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Comment by insulanus | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad to see this topic so hotly debated here.

After having read most of the comments here, most of the discussion is turning on the point of what the first amendment does or does not require. That's great - the law should be the low bar for behaviour of the government, corporations and populance.

The first amendment is an excellent part of the constitution, putting the U.S. far ahead of many other regimes when it comes to free speech. However, it's not the be-all end-all. The corporate and political landscape, the balance of power between the people and government, and the U.S.'s geopolitical situation have changed since 1791.

Too many people treat the American constitution like the U.S.A. Law-Bible - ever correct, never flawed, never to be updated. That is absurd. The last amendment was ratified in 1992, and I'd say we are overdue for a few more.

In your arguments, please distinguish what is legal from what you think is the right thing to do.

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We can’t have no moderation. There are a million reasons from spam to hostile government bots etc.

At least the US legally allows companies (ie prevents government censorship) to choose what they moderate, rather than almost any other country where governments can easily censor.

But I believe we can’t really have winner takes all markets any more, for political reasons. The current winners in these social network markets have basically aligned with one political side. This isn’t even a question any more.

So what will happen? The market will correct. At a minimum these markets will split in two with duopolies, one for each political side, but it could be more fragmented.

Just like in old media. We have fox and cnn, we will have Facebook Twitter and whatever the right will build.

It’s inevitable. Network effects won’t save the day when you are censoring mainstream right views. You can’t be seen to be against half your market. The customers will leave. It might take time, but they’ll leave.

Instead of calling them "bots", call them propagandists.

They are often real humans writing spin.

> At least the US legally allows companies (ie prevents government censorship) to choose what they moderate...

This directly conflicts with the following statement from the article itself.

> Twitter said in the report India was now the single largest source of all information requests from governments during the second half of 2020, overtaking the United States, which was second in the volume of requests.

This discussion _is_ about the US (but also other governments) censoring Twitter posts.

As far as the distinction between what is legal and what I think should be the case... I think this is illegal as the government is coercing censorship. It's certainly legal if Twitter censors itself.

As far as what I think should be the case... I don't think government should be anywhere near the public square, and I personally don't use these platforms. I'm doing what I can to move to more distributed platforms with better speech.

HN is pretty great, but I left reddit a while ago. If a private co censors too much for me, then I have the choice to leave.

If the government enforces censorship, then I'm toast.

> This discussion _is_ about the US (but also other governments) censoring Twitter posts.

Presumably the US is genuinely asking Twitter to take down posts, not invoking any hard power to coerce Twitter. That runs counter to free speech ideals, but it's not a strict violation of Twitter's rights. If there is a victim, it's the folks whose Tweets are being taken down, insofar as the de facto public square is privately owned and thus not subject to first amendment protections (Twitter can legally, unilaterally censor the de facto public square).

> Presumably the US is genuinely asking

This is probably the first honest argument I've seen in this thread about whether this is legal or not.

Personally I believe this is not the case. I believe there is a lot more coercion behind these asks then we're seeing, but that aside I also agree that.

> That runs counter to free speech ideals

and

> Twitter can legally, unilaterally censor the de facto public square

but, shouldn't we be wary of even a non-coercive relationship like this where government and corporations enter into mutually beneficial monopoly supporting relationships?

All that said, I will be firing up a Mastadon server shortly. (It's been on my bucket list for a bit now.)

Twitter is not the public square. It's not even a public utility. It's a private company. It's more akin to a newspaper's "letters to the editor" section. Users send X to Twitter, and Twitter chooses to distribute X to its other users. A real public square does not have an intermediary with moderation power.

We don't have an Internet equivalent to the public square. Maybe 4chan, but even they moderate (child porn, etc.), and technically, your messages still get posted through an intermediary. Maybe there are darknet sites that are true "unfiltered, unhosted, broadcast to everyone" social media, I don't know. Maybe SMS is the public square, but there's (thankfully) no way to broadcast an SMS to the world.

Whether or not Twitter the platform has some technical feature in common with the public squares of olde is missing the point. The concern is that a significant volume of our national dialogue (and indeed the dialogues of many nations) is hosted on Twitter, to the extent that many people (including the very same people who think Twitter's "censorship" is a Very Good Thing) are concerned that Twitter is a vector through which foreign state actors can and have indirectly influence democratic elections (if state actors can do it indirectly then that implies that Twitter the company can do it directly). Even if you aren't convinced that Russia used Twitter to game the 2016 POTUS election, there's a larger umbrella of concerns about the outsized influence of social media companies (for example, the various arguments levied in The Social Dilemma).

I agree that we can't have zero moderation, but we should also recognize that large social media platforms have become the de facto public square and while it is lawful for them to moderate content, it's detrimental to our society. If I had to choose between trusting Twitter to moderate such a large volume of our society's speech and flat-footedly regulating them like a public utility to the extent that their quality drops and they vanish into the ether whence they came, I'd certainly choose the latter. That said, I think we can find middlegrounds that provide for high quality digital content while also allowing people to have robust speech freedoms in practice.

One such incarnation which is particularly interesting to me is the idea of regulating compliance with an open protocol such that Twitter doesn't own your social network, but rather they are simply one option through which you can access that social network. If you like Twitter's monetization model and moderation, great. If you don't, you can trivially go elsewhere (i.e., you don't have to leave your connections and conversations behind--you can continue to participate in the same conversations from your new social media portal) or even build your own.

> we should also recognize that large social media platforms have become the de facto public square and while it is lawful for them to moderate content, it's detrimental to our society.

I don't think you appreciate how controversial this assertion is.

In certain circles, progress is seen as unattainable without a collectivist commitment to defining and suppressing harmful speech, and a de facto public square controlled by private entities as a welcome opportunity to do an end run around an onerous, entrenched legal obstacle in the first amendment.

I appreciate this but I also suspect that many of the people who advocate for this kind of private public square aren’t thinking through the implications from the perspective of their own professed ideals. In general, many anti-free-speech, pro Twitter Inc folks are left wing and left wing ideals don’t align well with privatizing the regulation of civil liberties. I think this is more of an emotional reaction on their part than a principled stance.

> but we should also recognize that large social media platforms have become the de facto public square and while it is lawful for them to moderate content, it's detrimental to our society.

Strong disagree. Social media platforms are no different from any other media platform. Should a newspaper or tv station be required to host official communications from a government administration? It is absolutely vital to democracy that they should be free to avoid publishing anything that they don't want to publish for any reason whatsoever including reasons we disagree with. Otherwise, every public sphere would devolve into state-controlled media.

The same restrictions must also hold true for communications from private citizens, especially given the global trend towards oligarchy.

> Strong disagree. Social media platforms are no different from any other media platform. Should a newspaper or tv station be required to host official communications from a government administration? It is absolutely vital to democracy that they should be free to avoid publishing anything that they don't want to publish for any reason whatsoever including reasons we disagree with. Otherwise, every public sphere would devolve into state-controlled media.

My specific proposal doesn’t require compelling social media companies to publish anything. My proposal only turns social media companies into portals into an open platform, so you can leave Twitter or whomever without leaving your network (conversations, connections, etc).

But even if we can’t muster that, then we should regulate them as utilities—that’s really all they are anyway: plumbing for communication (hence the “network” in “social network”). We will still have the same free press that we’ve always had—nothing is lost, but we don’t have the threat of a tiny cabal of companies with outsized influence over our democracies.

But again, that’s a last resort. Before that extreme, we could even do some good ole fashioned antitrust action to bust these social media giants up into smaller actors, or simply enact stronger privacy legislation and let the leeches atrophy on their own.

> My specific proposal doesn’t require compelling social media companies to publish anything. My proposal only turns social media companies into portals into an open platform, so you can leave Twitter or whomever without leaving your network (conversations, connections, etc).

Take a good, hard look at WeChat. You just proposed that we force the plethora of existing social media platforms to transform themselves into WeChat.gov portals.

> we should regulate them as utilities

We tried that with the only elements of the internet that actually are utilities: the networks themselves. It was called Network Neutrality, and the Trump administration killed it as soon as they took office on the grounds that it was government overreach.

> Take a good, hard look at WeChat. You just proposed that we force the plethora of existing social media platforms to transform themselves into WeChat.gov portals.

No, that's obviously only true if we picked a protocol that was designed to support mass surveillance (a la WeChat), but there's no reason said protocol needs to be anti-privacy. This is baseless FUD.

> We tried that with the only elements of the internet that actually are utilities: the networks themselves. It was called Network Neutrality, and the Trump administration killed it as soon as they took office on the grounds that it was government overreach.

I don't think the Trump administration killed it because it wasn't working out very well in practice; they killed it because of an ideological disagreement (or more cynically, corruption). Which is to say, this is a political problem and indeed my proposal, like any proposal that pits the people against wealthy special interests, is subject to the same problem--we need to fix our national corruption problem, but that's an entirely different conversation so I'm ignoring it to focus on the practical aspects.

> We can’t have no moderation. There are a million reasons from spam to hostile government bots etc.

Why not though? Why can't I choose how I moderate spam? If platforms like Twitter and Facebook want to protect users from spam content, why can't there be law requiring any moderation operate as a opt-in / opt-out system so long as the content is otherwise legal? If a platform doesn't want to do this that's fine and we can just treat them as a publisher.

I'm sure some people will complain that Twitter is biased in how they operate their spam filters, but for me this is fine so long as whatever they're doing to curate the content is entirely optional.

Moderation still exists in your system, presumably as a default-on.

First there's the legal set of things: doxxing, child porn, copyright violations, revenge porn, etc.

Then there are softer aspects: disinformation, threats, abusive language that are often easier to block than for the company or for society to 'climb back out of' or address post-facto.

Twitter and other platforms are built for viral marketing -- not all content should have the privilege of viral marketing. Then as a product, Twitter and others might want to think about the minimum experience level. What kind of demographics are going to be present over time, if every woman-identifying account, if they peek at the default-moderated content, see 1000s of abusive and hostile tweets directed at them?

Platform/publisher isn't a thing, that's a made up talking point.

Even if it were a "publisher" they can still refuse to publish your content, they can remove the content, and can edit the content. Publishers are not forced to do business with you.

"Curating content" is their business. That's how social media operates. You and I don't get to tell them that they can't run their business simply because we don't agree with their politics. You have to prove a significant public harm that's not protected. They're not a monopoly, nor do they control the infrastructure for social media. Nor do they have power over preventing you from creating your own.

> Platform/publisher isn't a thing, that's a made up talking point.

It mirrors an offline legal distinction that has a huge impact on liability. A printer is not liable for what they print because they don't exert editorial control while a publisher is because they do.

There are specific legal protections for online platforms that allow they to exert some moderation without qualifying as a publisher for liability purposes.

Thus the platform/publisher distinction is extremely relecant when discussing exactly how much moderation (and especially curration) can happen before a platform should assume the legal liabilities of a publisher.

True, but if I'm a publisher my liability would arise from publishing false stories like 'shkkmo distributes ransomware' or incitement like 'push shkkmo into traffic.' On the other hand, if I am the editor/publisher of Dweeb Aficionado I am under no obligation to give you editorial space or sell you advertising, except (in US law) if you can show that I am systematically excluding advertising from a class of people like you which enjoys some sort of legal protection.

I fail to see the relevance of this. As a publisher exerting editorial control, you also assume some liability for your content as that editorial control is a form of speech.

Printers who exert no editorial control are not engaging in speech and are thus not liable for the content they print (same with the ink, paper and printing press manufacturers.)

The first sentence in my comment above defines the scope and limits of my liability.

Publishers aren't special, they have 1st amendment rights that protect them as well. Publishers are not automatically liable for their published works. You have to prove a causal link between the publisher and something in the book itself. And then you have to prove a harm that goes beyond the limits of 1st amendment protections. There's conflicting precedence on it, courts disagree on the limits of 1st amendment and how it applies to publishers. More commonly, it's the author that is targeted, because they wrote the work, not the publisher.

>Why can't I choose how I moderate spam?

The scale of work there would make that more than a full time job. I can't imagine very many if any people want to do that...

Disks aren't free. You'd need to come up with something preventing a bad actor from using Twitter as a personal multi-exabyte storage service. Simple rate-limiting won't work due to Sybil attacks.

Why can't I choose how I moderate spam?

Well, you can run your own mailserver and likewise some sort of social stream. But it's not so much about what you can or can't do, as the much larger number of people who can't or don't want to run their own communications infrastructure but also don't want to be inundated with spam.

Consider the parallel of robocalls, ie phone spam. People regularly complain to their phone provider and/or the FTC about being deluged with unwanted calls, many of which are scams.

> The current winners in these social network markets have basically aligned with one political side. This isn’t even a question any more.

In terms of funding of political parties, this is pretty far from the truth.

> The current winners in these social network markets have basically aligned with one political side. This isn’t even a question any more.

Sure it is. Corporations are not hive mind beings, they make arbitrary rules then enforce them arbitrarily based on who's looking at the data feed when they see borderline TOS-breaking content.

>Just like in old media. We have fox and cnn, we will have Facebook Twitter and whatever the right will build.

I don't think it's destined or even likely to end up this way. The reason there's no major conservatively aligned social media is because the vast majority of users don't care much about politics. They may vote Republican, but they don't follow Republicans on Twitter, and they ignore politically heated debates on Facebook. The number of conservatives who want to talk politics with other conservatives is not enough to sustain anything on the same scale as Twitter or Facebook.

Don't compare these services to CNN or Fox News. News inherently involves politics, so it's easy for news services to differentiate themselves with politics. Instead, think of it like Disney+ and Hulu. Which is the one for conservatives?

We've had a few very prominent conservatively aligned social media outlet - Parler in particular comes to mind as a semi-successful one, but there are a bunch of conservative oriented message boards and news feeds that have existed for quite some time.

I'd strongly disagree that news necessarily involves politics as well, political topics can be mentioned and reference without turning things into a partisan sh*show and it is only recently (probably since about '95) that we've had rabid debate shows like Hardball that really rewarded news outlets for being extremely partisan.

There were laws that Reagan did away with about the so-called fairness of political television broadcasting, which might explain how those shows got more popular. However, I think politics and news generally have been of a rabid tenor since forever.

As an aside, I think there is a growing concern among politically active moderates in the US that the first amendment is the best we can do, and that more stringent protections couldn't be safely passed in today's hyper partisan environment. There is a sense, true or not, that 1791 had most lawmakers pulling for the same ultimate goal, of a healthy democracy, and that today that spirit has given way to red vs blue zero sum manuvering. So for practical purposes they treat it as the "law bible" - better than anything we could hope for today.

> Too many people treat the American constitution like the U.S.A. Law-Bible - ever correct, never flawed, never to be updated. That is absurd. The last amendment was ratified in 1992, and I'd say we are overdue for a few more.

This is reductive. The arguments I see and participate in are generally those who view the Constitution as an arbitrary document that can change meaning over time without amendment, and those that demand you respect the words on the pages and actually amend the Constitution through the proper channels instead looking for new ways to reinterpret it.

This is before getting into the quality of the proposed amendments: most laws can be passed statutorily by either the the States or Congress. Most disputes can be settled in Courts with no changes to the law.

So when whether or not something would be a Constitutional, which is to say, a legal violation is not the subject of debate, the quality of the proposals is.

Are you proposing any actual amendments you think Congress should take up? Or simply suggesting we pass amendments to pass amendments?

Well said. Something being 'the law' isn't an argument for or against anything in itself. In fact in extreme cases the official law can be extremely immoral and - after a regime change - itself criminal.

Regarding the US example, free speech laws were certainly not written with the intention of giving powerful companies the ability to censor public debates, since they moved from the town squares onto their digital platforms. Also corporations are not people!

It’s about governments around the world which can only also include the US and municipalities bound by the US Constitution

The US Constitution’s first patch having almost no relevance on Twitter complying with foreign government

So despite the audience here having a US centric perspective, I dont think your post about asking people to clarify legal vs feelings really helps move this discussion forward. Maybe slightly disambiguifies a US persons kneejerk response, but not really the topic.

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