this is simply banning obvious illegal activities, etc.--and be at least a little bit discomfited that a bunch of private companies can basically disappear someone from public discourse if they want to.

Mind you. Historically most people didn't have access to a platform anyway. And the record from at least some players like AWS is that their ban bar is pretty high. But it certainly suggests that big tech can decide to cut off some slices of discourse if they feel it's convenient.

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Private companies have been disappearing small business owners for two decades. PayPal locks your account. YouTube decides to kill your channel for copyright strikes to content you created. Amazon does - all the shady things Amazon is famous for. Apple kills your app because reasons.

And so on.

This is not about disappearing people. Or businesses. This is about disappearing politicians.

The real game here is that the mainstream media - especially on the far right - have suddenly discovered they're no longer owners of the narrative space, and their game tokens can be removed without notice.

Of course they're unhappy about this.

So if we're going to talk about concentrated media influence, we should be questioning the international reach and centralised narrative control of the Fox network (and others) at least as much Twitter or Amazon's ability to ban someone who was literally planning an insurrection in the US.

There is no free speech issue here, because the kind of "free" political speech we're talking about is very, very expensive, and only available to a tiny selection of headline operators.

Everything else in the social media space is noise farmed for engagement, and is unlikely to unduly trouble anyone who matters.

> So if we're going to talk about concentrated media influence, we should be questioning the international reach and centralised narrative control of the Fox network (and others) at least as much Twitter or Amazon ...

Yes, we cannot ignore the system effects of shared ownership and control. Many economists understand the concept of market power [1]. I'm not so sure that laws and cases around regulating speech have adequately explored the analogous ideas.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_power

> There is no free speech issue here, because the kind of "free" political speech we're talking about is very, very expensive, and only available to a tiny selection of headline operators.

I'm not following. Could you say it in a different way or perhaps with more words?

> the mainstream media - especially on the far right

What far-right mainstream media? In any case, why should any media own the narrative?

Your decision that Trump "Plan[ned] an insurrection" isn't well supported - He's accused of inciting a crowd. But why couldn't any similar narrative escalate (or be escalated) when all narrative are monopolised by left-associated media?

Most people didn't use to have a platform like Twitter where you could instantaneously reach the whole world, no. But the argument was always "If you don't like it just build your own thing". So, sure, maybe the NYTimes didn't have to publish you, but you could go buy a mimeograph or a printing press and put out your own newsletter, even if you had to stand on the street corner and hand it out yourself.

But now the companies that make printing presses won't sell to you. The machine shops that make the parts to build printing presses also won't work with you. Maybe you're supposed to mine your own ore and refine your own metal to build your own printing press?

In the long run, we're going to have to find a better way to deal with odious speech that by simply cutting people off and shutting them completely out of the public sphere. For one thing, this requires us to trust that the gatekeepers who control access are always going to be fair and just and only shut out genuinely bad actors. There's needs to be a process where anyone who wants to can still see and inspect the banned speech to audit whether it was really worth banning or not.

This is all still a special pleading that people are entitled to an audience of millions, rather then what they actually have a right to which is speech in public spaces protected from censure by the government. Not from private individuals.

I'm more then happy for us to decide that some parts of the internet should be public spaces, paid for out of general revenue and provided for the common good by the government. Internet access should be a basic human right.

But frankly, once you have IP-packet routing functionality, that's as much as I think you should be offered. No one else has any obligation to associate with you.

>For one thing, this requires us to trust that the gatekeepers who control access are always going to be fair and just and only shut out genuinely bad actors. There's needs to be a process where anyone who wants to can still see and inspect the banned speech to audit whether it was really worth banning or not.

How is this different from what we have today? Who decides what's really worth banning? Why should that person/entity and not another one?

There's no end to this, there's always going to be a something that is just completely arbitrary. IMO the only "solution" is to have a truly decentralized platform.

Well, people didn’t use to have a lot of things, it’s still a big problem if you ban certain people from a platform but not others. Those that are allowed gain a huge advantage.

It’s especially problematic if these de facto monopolies take sides in elections.

How is it any different than if I was banned from HN or an IRC channel?

These "platforms" are just large message boards.

Both AWS and payment processors are substantially different from message boards.

Cannot agree more, what Obama started in regards to politically weaponizing payment processors (both VISA and companies that interact directly with their networks) against certain industries and individuals in the wake of Sandy Hook is legitimately concerning. AWS creating DNS and routing features is equally concerning, personally I don't want to live in a world where platforms start to build, control and ultimately monopolize the infrastructure they rely on to exist.

Don't you think that's a little reductionistic?

Few people on HN have 89 million followers.

There's a name for a economic structure where corporations are privately owned, but operate in alignment with the governments political agenda and goals. Perhaps out of coercion, or perhaps just trying to avoid scrutiny.

Corporatism?

Italian Fascism.

Which has its roots in Italian/Catholic Corporatism.

Is "the Internet" really a platform, though?

I see it as more like the telephone: customers that want to receive calls (i.e. TCP connections) sign up for the service and receive a number (i.e. an IP address) that others can then use to contact them. And some of these customers choose to have their number published in a public directory of subscribers (i.e. DNS) to make it more convenient for others to find them.

At the most fundamental level, the Internet is nothing more than a vast and automated network for establishing point-to-point (i.e. private) calls between two parties.

Platforms are like nuclear weapons. Nobody had them before, now the countries that have them are more powerful than everybody else. I think the analogy admittedly falls apart if you carry it too far.

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