Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship? | Hacker News Reader

Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

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166 pointscurmudgeon22127 comments

Facebook's censoring of #Revolution via their claims of moral superiority should frighten the shit out of every free person on earth. While we still have it reasonably good in America, their willingness to suppress speech in good times doesn't bode well for people who will be oppressed during bad times.

The first amendment made it clear that not even the government had the authority to use their vast moral authority, as they exercise through the legal system, to prevent people from speaking and organizing.

But #BigTech has a nuclear option on the speech on the web's most visible ecosystem, social media, through purely market forces and are doing the bidding of a single political party, exclusively. It's not just horrifying that they amassed so much unchecked power, but since 2016 they're actively using and abusing it to suppress legitimate political speech in every nook and cranny they control.

Media owners have always used their ownership to push their own version of reality. I guess the difference now is that we have allowed so much concentration of media ownership in so few hands. Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell.

Or is this just the current story? Maybe media has always been as concentrated as it is now, we just didn’t notice.

Public social media is really fundamentally different from traditional media because it functions as the public square in a way that traditional media never did.

As such, it needs to be evaluated and regulated as the novel thing that it is. It's not a newspaper and it's not a telephone company, and it's time to stop trying to apply old regulatory arguments and mindsets to the new situation.

So far, attempts to regulate social media show barely an understanding of the problem at hand, but I hope we can recognize that there needs to be defined a novel regulatory framework to prevent tragedy of the commons or heavy handed ideological censorship on public social media networks

In the meantime, the value of privately owned and operated, and invite-only social networks (like setting up your own Mattermost or IRC servers) will continue to go up in relation to public networks, because only in tight knit private communities can anyone actually speak their mind.

I’m curious as to why this was downvoted.

Is it because they disagreed with some of the opinions? I was under the impression that’s not what down voting was for here.

Personally I think it is worth considering a social media platform, once it reaches a certain scale and depending on how content is distributed, as a “public square” or at least more towards a “public square” on the continuum between a private community and a large scale public one.

Your Undivided Attention has an episode which touches on this: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/27-wont-you-be-my-neighbo.... The rest of their series has some interesting perspectives as well.

Could some one who down voted this elaborate on their reasoning?

I can no longer edit the above post but it looks like the parent post I was referring to is no longer down voted.

Compaining about downvotes or the reasons behind downvotes is a reliable way to attract downvotes. The is expressly mentioned in the site guidlines:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Understood, thanks

Social media also has tremendous potebtial for manipulation. If Fox News or New York Times prints false allegations, they and their brand are on the hook.

But Facebook can just boost someome who holds that opinion, you would have the inpression that millions of independant people are thinking that, and would never know who is pulling the strings.

Social media been doing that since nearly the start, though mostly for advertising purposes via "influencers." Read more about some of the early growth hacks (which have included lots of faked engagement) for most media companies to get a sense of this.

It's clear to people who were online since the early days how much things have been changed both artificially and naturally (Eternal September).

One of the problem of such networks is permanency of something that we still treat as spoken word. If posts were ephemeral, they would present much less of an attack surface for various digital mobs.

Maybe there should be an option for users to limit their comment lifetime to N minutes. With N starting somewhere around 5. Of course, you can do this manually, but a semiautomatic mechanism would work better.

Self-destructing messages only really work if you trust every person who reads them AND their devices. They can somewhat limit exposure (especially in obscurity) but also introduce the risk of establishing unwarranted perceptions of security.

People were always able to reproduce things you said—by repeating the words.

They can even claim you said something you didn't say!

That is true but I think it can be misleading to apply this kind of logic when technology has fundamentally changed the economics of this kind of recording. For example, it’s always been perfectly legal to station a police officer next to the road and have them write down the license plate numbers of cars on public roads. Does this mean we should allow law enforcement the unregulated ability to deploy automated license plate reader systems everywhere to track all of our movements in real time?

Your perspective is a cryptographic one, where most flaws are fatal. My proposal was a softer one: reduction of the "I met someone I hate, let me dig in his ancient comment history to get him fired" risk. Self-destructive messages are far from perfect in this regard, but still useful.

If self-destructing messages become the norm, you will see numerous efforts to log and cache those messages for journalistic, political, historic and economic reasons. This is why I made the second half of my comment. Self-destruction relies on obscurity of the practice to work and can create false feelings of security.

> Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell

It has just been defined to mean 'thing that harms consumer prices'.

The question is: who is the consumer? The idea that Facebook users == consumers might not be right. Perhaps the real consumers are the corporations that pay for ads. In that case, some price fixing might be out there. I doubt that Facebook does its best to keep the ad price on the level of a perfectly competitive market.

The current situation is technically better than it was 50 years ago. However, there is a big scale that goes from perfect totalitarianism to perfect freedom and it is pretty much always a good idea to be applying pressure in the freedom direction because big institutions (like governments) naturally attract people who want totalitarianism.

And the first amendment is a really good idea. It deserves a spirited defence no matter what the historical situation was. Media companies shouldn't be looking to or pressured governments to decide what is and isn't acceptable on their platform. If the ideal is impossible then the question of how close they can get must be asked.

In this case the answer is "much better than this". YouTube is setting up for more long term harm than good with its policies. Maybe even short term. I don't care if they like it or not, academics are exactly the sort of people who we should be allowing to voice "crazy" and "dangerous" ideas.

This has moved a long way on from when the coordinated takedown of Alex Jones was a controversy. Where is the line here?

If #revolution getting censored by facebook is enough to stop the movement, then it was slacktivism to begin with. Or as Gil Scott Heron said, the revolution will not be televised. One cannot expect mainstream businesses to support a movement that will fundamentally destabilize their revenue streams.

Libertarians are at a loggerhead here. On one hand, businesses are meant to be free to make money however they please, and the market is supposed to correct whatever human rights abuses occur. But the market doesn't seem interested in actual zero-censorship publishing platforms, so on the other hand, free speech advocates are concerned with perceived overreach by the largest platforms.

It occurs to me that the libertarian dilemma you mention, that the unregulated market rewards businesses that restrict liberty in practice, is fairly similar to the dilemma Peter Thiel mentions in https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio... , that expanding the franchise brought in voters who do not vote for libertarian ideals. He calls "capitalist democracy" is an oxymoron, and implies that the libertarian must choose one or the other.

In that essay Thiel advocates for capitalism over democracy, and suggests literally escaping to the internet, outer space, or the seas to be free from democracy and find a refuge for capitalism. But I think the better argument for the liberty-minded is to remain within our jurisdictions and choose democracy over capitalism. The rights to vote as you will, and to speak as you will without censorship, and to assemble as you will without restriction, are protected in our Constitution and moreover are widely seen as civic virtues too. The right to run a business as large as you will and acquire whichever other market participants you will is not protected, and we should stop seeing it as a virtue. Who can say, honestly, that the existence of Facebook as it is today is a victory for liberty?

> Who can say, honestly, that the existence of Facebook as it is today is a victory for liberty?

Mark Zuckerberg, and the millionaires that achieved that victory for him (at cost to the rest of us). The rift here is between individual liberty and universal liberty. And while I generally agree that democracy is a greater good than capitalism; I also see a big difference between the capitalism proposed by Adam Smith and the "shareholder value is god" version we see today. I'm also not too keen on communism. As far as I can tell, we need a messy blend of the pure systems, to constantly struggle and debate about the boundaries between them.

A possibile solution is changes to section 230. I saw a good approach last year that you can read about here: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/washington-can-put-a-...

The key bit was a recommendation from the Trump DOJ, which said:

> The Justice Department, which last month announced recommended amendments to the statute, has suggested that Congress replace “otherwise objectionable” with “unlawful” and “promotes terrorism.”

Which is in detail here: https://www.justice.gov/archives/ag/department-justice-s-rev...

Make that change, and watch the definition of "terrorism" expand out of all recognition.

Agreed. Terrorism seems like it is unneeded.

Reducing Section 230 protections is a giveaway to Big Tech.

Remember that the thing Section 230 does is not that it permits you to moderate; the thing it does is that it permits you to moderate without taking liability for defamation posted by users (and other similar illegal content, but defamation was the motivating goal). One forum, CompuServe, didn't moderate anything, and wasn't held liable. Another forum, Prodigy, moderated a little bit and was. Lawmakers realized this created a clear incentive not to moderate, which goes backwards from the intended goal of defamation law of preventing defamatory speech. Hence Section 230.

You can still moderate in a world without Section 230, provided that you do so well enough to protect yourself from liability, and you have the resources to fight any cases that arise against you. Who has the ability to do that? Big Tech.

Platforms like Facebook will be able to cope with a weakened Section 230 just fine, while still moderating. They'll end up moderating much more aggressively, in fact, instead of deciding to host unmoderated content - because their paying customers are advertisers, not users, and advertisers don't want to pay to put ads on unmoderated forums. (Compare Facebook's advertising revenue with 4chan's.)

But it's the smaller platforms, like this very site, blogs with comment sections, hobbyist-run Mastodons, etc. that will have trouble. They, also, won't decide to post all content without moderation; even in the world as it already is, so many blogs decided to stop having comment sections because they become swamps full of spam. YC runs HN because it reflects well on them; if they were unable to moderate, it wouldn't be worth their time.

So a founder thinking of taking on Big Tech and making their own, better communication forum will realize that their options are to make an entirely unmoderated forum, something that people demonstrably won't prefer to the options they already have, or to spend a huge amount of time and money on moderating their forums as well as Big Tech does. And their potential investors will realize this too. And those companies just won't get started.

(You might say, if this is all true, why was Big Tech so opposed to the Trump DOJ's proposals to reform Section 230? They weren't, they loved those proposals. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/544707-facebooks-zucke... Remember that Big Tech is the enemy, and they control what you hear.)

I agree that without Section 230 a company is effectively a publisher and takes responsibility for all content on the sites they host. I feel like that section should somehow be tailored to promote the First Amendment to let people say what they can that is legal. If you want protection from liability, you should allow people to post what they want as long as it's not illegal and then remove illegal content in a Good Samaritan or good faith effort.

Then users of the big sites will know if they are under the section 230 bucket or not. Right now, it's very easy to just say that you're doing it under section 230 because of the Catch all wording.

Doing this would allow people that did have their content moderated and the company said they were operating under section 230 to contest things that were removed if it is not illegal.

This likely does open up the internet to a big troll fest, and it makes how algorithms rank things very interesting

How do you envision HN working under such regulations? If I spam my startup on every post (which is clearly not in any of the exceptions to First Amendment protection), are they allowed to remove my comments or ban my account? What liability do they incur from doing so? Must they also remove anonymous posts complaining about employment at Amazon or whatever, because those defame Amazon?

Just say companies are counted as general social media after some % user penetration. Facebook with over 2 billion users is obviously a general social media site and should therefore have similar restrictions on what they can restrict as state governments, they can't be about some special topic with that many users. State governments do have the power to remove harassment and porn from public areas, so it could continue as is minus the political stuff.

HN with almost no users can continue as is.

The day I depend on an $800B corporation whose customers are other corporations and for whom my personal data is just an asset, in order to be able to speak and organize, is the day I am no longer free.

No law (Facebook's revenue in 2020 was more than twice the entire US Department of Justice's budget) nor good intention on the part of anyone currently in a leadership role at Facebook can in any meaningful way prevent them from abusing their position, if they want to. Certainly, convincing people in Facebook's leadership to do the right thing right now is not a meaningful solution.

I agree with you that the problem is market forces. If you tell people that they are free to make as much money as they want in any way they want, the natural, profitable result is the conglomeration of power. The invisible hand will scoop up everything into one big corporation. Even conventional antitrust law - the thing that prevents Big Tech from becoming a single overarching entity - is an admission that "market forces" are not actually good for society.

I'm a fan of proposals like this to address not only the serious danger of Big Tech but the ongoing danger that the market will create further monstrosities in the future: https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

Don't use facebook

Not an argument. Twitter heavily censors, as does Reddit. Even picture sites like Instagram "editorialize" user submissions. There isn't anywhere to go anymore, the internet has become unfree.

Don't use any of those sites then. The internet is more than them

I know this isn't the simplest solution, but the only solution is to stop giving them your speech. If a child lights something on fire every time they get their hands on a book of matches (dating myself perhaps), you stop giving them matches. You're right if you bring up the fact that we've never had to deal with the entire neighborhood supplying the kid with matches, but I think my point stands. We can only control our own (re)actions.

And don't be mistaken: the "freedom" sites fired up as First Amendment outposts to service nazis who got kicked off of mainstream services by corporate overlords, they're "censoring" too:

https://www.rawstory.com/baked-alaska-trump/

"to service nazis who got kicked off of mainstream services"

People you don't agree with are nazis? You are the lowest form of troll.

There are actual factual nazis. Not everybody on the far right is this way, of course. But it isn’t like people are being branded as such when nobody is displaying swastikas.

>People you don't agree with are nazis?

You apparently need practice in reading comprehension.

But I do find a lot to agree with in reasonable people, so sure, I could defend that accusation for s&g's.

If it was one site it wouldn’t be an issue, but these companies actually cooperate, work together, or hire the same third parties to coordinate bans that span not just one or two companies, but all of the major companies and sometimes including payment processors, all in the same strike. That is the easiest way for them to avoid blowback, when the person has lost all forms of communication at once.

It absolutely can be, and it's absolutely something to watch out for, but I'm not sure that it is government censorship in this case. YouTube is choosing who to ask ostensibly due to their expertise, not because of government threats or enforcement.

That said, a few years ago one of things that kicked off the change from being relatively hands-off to more active content censorship by all of these platforms was being dragged before Congress and lectured and threatened that, if they didn't start voluntarily censoring content, the government would force them to. Those government threats, though they lacked immediate legal force, really do constitute government censorship. So there's an argument to be made that this whole new world of "voluntary" censorship by platform providers really is at its core government censorship.

> YouTube is choosing who to ask ostensibly due to their expertise, not because of government threats or enforcement.

It sounds like you've accepted the article's claim that YouTube is consulting government employees.

If that's the case, aren't any gov employees who collaborate with YouTube here engaging in censorship?

Imagine an analogous situation: a PI goes to the police and offers to break into a suspect's home and collect evidence, if the police will tell the PI what to look for. Accepting that offer and advising the PI on what to collect would be a violation of the suspect's rights, even if the police are merely consulting on the PIs voluntary actions.

That comes down to nearly-unprovable hairsplitting. If government employees are demanding action, backed by force of law, then Yes. But if YT is merely free to follow or reject advice as it chooses, then No.

I can hear advice all day long from experts, but whether I choose to follow or ignore, the consequence is on me.

That’s not really a fair representation of reality. YT and others aren’t really “free to follow”. There are implications for their choice. For example they may face less anti trust scrutiny from the progressive left if they continue to perform censorship that aligns to that political ideology. They may face less scrutiny when it comes to taxes or privacy laws as well. It is precisely because we can’t prove or disprove these links that there should be no situation where state employees ask for censorship (either hard bans or actions like algorithmic changes), period.

> we can’t prove or disprove these links

Then the burden of proof lies with the person making the claim that these links exist. Until then, they functionally don’t exist from an outside perspective.

A burden of proof exists for anyone who makes an assertion.

In reality, they do exist or they do not, but obtaining accurate knowledge of the situation is another matter.

All those twitter-like companies have surprisingly uniform list of banned topics and list of topics that get promoted to the front page. If censorship wasn't a thing, there would be a variety of opinion, i.e. things you could say on Twitter but not on Facebook and vice versa.

The conclusion doesn't follow from the facts you state. There's a surprisingly large number of people who like Coldplay and short-sleeve dress shirts, and no government mandate was needed to get to that state of affairs, nor has any government succeeded in curbing these atrocities.

Is there a law? Or are the platforms in question voluntarily using guidelines as guidance? Are platforms punished in the courts for failing to follow guidelines or implement moderation? As far as I know, the answers to the above are a resounding "no," and it follows that this isn't state censorship. It's the freedom of association, and freedom of speech, exercised by corporation-persons.

Corporation-persons. Is there a more dystopian concept in existence?

Corporations are NOT PEOPLE. They're made up of people, but the entity itself is NOT A PERSON.

While I agree with you, that's how the supreme court has interpreted the constitution.

Let's take the strawman out of the picture and accept the fiction that corporations are not people. But, they are still not the state. They do not replace government services in any meaningful way -- choice of what to publish, and what not to publish, is firmly the role of private persons and commerce. Maintaining social media sites is not the role of government. Ergo, this is not state censorship.

Please don't repeat ideological boilerplate on HN and please don't use allcaps for empahsis - this is also in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Is it boilerplate? It seems very relevant to the discussion, given that it's addressing a specific point in the parent comment.

Boilerplate has to do with how often something gets repeated, so it's boilerplate independent of where it's inserted; which is kind of the problem with it.

Corporate personhood is older than America. Without legal personhood, how do corporations own anything? They've always been treated like legal persons, because that's sort of what corporations are for. They're legal entities that can own stuff and do some things, like hiring people and buying and selling. That doesn't work without them in some sense being treated like persons in the eyes of the law.

What they're not are natural persons.

Exactly how many legal rights corporations should have is a very good question, of course. But people get bent out of shape about corporate personhood as if it's new or particularly Orwellian.

(Governments have always been legal persons- you can sue the government in court- if it lets you- and the government can sue you. The government owns property, pays salaries, and so on.)

The article suggests that government employees may be consulting with YouTube in these censorship decisions.

And that consultation would seem to be prohibited by the first amendment, just as police aren't allowed to consult with PIs to violate people's rights, even if the PIs volunteer to do so.

(In other words, it's the gov employees, not YouTube, who would be violating people's rights by doing this.)

Is YouTube doing that voluntarily, or is that consultation required by law?

It doesn't really matter given the quid pro quo that could be facilitated through such engagement.

There are more ways of implementing incentive structures and control mechanisms than you can possibly imagine, which is exactly why people are right to be concerned.

It's the 3rd option: YT follows off-the-record recommendations to avoid potential problems with authorities. There are written, but unofficial, per-country rules and there's a well defined process to squash dissent: ML models analyze videos and comments to find non-complaint users, numerous contractors look at the automated flags and write their summaries, corp employees, up to VP level, review the reports and cancel the non-complaint users.

Corporations don't have freedom of speech and it is misleading to suggest that they do. In fact, there is an enormous amount of legal precedent for mandated corporate speech. If you don't believe me, look at your nearest "nutrition facts" label.

That precedent is, in fact, quite pertinent. Contrast with various platforms' labeling of misinformation, a law mandating such labeling would be wholly consistent.

But we don't even have that. First, the government would need to establish that the people are harmed by the lack of labeling.

Nutrition Facts rules apply the same to humans and corporations.

If I'm interpreting what the author said correctly, it is an incredibly resounding no. It sounds like these platforms are using the CDC as a credible source for information and the platforms are creating their own guidelines for what can and cannot be said.

Being concerned about treating the government as a reliable source of information is one thing, but conflating it with guidance on acceptable speech is quite another.

Always amuses me when it slowly dawns on people just how much power a government can exert if it wants to. Facebook, and most importantly it's advertisers, simply cannot afford to piss off countries. It is a battle that is not in their financial interest. Corporations will not stand up for your rights. You want to fight the power you'll have to become tank man yourself.

Every social group eventually uses the weapon of censorship. It's not just government...even without a proper institutional structure , censorship will emerge as a thing that a social group does endogeneously.

Like just scrolling back and looking at my last 10 posts on HN , I had to delete them after a few minutes in order to cut my losses because they were being heavily downvoted and once you are in negative territory nobody can see your posts anymore.

People just crave and love being surrounded by people who see things the same way as they do, so after a person has been burned a bunch of times, they'd start stepping outside themselves and acting on what they think will sell well socially among the community.

Pretty soon everybody starts doing this and you'll soon have a community full of people who are worthy of an actor studio interview.

Hollywood, DC, San Francisco and the Valley are prime examples of this

Disapproval and shaming are very strong and potentially dangerous tools, but they are not the same as censorship, even though they overlap to some degree. (But what doesn't?)

The worst kind of censorship is probably the emotionless, impersonal, mechanical sort done on a large scale either by specialized professionals or by robots.

It's because those who agree rarely bother to upvote, while those who disagree downvote often. It's the same in real world: disagreement in form of protests is loud and visible, while even massive support is quiet.

One fix HN could make is to take into account the number of readers before hiding a comment: 4 downvotes is big when there are only 10 readers, but it's nothing when there's a million.

That's the best idea I read on how to solve this problem, which sadly means it won't be implemented.... :P

For the record I did upvote you!

In my opinion this voting system on public sites is bad idea. Simply showing number of upvotes / downvotes is sort of ok. Making downvoted posts loose visibility is the most fucked up implementation I think. It makes for heavy self censoring which in theory should be against the very idea of HN.

Personally I sometimes upvote posts and had never downvoted a single one disregarding how much I do not like it.

I know this one will be downvoted as well but I have better things to enjoy in life vs winning a pop contest on social media.

Related: Under India's new IT Rules, govt determines (of-course, arbitrarily) what is anti-national and intermediaries like Twitter and Facebook have to comply with deletion requests for such content.

Govt is also asking WhatsApp, Signal and other messaging platforms to store information about the "originator" of message (which defies the concept of encryption).

I've said it before, but it deserves to be repeated again: the term "E2EE" has been hijacked to infer things that are decidedly not within the remit of end-to-end encryption. We keep seeing the term to be interpreted to mean "fully anonymous communications".

>Govt is also asking [...] to store information about the "originator" of message (which defies the concept of encryption).

No, it doesn't. I realise this likely comes off as pedantic, but encryption has only ever implied confidentiality, and more recently, integrity of the communication content. Obscuring and/or hiding the information about the communicating parties is an entirely different - and in fact a lot harder - problem.[ß]

Please note: I am not saying that governments requiring to store (rich) communications metadata is somehow right or proper. Hell no. As far as I see that's a massive invasion of privacy. But I will object to the misuse of terminology. It's bad enough that the shorthand form "crypto" has been hijacked by wasteful funny-money peddlers. I will fight tooth and nail to not let the term "encryption" suffer a similar fate.

ß: At scale, that is. For example, using a numbers station will make it technically trivial (if expensive) to transmit a message from an unspecified sender to an unknown recipient. But enabling similar level of security AND anonymity to millions and millions of participants is a much, much, much more difficult problem.

I'm on record railing against the collective power of BigTech, in particular some of their leaders' public statements about using their power to put the thumb on the scale since the 2016 election.

However, here I'm not convinced there's a huge issue. As I understand it the videos are still available on YouTube, but the creators are no longer able to generate revenue from them (or other videos on their channel). I'm not convinced YouTube owes anyone the ability to generate revenue from videos hosted (for free) on their platform.

I would expect many advertisers would not want to be associated with "fringe" theories; as the money YouTube pays creators is funded by advertising revenue, this makes demonetizing anything that strays too far from socially acceptable norms the sensible thing for YouTube to do IMO.

Another example of state censorship via private monopolies was AOC calling for the Apple and Google app stores to ban Parler following the Jan 6 capitol riot. If a sitting member of the government pressures private organizations to censor others, it should be considered a violation of the first amendment. Leaving aside the technicalities of law, it is unethical and immoral even otherwise and completely in conflict with American and classically liberal values.

Glenn Greenwald wrote a great article about this titled “How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler” https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho...

People shake their heads and wonder how the Catholic church could have been so backwards, dogmatic, and ignorant as to jail Copernicus. Yet, here we are.

"At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins."

https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...

Censoring commentary on scientific data because it doesn't fit with the a political narrative is anti-science.

The rationale that well intentioned speech should be censored because may be used by people to spread misinformation in a way the speaker never intended is a horrible standard to uphold.

When scientists openly and freely admit to self censorship for political reasons, it erodes the credibility of scientists.

We seem to be moving to the idea that people can not think for themselves and so need to be told what to do by "experts", who cannot be questioned. Your ability to think critically about what you see and hear, is being marginalized and ignored, in favor of gaining your obedience.

Holding out examples of people who make bad decisions, is used to gain acceptance for the idea that no one can make good decisions, except these few ones, who you now have to obey. This is the new religion.

Unfortunately, the experts and dogma of the day tend to turn out to be wrong, at huge harm.

I'd rather accept that there is some small fraction of the population that can be easily mislead by manipulative misinformation, with all of the risk that entails. That's better than the coercive thought policing we're starting to see.

Except no one is actually policing your thoughts or forcing you to have certain thoughts. You are here on HN, freely expressing your dissenting opinion. The problem is that decision makers and possibly the majority of the public disagrees with you and are also free to express their opinion, and you think that makes you a victim. This post is absurdly dramatic.

So if the 0.1% disagrees with people and just removes posts related to stuff that hurts them then it is fine? Facebook interfering with elections is just Mark Zuckerberg using his free speech? So you want to move the world towards a corporate dystopia?

And no, it doesn't really matter that we can talk here, as long as they can control the narrative of 90% of people they can just label everyone who disagrees as ignorant conspiracy theorists. There is a reason the Church could control Europe for such a long time without being an actual government, as long as you control the beliefs of the people then turning all of those people against an individual is essentially the same thing as the government labeling them a criminal, power over belief is therefore very similar to power as a government.

Yeah Bret Weinstein is just like Copernicus.

I strongly disagree.

But their videos are still online, they just can't make ad money from them?

Is it illegal for governments to start their own social network? I imagine it could be a lot of fun. Have a section for the block, the city, the region, and one for the country. Create contact lists, market places, business and personal pages for each? Use the same laws we already have for public space? Am I missing something? Are toll roads the future?

The thing that really bothers me about Weinstein's approach is that, while he and his wife are scientists, they're exceedingly quick to assert their hunches as scientific fact. They wear their scientist labels on their sleeves but their thinking is far more ideological. In a recent podcast about fluoridation in tap water, they were talking about how they avoid iodized salt, because iodine is a reactive chemical and you don't want to OD on it. Ludicrous. You'd sooner die from the sheer quantity of salt you'd have to ingest before the iodine even starts to become a problem.

It’s no different from religious fundamentalists who put their own whims and ideologies into God’s mouth. They’re just replacing God with science, but it’s the same schtick.

Isn't iodine deficiency a common thing?

it was more of a thing before they started adding it to salt, yeah

You need to check, though, because it's not added to all salt. Yes if you buy traditional "table salt" such as sold by Morton, it is iodized. Kosher salt, sea salt, salt crystals for use in a grinder, and other "natural" salts are generally not.

Goiters. Not cool.

> podcast about fluoridation in tap water

This has been a staple of crazies since, what, the 50s? I'm reminded of the speech from the deranged general in Dr Strangelove: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/characters/nm0001330

You could fit that right into a modern rightwing podcast without it being out of place.

Or, you know, the citizens of hyper progressive Portland, Oregon, who voted down a measure to finally fluoridate the city’s tap water less than 10 years ago.

It could be that part of the problem is that you only see their public persona. Start adding all the weasel words to imply that you think that something is 73% likely to be mostly true and you lose an audience

Everyone (well, most everyone) could stand to examine their own problems (well, issues) with stating opinions as fact.

It's funny because that's actually literally the kind of thing they do on the show in question, for which there is apparently quite a sizable audience. For example around April or May 2020 Bret presented a model assigning probabilities for various scenarios of lab leak vs zoonotic origin of Sars-Cov-2 (the kind of discussion for which they were branded conspiracy theorists for a long time).

I believe the Latin name for your post is ad hominem i.e. "Weinstein is a bad person."

Maybe you could address what he actually said, instead of attacking him & Heather?

I watched the video [1] I assume you're talking about. The word "reactive" is never spoken (I searched). While I do buy iodized salt and I'm not worried about it, their concerns about getting too MUCH iodine are measured and well-spoken. The concerns about fluoridation are, too (that the evidence for it is very thin, and the fluoride in water is not the same compound as was tested). Again, these are not wild-eyed conspiracists.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1oPcYDFPRU

The thing is, you've had Nobel Prize winners like Linus Pauling promote vitamin C as a panacea. Or Dawkins use his biology credentials to say something about philosophy/religion. Scientists using their credentials to give credence to whatever their particular argument in whatever domain is nothing new. In fact, it is part of what the Weinstein's general critique of the scientific realm is. Perhaps they lack the self-awareness to see when they do it themselves, but in my mind, no way are you going to somehow paint them as _worse_ than any other PhD scientist talking with their credentials.

>Or Dawkins use his biology credentials to say something about philosophy/religion.

It may be hard to imagine now, but at the time several major religious institutions had hard positions on subjects his biological knowledge was relevant to. His writings were instrumental in bringing about the retreat of those institutions from certain corporeal claims.

You're conflating several things. Dawkins making philosophy hot takes is not in the same category as promoting Vitamin C as a panacea for disease, which is literally just scientifically wrong. As is Weinstein's claim about tap water, which is probably the offshoot of some sort of "the government is mindcontrolling us with tapwater" conspiracy which they have bought into because both Weinstein's have gone completely and utterly mad.

I don't see how this comment has anything to do with the article.

They are scientists and they made errors outside of their field. Unless you can prove this is common to them. I don't see how this particular error they made is relevant to the discussion at all.

> they're exceedingly quick to assert their hunches as scientific fact

I have literally never heard them do this - they are exceedingly careful not to in general.

> they were talking about how they avoid iodized salt, because iodine is a reactive chemical and you don't want to OD on it

What fact did they state was scientific about this?

> In a recent podcast about fluoridation in tap water, they were talking about how they avoid iodized salt, because iodine is a reactive chemical and you don't want to OD on it.

That's a total fabrication. Here's what they actually said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_iJaExg2_4.

To summarize their point: the fluoridation of drinking water and toothpaste is unjustified, because what is used is not the fluoride salt that has been demonstrated to have benefits for stronger bones/teeth, and on top of that the distribution method is absurd because you can't control for how much water people drink. Then Bret brings up that iodized salt is a similar case in that the distribution method via table salt doesn't allow you to titrate, but that it has nevertheless been a success that solved major problems. That they personally don't use iodized salt because you only need to avoid a deficiency, which is also achieved via a balanced diet, is a separate point.

Fine, so he’s an idiot. Who cares! It changes nothing to me. The entire idea of outlawing misinformation and fake news is absurd. Let him speak, let his viewers be misinformed, the world keeps on turning.

I wouldn't listen to the Weinstein's about anything but so what if they do?

Should they have their mouths taped shut? This is the society you want to live in? I just don't understand when someone posts something like this.

Not to mention, as all times a ton of what we think of as correct today will be proven false in years to come.

Yes. I have been a victim of this when in 5 August 2019 they snapped all internet and even telephone and almost 8 months long curfew /shutdown to prevent me from voicing my anger.

The often used term was "misuse" in "misuse of social media" which meant they were watching every Facebook post and tweet and people were arrested for it.

Guidelines here is an euphemism for orders. The pro-censorship faction in the gov isn't strong enough yet to openly censor media, but it's strong enough to coerce Twitter and the like with the passive-aggressive "guidelines".

Worse. Collusion and election inference.

A corporation deciding not to run ads on videos of a crank promoting snake oil is not a First Amendment issue. It is barely even a censorship issue in the broadest sense of the term. Very sad to see Taibbi reduced to this kind of totally empty hysteria.

If promoting a certain snake oil because you'll receive government favours, then it IS censorship, cf. all the Title IX unconstitutional enforcement following threats of pulling federal fundings.

In this case, GAFAMs are scared as can be from being "regulated".

Yeah I was a bit surprised when I read the article and what they're complaining about is being demonetised. Not blocked.

I don't think this constitutes censorship. They can still publish what they want. They just don't get paid for it this way. If what they have to say it's that important, does it really matter? If they're indeed scientists, don't they have a day job doing science?

I'm all for free speech but getting paid for it is another issue altogether IMO. Still an ethical topic worth debating, but not a free speech issue.

The amount of gray posts in censorship threads always cracks me up.

Please go on.

This is my least favorite thing about HN, because it strongly reinforces groupthink. I'd much rather have the number of upvotes and downvotes visible, like Reddit, and leave the styling of the text unchanged.

If you happen to have NoScript installed, you can add something like this to the My filters

  ycombinator.com##.c00:style(color: #000 !important; )
  ycombinator.com##.c5a:style(color: #000 !important; )
  ycombinator.com##.c73:style(color: #000 !important; )
  ycombinator.com##.c82:style(color: #000 !important; )
  ycombinator.com##.c88:style(color: #000 !important; )
  ycombinator.com##.c9c:style(color: #000 !important; )
  ycombinator.com##.cae:style(color: #000 !important; )
  ycombinator.com##.cbe:style(color: #000 !important; )
  ycombinator.com##.cce:style(color: #000 !important; )
  ycombinator.com##.cdd:style(color: #000 !important; )

Change the color to match your preference.

It'd be cool to have an option in the user's HN profile/account that they can toggle if they want to hide the greying out

Have the admins of HN ever defended their decision to grey out downvoted comments with some good arguments?

Because reading a text thread where the color of the text constantly changes is rather annoying.

Personally, I think that voting is ridiculous, but I see the point.

It's one of the strongest methodologies for making a discussion board addictive.

I think an interesting feature to add would be to have peoples' user areas show how many downvotes they have spewed forth.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines points to "no".

It's not state censorship. There is no law driving these takedowns. It's the problem you get when one company has monopolized video.

But serving videos for free isn't financially sustainable without advertising and network effects. So you're stuck with YouTube or some regional equivalent whether you like it or not.

That was an odd summary of the issue at the end. Taibbi finishes by saying this is a problem because it potentially allows corporations to influence state institutions via regulatory capture, which in turn would result in dictating what can be said on sites like YouTube that use, e.g., CDC guidance to decide what is acceptable speech on their platform.

That seems tremendously convoluted to me. Regulatory capture is a problem, but it's a separate issue. Government agencies directing private censors would be a big problem. But private companies influencing other private companies' moderation guidelines indirectly like this, hoping the target company doesn't notice - really?

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