Are Social Media Companies Censoring Us? Is It Ever Justified? (msn.com) 398
The Washington Post asks what may be the ultimate question of our times. "Whether the largest social media companies have become so critical to public debate that being banned or blacklisted by them — whether you're an elected official, a dissident, or even just a private citizen who runs afoul of their content policies — amounts to a form of modern-day censorship."
"And, if so, are there circumstances under which such censorship is justified?"
The first person cited is Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. Fighting over whether a given speech restriction is or isn't censorship, she adds, is often an excuse to avoid harder, more nuanced discussions as to exactly which types of speech ought to be restricted, and by whom, and on what authority. "There are a lot of people in the U.S. who will claim to be [free speech] absolutists but then basically be fine with censoring sexuality," she says. In contrast, expressions of sexuality are widely accepted in Germany, where York now lives, but there's broad consensus that censorship of Holocaust denial is warranted. In New Zealand, she adds, the democratically elected government has a Chief Censor who reviews the content of films and literature. "I'm very wary of censorship," York says. "But the reason is, who do you trust to do it? It's not that all speech is totally equal and valid." In other words, the problem York sees isn't social platforms banning a powerful figure such as Trump. It's their lack of legitimacy as arbiters of speech, especially when they're censoring people who lack the stature to speak out through other means.
David Kaye, a law professor at University of California-Irvine and the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, agrees that we should be wary of tech giants' power over discourse — especially in countries that lack a robust free press. But he balks at applying the term "censorship" to content moderation decisions taken by the likes of Facebook, Twitter or YouTube in the United States... We're better off, Kaye believes, reserving the term "censorship" for the many instances around the world in which speech restrictions are backed by the power of the state. That can include cases in which "the state puts demands on social media to take down content, or criminalizes individuals who tweet," as has happened in China, the United Arab Emirates, Myanmar and elsewhere...
"If we start to dilute the idea of censorship as a state-driven tool by equating it with what platforms are doing, we start to misunderstand what platforms are actually doing, and why they're doing it," Kaye said.
The Post ultimately cites three experts who agree on one point: that it's worth scrutinizing the decisions of social media platforms because of their growing influence — whether or not you end up calling it censorship. But they also cite a follow-up observation from Chinmayi Arun, a resident fellow of Yale Law School's Information Society Project.
Too often overlooked in the debates over what social networks take down is that they aren't just passive conduits of information: Their recommendation algorithms and design decisions actively shape what speech gets heard, and by how many, and how it is framed — often fueling the kind of divisive content that they later face pressure to remove.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube may or may not have censored Trump a year ago. But there's no doubt that for years prior, they amplified and enabled him.
"And, if so, are there circumstances under which such censorship is justified?"
The first person cited is Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. Fighting over whether a given speech restriction is or isn't censorship, she adds, is often an excuse to avoid harder, more nuanced discussions as to exactly which types of speech ought to be restricted, and by whom, and on what authority. "There are a lot of people in the U.S. who will claim to be [free speech] absolutists but then basically be fine with censoring sexuality," she says. In contrast, expressions of sexuality are widely accepted in Germany, where York now lives, but there's broad consensus that censorship of Holocaust denial is warranted. In New Zealand, she adds, the democratically elected government has a Chief Censor who reviews the content of films and literature. "I'm very wary of censorship," York says. "But the reason is, who do you trust to do it? It's not that all speech is totally equal and valid." In other words, the problem York sees isn't social platforms banning a powerful figure such as Trump. It's their lack of legitimacy as arbiters of speech, especially when they're censoring people who lack the stature to speak out through other means.
David Kaye, a law professor at University of California-Irvine and the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, agrees that we should be wary of tech giants' power over discourse — especially in countries that lack a robust free press. But he balks at applying the term "censorship" to content moderation decisions taken by the likes of Facebook, Twitter or YouTube in the United States... We're better off, Kaye believes, reserving the term "censorship" for the many instances around the world in which speech restrictions are backed by the power of the state. That can include cases in which "the state puts demands on social media to take down content, or criminalizes individuals who tweet," as has happened in China, the United Arab Emirates, Myanmar and elsewhere...
"If we start to dilute the idea of censorship as a state-driven tool by equating it with what platforms are doing, we start to misunderstand what platforms are actually doing, and why they're doing it," Kaye said.
The Post ultimately cites three experts who agree on one point: that it's worth scrutinizing the decisions of social media platforms because of their growing influence — whether or not you end up calling it censorship. But they also cite a follow-up observation from Chinmayi Arun, a resident fellow of Yale Law School's Information Society Project.
Too often overlooked in the debates over what social networks take down is that they aren't just passive conduits of information: Their recommendation algorithms and design decisions actively shape what speech gets heard, and by how many, and how it is framed — often fueling the kind of divisive content that they later face pressure to remove.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube may or may not have censored Trump a year ago. But there's no doubt that for years prior, they amplified and enabled him.
Whoever is surprised has been living under a rock (Score:4, Interesting)
This is what happens when you surrender the public discourse space to mega-gigantic corporations: the constitutional rights don't apply to their private space - i.e. the usual "my place, my rules, if you don't like it go somewhere else" canard. The problem being, there is no somewhere else anymore because there is no public space anymore.
This is why I keep saying social media needs to be declared a de-facto public space, constitutional rights to free speech need to apply to them fully, their right to filter / censor things should be severely curtailed, and our elected critters should actively legislate and decide what is and isn't acceptable on those media instead of meekly asking the Zuckerbergs of the world to pretty-please police their networks like the overpaid lazy fucks they are.
Re: (Score:2)
And don't forget that media companies shape our information because that's how they make money. I love this quote from the summary:
Note how this quote completely fails to mention why they "amplified and enabled" him -- because it made them a ton of money! Their ratings were sky high during that time. They were literally living off of the guy.
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This is what happens when you surrender the public discourse space to mega-gigantic corporations: the constitutional rights don't apply to their private space - i.e. the usual "my place, my rules, if you don't like it go somewhere else" canard. The problem being, there is no somewhere else anymore because there is no public space anymore.
My personal web site is still working fine. I can put whatever I want on it and there's nothing Facebook or Twitter can do about it.
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Which is probably the worst thing about Facebook. Ok, banning specific phrases is a bit daft, but if there's a blend of information and propaganda that cannot be meaningfully filtered, then people are no longer capable of deciding anything for themselves without total isolation or suicide and those do not qualify as meaningful options.
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Who said anything about eminent domain?
My point is, if a private concern (or a small oligopoly) monopolizes a medium of communication to such an extent that it becomes effectively the only venue for people to communicate,they should be subjected to the laws that regulate public speech. It's happened to telephone companies in decades past, nobody is complaining about it, and the telcos weren't deprived of property.
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Who said anything about eminent domain?
You want a private corporation which has not entered bankruptcy to be forced to perform a public service. How else do you propose to cause that to happen legally? They built a service and you want to take it away. Build your own service.
If it's in the public interest to have an uncensored social network then the public should build it.
Yes. No. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, they are censoring us.
No, it is not justified.
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Justified according to whom? It is quite clear there are some people who find the lack of content control on platforms objectionable to the point where social media companies are routinely dragged through the mud (or even before congress) as a result. It is also clear that these are private companies and can choose to appease whomever they damn well please.
The only person who can judge whether the censorship is justified is the owner of the platform or content where the censorship is taking place, ultimatel
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No, it is not justified.
I disagree. Anti-intellectualism can act much like a disease in that it can be memetic in nature. You may believe it's a personal decision but it's not because it has real-world implications. Case and point is the pandemic. Anti-intellectuals promoted the idea of rejecting the vaccine which later got picked up and spread as the idea that it will kill you after X amount of time (it changed several times). The real-world impact here is a lot of people infecting others with COVID-19, some of which died as
Mission Creep (Score:2)
The problem is that the government *will* abuse this power. Misinformation from one side will be punished, but not the other. And vice-versa. Or "misinformation" deemed "harmful" to the government, as in exposing corruption and favoritism.
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Does it need to be justified?
Everything needs to be justified, especially when it comes to corporations. They are legal fictions which cannot exist without our blessing.
Censoring an idea is bad (Score:2)
Censoring an idea is bad. If they are doing that, then there are problems.
Censoring a particular expression of an idea can be ok. For example, if the idea is expressed as an insult or in an abusive way, then the person can be timed-out or something.
On Slashdot, we don't do censorship. You can call me a dumb fuck all you want and won't get modded down below -1.
Re:Censoring an idea is bad (Score:5, Funny)
You're a dumbfuck if you believe that!
4... 3... 2... 1... :D
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Slashdot dates from the days when censorship was considered a bad thing.
Maybe there was also another factor which still applies. when you have kind of a community then anonymity does not matter much: your user id becomes your alternate identity, which you care for in ways resemblent of your real identity. When the group becomes too large and people are not recognizable anymore this breaks down. Also trolls are typically 'driveby shooters'. If they are known posters it is simply called being too sarcastic or
"backed by the power of the state" (Score:2)
The Basketball Court and The Drugstore (Score:2)
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Then you'd vote with your feet and go hang out with the basketball kids instead, who in this metaphor are in an entirely different venue. This whole reich-wing conservacuck fantasy of persecution depends on imagining that all discourse occurs on Faceboot or Twatter, and this is a complete falsehood.
Says the "Washington Post" (Score:2)
The old media, news papers and television news have done exactly the same for as long as they have existed.
How often do you see businesses, capitalist and commercial lobbies on the news? We see them multiples times everyday. Compare this to people from unions, from coops, from charities, members coops or community groups who are like rocking horse manure.
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How often do you see businesses, capitalist and commercial lobbies on the news? We see them multiples times everyday. Compare this to people from unions, from coops, from charities, members coops or community groups who are like rocking horse manure.
Exactly. The NYT, which continually cries about the state of public discourse on public media, has been drastically underreporting the ongoing strikes and job departures, because their employees have on occasion attempted to unionize and they want to downplay that whole argument. Many slashdotters will also remember the whole SNAFU with the Tesla review where the author of an article drove around the block repeatedly until the batteries died, then claimed that the range estimate was wrong... and then the NY
A censored society (Score:2)
Is a mediocre society.
Censorship does not exist (Score:2, Interesting)
Either it does not exist because it has been disappeared so you are not aware of it.
Or it does not exist because you approve of it . It's just removing bad stuff.
Or it does not exist because you redefined censorship "it is not censorship, we are just making sure *almost* nobody can hear you".
There are many reasons to oppose censorship .For instance
- bad aim: people are stupid. when stupid people start censoring you can get anything
- bad goals: when power is allowed to censor, it will do so to aid its goals
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The definition of censorship has literally nothing to do with anything you've said. Just because we find censorship acceptable doesn't make it any less censorship. Just because we're unaware of it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. And your third point is literally talking about redefining the term so that's just silly on the face of it.
There are many reasons to support censorship too. The first and foremost being the right to free speech being inherently inseparable from the right to being associated with spe
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if you are going to suppress the voices of part of a community , even if they are wrong, you are destroying their trust in the system.
This was very obvious in the past 4 years with the Anti-Trump campaign.
Those people already didn't trust the system, so nothing was lost there, of value or not.
Being wrong is one thing. Willfully spreading misinformation is another. In between is willfully spreading information without fact checking. The first thing is no big deal. The second thing is outright fraud. The third thing is the grey area.
In that grey area people can be harmed by that misinformation. Permitting it to continue does more harm than leading some ignorant chucklefucks who have no idea what they're saying
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Shutting out 70 million people without a second thought. Definitely you're a contemporary democrat.
Let's take a case : the Hunter Biden laptop, a case which turned up in the middle of the election campaign. 50 CIA people wrote a letter to denounce it as Russian disinfo. The whole of the media and social media instantly complied.
Where was the disinformation? Except for the CIA interfering in the election process with their own disinformation about a Russian campaign? Which was obviously commonly treated as t
Of course thay are (Score:2)
Nobody is obligated to allow a handful of assholes to drive away their customers and turn their business into a sewer. If you had a Bar & Grill and a bunch of assholes showed up every day and drove your customers away by treating them like pieces of shit, you would ask them to leave no question about it.
Try going to the mall with a bullhorn and harassing the shoppers with your personal manifesto they would kick you out in no time, Oh No I'm being censored!
Strange how it works (Score:2)
The US also has censorship, like China, but they are smart capitalists and privatized it.
Meet the Censored (Score:2)
Matt Taibbi had a series a while back called "meet the censored", where he digged into specific censorship cases.
In generally we don't care about censorship when it is invisible to us, mostly because we are not interested in it anyway.
For instance
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/... [substack.com]
Asking the wrong question. (Score:2)
The real question: Why is 'censorship' necessary? Why are people so stupid; willing to believe anything that is fed to them? Why is it that FB
Re: (Score:2)
Why is it that FB (that is what this is really about) does not have a moderator system (like /.) so such items are not weeded out & flagged?
It does. They just pay the moderators. This is good because it should not be an unpaid job, and it's also necessary because there is a larger volume of bullshit there and you can't expect volunteers to handle the job, and also because you can't expect volunteers to handle the job responsibly — the content on Facebook is already provided by volunteers, and that task is not being performed in good faith much of the time. The same people are supposed to be trusted to moderate? HA HA fucking HA.
Pat Paulson if alive today... (Score:2)
"We believe there is a place for censorship on the internet, and we only wish Facebook would let us tell you where it is."
rank hypocricy (Score:2)
We've had to listen to that pounding drum for decades.
Facebook, Twitter, etc are private businesses, so y'all can GO F*CK YOURSELVES. Glad to see you finally on the wrong end of market populism.
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It hurts only if you are hit.
Do you know how many not-conservative posts are censored, how many not-conservative people are banned from social media? No? Maybe it's time for self-declared conservatives to look at other people and their problems. But that wouldn't be conservative and self-serving, right?
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Studies have found that Facebook actually favours conservatives. Twitter is a bit more balanced, but also 1/10th the size of Facebook.
People often seem shocked by that statistic, but Twitter really does have about 1/10th the number of active users as Facebook does.
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It seems the social media and tech companies seem to censor conservatives almost exclusively.
Then surely you can point to examples of people being censored by Facebook or Twitter only for posting that taxes should be lower or that there should be less business regulation?
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I suspect there's a large overlap between "conservatives" and people who say dumb shit
Of course. But the question is whether people that say stupid offensive stuff should be silenced.
If freedom doesn't include the right to be stupid and offensive, what is the point? Nobody needs "freedom" to be polite and conformist.
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If freedom doesn't include the right to be stupid and offensive, what is the point? Nobody needs "freedom" to be polite and conformist.
So where do my rights end and yours start? My rights include not having to listen to your inane shit, in a PRIVATE space. Private clubs, private business, private rights.
How come your rights are greater than mine? You get to say any thing you want, and we all have to tolerate it? No, that isnt how society works
If you think we ever lived in a pure free state, you are not the person to have this conversation.
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Your description of speech suppression on social media is inaccurate.
When Twitter banned Trump, it wasn't because he was invading other people's space.
People followed his tweets and then became offended at their content. The complainers chose to listen to him.
Should he have been silenced? Or should those who don't want to hear him just unfollow?
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Twitter banned Trump because his unhinged tweets helped spark an insurrection against the democracy of the United States.
If we rely on social media corporations to prevent the President of the United States from communicating with the American people because the people are presumably too stupid to handle what he has to say, then perhaps our democracy is already lost.
Re:Conservatives (Score:4, Insightful)
If the president of the United States is prevented to reach the citizens by using social media something is seriously wrong. It's not like he/she can't call to a press-conference or publish a blog on whitehouse.gov...oh wait...
No, this whole discussion boils down to entitlement, the idea that you are entitled to use others private property against their wishes just because the ability to reach a lot of people through it.
And by all evidence, there are a fair bit of people in the US who are too stupid to realize when they are told a big lie. The last 30 years have turned the US into a grifters paradise.
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One sign that a democracy is really screwed is when the people in power have undue influence over the media, e.g. by owning the most popular publications/channels, or by exerting political pressure. Most democracies have rules to try to prevent that sort of thing from happening.
If Twitter was not allowed to ban politicians or label their posts as misleading, it would be very very bad. Being elected is not a mandate to dictate and control the media.
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Yeah. What people fail to realize is that your first sentence to a large degree describes how it was before the rise of social media. Go back 50 or 100 years and look at how partisan the news prints where and how people didn't really have a way to voice their concerns to a large audience. What they knew and what information they could get came from very very few sources.
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That's why I like Twitter. It's got plenty of problems, but the fact that it gives so many more people a voice and allows them to communicate directly with politicians is good.
Re:Conservatives (Score:5, Insightful)
If we rely on social media corporations to prevent the President of the United States from communicating with the American people because the people are presumably too stupid to handle what he has to say, then perhaps our democracy is already lost.
If a president of the United States can't figure out how to directly communicate with the American people through the internet without utilizing privately owned social media, then perhaps that president is pathetically ill-equipped to lead a nation.
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You seem to be saying that American democracy requires social media to function. I don't think that's true.
In a healthy democracy there is a filter between the president's brain and what messages the people get from them. The president has advisors who help draft statements, and the press publishes what the president says with context and fact checking. Most importantly the press presents a plurality of views.
Twitter gave Trump a direct feel from his brain to his followers. Its algorithms created a bubble w
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Twitter banned Trump because his unhinged tweets helped spark an insurrection against the democracy of the United States.
If we rely on social media corporations to prevent the President of the United States from communicating with the American people because the people are presumably too stupid to handle what he has to say, then perhaps our democracy is already lost.
What twitter and social media just showed is how much they control what you hear and see and anyone who gets elected has to abide by them the rule politicians used to have was
"Never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel"
the problem is still there its no longer ink and paper its byte and screens and that has made them more effiicent and less controlled at least papers had editors and editorial staff before it got affected by the owner and they could squeeze out a paper or 2 before they got f
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If we rely on social media corporations to prevent the President of the United States from communicating with the American people because the people are presumably too stupid to handle what he has to say, then perhaps our democracy is already lost.
You're right that this is acting basically as a firebreak to a bigger problem that could threaten to destroy democracy all on its own, a couple of generations so uneducated/anti-educated by conspiracy theory culture and so blinded by a level of unthinking partisanship that can only be compared to British football hooliganism, that they can't avoid being trivially manipulated into destroying democracy, the planet, or anything else the ownership class might find it profitable to destroy. Future generations ne
Re: Conservatives (Score:2)
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This, it's really a compelled speech issue. The core question is, are we going to compel private platforms to host content they don't want to host or not? The only reason the issue of censorship might deserve to enter the discussion is due to the near-monopoly of the social media market.
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And, I think this IS the angle that has to be looked at with respect to possibly reclassifying the SM giants more as a "common carrier" type entity.
Due to their monopoly, they have become the new defacto "public square" with respect to common citizen speech.
The monopoly allows them even through moderation to dictate and direct public information and discourse they way they
Re: (Score:3)
I think a better solution than turning Facebook and Twitter into common carriers and opening the floodgates of hate speech and disinformation would be to break up these social media megacorps (especially Facebook, which should have Whatsapp and Instagram broken off just for starters) and require them to make their products more interoperable. This also means there wouldn't be a giant heavily regulated too-big-to-fail social media monolith sitting ready as a turn-key state media system for possible would-be
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You think Biden's bad? Remember that Trump lost to him.
(After that? Reflect on the sorry state of the country when those two are the best candidates that can be found to run it)
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Ok, I'll bite.
What were the racist tweets the idiot supposedly sent out?
There's people out there spewing out racist crap all the time and they aren't getting banned.
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So where do my rights end and yours start? My rights include not having to listen to your inane shit, in a PRIVATE space. Private clubs, private business, private rights.
How come your rights are greater than mine? You get to say any thing you want, and we all have to tolerate it? No, that isnt how society works
As long as you are not being *forced* to listen to their inane shit, or prevented from publicly stating your opinion against them, your rights are in no way being limited. Of course, we have no obligation to listen to you in return, nor media are in any obligation to propagate your reply either
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The key there is "forced".
If something is blatant to the point where it is impossible to exclude, then I'd contend that a person is being "forced" even though no direct force is being used.
It really comes down to an issue of boundaries. If I can establish boundaries and enforce them without unduly limiting my life, then I'm not being forced even if force is actually being used.
So, for example, in America where billboards, robocalls, email spam, text message spam and junk mail are absolutely EVERYWHERE, I ca
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If freedom doesn't include the right to be stupid and offensive, what is the point? Nobody needs "freedom" to be polite and conformist.
So where do my rights end and yours start? My rights include not having to listen to your inane shit, in a PRIVATE space. Private clubs, private business, private rights.
You are both right but are talking past each other. Absolutely everyone should be able to go into their own homes / football clubs / family social media discussion and ignore the rest of the world. At the same time, most people should be allowed to put their views out somewhere where they can be discussed and criticised. Meta corporation, formerly known as Facebook, is actually taking control of the overall public debate. and have an effective monopoly on the ability to influence elections and trigger peo
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At the same time, most people should be allowed to put their views out somewhere where they can be discussed and criticised.
Actually, most people prefer circle-jerk echo chambers, where they can just congratulate each other for being on what they perceive to be the virtuous side of an issue. The people doing the bulk of the whining and moaning about their free speech being violated are generally the ones who want to put their speech in front of folks who have no interest in hearing it.
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If freedom doesn't include the right to be stupid and offensive, what is the point? Nobody needs "freedom" to be polite and conformist.
So where do my rights end and yours start? My rights include not having to listen to your inane shit, in a PRIVATE space. Private clubs, private business, private rights. How come your rights are greater than mine? You get to say any thing you want, and we all have to tolerate it? No, that isnt how society works If you think we ever lived in a pure free state, you are not the person to have this conversation.
More to the point, a private company should be able to decide what speech they allow on the premise or platform. At least that's what my old school conservative friends say.
They own the platform so the call the shots. It's not censorship, that is what the state does when they shut down speech. As pointed out, no one wants free speech, they want, to quote Nate Hentoff, "Free speech for me but not for thee..."
Re: Conservatives (Score:2)
Re:Conservatives (Score:5, Insightful)
My rights include not having to listen to your inane shit, in a PRIVATE space.
It seems you have demonstrated nothing more than the right to invent your own rights, but not the right to expect others to follow them.
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Re: Conservatives (Score:2)
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So where do my rights end and yours start? My rights include not having to listen to your inane shit, in a PRIVATE space.
I've found that if you try to start claiming "the right not NOT" something it basically becomes carte blanche to ban almost anything.
"I have the right to not have to look at two men kissing."
"I have the right to not have my kids go to school with the black kids."
"I have the right to not have to worry about the Jewish bankers taking all my money".
If you have to frame your position on the right to "not" something, it's already on shaky territory.
As to the space being private, that may be, but there's a reason
Re: (Score:2)
We can skip it when social media implements social credit systems and starts burying shitty information and shitty people from being able to interact with those with higher social credit.
But really, do we want that? Because that's what "I want the right to be a shitty person" means. Controls where shitty people only get to talk to other shit-covered people.
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> So where do my rights end and yours start? My rights include not having to listen to your inane shit, in a PRIVATE space.
So who is making you listen to his inane shit in a PRIVATE space?
Just skip it, okay?
Facebook advertising, in fact targeted advertisers in general. People can't properly run their own "private" spaces and so they use Whatsapp or Facebook or whatever who then get data from them and use that to advertise to the other people that come to that space. Your local family crazy comes up with a silly idea ("I need to inject the kids with fish tank cleaner") which you would normally talk her down from and protect everyone but you can't because she's already had some insane advert/propaganda sent her
Re:Conservatives (Score:5, Insightful)
> So where do my rights end and yours start? My rights include not having to listen to your inane shit, in a PRIVATE space.
So who is making you listen to his inane shit in a PRIVATE space? Just skip it, okay?
You may have the right to freedom of speech but you do not have the right of unhindered and unlimited access to other people's platform to say unlimited amounts of glactically stupid shit. It's not really about whether or not I want to listen to your insane shit in a PRIVATE space. It's whether the owner and operator of the PRIVATE space wants your insane shit in their PRIVATE space and whether they want to get sued for damages because they allowed you to encourage people to say, drink bleach for example using their PRIVATE space as a platform and you succeeded in getting some morons to drink bleach. Private platforms like Facebook and YouTube are not a public service, they are platforms operated by private companies that can decide you, your beliefs and your utterances are detrimental to their brand and toss you out on your ear just like your local bakery can when you go in there to preach the virtues of bleach drinking. Perhaps you would then be better off finding a new platform, like Parler [parler.com] where you can preach the virtues of bleach drinking unhindered and where you can find an accepting and interested audience.
Re: Conservatives (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Even given this, as the previous poster stated, thereâ(TM)s no reason you canâ(TM)t just skip the content you donâ(TM)t want to see instead of insisting Big Tech censor it. Itâ(TM)s the same as browsing through your favorite streaming platform, you pick what you want to watch. It doesnâ(TM)t require some social class system, in fact that would be a big step backwards.
I'm not sure you can "just skip the content". People in general have limited resources (time) to spend on reading/skimming input feeds. So if your input feed is effectively saturated by certain kinds of content, you're more likely to miss other interesting/important content that's not prioritized by the algorithms of the platform.
Perhaps it's even possible to think of this in terms of a DoS attack? If there's enough targeted information to a certain subset of people, you might effectively be able to preve
Re:Conservatives (Score:4, Interesting)
> So where do my rights end and yours start? My rights include not having to listen to your inane shit, in a PRIVATE space.
So who is making you listen to his inane shit in a PRIVATE space? Just skip it, okay?
You may have the right to freedom of speech but you do not have the right of unhindered and unlimited access to other people's platform to say unlimited amounts of glactically stupid shit. It's not really about whether or not I want to listen to your insane shit in a PRIVATE space. It's whether the owner and operator of the PRIVATE space wants your insane shit in their PRIVATE space and whether they want to get sued for damages because they allowed you to encourage people to say, drink bleach for example using their PRIVATE space as a platform and you succeeded in getting some morons to drink bleach. Private platforms like Facebook and YouTube are not a public service, they are platforms operated by private companies that can decide you, your beliefs and your utterances are detrimental to their brand and toss you out on your ear just like your local bakery can when you go in there to preach the virtues of bleach drinking. Perhaps you would then be better off finding a new platform, like Parler [parler.com] where you can preach the virtues of bleach drinking unhindered and where you can find an accepting and interested audience.
The poster you are replying to is using the same rhetoric that USENET leaders used - just don't read it. That ended up being the end of usenet. All the people who were there for conversation left, and that took all of the fun away from the nut cases. So the nuts left to find still viable groups to destroy.
The problem with the idea "just ignore it" principle is eventually you ignore all of it because all the sane people end up leaving. Tragedy of the commons writ large.
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Do you have the right to lie?
Yes. You have a right to lie. This is well-established law in America.
Libel and slander are torts, not crimes, and can only be applied after-the-fact. They can't be used for prior restraint of speech.
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Of course. But the question is whether people that say stupid offensive stuff should be silenced.
This is actually a trick question and a side show. The real question is whether a bunch of large private companies should be allowed to have effective control over the public debate. Twitter is a private company and it does have the right to choose what it wants to promote or not. The same kind of goes for Meta/Facebook. They have to do some kind of control to stop e.g. child porn and you don't want them to be fully controlled by the government so basically you have to leave the decisions largely to the
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There are two reasonable positions for a company - "common carrier" which passes on messages between limited groups of people who know who each other are and "publisher" who decides what content should be published to public and semi-public groups. It's probably time to force the social media companies to split into separate companies which do either one or the other but not both.
Common carriers are companies that commit to providing services to anyone willing to pay their fee. That alone would mean that designating free services like FB and Twitter as common carriers would be outside the norm. Additionally common carriers are still not total free for alls and in fact can (and do) require adherence to a terms of service, they simply have to be a consistent fair to all ToS and are generally regulated to ensure that is the case. Just the most obvious example being that most (all) h
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That alone would mean that designating free services like FB and Twitter as common carriers would be outside the norm.
I wouldn't propose designating an unaltered FB as a common carrier. I'd split it into two parts - a network division providing service for delivering social media content from publisher to browser which would act exactly as you describe a common carrier and a publisher division which would use the network division to deliver content and services.
Just the most obvious example being that most (all) has some kind of ban on using the service in furtherance of a crime.
Totally true, but this is a thing which is only incidentally investigated by the common carriers themselves and primarily in the situation where the attack is again
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Does making a profit justify these means? I mean sure, you could blame the users for being stupid, like a lot of people blame drug addicts for being morally evil. But you should also take a closer look at their dealer that keeps supplying them. After all it's the dealer
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There's an enormous range of possibilities between stupid/offensive and polite/conformist. A person can be politely non-conformist, for example. You're more than capable of doing your own thing without intruding on others or obstructing them. I think that part of the problem society has is that it constructs such extreme ideas of a duality that simply doesn't exist.
Re: Conservatives (Score:2)
I belive there is a difference between being silenced and not being amplified.
That said, we give tech companies far too much control over our culture, media, politics, behavior, and thoughts.
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Funny, I remember that the anti-Trumpers in 2016 were saying and doing the exact same shit, but somehow it's a conservative problem.
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True, because the fibbies didn't create one. If that had been a real insurrection attempt, the guy who is on video cutting down the restricted area signs before the crowd got there and Ray Epps would have been the two people first arrested and charged. Instead less than 3 months after the "insurrection" Ray Epps was removed from the FBI's most wanted list and the guy cutting down the signs was never on there. The only actual charges of people in the Capitol were for parading and trespassing and the judge in
Re: Conservatives (Score:5, Insightful)
Like egregiously implying that conservatives are stupid?
Would that be an example of people deliberately saying hurtful things in the internet?
Or do you believe it's justified just because it suits your politics? Or is it that "those kinds of people" deserve to be hurt? Both?
Because I'm pretty sure "it's fine as long as I agree with it" doesn't really scale as a principle for allowable speech. Even you could see that.
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>"Whether it's convincing them that vaccines are bad or that insurrection is necessary to prevent a "fraudulent" election from being certified. Or that trans people are evil non-humans who are trying to take over society and scare little girls in public restrooms."
That is your skewed view of "conservatism", but it isn't conservatism. The overwhelming number of conservatives I know do not think vaccines are bad, and ARE vaccinated- they think forcing them on people against their will is bad and hiding in
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For the umpteenth time, companies do not censor, as that's something a government does.
If you search for definitions of "censorship", none of the definitions contain the word "government".
The 1st Amendment only applies to the government or entities acting on behalf of the government. But you can still be censored by entities that are not governments.
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Censorship implies that someone is being forced to remove content against their will. A publisher can be forced to censor a book. If the author decides to change the text themselves, that's not censorship. If the publisher declines to print their book, that's also not censorship.
The only censorship going on is when social media platforms are legally required to remove material. Simply booting people off their platform or deciding that they don't want certain content is not censorship. The author can publish
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If the author decides to change the text themselves, that's not censorship
Absolutely not true, what you're describing is called self-censorship. When an artist changes his output based on what he believes would be socially inappropriate, or morally out of bounds, or not publicly acceptable or whatever. He changed his vision to accommodate others sensibilities. This isn't always necessarily a bad thing, but is it always good to water down your work just because it makes someone uncomfortable? That's the point of Art after all? To challenge your preconceived notions, To bring you i
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There is a difference between changing something because you think the change makes it better, and doing it because you feel social pressure to. Even so, there has never been freedom from the consequences of speech, if you say something that upsets people then they have the same right you relied on to criticise you.
Therefore self censorship cannot be solved, because the only way to do so is to limit the free speech of others.
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There is a difference between changing something because you think the change makes it better, and doing it because you feel social pressure to
The difference is that if i decide to change an element because the art is better without it, that's not self censorship that's art being a decision making process. Doing it for social pressure is self censorship. Correct: "there has never been freedom from the consequences of speech", you are fee to criticize all you want and the Artist is not immune from it. But altering his vision based on expected social criticism is still self csnsorship [wikipedia.org], like i said it's not always a bad thing.
And i totally disagree
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Censorship implies that someone is being forced to remove content against their will.
No it does NOT. It implies that the content is being removed. It does NOT specify by whom. You made that up out of nothing.
The only censorship going on is when social media platforms are legally required to remove material.
That, sir, is complete nonsense based on a total lack of understanding of the written word when it comes to the definition of censorship.
Facebook removing your content from their platform is censorship. It is not government censorship. It is not illegal censorship. It is usually not even unwarranted censorship, IMO, although that is subjective. But it is unarguably censorship by definit
Re:That's not censorship (Score:5, Informative)
For the umpteenth time, companies do not censor, as that's something a government does.
And you are 100% wrong. Companies can censor. I can self-censor.
Companies can't violate the first amendment by censoring (unless they do it on behalf of the government). That may be what you are thinking. But they can censor.
Companies cannot violate the first amendment (Score:2)
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No he's not. A filter is nothing more than an automated form of censorship. One doesn't need to be a government entity in order to censor something. The definition of censorship is the suppression of something someone finds objectionable. You people need to read a dictionary sometime. Also just because TFA uses the term incorrectly doesn't mean that incorrect use becomes the new canonical meaning.
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Oxford English Dictionary (the one true dictionary of English) says this for censorship: Any regime or context in which the content of what is publically expressed, exhibited, published, broadcast, or otherwise distributed is regulated or in which the circulation of information is controlled. A regulatory system for vetting, editing, and prohibiting particular forms of public expression, presided over by a censor (an official given a mandate to review specific kinds of material according to pre-defined crit
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You're only the umpteenth poster insisting that companies cannot censor because they are free to do as they please. It's wrong on all counts but it would help you if you would start looking at our massive 'noncensorship' problems.
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In Ancient Rome ...
We don't live in Rome and English isn't Latin.
I looked at a dozen definitions of "censorship" and not a single one mentions "government". Google "define:censorship".
From Wikipedia:
"Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions and other controlling bodies."
It's only censorship in the literal sense, if it is done by the government or on the behest of the government.
Not true. Even "self-censorship
Idiot poster accidentally adds to the debate (Score:2)
I identify as transgender six year old girl
Waiting for the censor hammer now of slashdot to mark my post as ascii art and block it.
This is such a great example of why we need moderation systems; thanks. Totally off topic, trying to trigger some pathetic "woke" debate. Modded down to -1 we would normally be able to ignore this and only because of it's "censorship", or better stated, proper moderation, is it back into the territory of useful valuable discussion.
Who knows why this poster even bothers? All we know is that a bunch of losers are willing to waste their empty lives sitting waiting for posts to turn up on an obscure tech site
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Your comment proves the original satire's point. If you missed the fact that it was a meta-comment about Slashdot's moderation policies, in the context of a post about social media moderation policies, when the entire comment text was about Slashdot moderation, it reflects only on you and your labeling of the subject line as "totally off topic".
Re: Idiot poster accidentally adds to the debate (Score:2)
I missed the point too. It smelled light edgelord bullshit and I rolled my eyes and scrolled on.
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Another one of those annoying objective truths is that lies are by definition speech. It's extraordinarily hard to lie without using words (or some other language, such as 2+2=5) to express the false assertion.
Obviously, not all speech is legally protected, but that's a much more nuanced topic. The big risk that the US's First Amendment recognizes is that those in power might use that power to impose their own set of beliefs and acceptable speech on everyone else.
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I love killfiles. The ability to determine my own boundaries, in a way that others cannot transgress, is important to me.
I don't think that controls should be limited to killfiles (again to use USENET as an example, the USENET Death Sentence was applied only twice IIRC but was an absolutely vital part of the system). There is a place for filtering at levels other than the individual, just as there's a place for firewalls and Active NIDS in a network, but because these are far blunter tools they need to be u
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We may well do, but there's too much noise and not enough signal to hear those better questions or the answers to them. Partly because of the problems mentioned in TFA, partly because those who enjoy the noise have become very good at amplifying it.
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Sometimes posts disappear from conversations here. They are generally some kind of fake ad spam, like the bizx ad troll. Those posts are censored by Slashdot editors. Is that warranted, or not? Few would say not to that specific example. So if some censorship is acceptable, where do you draw the line? That's the real conversation.
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There's few places these days where you can say anything (or almost anything) you want with impunity, and those places are generally treated like havens for the deranged and potential terrorists like 4chan
Those places are treated that way because that's what they primarily are. Most of the ideas being censored on social media are really fucking stupid at best, and almost all of them are actively harmful in some way or another. At minimum they harm healthy discourse by spreading lies, misunderstandings, and half-truths. Are some things being censored that shouldn't be? Yep. Does that invalidate the concept of private censorship? Nope.