Censorship by big tech at the behest of the U.S. government?

Based on the reactions I got from people I knew and respected, the last two years showed me exactly how shit like the holocaust went down. How ordinary people like you or me can be filled with so much fear and propaganda that they willingly sent their fellow humans to their demise with a smile on their face. We got incredibly lucky that things didn’t escalate to violence.

I mean for Christ sake, we have phone numbers people could call to rat out their neighbors family birthday party. We had police kicking kids and arresting people for using a playground. All it would have taken was some “expert” or politician to give permission to harm those “selfish grandma killers” and it would have been a whole different thing. People I thought I knew and respected completely lost their damn minds. Many have yet to recover.

What these “experts” did to society is beyond the pale. Humans may have fancy shiny tools and “science” but we are fundamentally the same superstitious creatures as those who came before us 10’s of thousands of years ago.

"The Post originally described Cotton’s remarks as “debunked” and a “conspiracy theory” in a February 2020 article. But last week, The Post rewrote the article’s headline, softening “conspiracy theory” to “fringe theory” and noting that scientists have “disputed” it rather than “debunked” it."

[1]"The media called the ‘lab leak’ story a ‘conspiracy theory.’ Now it’s prompted corrections — and serious new reporting." Washington Post, 6/10/21

Yeah, and same if you discussed it on HN.

Society is “group think”. Try paying rent in bottle caps, and telling your boss to go fuck themselves when they ask for something. Fear of unemployment and homelessness make that unlikely.

City to city, coast to coast, group think and fear keep us from having serious conversations about consumerisms impact on the environment; don’t touch my capitalism click clack

The difference is that’s group think you’ve been conditioned since birth to believe is as immutable as the orbit of the planets.

If we all “group thought” more bicycles and fewer cars were more appropriate that’s what we’d produce. It’s unjustifiable belief to make it sound as if you’re a truly free agent unaffected by group think and fear of alternatives.

My example would be one of the scientists on President Biden's Covid advisory council being interviewed on PBS and pointing out that cloth face masks were not effective against an airborne virus, but n95 masks offered some real protection.

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...

I, personally, saw people demand that links to that interview be removed as "disinformation".

The fact that people keep citing this ridiculous claim is evidence of why this "contradiction" was necessary. People are too selfish and panicky to respond rationally to "although masks are useful, we need current masks for healthcare workers, so please don't go buy any". That message is 4 times as long as the attention span of the average American. As such, it got consolidated into the much more brief (but not strictly accurate) "you don't need to wear masks" until such time as the supply chain could cope.

This was a rational and intentional decision, not a contradiction.

Which is exactly what you would expect to happen as we get new data on anything new. The fact that people were excepting the medical community to have prophetic knowledge about a novel virus barely a month after it had been confirmed speaks more to the American public's poor understanding of the scientific process.

Side note, but just a reminder that Fauci NEVER said "masks don't work", as much as this gets repeated on social media. He said that they prevent infected people from spreading it to others and did not recommend that everyone wear them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI

And when further data came out about asymptomatic transmission, the recommendations changed.

Side note 2: "hug a chinese" and "vaccinated people don't spread COVID" were both from politicians, not the medical or scientific communities. I found plenty of blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels from actual epidemiologists and virologists (such as "this week in virology") who did not say such things. Unfortunately Americans don't really care enough to distinguish between "science communicated by politicians" and "science communicated by scientists". After 2020 and watching as people working in relevant fields - like the podcast above, or "your local epidemiologist" - just got straight-up ignored by COVID deniers, I'm not even sure most of the public even knows how to look up "communication by scientists"...

When and where was this the message? I'm not doubting you, I just got most of my covid info from going to blogs then reading the abstracts of papers they linked to, and I remember the efficacy being in the 80% to 90% range for the initial strain. Even smallpox vaccines only had around 95% efficacy. There's no good reason for a journalist to report that any vaccine is 100% effective.

Anecdotally I've found if I just say something relatively unbacked or 'stupid sounding' that the mainstream can easily attack to make my argument sound dumb, I don't get the ban/removal. It's only when you present a factual argument, and especially if you start winning people over, that reddit is especially quick to ban you.

I've noticed this same progression on HN. If I lose the debate due to not enough facts/persuasion, then people tend to leave it at that and rest satisfied they put an idiot in their place -- why would they want that comment removed when it can stay there as a head on a spike. If I introduce facts but they are unpopular, it will get downvoted to hell and people seem satisfied with that. However, if I actually start winning people over then my comment gets flagged, because we can't allow the wrong view to 'win.'

"I think this is incorrect" is answered with "how prestigious are your credentials?" instead of "what are your reasons?".

Prestigious credentials should rest on the foundation of good reasoning, not the other way around.

I still think the way media attacked everyone who wasn't exactly in line with the current ideas is a shame for everyone in media who participated.

And the way social media companies prevented public discussion between licensed medical doctors with decades of experience and fantastic track records, that is another clear signal that they have way too much power.

Saying we needed to shut down everyone because some of them did or could do something wrong is really backwards.

The only social media company that I know of that didn't make a fool out of themselves was Telegram, who, as usual, focused on the interests of its users.

This month, I had weird health problem that sent me to the hospital, and asked again if anything could be related to the vaccine. This time, he said it was a possibility because has has seen some similar cases in the past.

The problem here is not changing your mind using fact. That's how you should do it.

The problem here is stating at first he was sure it could not cause any grave problem (at least not worse than covid). Because this was not rooted in fact, we didn't have remotely enough data to know this.

But this is what a lot of the medical and political elite claimed during the pandemics, and questioning it would get us the rethoric you just used in your comment. This is what a lot of comments on HN, twitter and the whole internet agressively screamed, with disdain toward people that were raising pragmatic worries.

This is not a sane way of approaching science. This is arrogant, and creates distrusts in a world where we desperatly need humility and bonding together.

In fact, you know your position is not in the best light because you are using a throwaway account to state your position, in a thread that has been very cordial.

The blame lies with those doing the censoring, not with wackos. The wackos are just a way for those in power to shift the blame for their decisions.

For instance, the CIA spent the equivalent of several billion dollars trying to lift an obsolete Soviet submarine from the ocean floor, against the recommendations of the US Navy which thought they could recover the relevant materials using deep sea remote control 'drones' from a spy submarine, rather than using a surface ship to lift the whole sub, which they said would fail and risked discovery. Well it did fail, and they did get discovered and the US Government was forced to explain itself to the Soviet government. But in the aftermath of this boondoggle, the US government was more candid with the Soviets than with the American public. The rational for sharing information with the Soviets but not with the American public can only be to protect the CIA/etc from public accountability. They continue to use the ambiguity created by their secrecy to lead people to believe they were more successful than they actually were. The Soviets/Russians can get ground truth about this incident by sending their own drones down there to see what was left of the submarine. The CIA's classification of the incident serves to obscure the truth from the American public, not the Russians.

I think this is just a limitation that we're all mostly ok with.

The first amendment protects speech in the United States for good reason. There are bad people in the world. Those bad people can end up in government. The government wields incredible power. The three branches are meant to keep each other in check - but so are the citizens. The ability to vote in/out candidates is a balancing force. The humans in power being able to distort speech in the country to favor keeping them in power breaks that balancing force.

This article is asking "did the government attempt to suppress speech." That has nothing to do with moderation on HN.

dang is not a representative of a government. It's entirely reasonable (IMO) for the mods here to suppress speech critical of decisions a government is making - it's their site. It is entirely unreasonable for a government to suppress speech critical of decisions the government is making. Blurring that line is how you do a fascism.

I post here now because the locally-enforced Overton window is much larger than alternative platforms, which makes conversations much more interesting, challenging, and productive.

If people could say whatever they wanted here, I’d expect to see a lot more comments I wouldn’t bother engaging with at all, but that’s okay.

I’m not a horse — I don’t need blinders to prevent me from getting spooked.

There is no national security without free speech. There might be oligarch security, but not security for the people.

> public admissions by then-White House press secretary Jennifer Psaki that the Biden administration was ordering social media companies to censor certain posts, as well as statements from Psaki, President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threatening them with regulatory or other legal action if they declined to do so,

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/internal-documents-rev...

Directly. Massively outside of their scope of authority.

Where do you read this stuff?

It says "v Twitter" in the title of the lawsuit [1].

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/61630076/1/berenson-v-t...

Your link makes reference to a similar kind of article about the First Ammendment, which is also bandied about as if it's some kind of rebuttal to people that think platforms are defacto government arms.

If anything, my suggestions would remove protections from companies that are inherently trying to drive "interaction" and who do not moderate sufficiently. If sites had to worry that leaving comments from users up that will get them sued, they would be more proactive in removing comments. Instead, currently, they choose to highlight and elevate those comments to groups that they believe will find them abrasive, in search of interactions. I am pretty clearly arguing that their choice to spotlight certain content over others using some decision-making beyond "most recent" or "most liked" should be considered their own editorial content, which is already part of s.230. From your own link:

    If you said “Section 230 is a get out of jail card for websites!”
    You’re wrong. Again, websites are still 100% liable for any content that they themselves create.

"There's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that" gives a pretty clear hint. The mob boss never says to his hitman "I think Fat Tony is a snitch, please kill him for me" but he still ordered the hit.

Every freaking complaint about the story is about the story itself. It is Buttery Males v2. Same thing -- they didn't care about the emails, they cared about the story.

If your organization reports this without any kind of verification - given the common Russian trope of hitting civilians, including civilian buses, and then blaming Ukraine - then it's going to be correctly flagged as propaganda.

That's what you're arguing for. The government regulating speech is a violation of the first amendment, period. That includes forcing speech.

The problem isn't corporations having the right to moderate. The problem is corporations have become so large and powerful that meaningful competition can't exist.

The typical rebuttal that I hear is not that it’s kosher, but that it doesn’t have anything to do with the first amendment.

Choices are:

- government tells social media what to do (controversial)

- government doesn’t tell social media what to do (controversial)

People can be upset forever, but it’s a stalemate that will never get resolved in this political climate. Not coincidentally, a lot of money is made on unresolved problems.

Nothing about the executive branch or threats

You can be happy or sad about the ends - but should be terrified of the means.

It wasn't an award show snub, or a gender bathroom debate, it was the entire direction of the USA with the largest military on Earth.

We know about it now. The problem is a large number of people when polled said they would not have voted for Biden if they had known about the laptop before the election. It may have been enough to swing the election.

I've been "asked" by police/regulatory agencies on multiple occasions to do something. Every time I refused I was met with hell, up to including officers lying to a judge to obtain federal search warrant.

{{Citation needed}}

I can't find any government mandates of censorship that your comment complains about. This article is about how the administration said that Facebook was killing people by spreading misinformation, and the company felt shamed into changing what posts it promotes and how it tags them, realizing that doing so would also be more profitable long term. The government has said bad things about a lot of companies and has done so since its formation.

"shutting down trolls" is precisely the language used when shutting down wrongthink, though. Everyone is a "paid Russian troll" or a "paid shortseller troll".

We are forever charting a course between a Brave New World and a 1984 future.

What means of retaliation do you believe Trump would have had against social media platforms while in office? A President doesn't have the legal authority to simply outlaw companies they disagree with, nor do they have a right to a social media account, or to force businesses to accept them as a customer, or carte blanche to violate contracts or terms of service. Sign an executive order making it illegal to ban his accounts? Executive orders aren't laws, and Presidents aren't monarchs.

Meanwhile, as a billionaire celebrity even out of office, Trump remains perfectly capable of suing over his social media bans, which he is currently doing.

Maybe individual messages are kind of okay, but all together it definitely reads like policing of private speech. The inter-agency communications in particular are pretty bad.

[1]: https://nclalegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Joint-State...