The censorship of WallStreetBets needs to be a watershed moment for everyone

https://proprivacy.com/privacy-news/wallstreetbets-censorship-watershed

by zpeti • 5 years ago

121 73 5 years ago

llampx• 5 years ago

First Discord bans the group, now Facebook, and in the meantime, Google has helpfully removed more than 100K negative reviews.

Big tech is organized against the little guy and at the end, they are no worse than the Wall Street, whether they wear shorts and t-shirts, turtlenecks or suits.

mancerayder• 5 years ago

I enjoy listening to Greenwald's impassioned rants on the topic, with arguments in favor of freedom of speech and examples of what can go wrong historically. There's an interview/conversation with Unherd / Lockdown TV that's of particular interest on the topic.

mr_woozy4• 5 years ago

so link it then.

fjabre4• 5 years ago

I would hesitate from calling WallStreetBets or Reddit the 'little guy'. That's the part that gets me about this story. Both sides are immoral and wrong in manipulating the market and both sides have committed the crime of market manipulation.

jjj1232• 5 years ago

I guess I don’t understand why manipulating the market is immoral if you’re open and honest about it the way wsb was.

noxer4• 5 years ago

You are totally misinformed. To bet against people who took too much risk is exactly what the market should do. Not immoral and its not manipulation at all. The problem isn't the betting of either side the problem is that one side de-facto can not loose (the current situation is an exception and it needs to be seen how much they actually lost in the end). They either get bailouts or get almost "unlimited free" loans to keep going until the tides turn and profits cover previous loses. This is actually manipulation. No matter who bets and on what, a fair free market would liquidate the losers, end of the story. The problem is that the losers in this case aren't actually legally allowed to lose that money because they gamble with other peoples money. Nonetheless they should be liquidated and the rightful owner should sue them and what not but ultimately they have to take the lose. To give your money to someone so they make more is in itself a bet that comes with a risk. Just because someone lost your money in a possible illegal way doesn't mean you have the right to get it back. If I give you 100 bucks and you steal it instead of multiplying it you are a criminal but I still have to bear the lose. Hedge fund and other financial institutions should not be treated differently.

kmeisthax• 5 years ago

Each one of those bans can be explained as WSB being a victim of their own success. None of these companies have a compromising financial connection to Melvin Capital in the same way that Robinhood did.

For example, the WSB Discord was basically such a trainwreck that the WSB mod team themselves admitted they had significant problems keeping it under control. We can extrapolate that to Facebook as well. Hell, the WSB mod team even locked /r/WSB for a few hours to try and figure out a moderation plan. Most online platforms either rely heavily on community moderation (Discord, Reddit) or a small army of employee moderators that have to be rotated out frequently for the sake of their own mental health. Neither of these models work well for an already-rowdy community suddenly 10xing themselves in both scale and frequency of rules violations. It's basically uncontrollable and the only option is to shut it all down until you have a chance to cool off. (Again, that's why /r/WSB was locked yesterday.)

As for Google, they took a third approach: heavy automation. They have shittons of antispam systems specifically targeted to prevent review spamming. A sudden burst of 100k negative reviews from legitimate users angry that they can no longer participate in a financial flash mob is technically indistinguishable from someone who bought and compromised 100k accounts and decided to threaten Robinhood with negative reviews. Your antispam system isn't going to understand context (e.g. Robinhood fixing the books in a particular direction) but it is going to understand timing.

There isn't really a good way to handle this. The null option of "do nothing and let the problem fester" isn't a good option. This is because people will figure out that WSB is the server/subreddit/group you go on in order to break the rules and get away with it. Anyone with a chip on their shoulder about platforms having any sort of moderation rules will deliberately spam these corners of it, and normal people will assume that such behavior is now OK because there's no enforcement. This will spill over into other corners of the platform until everything is as bad as the lowest common denominator. (See also: what happens to subreddits as they grow, the entirety of 4chan, etc)

Tenoke• 5 years ago

This is pretty much it rather than coordinated tech action. I support WSB and am not even remotely a Trumper but what happened to Parler was a much better example of a Big Tech shut down.

davvolun• 5 years ago

As is nearly always the case with these types of conspiracy theories, never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

More charitably, you can explain most of these actions (maybe excepting Robinhood's actions) by the mods of these platforms and locations being roughly as surprised by things as Melvin Capital.

dublin• 5 years ago

On the other hand, you could just allow free speech and expression, a strategy that has worked extremely well in western civilization for at least the last 500 years.

For instance, I have no problem with letting Nazis present their views - it only makes them look as ridiculous as they actually are, and tyranny by Nazis is no better than tyranny by Socialists/Communists, so reasonable people who are not ignorant of history should strongly oppose both. (Although, arguably, the Nazis were far less effective at killing millions of people than the Communists were...)

Person5478• 5 years ago

Until Google does something else I'd give them a pass. Steam, for example, will give you more information about the reviews to avoid brigading.

I'm more inclined to believe Google is trying to head brigading off. When they start being more active however ... then we can no longer give them the benefit of the doubt.

But I'm 100% with you wrt Discord/FB.

9985479945_• 5 years ago

When your platform becomes a means to drive violent action against society, either physical or financial, it’s no longer censorship to shut it down.

flyingfences• 5 years ago

Do you care to explain how buying a stock constitutes "violent action against society"?

Karunamon• 5 years ago

Censorship is a description of an action, not a value judgment. Restricting someone's ability to speak is censorship.

engineer_222• 5 years ago

You have not shown how WSB is violent.

m_a_g• 5 years ago

And how did WallStreetBets "drive violent action against society" exactly?

ceejayoz• 5 years ago

Initiating a short squeeze isn't "financial violence". C'mon.

jayspell• 5 years ago

What WSB is doing is peaceful protest. Based on your definition of violence the Montgomery bus boycott was violence.

eecc• 5 years ago

Uhm so if you’re a group of out-group “retards” you’re violent, but if you’re a well groomed lad in a suit it’s a-ok “just the invisible hand at work”?

bdcravens• 5 years ago

Then virtually any platform, including HN, can be shut down under this definition.

Zigurd2• 5 years ago

This comment sums up how to miss the point: Calls for physical violence should get you banned. "Financial violence" is among consenting adults, and nobody dies.

gz53• 5 years ago

One of the few things a democracy can not tolerate is intolerance. This type of censorship is intolerance.

Our legal system has processes* to deal with people who abuse their freedom of speech. If those processes need to be improved upon to take into account the global megaphone of social media, then let's do so. Censorship however is not the answer.

* e.g. crying fire in a movie theatre can mean you are guilty of a crime like disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace. More extreme words (see Brandenburg versus Ohio) could mean you are found guilty of advocating “crime, sabotage, or unlawful methods of terrorism” for political purposes. All of that depends on context, intent, etc...variables which should be determined in a court of law.

JumpCrisscross2• 5 years ago

Our legal system has processes to deal with people who abuse their freedom of speech*

We need to codify when platforms are liable or responsible and when they are not. Child pornography, calls for violence and political misinformation are currently, legally and politically, respectively, the platform’s problem.

Potential securities violations should not be. But platforms don’t know that. Creating legal safe harbours is merited.

merpnderp• 5 years ago

Child pornography, calls for violence and political misinformation

One of these things is not like the others...

Saying that it is okay to censor "political misinformation" is just saying it is okay to censor any political speech you don't agree with.

tw04• 5 years ago

One of the few things a democracy can not tolerate is intolerance. This type of censorship is intolerance.

Not only can a Democracy tolerate intolerance, it REQUIRES intolerance to survive.

Our legal system has processes* to deal with people who abuse their freedom of speech.

So... intolerance to certain types of speech.

gz53• 5 years ago

one of the few thing a democracy can not tolerate is intolerance

...within the confines of what is legal.

agree we can not tolerate what is not legal.

will_pseudonym2• 5 years ago

My cousin who I have been IM'ing with from the days of AIM/ICQ/Yahoo Messenger asked me yesterday if there was a better chat app than Facebook Messenger. We're both using Signal now.

https://signal.org/download/

Disclosure: Not affiliated with Signal, but I donated $20 to them to support their mission. And since this is on a post about GME, I am a GameStop customer, but I do not own nor have I ever owned GME stocks. I am a WSB and GME supporter. I purchased $2000 in Bitcoin last night for the first time ever after the GME trading shutdowns on Robinhood and others yesterday.

EDIT: had the wrong link for Signal.

Zigurd2• 5 years ago

Discord banned WallStreetBets for violent calls to actions. Thet is hugely different from Google removing bad reviews wholesale, with no apparent effort to distinguish genuine reviews by actual users from spam. Actions by zero-cost trading platforms are the most problematic because they favor data customers over end-users in a way that materially damages end-users.

Not every restraint on speech is censorship or venal commercial interest. And some of what was done is going to cause platforms like RH to deservedly get into considerable regulatory and reputational trouble.

will_pseudonym2• 5 years ago

Anyone could join that Discord server. Discord is incredibly difficult to moderate at scale, and they had banned every bad word that they didn't want the chat to be about. People joined and posted bad words in Unicode that the bots didn't catch, and people can screenshot them instantly.

mythrwy2• 5 years ago

Almost every platform with a meaningful user base is going to have "violent calls to action" depending on how it is framed. Most especially those with slow/poor moderation.

I'm guessing "violent calls to action" on first person shooter game channels received much less attention. Particularly given the timing of this reaction to "violent calls for action".

mensetmanusman• 5 years ago

What if it is false flag posts though? That’s what’s done now on youtube when people want to shut down their competitors.

engineer_222• 5 years ago

What's interesting about the WSB/GME story is how it's got bipartisan appeal. AOC and Ted Cruz publicly agree that the little guys are getting short shrift in this.

It's the first mob in 2020/2021 that's not dividing the country down party lines. We should do this more often :)

fjabre4• 5 years ago

I'm glad we can finally admit that Reddit is a mob and encourages mob mentality. There is no wisdom in that crowd anymore.

And maybe not party lines but the stench of hypocrisy is overwhelming. This mob helps no one. It's just a lot of people making bets against each other and manipulating the market.

Just because one side is an angry mob on Reddit does not make it right or moral what happened. I would hardly call r/WallStreetBets 'the people.' It's nothing more than an angry mob.

NoOneNew2• 5 years ago

Technically, every revolution that took down monarchies were mobs.

Yes, a mob does not automatically make them right or moral. But let's be fair about the WSB mob, they're going straight after an oligarchy that has done some fucked up shit to the general masses. As one tweet put it, they're going to force a lot of people to sell their second yacht to afford the payments for the first one. I also love how many other big CEOs of real companies that produce real things are backing the WSB folks.

Dont get me wrong about short sellers too. The act of short selling is technically good. There are some good firms that pay for investigations into large public companies to expose complex crimes, then short sell to recoup and profit. Melvin isnt one of them.

Rumudiez• 5 years ago

What makes you think hedge funds are different? It's just a lot of people making bets against each other and manipulating the market.

whateveracct• 5 years ago

it's got bipartisan appeal because the one thing politicians have in common is how self-aggrandizing they are

04rob• 5 years ago

Ted Cruz is married to Heidi Cruz, a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs [1]. I'm not sure what his angle is but he clearly has a vested interest that may not align with the little guys.

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

guram11• 5 years ago

when bigtech unprecedentedly walks away unscathed from censoring EVEN that US President, do you think they had any trouble doing the same to us nobody?

t0astbread2• 5 years ago

Doesn't WSB also use things like homophobic slurs and similar language casually? I can see where the opportunist allegation comes from but I'm really not that surprised that someone would ban them.

mythrwy2• 5 years ago

Ok maybe. If they were banned initially.

But banning them immediately after successful action against existing financial interests for "homophobic slurs" (or whatever the excuse was) is just... well, an excuse.

NoOneNew2• 5 years ago

Yup, doubling in on what you said. If they were banned ages ago for that reason, okay. Understood. Especially if every group that uses slurs gets insta banned as well. Roger that. Thats a fair system. But doing so only when the financial overlords are getting hurt by that group? Come on, because regex was invented this week? Now they can easily find the slurs? This is a classic pissing in our pockets and telling us it's raining.

t0astbread2• 5 years ago

Agreed, it's an excuse and they should have been banned sooner if their language constitutes a rule violation. But I'm not really concerned about free speech when a group gets banned from a web service after violating its rules, even if the violation was just used as an excuse.

Valgrim• 5 years ago

The "retards" of WSB pride themselves in using these slurs spuriously.

LatteLazy2• 5 years ago

I am not clear what other options we have here. If we ban censorship (the defecto result of repealing section 230) then we accept that fake news will become a way of life. Any attempt to correct or remove intentional lies will disappear. For all my personal commitment, I don't think we can handle the amount of misinformation we're already drenched in...

jjk1662• 5 years ago

Censorship is not and never can be a solution to the issue of misinformation. At best it can hide the problem as people are forced to take their wrongthink underground, but there it festers and no one can effectively root it out.

No the only way to deal with incorrect information is correct information. You can't suppress the argument, you need to win the argument. People need to be taught how to think critically and evaluate various conflicting sources of information, we must go out of our way to present information showing our positions to be true and call out even those we want to agree with when they don't, and we must take the high road and maintain composure even when others do not act in good faith. Yes, it's exhausting, but no one ever said doing the right thing is always easy.

LatteLazy2• 5 years ago

I used to think this way but the nature of social media has changed my opinion.

When Trump lied on TV, twitter etc, it worked. Shutting him up was a much more effective approach than "we think you should read this" links offering more information to people who didn't want it.

And that's trump. Who is crawling into the depths of social media to win arguments on /r/TheDonald etc? No one. Partly because its exhausting and partly because they'll ban you. Bit mainly because talking bs is easier than disproving bs by an order of magnitude. It's asymmetric warfare. It's simply not practical to "win the argument" anymore.

And winning the arguement doesn't actually change anyone's mind anymore. No one open minded and rational supported Trump after the last 4 years, yet his vote count went up by 7m.

I feel like we'd never apply this to any other social issue. No one says we should not ban kids from smoking, but instead win the arguement on it with them. No one says we should permit drink driving but win the argument with every drunk arse hole and convince them not to do it. So why is this different?

We're reaching a point where you can have social media without any fact checking OR you can have democracy. But not both.

I don't expect the right answer to be easy. But I has to be possible and practical. This looks like the only option that fits that criteria right now.

danShumway3• 5 years ago

This is the moment free speech advocates have been warning about for generations. [...] Yesterday, however, a line was crossed.

As a free speech advocate -- no, it's not. It is censorship, but it's not the moment. It's not crossing a special line that's never been crossed before.

The stuff that free speech advocates warn about is stuff that already happens regularly, and while it's valid to talk about the effects of the crackdown on WSB, and while I'm happy to see more people learning about the issues that we face on the Internet, WSB isn't special. Talk to the people making adult games on Steam, talk to the app devs trying to make experimental content on iOS, talk to businesses affected by our online payment systems, talk to sex workers who get driven out of society and lose their jobs because of doxing, talk to the social justice activists and whistleblowers that get targeted by law enforcement and added to no-fly lists.

WSB is just another example to add to the list. This isn't a watershed moment, it's just a moment, consistent with what many other communities have already experienced online and within the US.

----

To be clear, I'm not just being argumentative about this for the sake of being argumentative. Understanding that this situation isn't unprecedented is important.

Whenever these stories get run, there are many people who show up who aren't familiar with the extensive groundwork that has gone into building a consistent ideology about free speech and into building workable solutions around decentralization and regulation. When events like this happen, sometimes those people come into the free speech debate and propose solutions that are unworkable, because they want to skip the hard part of going and looking at the work and research that already exist. They treat the censorship that is affecting them personally as if it's an isolated, special, new category of censorship that requires novel solutions. Usually, it doesn't.

The end result of that process is that we get important discussions about online payment systems, Net Neutrality, and decentralization hijacked by people who don't understand how Section 230 works, and who believe that Conservative censorship online is some kind of watershed moment that justifies bringing back the Fairness Doctrine. We get people arguing that these kinds of changes are somehow reverse ToS violations, and that calling out WSB's more problematic language is somehow some kind of libel, or who think that freedom of association is a 1st Amendment bug instead of a feature.

I'm not saying people shouldn't be incensed at this kind of censorship, but I am saying, this happens all the time to lots of communities who don't have voices, and your community is not the breaking point or last bastion of free speech, your community is just another example. It is good if that wakes you up to understanding the problems we're facing with censorship online, but please if you're in that position go read up on the situation from people and organizations like Doctorow, Popehat, the EFF, the Free Software Foundation, and the ACLU before you start proposing your own solutions.

It's frustrating to be part of a movement that has an extensive history, and then to see a large portion of that history thrown away because Conservatives and amateur stock traders think that their censorship is an unprecedented situation that requires special solutions.

I want the censorship of WSB to open people up to the idea that censorship is real and dangerous. But I want them to be motivated by that to learn more about free speech advocacy, not to just propose reactionary solutions and to act like the current situation is unprecedented. It does a disservice to the many much more marginalized communities, (communities that don't have bipartisan advocates cheering them on and constant coverage from mainstream websites and TV stations) to act like this censorship is somehow more important or insidious than theirs. That kind of attitude is harmful both because it encourages people to think about censorship in lazy ways, and because it understates the problem.

WSB isn't a watershed moment in censorship -- they're lucky. Public outrage got them reinstated in Discord. Censorship on Robinhood is going to lead to Congressional meetings. They're getting wide coverage on cable news. Most communities online don't get that privilege.

zpeti• 5 years ago

Thanks for the input! (I wrote the article).

I agree with a lot of it. Maybe the reason its a watershed moment, is that when censorship happens and its on the side of wall street banks, I think for 99% of people the penny starts to drop what the hell is happening here.

Up until now a lot of it was justified by many many people as protecting protected classes etc. Well, its not quite that any more is it?

danShumway3• 5 years ago

Up until now a lot of it was justified by many many people as protecting protected classes

Some of it was justified that way. Steam's war on adult games wasn't. The use of lawsuits/libel laws to shut down critics isn't justified that way. FOSTA-SESTA wasn't (reasonably) justified that way. The "cancel-culture" debate has always been an extremely narrow part of the free speech debate, and has always been a little bit problematic because it attracts people who don't understand how freedom of association works and how to balance that with more general (but still valid) concerns about cultural censorship and othering. Most real free speech debate and advocacy happens outside of the framing of Conservatives vs Liberals.

People should be thinking about free speech more broadly, and they should be considering not just the censorship they see in service of protecting marginalized communities/classes, but also the less publicized censorship that directly affects those communities.

I'm trying to walk a line, because I don't want to discourage people from waking up, but do I do want people who are incensed about WSB to realize is that WSB is in an enormously privileged position right now, and compared to the history of many other communities, their censorship is mild and temporary.

mr_woozy4• 5 years ago

I appreciate your reply comment. What would is your opinion on private platforms such as Reddit, Twitter et al. and their obligation to not shut down or restrict dialogue or discussion.

It is my opinion that since they're a private company and explicitly state so in their terms they're under no (legal) obligations whatsoever to maintain users ability to comment. They're not the government and therefore can do as they please in this regard and people would be wise to remember such lessons when investing time and energy into privately owned platforms.

I'd be interested in your opinion however.

danShumway3• 5 years ago

and their obligation to not shut down or restrict dialogue or discussion.

We can have a social debate over whether it's desirable for Reddit and Twitter to shut down dialog or discussion, but that's very different than arguing about the 1st Amendment implications. We can say that it's bad for Facebook and Discord to censor WSB without trying to argue that it's illegal or that it's something that the government should stop.

Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook have a 1st Amendment right to decide what goes on their platform. It's not just that they don't have an obligation to host everything, the Constitution protects their right not to host everything. The reason they can censor WSB is because they have freedom of speech. This is a central "conflict" in the 1st Amendment: it guarantees both freedom to say what you want, but also freedom not to say things. It guarantees freedom of association for private entities.

Free speech advocates are constantly trying to balance those rights and figure out solutions that make it easier to speak without removing peoples/companies' fundamental right to decide what speech they host and who they associate with.[0] That's not always trivial to do, which is why knee-jerk reactions like the Fairness Doctrine are problematic -- they ignore that difficult balance and instead just try to force private platforms to be "fair". This is also why some of the current dialog about cancel culture is problematic to me. Yes, we can talk about whether these trends are healthy for a society, and that's a valid conversation to have. But fundamentally, complaining about people online and criticizing them is free speech. A lot of cancel culture falls into this area where it's not clear at all which part you could legislate or make illegal without violating the 1st Amendment in the process.

My personal opinion is that we should be cautious about handing control of our public communication to a small number of private companies -- in other words, it's not the freedom of association that's a problem, it's Internet centralization. Worrying about the power of platforms like Facebook is not the same as saying that nothing should be moderated. It's good, even essential, for communities to moderate. It becomes more of a problem when one or two platforms control large swaths of the Internet.

I'm personally less worried about Facebook than I am about AWS/Cloudflare/Apple. But it would be nice to have more competitors to Facebook, and there are a lot of ways that we could try to get more competition in the social networking space. Just a few things we could try:

- Antitrust (Facebook regularly buys competitors so it won't have to compete with them, we could put a stop to that)

- Adversarial interoperability (We could limit the CFAA and DMCA so that scraping content you own from Facebook was easier and more legal. It's a more complicated discussion, but this could help combat the "network effect" problem with new startups)

- Promoting decentralized alternatives that are easier to self-host (ie, Mastodon, Peertube, etc...)

- General education (teaching people to be cautious about making these private platforms essential to their lives, and to be more proactive about seeking out Open alternatives)

----

[0]: In my own "manifesto" about Internet rights, I try to explicitly call out both the Right to Communicate and the Right to Filter as being equally important (https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/). I think that both freedom of speech and freedom of association are essential, and neither really works well without the other.

Traster• 5 years ago

This is the moment free speech advocates have been warning about for generations.

Yes, and the fact that people have screamed censorship at every moment for the last 20 years makes it much more difficult to take seriously.

"First they came for the terrorists, then they came for the people organizing a violent overthrow of the government" isn't "First they came for the socialists". And it certainly didn't include "Then they stuck little notices below videos of anti-vaxxers with links to medical experts".

Not everything is a matter of degree.

Yesterday, however, a line was crossed.

Which is why we need to actually address specifically what happened yesterday, and not lump them in with violent terrorists.

I oppose (although am unsurprised) by Facebook's actions in this case, but I think this is a really weak argument against it.

midjji• 5 years ago

It would be terrible if this was actually censorship, but its not, its restricting access to an exclusive and commercial forum with a policy you agree to if you use it. No one is preventing people from talking about this, and its not like there isnt a great many alternative forums to do so.

Why they did so is completely beyond me however...

floxy• 5 years ago

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/censor

noxer4• 5 years ago

It doesn't matter if it "actually censorship". Why people always argue about definitions and stuff while the real effect it has is obvious and its completely irrelevant if it ticks all the boxes for the definition of "censorship". People use the word because there simply inst a better one. Maybe its just suppressing or consensual temporary censoring who tf cares. Its not about definitions or whether a law was broken its just about the effect it has.

mr_woozy4• 5 years ago

yea why use actual definitions when flailing around wildly because you're emotional about a topic. See.....that's how stupid your argument just was.

chosen1111• 5 years ago

HN normies are realizing what the right wing have known for years.

Same with crypto people who doe eyedly tout “uncensorability” in their apps. Will you stand up to speech codes and natsec breathinv down your neck? I doubt it.

The end of the day all of this is ultimately either total fork of sovereignty or remaining in the pig pen of walled garden freedom.

It’s anti American but ultimately thats just what it is

The censorship of WallStreetBets needs to be a watershed moment for everyone

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