When radio was king, many outlets chose to stop broadcasting Father Coughlin

https://theconversation.com/that-time-private-us-media-companies-stepped-in-to-silence-the-falsehoods-and-incitements-of-a-major-public-figure-in-1938-153157

by samizdis • 6 years ago

178 194 6 years ago

theconversation.com

gxs5• 6 years ago

Often we confuse there being precedent for an event with the precedent being actually right.

I understand both perspectives here: what's "morally" right and what is strictly by the book right.

Personally, I lean towards the latter. As the famous quote says (paraphrased), I may not agree with what you say, but I'll always defend your right to say it.

At the very least it should go through due process, not be at the whim of some private organization.

JohnTHaller• 6 years ago

You're welcome to say it. Others should not be forced to listen, repeat, or amplify what you say.

_Microft• 6 years ago

That’s why I don’t like „retweets are not endorsements“. Spreading a message is endorsement, one way or another. They have the choice to retweet or not and when they choose to spread the message, they become co-responsible for its consequences.

strangattractor• 6 years ago

There is a difference between letting someone speak freely and handing them a megaphone. The Constitution does not give individuals the freedom to incite violence. It is designed to prevent it. Russia is putting Parler back online - at least they believe in free speech.

engineer_226• 6 years ago

Fine - let's run with this.

We set up a system where certain ideas are not tolerated. There is a preferential system for use of mass communication platforms. Only officially sanctioned speakers or patterns of thought are allowed to be broadcast to the mass.

A step further: Who decides what is acceptable? And on what grounds shall we suspend the speech of others? What stops this from becoming suppression of political speech?

klmadfejno• 6 years ago

Perhaps there's a middleground between allowing someone to say something privately and providing them a platform to broadcast that message to the world though

engineer_226• 6 years ago

Good point. But it begs the next question: where exactly is the line between the two?

partiallypro2• 6 years ago

I know people will try to draw a parallel between this and banning Parler, Trump, etc from social media but they are quite different. A radio station operates more like a newspaper and vets everything that is broadcast on its channel and has to grant access to do so, that isn't true of social media. This would be more akin to CNN/MSNBC/etc refusing to air Trump rallies.

ceejayoz• 6 years ago

Radio stations regularly have live interviews with listeners, and my local NPR station ends those segments with "the views expressed in this segment may not reflect those of the station, underwriters, or management".

partiallypro2• 6 years ago

That's no different than a "letter to the editor." Still not remotely similar to social media.

engineer_226• 6 years ago

Clearly, we've gotta change. Something needs to be done. But I think we should very carefully weigh our options, lest we become that which we seek to destroy.

rhino3693• 6 years ago

And if anyone thinks the answer is clear, many of the same people saying we need to blacklist anyone claiming election fraud were saying Trump was trying to steal the election in October.

If we can be ban false claims of election fraud, we can ban true claims too.

ardy423• 6 years ago

We can be ban false claims of election fraud, we can bad true claims too.

I think the terms "shun" and "ostracize" fit the current situation better than "ban."

discohippy• 6 years ago

Yes we already know that everyone on this forum is pro censorship. Can we all just move on? Im so sick of all this political news when all we really care about are apple gadgets and javascript frameworks.

woodgrainz• 6 years ago

The Paradox of Tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

polishdude20• 6 years ago

Ah that's a good point. The only think that need not be tolerated is intolerance itself. Sadly, tolerance easily can stem from the lack of backbone than from the abundance of it.

gadders• 6 years ago

Yes, sadly that seems to be what has happened at Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.

whoopdedo• 6 years ago

I would also propose there is a Dunning-Kruger Corollary of Tolerance, which is that the more intolerant a person is the more likely they are to perceive themselves as tolerant, and perceive people who disagree with them as intolerant.

Ericson23142• 6 years ago

Radio was a natural monopoly, but thanks to federation, social media need not be. (Note federation means one app, multiple echo chambers, should be easy.)

mcguire6• 6 years ago

How would that improve matters, exactly?

Ericson23142• 6 years ago

Fox & Facebook have a profit motive for engagement at all costs, but federated social media would hopefully resist commercialization as various orgs ran servers / moderation for different purposes, you know, like the www.

Even if they were running adds like the old forums and what not, it would be more to reach costs and promote a media empire.

Yes, this all sounds like a rather wishful deescalation of the attention economy, but if nothing else, remember the hoi polloi didn't radicalize themselves in a vacuum, much as we see that narrative being pushed. I much prefer the above to some state capitalism regulated Facebook dystopia.

safog3• 6 years ago

The big problem here is that writing a regulation that decides what's okay / not okay on a platform (either by the platform itself or by a govt) is basically impossible.

Any sort of you-shalt-not-serve-this-content type of rulebook won't stand up to real world use and you need a team of lawyers to exercise judgement on if content is allowed or not allowed on a platform.

A couple of examples to de-politicize this:

- FB says gore / violence is not allowed. There was a Facebook post on how one of Mexico's most violet cartel members was killed that circulated on FB [1], received a lot of attention, and popped up in people's feeds leading to cries to take down the post (won't someone think of the kids!). They did take it down and then the Boston marathon bombing happened. Similar pictures of blood / gore circulated but this time FB was forced to keep the pictures up in "public interest".

- Nudity is not allowed on the platform. As part of their nudity filtering, they kicked off a group on breastfeeding from FB which again lead to protest and FB allowing it and modifying their policy to specifically make an exception for breastfeeding. YT and Amazon suffer from this as well (though we haven't had a big PR bust up yet). Amazon algorithms for instance recommend "adult" fiction (with provocative cover art) along with children's books. Beyond just playing whack-a-mole with these products, and some half assed attempts to detect nudity in book covers, I don't think a lot of progress has been made.

So yeah, I think Zuck will be more than happy to say, please tell us what to allow on the platform and we'll follow it to the letter and deflect the blame to the regulators.

It's not even clear that there's a solution here beyond let the platforms exercise their best judgement and sort of muddle along.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/1/5569878/the-dark-side-of-t...

walrus012• 6 years ago

Amazon algorithms for instance recommend "adult" fiction (with provocative cover art)

amazon publishes way more than that, NSFW, google "chuck tingle". The famous author of "space raptor butt invasion", and who can forget the literary masterpiece "pounded in the butt by my own butt"

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=chuck+tin...

recursive• 6 years ago

WTF is even real life. There are hundreds of them. https://www.amazon.com/Chuck-Tingle/e/B00SF2MTYK

One of my favorite titles is "Creamed In The Butt By My Handsome Living Corn"

mcphage3• 6 years ago

and who can forget the literary masterpiece "pounded in the butt by my own butt"

Don't forget the meta-level 'Pounded in the Butt by My Book "Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt"'

nitrogen• 6 years ago

It's not even clear that there's a solution here beyond let the platforms exercise their best judgement and sort of muddle along.

Ensuring a diversity of platforms with no one/two/three platforms controlling the vast majority of interaction would probably help.

root_axis4• 6 years ago

People are free to use whatever platforms they want, you can't force the masses to use alternative platforms. Besides, the landscape is already very diverse, but the most popular platforms will always get the most media attention, it's not like using FB precludes the use of any other platform, most people who are active on social media are active on multiple sites. This just isn't a problem.

rootusrootus3• 6 years ago

So yeah, I think Zuck will be more than happy to say, please tell us what to allow on the platform and we'll follow it to the letter and deflect the blame to the regulators.

He would never do that. He needs regular users to stay on the platform. The censorship isn't to appease government regulators, it's to keep from alienating regular people who don't want to be exposed to it. Deflecting blame to the regulators wouldn't stop users from leaving and heading to a platform that did more effective damage control.

safog3• 6 years ago

He's been saying that pretty consistently for several years though.. too lazy to dig up the links.

Regular users might be somewhat impacted (if their bill gates is tracking us through vaccines post gets removed for example) but most people I'd say just want to post their breakfast / travel photos on Facebook than deal with QAnon conspiracies.

ramoz3• 6 years ago

I address this in another top comment as well. Just additional perspective.

You can't predict the future, so you have to find the one thing(s) to protect in all cases. And like you say, it can not be subjective. In Gov't Tech Acquisitions regulation the single objective is to protect and enable small and disadvantage businesses.

Perhaps it could be the same with platforms that propagate info, but there is risk in creating a competitive environment without some form of formal trust system. It does seem ambitious / hard to think about.

paulmd6• 6 years ago

Well, ultimately the law is interpreted by humans, concepts like "good-faith effort" and "bona fide" exist despite those not being something you can exactly define in a law. But judges know it when they see it and it's not actually a problem in practice.

This is ultimately one of those things where computer scientists (specifically) freak out because the real world isn't zeroes and ones like they're used to, it's all shades of grey, but if you act in good taste it's probably not going to be a problem. Ban the cartel murderporn, show the aftermath of the bombing (or not, at your discretion), ban the nudists, but allow breastfeeding (or not, at your discretion), all of that sounds fine to me and we don't need to code an exact line into law.

This is really a common thread in HN threads discussing anything touching on laws or regulation, because computer touchers just can't wrap their head around the idea that the law isn't absolutely precisely defined in a state machine and the judge and jury are going to apply human reasoning. But that's how the legal system works.

I'm going to note that there is of course a degree of self-servingness in insisting that there be an exact line drawn. It's a way for Facebook to punt on actually having to moderate their platform and push that responsibility onto the courts, because they don't want to pay humans to deal with what is ultimately a human problem that needs to be solved in human ways. The nature of the world is that there are grey areas and some stuff in the grey area is fine and some stuff shouldn't be there, and it will take human intervention to decide which is which.

If you don't want to pay to do that, and you want to be 100% on the green side of the line, then you will have to default to very aggressive censorship that will probably annoy users, but that's the price of being on a free platform that doesn't want to pay for adequate moderation.

safog3• 6 years ago

I think what you're missing is that FB does employ an army of content moderators to decide if something passes their bar or not. And these are low wage, button clicking jobs along the lines of the AWS mechanical turk where without very explicit clear guidelines, you fall flat on your face.

For context, reviewers apparently typically spend ~0-3 seconds to determine if a piece of content (mostly pictures) is acceptable. Given the pace of content creation, I'm amazed they even get that long, I assume algorithms do a lot of the heavy lifting as well.

Even if you have extremely smart reviewers, if your guidelines aren't clear and you leave it to the reviewer's interpretation, you'd likely get extremely inconsistent results and that feels like a worse product experience than having no moderation at all.

So either have the govt decide these guidelines (esp. on political speech) and let them eat humblepie or let the platform do it and don't complain when they ban the POTUS.

x86_64Ubuntu3• 6 years ago

... you need a team of lawyers to exercise judgement on if content is allowed or not allowed on a platform.

No you don't. The platform is private property, they can decide whether or not they want such content, no lawyers needed. When someone gets banned or flagged on HN, does anyone mention lawyers getting involved? Of course not.

joshuaheard• 6 years ago

The answer to dangerous lies is the truth, not censorship. We have a marketplace of ideas where bad ideas die and good ideas spread. Unfortunately, I see a trend towards restricting free speech, which will only harm the country in the long term.

thejellypen• 6 years ago

bad ideas may eventually die by they may also cause harm before dying out.

rootusrootus3• 6 years ago

We have a marketplace of ideas where bad ideas die and good ideas spread

That is the ideal. The actual marketplace seems to operate in the opposite fashion.

ardy423• 6 years ago

We have a marketplace of ideas where bad ideas die and good ideas spread.

If that were true, neither QAnon nor "Stop the Steal" would have gone anywhere. Instead, they spread like wildfire to the point where their adherents literally attacked the democratic process.

The marketplace of ideas only works that way when its participants are rational actors with good judgement, and it's becoming increasingly clear that is not actually the case.

zug_zug2• 6 years ago

Yes, and we can simplify even more -- we have a case from 80 years ago where the greatest atrocity in history was committed by a population that got duped by an anti-semitic demagogue.

To all those bandying about "free speech" without ever tackling any of the nuances of reality, I'd love to hear -- if push came to shove, would you have argued platforms should be giving megaphones to even Hitler? If not, you acknowledge there's a line, so let's define it.

dcolkitt4• 6 years ago

The marketplace of ideas only works that way when its participants are rational actors with good judgement

You're leaving out the implicit assumption you're making, that the "authorities" in charge of the marketplace are rational actors. You better hope to hell, that they are.

Because when some marketplace participants fail, they fail gracefully. When centralized authorities fail, they fail spectacularly and disastrously. I can virtually guarantee you that Qanon will be a footnote in ten years time. In contrast how would you like to live in Iran, China, Turkey, or any other regime where lunatics have taken over in the name of "protecting the people from dangerous ideas"?

All those people clamoring for authorities to clamp down on irrational Trumpist extremists, have forgotten that Trump and his cronies were just recently in charge of all three branches of the government as well as a supermajority of state governments.

This is how the political cycle always goes. All anybody sees is a sensible, incoming administration with likeminded views. And I actually agree. Biden's a decent man, and I honestly can't see him abusing even very broad powers. But what happens after? But there's no putting this genie back in the bottle. Do you trust President Donald Trump Jr. or President Tucker Carlson or President Josh Hawley with that power?

This isn't even hypothetical. Most people here are too young to remember the post-9/11 hysteria. But I can virtually guarantee you that had the current crop of anti-speech activists managed to put their would-be "anti-extremist" laws in place, that opposition to the War on Terror would have been de facto illegal.

Dealing with some stupid conspiracy theories and LARPer shamans, who have as much chance of overthrowing the American government as my toddler, are a small price to pay for fault-tolerance in liberal democracy.

triceratops• 6 years ago

These "marketplace of ideas" zealots don't operate on evidence. No exceptions or qualifications to the sanctity of free speech exist. Free speech is a faith, and no such heresies are allowed.

I love free speech. I think it's one of the most important things in society. But the whole "kill lies with more speech" meme needs to die because there's simply no evidence for it.

We should have free speech for its own sake, and recognize and mitigate its harmful effects as much as possible. If we don't, society will turn against free speech entirely and everyone will be much worse off.

genericuser314• 6 years ago

"We have a marketplace of ideas where bad ideas die and good ideas spread."

Perhaps it should work that way, but in a US context, I think this is demonstrably false. Many people participating in the marketplace of ideas hold diametrically opposing ideas and posit contradictory facts. There is no winnowing of falsehood from truth.

wiredfool2• 6 years ago

Your fundamental assumption is that bad ideas die. I'm not sure that is supported by the evidence.

The converse of that is "If the idea persists, it's good". I'm having a hard time seeing the evidence for that as well.

mcguire6• 6 years ago

Maybe something akin to Gresham's law?

username90• 6 years ago

Bad ideas die but it takes decades.

aaomidi• 6 years ago

where bad ideas die and good ideas spread.

Why do we assume this is true? Billions of people get scammed in the world yearly. Yes. Billions.

Mass hysteria[1] is a thing, and sure in the long term an idea __may__ die out (again, there's no real evidence of this). The damage done until it does die out can lead to a rise in cult of personality like how Hitler came into power and became so popular in Germany.

There isn't some natural filter of hate and __bad__ ideas in humans. People are sheep and will put their weight behind anyone who resonates with them. Not necessarily "good" ideas.

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

tomku• 6 years ago

The thing that makes ideas spread is not good/bad or truth/lie, it's whether people find them useful or comforting to believe. The truth has no chance in the "marketplace of ideas" against comforting lies that reinforce people's feelings of superiority and infallibility.

anigbrowl5• 6 years ago

We have a marketplace of ideas where bad ideas die and good ideas spread.

Doubt. This was certainly the intention but it's very plain that the market of public discourse doesn't work nearly as well as scientific peer review, which is itself somewhat flawed.

It's an old truism that 'a lie can get halfway round the world before the truth has got its shoes on.' It has also been rigorously documented: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 For that matter, phrases like 'the big lie' reflect a wide social awareness that lying has historically been an effective political strategy.

Besides the fact that the marketplace of ideas demonstrably doesn't privilege truth in the short term, why would you expect it to? A marketplace is easily dominated by whoever can invest heavily in promotional tools. Furthermore, many people in the market demand entertainment or validation rather than truth, so there's abundant money to be made out of selling pleasant-sounding bullshit.

yifanl• 6 years ago

In a world where we cannot censor an idea, then there is _no_ difference between a good and a bad idea, the very act of making a value judgment if an idea is good or bad is inherently an act of censorship.

Given that, there's clearly an amount of acceptable censorship that is higher than 0.

burnthrow• 6 years ago

Okay, now do McCarthyism!

ramoz3• 6 years ago

They do the opposite as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft#:....

rootusrootus3• 6 years ago

The best answer I can come up with for this problem is much stricter enforcement of antitrust laws. Private organizations should not be compelled to carry content they find objectionable, but they should also not be allowed to dominate the channel.

jakelazaroff5• 6 years ago

I think this is the only answer. I see a lot of people up in arms when it comes to speech they care about (e.g. Twitter removing QAnon) yet utterly silent when it comes to speech they don't (e.g. Tumblr removing NSFW). The "slippery slope" is only a problem when it hits close to home. This makes me think that if the shoe were on the other foot, team "free speech" would be more than happy to play censor.

The only way to prevent that is to keep entities from gaining so much power in the first place.

ramoz3• 6 years ago

Agree.

Government acquisitions regulation for tech itself is also a good example.(for COTs products, contracting dev/integration, consulting, research, etc). Gov't acquisition law has become so complex, yet has one single constraint in mind with every update:

Protect and enable small and disadvantaged businesses.

It's not perfect, in many new ways inefficient, but seems to do its job.

But what is the constraint we need when it comes to propagating information? It's not as objectively clear as the acquisition case.

hypersoar• 6 years ago

I'm all for that, but I think more radical action is needed in the case of social networks. Should social networking sites funded by advertising be allowed to exist? The business model rewards maximizing "user engagement". However much Facebook might be removing provocative material now (which I am in favor of), the fundamental incentives of their business will push them back to where they were, letting outrage-driven content spread. It's unreasonable to expect a corporation to do otherwise without intervention.

mikepurvis3• 6 years ago

Not an external remedy, but one thing I wish Facebook would do is offer the equivalent of rel="nofollow" for engagements. I know there's a separate workflow for "show me less like this" or "mute this user for 30 days" but that feels more like me creating my own little banlist. Instead, I want a box I can tick which means "I'm posting here to fact-check this or attempt to correct the record; please don't treat this as an engagement for the purposes of recommending this link/story/comment to others, or for finding more things like it for me to look at."

I know it's still counter to their business because ultimately outrage -> engagements -> ad impressions. But I can't help thinking it might be a start.

mikepurvis3• 6 years ago

I agree in principle, but it's worth also examining the effect this has on how people end up in media echo chambers— when the media is a monopoly like the BBC and people expect to hear Jeremy Paxman grill you, you're going to go face the music, because not doing so will be even worse for you than going and faceplanting (a similar thing could be said historically about Peter Mansbridge on CBC in Canada).

In the US, though, there's no such impetus. Interviewers and even whole outfits can get cut off from access for the slightest thing, so then you have the phenomenon of politicians only ever being interviewed in increasingly safe environments, with friendly hosts who suck up to them, following prearranged lines of questioning, etc. Any apparent instances of toughness are basically theatre, with both sides in on the act.

Anyway, I don't have an answer here. Choice in media is absolutely a net good, and competition is critical to a healthy overall dialogue. But I feel that some of the more subtle costs of this approach are not always considered in discussions about it.

paulmd6• 6 years ago

people expect to hear Jeremy Paxman grill you, you're going to go face the music, because not doing so will be even worse for you than going and faceplanting

the lesson of Republicanism/Trumpism in the last decade is that this is very much not true. If parties are sufficiently polarized, you can just not go and nothing will happen, people will even defend your decision for not participating in a "biased" interview.

No actual bias need occur of course. And on the flip side refusing to participate in the actual hyper-partisan media will be perceived as justification for the former action. "Both sides do it!" and so on.

starik363• 6 years ago

should not be compelled to carry content they find objectionable, but they should also not be allowed to dominate the channel

How do you do that though? The network effect almost always chooses a single winner in the social media market. YouTube is a perfect example. The content creators go where the market is. How do you make sure YouTube doesn't dominate the channel?

My (imperfect) solution is that once you get to the channel domination point, you should be treated as a utility - e.g. you can't kick people off your service unless they've broken the law.

mcguire6• 6 years ago

Your imperfect solution is what we have, minus any moderation. That doesn't sound pleasant.

I might be tempted to go along, though, if your utility is transparent to the legal process---you can sue people for fraud, for example.

farias0• 6 years ago

The implication of what you're saying is that fighting for net neutrality isn't enough, we need to ensure ample platform to everyone. But is it true? Isn't free speech more about not suffering legal persecution?

Grimm12• 6 years ago

Your solution means no real competition or innovation could take place in that space then. I know it was just a quick take but there's a lot of consequences to that route imo. There's also nothing saying that everyone always goes to one social platform. Facebook for instance bought all of their recent potential competitors so it's more of a self fulfilling prophecy right now and one that really needs to be handled by anti trust imo.

Animats• 6 years ago

There are solutions through antitrust law. One is that dominant carriers can't own content. AT&T should have to sell off Warner.

Another is to make local carriers common carriers, so they just provide transport independent of content. Telcos are still common carriers for analog telephony, but managed to escape it for Internet services.

nefitty• 6 years ago

I assume incumbents might end up in the position where their smaller competitors have to deal with less regulation. For example, if MySpace had been treated differently than Facebook, it might have brought MySpace down much more quickly, but at the same time kept a lid on Facebook’s influence.

maxerickson3• 6 years ago

Is the internet a channel or is Facebook a channel? Both?

Why?

analog312• 6 years ago

Facebook is a channel. Here's my rationale. They have a dominant position in personal data gathering and targeted advertising, with algorithms that couple the creator and recipient of content. It's a made for purpose propaganda service.

If you host your own web server with a particular message that you want to express, it will be lost in a sea of servers, and never reach your intended audience.

If you host it through Facebook, the Facebook algorithms and targeting will help you direct it towards your intended audience, or help your audience find your content.

fareesh• 6 years ago

If the owner of a restaurant criticizes the local Mayor on television, and then the health inspector and fire safety inspector show up the next day and start measuring the distances between doors and windows down to the micrometer - this is all technically and legally correct. Everyone is acting with the authority that they have the right to. If violations are found, the penalties would also be 100% legal and correct.

Now if we choose to be fools and ignore what has actually happened here, we have the right to do that too. Most of the conversations about freedom, censorship, misinformation, private corporations, rights, authority, etc. seem to be neglecting the tremendous scope for abuse.

The mere accusation of being an infidel is enough to taint the perception of the person in question. Someone was banned from the radio for alleged misinformation. What's the vetting process? For most it's to check their political leanings, laugh, and not pursue the matter further. This is a dangerous standard to set.

Simulacra• 6 years ago

An accusation today can ruin a person, more so than ever before.

mcphage3• 6 years ago

An accusation today can ruin a person, more so than ever before

It probably can, but unfortunately the people usually held up as examples of this generally haven't actually been ruined. I mean, what are some actual examples of people who have been ruined by accusation?

rictic• 6 years ago

more so than ever before

This is ahistorical. In many societies throughout history, an accusation of heresy was a mortal threat, or worse.

content_sesh• 6 years ago

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Father Caughlin was not a plucky underdog speaking truth to power when he downplayed Kristallnacht and blamed the Jews for their own persecution. The "alledged misinformation" was in fact, genuine misinformation. And the vetting process was immediate global condemnation.

jrochkind1• 6 years ago

From the article:

Coughlin saw things differently. He blamed Jews for their own persecution and claimed in the sermon that the Nazis had actually been lenient. Only a few synagogues were burned, he lied, adding: “German citizen Jews were not molested officially in the conduct of their business.” And communists, not Jews, were the real targets of the Nazi mobs, according to Coughlin.

Can you clarify, do you suspect this information is not accurate? Or you think it's not sufficient to judge the effect of Coughlin's broadcast and the matter needs to be "pursued further"? (How, what sort of pursuit, what would we be looking to find?) Or something else?

Coughlin wasn't secretive about what he believed, and he was banned from certain stations for exactly what he said on the radio, I think? I'm confused what sort of additional vetting you are suggesting should have happened, by whom. I could respect better an argument that it's worrisome when large corporations can ban people for their political views... but you are arguing that Coughlin's political views were misunderstood? Really? How so?

Or wait, from the first paragraph, that Coughlin wasn't really banned for what he said on the radio, but for... critisizing the local government? With what sort of critisism? You realize it wasn't actually the government that banned him, it was a choice of individual broadcasters not to broadcast him?

x86_64Ubuntu3• 6 years ago

Parent commenter's comment intentionally avoids mentioning the comments that lead to the ban. Pretty much all of the people who scream "slippery slope" and cry for Parler will follow a similar pattern. So instead, the argument trends towards concern-trolling about "vetting" and such.

lordnacho• 6 years ago

It could never be written into the constitution, but it's still there as an essential element of making decisions together.

The concept you're looking for is "good faith". And faith is what it is, you can't have evidence for what went on in the inspector's mind.

Good faith is basically the goodwill be give each other that we're deciding things according to what we say we're deciding things by. If you're judging a figureskating contest, you are supposed to do it based on the desire to promote good technique and artistry. If you do it based on who you think looks good, nobody will ever know, they can only suspect it after you've given full marks to a few good looking people with bad technique.

Once that is undermined in a society, we end up with a mess, because just about every decision can be questioned as a political move, which is what is happening in the US.

Take that appointment of Merrick Garland. How many people now think that it was a good faith decision to not hold a hearing for him? Is it believable that people opposed the hearing for non-partisan reasons? I think it's hard.

motohagiography• 6 years ago

This "good faith" issue is written into many contracts, and a lot of rules just collapse without a basis in shared principle. What I see is a kind of moral legalism, where people essentially litigate their positions to greater and greater powers as a means to wield their dominion, and this is the very essence of faithlessness.

Whether it is a constitutional appeal to freedom of speech, or political "ratfucking," by people who hide behind societal penalties for any violence, the spirit of mendacity and sadistic antagonism is the same. That good faith principle is the only thing that enables societies to be governed with consent instead of just ruled over as interchangeable subjects.

When we dispense with principles and their honourable spirit, we dispense with the only meaningful thing separating people from animals.

thelastwave3• 6 years ago

I don't think anyone seriously questions whether the non-approval of Merrick Garland was done in good faith or not. Rather, the phraseology used is whether it was constitutional. McConnell didn't use a pretext, he flat out acknowledged what he was doing, and that it was constitutionally his prerogative.

mcguire6• 6 years ago

I wouldn't necessarily call it "alleged misinformation".

"In the wake of [blaming "Jews for their own persecution and [claiming...] that the Nazis had actually been lenient. Only a few synagogues were burned, he lied, adding: “German citizen Jews were not molested officially in the conduct of their business.”], a New York radio station decided to break with Coughlin. “Your broadcast last Sunday was calculated to incite religious and racial strife in America,” said a letter from WMCA radio. “When this was called to your attention in advance of your broadcast, you agreed to delete those misrepresentations which undeniably had this effect. You did not do so.”"

Coughlin broke an agreement not to "incite religious and racial strife". Emphasis on "broke an agreement".

Nacdor• 6 years ago

The mere accusation of being an infidel is enough to taint the perception of the person in question.

Not that we need more reminders of this fact, but here's another recent one that everyone should read: Alex Morse committed the mortal sin of trying to unseat an incumbent Democrat in Massachusetts. The Democratic party used false accusations of inappropriate sexual behavior to successfully smear him and destroy his campaign. Even after their "investigation" turned up nothing they still continued to attack him: https://theintercept.com/2021/01/18/alex-morse-umass-amherst...

anigbrowl5• 6 years ago

Perhaps you should be more specific instead of resorting to vague insinuations, which can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings.

marcosdumay• 6 years ago

What's the vetting process?

You either don't care and make damn sure that the communication channel has a lot of competition over the public mindshare, or you make it completely formal with democratically created rules with last appeals in the government judiciary.

Both of those are fine. Not perfect, but fine. None is dangerous. The first option is the default, for obvious reasons.

I don't know how it was at the time, but our current situation with social media is neither of those options, and not fine at all. Anyway, any comparison or decision based only on the ruleset is misleading.

betterunix2• 6 years ago

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is misinformation -- not "allegedly," it is a straight up lie that was intended to stir up antisemitic hatred. The man in question used his print publication to propagate that pamphlet. That same man spent years using his radio program to promote the falsehood that the Russian Revolution was sponsored by "Jewish bankers" and the conspiracy theory that "Jews" were behind Bolshevism. In response to Kristalnacht he said that the persecution of Jews by the Nazis "followed" the persecution of Christians by the Bolsheviks, as if Kristalnacht was a response to what happened in the USSR. When he was challenged on his antisemitism he declared that he wanted the "Good Jews" on his side and that he was only taking a stand against the persecution of people generally (never mind his comments on Kristalnacht and support for the Nazi Party and the Bund).

So no, this is not an example of out of control censorship or a witch hunt or even a "mere accusation" ruining someone's life, nor was it simply that he was an opponent of Roosevelt (who, like every US president, had many political opponents). This is an example of someone who was fomenting religious and ethnic divisions by spreading the propaganda of one of America's adversaries -- while also being indirectly funded by that adversary.

MikeUt2• 6 years ago

the conspiracy theory that "Jews" were behind Bolshevism

10 of the 15 leaders of the Russian-supported socialist revolution in Germany were Jewish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%8...

It would be interesting to compare that to the percentage of the German population that was Jewish at the time.

Zuider• 5 years ago

Fr. Caughlin's anti-Semitism was reprehensible, but given the pervasive atmosphere of anti-Semitism at the time, was it actually the distinguishing feature that caused him to be singled out?

On a historical note, the 'Protocols' was originally intended as racist satire, based on the unlikely premise of a leak from the key plotters in a conspiracy. It was immediately received as if it were genuine.

compsciphd• 6 years ago

not 100%. There's a jewish law concept of an eruv. without getting into the nitty gritty of it, many places that have them, make use of existing utility poles (with permission of the utility companies that own them). Many municipalities have laws that are really unenforced that things can't be posted to them. Sometimes when building an eruv, they will post a strip to the pole (again, don't have to get into the details as to why, unimportant for this discussion). Cities that want to make life difficult for the people building the eruv try to enforce the law against them.

the city general loses in court

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%9318_Bergen_County_...

just because the law defines something, we are also equal in the eyes of the law and if a law is not equally enforced and is viewed as being used by the government as a bludgeon against the practice of protected rights, then the government has a difficult case to defend.

99_00• 6 years ago

Interesting history, and the subtext seems to be that this is precedence for deleting Trump from social media. But the connection isn't presented, it is assumed. And in my opinion, doesn't exist.

As a media historian, I find more than a little similarity between the stand those stations took back then and the way Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have silenced false claims of election fraud and incitements to violence in the aftermath of the siege on the U.S. Capitol – noticeably by silencing the claims of Donald Trump and his supporters.

If you're going to link accusations of election fraud with Nazism you need more than "more than a little similarity".

And bundling up accusations of election fraud with incitements to violence is very sloppy. Someone can believe fraud happened without advocating violence.

If we don't allow that seperation, then anyone who is critical about anything to do with the election is inciting violence. Of course, when this standard is applied it won't be done evenly. Instead it will be targeted to certain groups. At that point it becomes political persicution.

rmason2• 6 years ago

Being born in Detroit I heard about father Coughlin my entire life. Almost all of it was negative.

Did you know that after losing his radio show the post office refused to let him distribute his newspaper, Social Justice?

Despite many catholic parishes having closed Father Coughlin's church is still active. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Shrine_of_the_Little_...

shadowgovt3• 6 years ago

The Wikipedia summary of the story with the post office is absolutely fascinating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin#Cancellation_...

It appears that FDR's attorney general put pressure on the post office to revoke Coughlin's 2nd-class mailing privileges. In the end, the privileges weren't revoked, but (due in part to FDR putting pressure on the Catholic church itself), the bishopry commanded Coughlin to restrict his activities to local ministry.

rmason2• 6 years ago

Father Coughlin was a strong supporter of FDR dating back to when he was Governor of New York. It is only when he broke with FDR in 1936 that he started having problems.

rektide2• 6 years ago

I'd like to see a democratic/noospheric voice enter the picture, some day. I'm not sure it will be great, but giving the people a way to aggregate their voice, to say for themselves what they find objectionable & undeserving seems due. In a town square, one can just shout over jack-asses. But they keep being invited onto television/media! Stirs up more controversy, keep ratings high.

rektide2• 6 years ago

To be clear, I don't think that democratic vote should silence people. But I do think that people should have the option to stand & be accounted for, and one of the most important places to do that is in supporting, refusing, or outright censoring others. Government never had the option before of letting us chip in, letting us voice our support or distaste or alarm. Particularly the popular, the famous, those given the megaphone: they should be subject, real-time, regularly, to our accounts. And hopefully, our own accounts over time help us better determine who we were, where we were right, where we were wrong. So we can correct the record, keep becoming more perfect selves, as we try to head & govern towards our more perfect worlds.

duxup• 6 years ago

It's a tough call with private ownership of platforms and their rights and everything else.

I'm perpetually wondering how much you tolerate the free speech of a group whose purpose or side effects would inevitably restrict the rights of others.

olivermarks5• 6 years ago

Some context ...Coughlin was initially a powerful asset and supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, but then became a political opponent, accusing him of being too friendly to bankers. In 1934, he and others established a political organization called the National Union for Social Justice, supported by many German and Scandinavian immigrant Americans. membership was in the millions behind an agenda of monetary reform, nationalization of major industries and railroads, protection of labor rights and like the national socialists in Germany very anti communist.

The 30's were an extraordinary time - Hitler was Time magazine man of the year in 1938 - and there was strong resistance to the USA entering an 'old country' war at the end of the decade. A rough equivalent to 'occupy wall street' in the mid 30's was obviously very anti banker and this was a large part of Coughlin's Catholic German appeal. (Many Irish catholics were heavily involved as well as Italian Americans who had Mussolini supposedly making the trains run on time while pushing back on some bankers).

The William Kovarik (Professor of Communication, Radford University) article was originally titled

'That time private US media companies stepped in to silence the falsehoods and incitements of a major public figure … in 1938' in 'the Conversation' - the Smithsonian chose to re headline it.

1938 was a major turning point in US politics and as is the case today there was a major clamp down on free speech. This arguably subsequently partially resulted in the US entering WWII...

https://theconversation.com/that-time-private-us-media-compa...

mcguire6• 6 years ago

Note also the "cocktail putsch" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot)---one of the few times you get to say "Smedley" with a straight face.

cafard• 6 years ago

Actually, I believe that the USMC always has a bulldog mascot named Smedley.

kevinventullo3• 6 years ago

Could you expand on your last sentence? My understanding was that the US entered WWII as a direct result of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

olivermarks5• 6 years ago

Useful link about US isolationists vs interventionists https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/great-debate

olivermarks5• 6 years ago

Had Huey Long not been assassinated in 1935 he would have been an important participant in the isolationist politics of the late 30's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Huey_Long

ausbah• 6 years ago

deplatforming bad actors works

paulmd6• 6 years ago

In some circumstances, and for a while. For example Parler has found a new host in Russia, probably with a big helping hand from Russian intelligence.

And sure that host could be deplatformed over it too, but if that continues to escalate then the ultimate endpoint is a balkanized internet where we don't tolerate traffic from ISPs that provide peer exchange to ISPs that provide data services to datacenters that provide services to hosting services that provide services to Parler. Effectively if Russia is willing to continue to escalate then the only practical solution to "de-platform" Parler would be to cut off Russia from the rest of the internet entirely.

daveslash• 6 years ago

This is off topic, but I can't get over how professional those protest signs look, especially given that this was before high availability of at-home publishing software, on-demand printing services and the like.

spoonjim• 6 years ago

Overall hand skill used to be much higher in the US, out of necessity: making clothes, repairing houses, auto maintenance, painting and decorating, etc.

wil421• 6 years ago

Some of the signs are the exact same. I doubt they created these at home. Printing companies were around back then.

allannienhuis• 6 years ago

There were some interesting technologies before computer aided design in sign shops. When I was a kid one of my first jobs was silk-screening custom-made signs (like in those photos) and stickers. Much of it was done with light (UV?)-sensitive film techniques. A master was created carefully letter by letter from a bunch of letter 'stickers' [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letraset], then the light-sensitive film was applied to the silk screen, and the master laid on to it and a lamp shone on it for a few minutes. The parts NOT exposed to the light (behind the letters) were capable of being washed away with a solvent of some sort (water in some cases if I remember correctly), leaving a very high resolution stencil that would be used to print onto whatever material desired, with a number of different types of inks. Pulling a squeegee and stacking hundreds of placards for drying was my summer job for several years. :)

For the really custom stuff, our commercial artists were amazingly talented with both brush and penknife. Some of those guys could paint lettering by hand that was incredibly consistent and amazingly fast.

kazinator2• 6 years ago

I don't buy the pattern of this argumentation which is basically:

"We did something like X a century ago, so X is not chilling new trend; X is quite okay."

It doesn't take much imagination to substitute various behaviors for X.

JKCalhoun2• 6 years ago

You seem to be creating the pattern yourself. I see:

"We did something like X a century ago, history repeats, full stop."

Where did "X is quite okay" come from?

kazinator2• 6 years ago

The tone of the article conveys agreement with the intervention.

For instance, the closing remark "in both cases, private business had to step in when the consequences became evident" could be rendered neutrally as "in both cases, private businesses stepped in when the consequences became evident."

"Had to step in" has the effect of defending the actions, by insinuating that they had no alternative.

upofadown• 6 years ago

Father Coughlin was engaging in hate speech which is illegal in most countries (the US is an exception)[1].

Advocating sedition seems like a fundamentally different thing with a lot more political implications. Normally such a thing would result in the censure of individuals, not entire classes of individuals.

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

citizenpaul• 6 years ago

Hate speech is not a thing. It is a falsity that dumb people accept as a form of censorship when they don't like something. There are simply things you don't want to hear and things you do. Threats right? Nope.

thelastwave3• 6 years ago

Surprised you're not being heavily downvoted already. (I don't agree with that, just surprised.)

I do however think extreme hate speech is a real thing, it's just misapplied to the point where anything anyone disagrees with is labeled hate speech.

Because at the end of the day, all negativity is based on hate, right? If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all (which is a nice convenient bromide for eliminating real critical thought.)

krastanov• 6 years ago

It is true that "hate speech laws" are limits on free speech. It is perfectly reasonable to consider any limitation on free speech to be unethical, but pretending that "hate speech" is not well defined is willful ignorance. No country has absolute protection of absolute free speech.

guyzero• 6 years ago

You may not like hate speech laws, but they're explicitly coded in to plenty of legal systems, like Canada.

https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/Resear...

newacct583• 6 years ago

The case in point was a single speaker being suppressed, not a "class", though. I don't understand why people keep trying to argue as if conservatives as a whole are being "suppressed". Most of them are still on Twitter (or here, or reddit, or...).

Parler was specific community with a specific set of inadequate moderation policies and became a center of thought for a violent community that ended up engaged in political violence. And that site, and only that site, thus became a target for broad suppression by other actors in the market.

wnevets2• 6 years ago

Watching so many self proclaimed libertarians and free market cures all folks twist themselves into pretzels advocating the government should force companies to allow Parler, Trump and others use their services has been very entertaining. Too bad gay couples wanting to buy a wedding cake didn't receive that same kind of support from these folks.

krupan3• 6 years ago

I think if you paid better attention you’d notice the libertarians are not asking for the government to intervene. You can voice opposition to something without advocating for the government to regulate the thing. That is in fact a core tenet of libertarianism: persuasion instead of government coercion.

anigbrowl5• 6 years ago

It's kinda disingenuous of them to ignore the fact that Trump made a big thing out of repealing section 230 and has not only talked many times about regulating social media but formally petitioned the FCC to do so: https://www.ntia.gov/files/ntia/publications/ntia_petition_f...

wnevets2• 6 years ago

I think if you paid better attention you'd noticed I used the self proclaimed qualifier for a reason. I have no interesting in playing the true scotsman game.

tengbretson• 6 years ago

I don't think the founders ever could have imagined the possibility of high-capacity, fully automatic broadcasting of speech when they wrote the first amendment.

maxharris• 6 years ago

I find it troubling that this article omits the fact that Coughlin's newspaper was a weekly named "Social Justice", and that Coughlin was the leader and founder of the National Union for Social Justice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Justice_(periodical) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Union_for_Social_Just...

The overlap in names between Coughlin's authoritarian-right movement and today's increasingly authoritarian-left version may at first seem like a mere coincidence, but my view is that this is reflective of a deep epistemological commonality between these views. Despite the surface-level political differences, which amounts to disagreement on who to scapegoat and which group should wield increasingly authoritarian power over others, they are not very different.

From where does this commonality stem? German philosophers that created the intellectual conditions within German society that made both the Weimar Republic and its collapse into Hitler's Nazi Germany inevitable: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/530716/the-cause-of...

dang• 6 years ago

Url changed from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/time-private-us-media..., which points to this.

tqi• 6 years ago

The most frustrating thing about the whole debate around censorship/deplatforming that no one seems to want to acknowledge that there is probably no good answer, only acceptable compromises. Everyone wants to paint those who came to a different conclusion as stupid or acting in bad faith, as if the answer is as clear as the sky is blue. No wonder this discussion never goes anywhere...

tinus_hn• 6 years ago

In other news, you also can’t say ‘ass’ on the radio.

When radio was king, many outlets chose to stop broadcasting Father Coughlin

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