Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse

https://bombthrower.com/articles/when-dissent-is-misinformation-fallacies-become-facts/

by StuntPope • 5 years ago

300 240 5 years ago

There was another submission a few minutes ago in the same light. It linked to an article about how Big Tech companies are censoring doctors and decide what is accurate medical information. It was removed.

mberning• 5 years ago

Maybe it was flagged to death. Maybe it will be back. All I know is when these type of stories come out two things are assured. 1) Shenanigans do take place. 2) The powers that be definitely don’t like it if you notice and talk about these shenanigans.

aaronchall2• 5 years ago

And now so has this one.

dang• 5 years ago

Just to be clear, when you see [flagged] on a submission it means that users flagged it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

aaronchall2• 5 years ago

I don't see [flagged] anywhere, though, dan?

smileypete• 5 years ago

I emailed dang and he kindly unflagged it on request, but it got flagged again soon after. Maybe he can permanently unflag it?

He also said:

'I've unkilled it so you can respond now. It's not really on topic for HN though. Too much of a provocative opinion piece and not enough significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). That guarantees a flamewar, which we're trying to avoid on HN.'

I thought it was worth posting because it was written back in August 2020, so was quite prescient.

rvz• 5 years ago

Soon, your devices, smartphones, laptops and watches are going to have a political opinion.

They are the little brothers reporting your 'thinking' to big brother to see if they will ban you or not.

slowmovintarget• 5 years ago

Fountain pens and notebooks, fountain pens and notebooks.

jasonjayr2• 5 years ago

This is rehashing the old "common carrier" debate again, isn't it? Which of these are the common carriers: Physical wire/connectivity provider? ISP? Tier1 ISPs? Social media sites connecting messages with other folks?

Where is the line drawn, and what responsibility does each level have?

jeffbee2• 5 years ago

You can't use the common carrier argument to force someone to be a common carrier. If you pick and choose your clients based on policy you are by definition not a common carrier. Mailchimp is a private carrier. They choose what to carry.

jasonjayr2• 5 years ago

Agreed -- but a lot of social media sites say "we just connect people" and then turn around and are forced to play moderator so things don't burn out of control...

echelon• 5 years ago

It'd be nice if the plumbing worked together.

I'd like to be able to export data easily, run my own programs easily, write software that doesn't get taxed or asked to be resubmitted (since when did Microsoft charge for Windows app development?)

Every company purports to be for you, but it's a big toothy grinned lie. Some of them sell you, others sell you out.

It also sucks that these companies surface the worst of humanity to drive engagement. Are people really this terrible?

Tech started to sour in 2005.

kfprt5• 5 years ago

This is underrated. It should absolutely be a right to leave the walled garden and take your data with you.

kfprt5• 5 years ago

Lately being on the internet is feeling more like Junta era Argentina with content disappearing left and right.

jareklupinski2• 5 years ago

youtube-dl is the only proof I have that some of my favorite content ever actually existed

kfprt5• 5 years ago

For me it's the realization that I don't even know what I lost. I just have lists of dead URL's.

rejectedandsad• 5 years ago

I agree but it’s exceedingly rare that this is because of political reasons - usually, it’s because of music rights issues.

kfprt5• 5 years ago

I guess it depends on how you define 'political'. Almost all censorship is related to politics in one way or another. The cycle is X minority is mad and gets a news article written and then there's a new wave of disappearances. Really anything at all controversial. Often it's something not child friendly, which ignores the mass of the internet that is also not taken down for this. If you have kids do you really want their content moderation farmed out to some megacorp?

varelse8• 5 years ago

I remain confused as to why anyone thinks they have unlimited first amendment rights on social media. It sounds a lot like thinking one has first amendment rights at a private employer. Let's clear this up right now. TLDR: you don't unless you explicitly do.

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/setting-the-record-straigh...

Edit: keep bringing those freethinker(tm) downvotes. It won't change the law one bit, but I guess it gives good feels.

I mean you could also try starting your own social media network that absolutely guarantees first amendment rights, but so far only hilarity has ensued from that premise along the lines of tragedy plus time equals comedy. You could be the first one to prove them all wrong. What's stopping you?

Or if that's too hard, why don't you all apply to work at Facebook and Twitter? Then you can work your way up the ladder until you can depose Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg. And on the first day of your reign of your new empire you can proclaim to all shareholders and employees that your social media site is entirely unregulated. Otherwise WTH should these companies care about you? You won't build anything and you won't do the work to change the path of something already built.

Turing_Machine8• 5 years ago

Edit: keep bringing those freethinker(tm) downvotes

Sauce. Goose.

Edit: Maybe you should start your own tech news site. Or if that's too hard, why don't you apply to work at YC and work your way up to a position where you control the moderation for this site?

Once again: Sauce. Goose.

varelse8• 5 years ago

You're assuming I'm not okay with the content moderation of Hacker News. You should never assume.

If anything you should jump with joy at the rights of people who disagree with this article to flag it and at your right to register discontent without any substantive argument as to why you are registering your discontent with but a simple down vote.

That's freedom of speech in action! And while my tone here is sarcastic, I believe sincerely that this moderation system is currently superior to any of the ham fisted bad AI deployed on either of the two leading social media sites.

mancerayder3• 5 years ago

Edit: keep bringing those freethinker(tm) downvotes. It won't change the law one bit, but I guess it gives good feels.

Freedom to comment is not freedom to not be downvoted into oblivion. You can complain but we'll grey that one, as well. There's lesson in the irony.

varelse8• 5 years ago

And yet still not a single counter argument explaining why you guys don't build your own social media site instead of whining about the old and stupid leading brands. There's lesson in the irony.

fighterpilot5• 5 years ago

I have no problem with social media companies kicking off anyone they please. I do have a problem when the lines between government and private get blurred, and a government can indirectly or directly influence the censorship decisions of private companies through threat of regulation, a revolving door, or by explicitly flagging certain posts. That's a grey area 1A violation in my mind.

varelse8• 5 years ago

When has any of this not been blurry?

Tech gets all sorts of tax breaks to innovate. That's okay, but if they proactively kick people off the platform so as to head off government regulation, that's not okay?

Or wait, let me guess, all tax breaks are good! How'd I do?

jeffbee2• 5 years ago

These guys are parody-proof. "In my blog which is indexed by Google and Microsoft I reiterate the arguments from my book, available on Amazon, about how big tech is deplatforming me."

CarelessExpert3• 5 years ago

It's honestly deeply comical. It's a classic example of wanting to have both free speech and freedom from consequences.

It seems to me the religion of capitalism has a solve, here, and it's called competition.

If they really believe in freedom, they should support the freedom of Twitter to kick them off the platform, and these folks have the freedom to find another platform elsewhere.

But, of course, freedom isn't what these people are after. They just want to manufacture a different kind of consent.

g42gregory• 5 years ago

I think this article spot-on. In my opinion, there is very little (but not zero) actual misinformation on the Internet. Most of what we call “misinformation” is an influence campaign by one side, which is thoroughly disliked by the opposing side. When Big Tech labels something “misinformation” they are essentially taking one side or the other on the issue at hand.

ordinaryradical2• 5 years ago

there is very little (but not zero) actual misinformation on the Internet.

It’s not the amount to take issue with but the spread of its influence. Anti-vaccine ideology was given a platform by big tech and now we have an endemic disease because folks believe that nonsense and let it hold sway over their medical decisions.

Edit: for folks voting this down I’d be interested in a rebuttal or at least an explanation of how this doesn’t add to the conversation. I try to be a good citizen here and thought I was engaging in good faith.

Turing_Machine8• 5 years ago

You don't get to argue that it should be permissible to shut down people's opinions and then complain when your own opinions get shut down.

mancerayder3• 5 years ago

Edit: for folks voting this down I’d be interested in a rebuttal or at least an explanation of how this doesn’t add to the conversation. I try to be a good citizen here and thought I was engaging in good faith

"Misinformation", someone might say, and we wouldn't have to give you any justification. No freedom from consequences, they say.

__blockcipher__• 5 years ago

I have downvoted you because you seem to believe that if there were no anti-vaccine sentiment, SARS-2 would not exist, which is patently absurd

topkai22• 5 years ago

I watched my mom’s* Facebook feed for a bit on Jan 6. In a span of 30 minutes she was getting bombarded by claims that the people invading the capital in order to overturn the election were actually antifa complete with a veneer of evidence**, a passage that was misattributed to Dave Ramsey***, along with all the normal claims about a “stolen” election.

The misinformation may be coming out of a organized campaign or it may arising organically, but it definitely exists in droves and is spread by social media. It exists on both sides, but it is not balanced.

* thankfully, she’s pretty discerning and don’t believe any of this, but believes it is important to not le this sort of behavior cause her to “unfriend” people she’s known for decades.

** just to be clear, they weren’t, and the evidence was that pictures of insurrectionists appeared on an antifa web site. That was true, but that’s because they appeared on the part of the website dedicated to documenting people as fascists

*** I found the original source in about a minute, and a public rebuttal from Dave Ramsey in two

spoonjim• 5 years ago

This comment shows the power of disinformation — pure lies like “the election was stolen” or “vaccines cause autism” if repeated enough become “differences of opinion” with two different “sides.”

zozbot2342• 5 years ago

Mailchimp is "big tech" now? Can't these folks just throw a RSS feed together (hosted on the cheapest static webhost around) and tell people to subscribe to it? This is a big fat nothingburger if I ever saw one.

Turing_Machine8• 5 years ago

Because to a first approximation everyone understands, and can get, email, while maybe 5% of the population, if that, understand RSS feeds. My 80 year old aunt can read email. While I'm sure I could teach her to use RSS feeds, it would not be a task I would look foward to. And she has me. Most people don't have me, or anyone like me (or, likely, you, or the majority of other users of this site).

What you're saying is roughly equivalent to "So what if they can't use the telephone or television? Can't these folks just use Morse code?"

zozbot2342• 5 years ago

Because to a first approximation everyone understands, and can get, email, while maybe 5% of the population, if that, understand RSS feeds.

At some point in history, 5% or less of the population understood email. RSS feeds are not inherently more complex than email, in fact they're quite a bit simpler. (And even if you don't grok RSS feeds, you'll probably grok a weblog; RSS is only relevant here because it gives the exact same affordances as something like a Mailchimp newsletter, even though it works differently under the hood.)

tzs2• 5 years ago

Or they could use email but via someone other than Mailchimp, such as ActiveCampaign, MailerLite, Sendinblue, GetResponse, Moosend, EngageBay, Omnisend, Zoho, Mailjet, ConvertKit, Benchmark, AWeber, HubSpot, Constant Contact, DotDigital, Campaign Monitor, Sender, SendPulse, Klaviyo, Jilt, Autopilot, Drip, Keap, and probably many others.

Email is not like, say, Facebook where to reach someone on Facebook you need to send via Facebook. How you send email is largely irrelevant as long as you pick a provider that doesn't send so much spam that their outgoing mail gets blocked.

yssrnjm• 5 years ago

I have been told to disagree with this post. Therefore I disagree with this post.

jsnell• 5 years ago

There's some chutzpah in an anti-vaxxer pushing fraudulent Covid miracle cures and invoking Semmelweis in the very same post.

StuntPope• 5 years ago

Where is the anti-vax material in that post?

PhasmaFelis5• 5 years ago

The part where he says that being snarky to vaccine deniers is literally just as bad as racism.

“Covidiots”, “Deniers” these are not rational counter-arguments, they’re slurs. Anybody employing them is not engaging in discourse but rather bigotry and prejudice. This is as inexcusable as racism. Over the past few years many have been challenged to examine their own biases and privilege, in certain contexts for perfectly valid reasons. Anybody engaging in this type of othering toward skeptics and contrarians lacks self-awareness and empathy to the same degree as a racist.

grzm2• 5 years ago

The title's been editorialized: Actual title is "When dissent is misinformation, fallacies become facts"

epoxyhockey• 5 years ago

I think the title is distasteful, but the title tag of the article matches the hn title and is also the first title displayed above the fold (on a mobile browser, at least).

grzm2• 5 years ago

Good catch.

CarelessExpert3• 5 years ago

These companies think they’re the patricians of internet discourse. The reality is they’re the plumbing.

That was true until they started promoting and demoting content in order to drive engagement and juice their ad revenues.

Big tech is not plumbing. The minute Facebook invented the news feed they became editors and content promoters.

If they really want to just be plumbing, they can shut down their algorithms any time.

As an aside, I picked on that part of the post because the rest of it quickly pivots away from tech and reads as a self-promoting, semi-unhinged rant about covid that reads like the drunken ramblings of Q adjacent anarcho-libertarian, complete with the big hits: references to the "Davos elite", hydrochloroquine, ivermectin, Evil Dr. Fauci, etc, etc.

Which reminds me, I should probably flag this post given it's relevance to HN is glancing at best...

stale2002• 5 years ago

The minute Facebook invented the news feed they became editors and content promoters.

Ok. If they are editors and publishers then perhaps the law should change so that should be treated like other content editors that exist already.

We could do this by treating them legally equal to things like the New York Times, with all the legal responsibilities, freedoms, and liabilities that such a thing entails.

And these companies that don't want to be treated like editors, then we could create new provisions in the law, that give them protections if they act like how the phone company acts.

la6471• 5 years ago

That started when politicians shifted their responsibilities of governance and policy making to private entities to cover for their inefficiencies and their vote bank politics.

ergocoder• 5 years ago

Not only politicians. A lot of people support this.

Regarding trump being banned: "Twitter can ban whomever they want".

We are now in a screaming match. Who can scream at the twitter exec louder win.

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

But power expands until it fills the possibility space

zug_zug• 5 years ago

I'm also gonna flag this, after careful deliberation. I'm gonna leave a comment, because I'm not the shadow powers that be, I'm just a dude who thinks this is an incohesive rambling that's a waste of everybody's time and, despite the promising title, ultimately rehashed flame-baity non-tech non-news.

evrydayhustling• 5 years ago

Yep, another day, another random dude who considers himself an expert on what freedom is, what tech platforms are, and the dangers of private businesses refusing to amplify his friends. Even a plumber will refuse to route your sewage back to the public water main...

tzs2• 5 years ago

It was kind of amusing that in his section giving examples of what he said were various logical fallacies in the "vast majority of all media narrative around COVID-19" he committed several of those same fallacies, plus a few more.

bena5• 5 years ago

It would be funnier if it weren't so common. Everything is a cudgel to people like him. Fallacies exist, not to introspect on one's own arguments, but to assail arguments you disagree with. Data exists only so long as it supports your conclusion and any data to the contrary or supports other conclusions is wrong. Never defend, always attack.

mcint• 5 years ago

Odd critique coming from the head of a DNS company, that could easily offer a competitive service with MailChimp.

The obsession with class (in the title, and content) and misunderstood genius reads more like within-class squabble than an argument for a different order.

I did some freelance work helping someone worried about Google censorship move their services to more independent alternatives, including EasyDNS. This post makes a lot more sense to me as signaling, in that respect.

freedomben3• 5 years ago

Odd critique coming from the head of a DNS company, that could easily offer a competitive service with MailChimp.

I think you missed the author's point. His point is not that someone needs to start a competing service. his point is that the feel that tech companies are patricians rather than plumbers is widespread and common place.

polskibus• 5 years ago

Exactly, tech giants are now a natural monopoly, which means we should force them to provide more utility than they want to give in exchange for tolerating their privilege. Either that or break them up.

robertlagrant5• 5 years ago

MailChimp is not a tech titan.

gpsx• 5 years ago

Should big internet companies by plumbing and not exert control over content on their system? As much as it annoys me some of the things Google, for example, does exercising the power they have, it does have the right to control what is on there, to some extent. As I interpret it, I think the OP is saying it is not right to censure, but I am not sure how this applies to a private company and content on their own system.

I agree a big company shouldn't have _complete_ power to control content on their site for reasons the OP says because at some point this becomes a danger to society. At the same time it is a danger to society to freely let users promote whatever content they want, for the same reasons.

For all the examples or people who have been persecuted (or whatever word would fit better) for saying the "truth", like scientist who said the earth was not at the center of the universe, there are countless others who, for the better, were quieted from issueing harmful information.

The OP says people should be taught a lesson in critical thinking, but I don't think this is a problem. I think most people are pretty logical, they are just dealing with misinformation, no matter what "side" they are on.

So this is a real problem. It is good the OP raises these questions, but I don't think it has the solution.

toiletaccount2• 5 years ago

sometimes I wonder how people and politicians would react to a user-friendly decentralized and distributed social network with strong crypto in the right places and no hierarchy.

if such a thing were ever made, it would be very difficult to monitor or moderate.

creato• 5 years ago

It also sounds difficult to curate (just another kind of moderation), and much of the success of the current social media heavyweights is due to their curation.

grishka2• 5 years ago

It's a fallacy. Good social media platform doesn't need curation. It doesn't need any recommendation system whatsoever. Every single thing you see in your feed is the result of your conscious decision to follow someone. It's just you and your friends. And exactly zero content from people you don't know.

Current social media doesn't respect you because being respectful doesn't drive metrics.

psyc• 5 years ago

This is one of my favorite thought experiments, except in my version it is guaranteed that nobody can moderate anything, ever. My best guess is: There is a threshold for how much of a problem something can become before congress makes a law prohibiting "access" to this network or running the client, or any analogue thereof. Then there's another threshold at which the government ratchets up resources for real enforcement.

In short, the conclusion I always come to is that no matter what the math and the game theory say, if the legislative, executive, and judicial all agree that it's a big enough problem, it's dead. There's nothing technologists can do about this. At least, this is the conclusion I always run into whenever I've tried to brainstorm technical solutions over the years.

vkou• 5 years ago

It'll immediately fill up with pirated content, porn, porn of dubious legality, spam, and harassment, ensuring that all the normies would stay on Facebook.

It'll be a social network for people who were banned from all the other social networks, which is not a great town to live in.

toiletaccount2• 5 years ago

it could, but the internet in general is like this and everyone still uses it. imagine if user/content discoverability is impossible without a fingerprint or token.

Barrin924• 5 years ago

That's what Mastodon is. It looks good and is about as easy to sign up for as it gets with a federated network. I don't think there's much demand for it. A lot of people seem to overestimate how relevant decentralization is to the vast majority of users.

The inherent complications or disadvantages of decentralization aren't worth it for most people.

grishka2• 5 years ago

It's easy to sign up but then you don't know what to do because you have no way of finding people you know on the fediverse. Any social media platform that has had any semblance of success had at least one of the two ways to bootstrap your social graph: either by importing your contact list from somewhere else, or through global search with enough parameters to find someone by name and city. Mastodon has none of this.

Animats• 5 years ago

Tor?

spikels• 5 years ago

Hey Big Tech!

* No Liability For User Content

* Arbitrary Control Over User Content

Pick one!

PhasmaFelis5• 5 years ago

I read the headline and was nodding along.

Then I got to the part where he suddenly rants that content moderators are "probably...teams of purple-haired Millennials with nose hoops and personal pronoun mood-rings."

And calls out the AP for marking a medical claim "false" just because no one has been able to produce any evidence for it.

And says that calling anti-vaxxers nasty names is literally just as bad as racism.

I'm looking at the comment I just typed and it sounds like I'm exaggerating to make him look bad. But I'm not. That's what he's actually claiming.

Barrin924• 5 years ago

Not sure if there's a more eloquent name for these kinds of "throw enough shit and hope some of it sticks" arguments but the article is very confused, from claiming ad hominem attacks are as bad as racism, to ranting about millenials and throwing in WMD's in Iraq for good measure.

The actual key issue is somewhere in the middle of that article:

"When tech companies take it upon themselves to arbitrate what is or isn’t misinformation, or taking action based on events that occur outside of their own platforms what they are doing, at its core, is adjudicating international law"

No, it isn't. It's a private company determining how and who it conducts business with. Being a 'patrician' of your own property is completely fine and in fact a basic right, and if you don't like Mailchimp's content policies, go to a competitor.

Unless someone explains to me, in plain English, why we ought to abolish the very important freedom of deciding for themselves who and how private entities do business with, I don't want to read any essay length pieces any more about the Gulag archipelago, Orwell or how his friend being cancelled by Mailchimp is like being stuck in Soviet Russia.

And to preempt the inevitable "but they're so large!". This is not an indicator of anything. Tech companies are large yes, but competitors are, as Google actually correctly put it at one point, one click away. Size is not an indicator of market power, inability to chose alternatives is.

tangjurine2• 5 years ago

[explain] to me, in plain English, why we ought to abolish the very important freedom of deciding for themselves who and how private entities do business with

The explanation for this is the same explanation for why eminent domain exists. If you own a piece of land that will be in the middle of a busy road, in the US you likely can't construct that part of the road yourself and charge people or arbitrarily restrict people from using it - you likely will have to sell it to the US government.

I'm not trying to argue about if this is the ideal way to do things, but the more society views tech companies owning platforms like landowners owning parts of roads, the more government control.

Barrin924• 5 years ago

Eminent domain exists because land use is exclusionary. Land owners have the ability to hamper development by exercising coercive power. If AT&T or your phone provider start to cancel you, you have a pretty good analogy.

Services and products on the internet however are not landowners. The reason eminent domain exists is because land is not fungible. Mailchimp however does not sit on mail-land. There is nothing that prevents dozens of mailchimp competitors to exist, offering whatever content policies people prefer. Google does not sit on search-land and somehow excludes anyone from building a search engine. Tech companies, in almost all cases, derive their value from the intellectual property that they built, not some sort of analog to land they stumbled upon. If that was the case we would be on MySpace.

kwere• 5 years ago

The issue about policing Is not "muh private property, people choiche", but about controlling a "public utility" like a nation Wide communication medium. Here the society needs hamper the private business (or monopolization in general) side, Like in journalism, food safety, health services. I would dare say that any social medium that get Mass adoption and can influence massively society needs public oversight & regulation (with good regulators). Facebook & Co. Need to comply as Purdue had to when society realized their shenanigans in a "lasseiz faire" enviroment

rosmax_1337• 5 years ago

Regulation of private companies is sane and normal, there is no need to appeal to their inherent freedoms and such, everyone should be on the same page about that. If you ideologically believe that no regulation should ever be imposed on a company, or individual, then take that idea to where it goes logically. Add problems like ecology, climate, transportation, and yes: control over information.

The problem is rather __who__ will regulate a __global company__, when infact companies like google arguably hold more political power than many smaller countries do.

Barrin924• 5 years ago

Regulation of private companies is very sane and normal, I never said anything to the contrary. But yes there is a need to appeal to our fundamental freedoms apparently because you still need to actually justify and make a coherent argument why a given piece of regulation or limitation of freedom is reasonable, rather than just being mad that you got kicked off Twitter.

It's very important to distinguish between the actual right you have, which is that nobody should be able to compel you to speak, or how to speak, which is a right that in this case Mailchimp has, and the complete reversal of this, namely forcing private entities to host the speech of others, and have the government coerce platforms on behalf of third parties.

The author wants nothing less than a complete reversal on how we treat association and speech on the grounds that in his perception, 'purple haired millenials' run a business in a way that he doesn't approve of.

geofft4• 5 years ago

There is a simple, straightforward answer here - prevent companies from amassing such power in the first place.

It is far more obvious to me that there is an inherent right to choose whom you do business with and whom you don't than that there is an inherent right to have a single corporate entity employing unbounded numbers of employees and making unbounded amounts of money. The individual person can buy and sell on their own, without the government; the corporate entity only really works because it is recognized by the government.

To be clear, I'm not claiming that regulations are illegitimate. We do regulate, say, the individual farmer to make sure they're selling actual milk and not melamine. We do regulate the individual storekeeper to obligate them not to discriminate on race. But those regulations are all very measured and designed to solve specific problems (ultimately - protecting those who are even weaker than the individual businessperson).

Mailchimp is not some tech titan. They do not have more political power than any functional government. They are in no sense a monopoly in their industry, and they have exactly one industry, unlike the usual juggernauts that come up here. Calling them "Big Tech" is a clear example of the terrible slippery slope of adding regulations about obligating companies to do business vs. regulating their accrual of power, if that's the real problem.

Any regulation that would apply to Mailchimp would - if it's going to be effective - also have to apply to a startup that wants to be in the same industry. (It may not apply immediately, but it will certainly apply to the startup's medium-term goals, and thus affect its profitability.) If you just want to regulate Google and Facebook, I could almost believe that, but if "Big Tech" includes Mailchimp, who doesn't it include?

What we'll end up with is a system where anyone who wants to do business must have their business plan approved by Big Government, and where a professional specialization in complying with those regulations arises, and where there's a nice revolving door between implementing and enforcing them, and where Google continues to hold more political power than several countries and can engage in regulatory capture. It's hard to imagine that this aligns with the political desires of anyone except the current leadership at Big Tech. (Even the aspirational leadership of the next generation of Big Tech will find themselves shut out by this regulatory regime.)

axguscbklp• 5 years ago

If I wanted to and could find the funds, would I in practice (as opposed to just in theory) be legally allowed to create my own financial services organization that would provide financial services like payment processing and banking to people who have been banned by other financial services providers for their theoretically legally protected speech? Honest question - I do not know the answer.

bobthebuilders• 5 years ago

Yes. Legally you would. Now would your partners and customers and all the people who buy your products be ok with it? Hosting companies have popped up where for this exact scenario. Most businesses have a stack of (supply chain? vendors? dependencies?), and all of those people need to support you for you to stay afloat.

bumby6• 5 years ago

Unless someone explains to me, in plain English, why we ought to abolish the very important freedom of deciding for themselves who and how private entities do business with

Not a lawyer, but I wonder if the Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper clause give regulatory power to the government under the guise of promoting the general welfare. After all, this has been applied to commodities in the past, even when said commodities weren’t even used in trade/commerce.

In plain English, there’s precedent in the constitution and law for the government to regulate business if it promotes the general welfare.

Turing_Machine8• 5 years ago

In plain English, there’s precedent in the constitution and law for the government to regulate business if it promotes the general welfare.

There are a lot of things that "private entities" aren't allowed to do when doing business with the public in the United States.

They can't discriminate based on race, or religion, or national origin, or handicaps, or (in civilized areas) sexual orientation.

It wasn't always that way. At one time all of those things were perfectly legal. But we, as a society, after a great deal of argument (sometimes contentious) decided that they were wrong and changed the laws to prohibit those things.

We're having essentially the same arguments about online speech right now.

closeparen• 5 years ago

That part isn’t the problem. But the part where we make it clear that by carrying the wrong speech, tech companies are sticking their necks out for antitrust enforcement and other regulatory curtailment, is a bit worrying.

psacawa• 5 years ago

I think the term you're looking for is "gish gallop" [1]

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

Turing_Machine8• 5 years ago

Unless someone explains to me, in plain English, why we ought to abolish the very important freedom of deciding for themselves who and how private entities do business with

Just to set some parameters here, you would be fine with, say, a landlord refusing to rent an apartment to a black person?

shkkmo5• 5 years ago

Unless someone explains to me, in plain English, why we ought to abolish the very important freedom of deciding for themselves who and how private entities do business with,

Is there no room for nuance here? Can't we support freedom of association without encouraging expanding levels of censorship?

The reason why big tech platforms have been moving towards more censorship isn't just out of natural inclinations, but directly due to people blaming those tech for allowing types of speech.

There are strong arguments, some of which the article puts forward, for the value of free flowing information. This doesn't mean we have to abrogate freedom of association, but it does mean that we should push back against censorship.

We could also limit freedom of association without abolishing it. (There are already laws restricting freedom of association to prevent discrimination against protected classes.)

Tech companies are large yes, but competitors are, as Google actually correctly put it at one point, one click away.

It often is far more than "one click". If your email provider terminates your account, you'll have huge problems everywhere you signed up with that email. If your twitter account is revoked, you lose all your followers and history. If you have digital "purchases" on an account, you permanently lose access to them if the account is revoked.

There are all kinds of ways that a corporation, exerting their freedom of association, can have huge negative impacts on their users. The power imbalance here is sufficient to warrant concerns about abuse.

I don't think we should revoke freedom of association from tech companies, but I do think we need to create limitations on how they can exercise that right and provide checks and balances in that process. I am not certain what those limitations should be but I think that is the direction the discussion should move.

TeMPOraL4• 5 years ago

Tech companies are large yes, but competitors are, as Google actually correctly put it at one point, one click away.

Except they're wrong. There's no meaningful competitors to choose from. The big tech platforms - and arguably most SaaS software - are not commoditized. There's no competitor you can just switch to. This is mostly achieved through purposeful incompatibility, and all kinds of network effects.

Size is not an indicator of market power, inability to chose alternatives is.

Exactly. But in winner-take-all markets, the two strongly correlate.

john_moscow• 5 years ago

Unless someone explains to me, in plain English, why we ought to abolish the very important freedom of deciding for themselves who and how private entities do business with, I don't want to read any essay length pieces any more about the Gulag archipelago, Orwell or how his friend being cancelled by Mailchimp is like being stuck in Soviet Russia.

Because the government is supposed to enforce antitrust laws to make sure there is always a handful of private companies competing with each other, and taking different stances at various topics, so that the consumers could find the one that suits them.

Currently, if you want others online to hear your opinion, you need to rely on a very limited set of free-to-use services that have an increasing appetite in deciding what opinions should be heard. You cannot easily outcompete them, unless you can find billions of venture capital to subsidize your service until it grows large enough for the big advertisers (that are part of the same club) to consider it interesting.

I would say, if a private company doesn't directly charge its users for the services it renders, it should be treated as a government service.

myrryr3• 5 years ago

Except that isn't true. You can fire up a BBS from your home machine. Anyone who wants to hear your opinion on things can read it. Freedom of speech is NOT the same as freedom to force people to listen to you.

tlear• 5 years ago

Problem is two fold, one is that part in power can use variety of methods to coerce platforms to do their bidding. This is not a supposition this has been going on all over the world for a while. For all practical purposes FB and twitter act as an arm of US government when it comes to COVID, remember when you would get insta banned for suggesting that maybe maybe virus that arose 10 mins away from a lab where they used to work on viruses like that might, could maybe somehow be related to the said lab?

Second is that platforms themselves now have massive political power. Twitter or FB can easily suppress any fact or opinion it does not like(see Twitter and Biden's crackhead of a son), it can also easily trade ability to suppress for political favours.

In a society as divided as US is right now it is inevitable that they take the 51% side to suppress the 49% side. Result will be a bloody a mess.

There is no solution to it either, shit is in full flight towards the proverbial fan.

raxxorrax2• 5 years ago

You are refering to freedom of association and you are correct that platforms should be able to choose their customers if they want to. If they do that however, they will be held to account for their choices they make in contrast to platforms that allow more freedom of opinion. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Some people say allowing certain content is a statement of endorsement. "Silence is violence" and similar argumenents, but I disagree with that line of reasoning.

"Throwing shit at people and hoping it sticks" is something I do associate with accusations of racism to be honest.

voidnullnil• 5 years ago

No, it isn't. It's a private company determining how and who it conducts business with. Being a 'patrician' of your own property is completely fine and in fact a basic right, and if you don't like Mailchimp's content policies, go to a competitor.

Correct. They can do what they want. However, the title of the article is still correct.

dj_mc_merlin5• 5 years ago

I'm not going to comment on the author's credibility or overall quality of his arguments.

However, I think he brings up a very important point: who gets to decide what's misinformation?

* Private organizations are run by fallible humans, chasing money and reduced liability

* Governments lie. If you don't believe me, read any history book

* Scientists are not a spherical mass floating in a vacuum with a unified opinion, nor are they correct by default

Furthermore, only engineers believe most of the important issues in the world actually have an objective answer to them.

So, who gets to decide? Who gets the power of saying what thoughts are bad and what thoughts are good? Is it someone you agree with? What if it changes to someone you don't?

whatshisface• 5 years ago

Who gets to decide who goes to jail? All of the same fallibility arguments apply.

dj_mc_merlin5• 5 years ago

Yes, I agree. My arguments extend to the law too. Previously, you could've gone to jail for being black or having a beer. Women got to vote in 1920.

I personally follow the law so I don't go to jail, since historically it has been made by idiots.

shkkmo5• 5 years ago

Ideally? A jury of your peers supported by a system that at least purports to provide checks and balances against the system being dominated by any single person or groups' judgement.

If factual veracity faced a similar system that tries to balance the needs and desires of all participants, then censoring misinformation would be a lot more palatable (and would still, like our justice system, often be wrong.) The current system of supressing misinformation has none of the check and balances contained in the legal system and adding those in would do a great deal to facilitate trust in that system.

andi999• 5 years ago

If the government enacts a law to ban misinformation, I am sure there will also be a ministry of truth by that government, which will decide what information is truthful and what information is not.

WalterBright4• 5 years ago

Most evil in the world is perpetrated not by evil people, but by people with good intentions who believe they know what is best for others, and believe that justifies forcing it on those others.

So, who gets to decide?

Each individual gets to decide for themselves.

bumby6• 5 years ago

I think you’re right in your assessment of “evil” but pragmatically wrong (or maybe just oversimplifying) the solution.

When there are large asymmetries (for example, in information or risk) regulation can be warranted. For example, most people feel regulating fissile material is prudent because the risk of it coming into the wrong hands is too high to just let unchecked freedom ring when it comes to owning it or not.

devwastaken3• 5 years ago

Most evil in the world is perpetrated not by evil people, but by people with good intentions who believe they know what is best for others, and believe that justifies forcing it on those others.

Other way around. Evil would convince you that leaded gasoline is fine, and that "good intentions" of regulating lead out of gas are evil because government power.

secondaryacct• 5 years ago

I disagree: we live in societies and can vote. In my country we decided that trading, joking, lauding, repeating anything nazi can be prosecuted: so we do prosecute it, a judge decides, according to past judgment and his opinion of the law, and done.

No need to give everyone the job to be clever - we can actually blacklist any opinion we dont want to see circulated and vote on it.

zippergz• 5 years ago

Each individual deciding for themselves causes the tragedy of the commons.

geofft4• 5 years ago

OK, but, we already have social/legal/cultural norms for deciding what thoughts are bad and what thoughts are good. Here are some things I can't do via Mailchimp for either legal or cultural reasons (see also https://mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use/):

- Advertise pornography

- Plan attacks against the United States government

- Advertise medical cures that the government doesn't approve of

- Sell counterfeit products

- Pump and dump a stock

- Reveal the identities of CIA operatives

All of these are thoughts, just as much as advocating against vaccines or for alternative cures or what-have-you are thoughts.

Who gets to decide any of the above?

Would it be a good idea to set up society such that all of the above thoughts are protected speech?

naasking• 5 years ago

They're not just thoughts but also actions. Actions are typically what's regulated by governments, not thought. Maybe by "thoughts" you meant "ideas".

kmonsen• 5 years ago

They are not thoughts as sibling mentioned.

If you think any of these things in your own mind but don't take any action on it that is perfectly ok and carries no legal risk.

Turing_Machine8• 5 years ago

Other than advertising (legal) pornography, all of those are actual violations of the law, at least in the United States.

Clearly MailChimp (or any other service) can't knowingly allow their platform to be used to violate the law, or they would be held accountable.

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

who gets to decide what's misinformation?

Whoever wants to. and then people can compare the competing arbiters and decide who would earn their trust. That used to work with mass media until the internet came along. Now we no longer have multiple newspapers, but "The Newspaper" , "The TV" and "The telegraph" (Twitter?), like 2-3 news sources in total which are basically politically aligned. The name of the game changed from "popularity and copy sales" to "the network effect". I m not sure if this can ever change within a centralizing communication medium like the internet, but perhaps at some point people will realize that the network effect is evil and it will get a bad name.

wizzwizz4• 5 years ago

I m not sure if this can ever change within a centralizing communication medium like the internet,

The internet, centralising… what went wrong?

asymptosis• 5 years ago

only engineers believe most of the important issues in the world actually have an objective answer to them.

Was this really necessary? How many engineers do you know, and how many of them actually ascribe to this belief?

dj_mc_merlin5• 5 years ago

It's a playful jab at a category of people I am part of too, although I do not share that belief. The statement I made is wrong on purpose regardless (for light comedic effect): not only engineers hold that belief, nor are they the only ones who do.

There is a significant overlap (higher than a random person's picked from the population) between engineers and what I would call "fundamentalist rationalists". That is, people who believe in reason and science to the point they wrap the speedometer back around to religious belief again. Those people become unable to think outside that framework and consider nuanced solutions. Not everything worth solving has measurable or falsifiable solutions. The world can be very uncertain and work against all common sense at times. This doesn't mean one shouldn't attempt to make sense of it obviously, but science does not a god make. It may, hopefully, but pretending it is that way now is no good.

Ir0nMan• 5 years ago

Until recently I thought we already settled this:

-People you believe are saying true things get to speak.

-People you believe are saying false things get to speak.

-People you believe are saying nice things get to speak.

-People you believe are saying mean things get to speak.

Everyone gets to speak. Individuals get to decide.

umvi• 5 years ago

That was until we collectively decided harm reduction is a greater cause than freedom preservation. Now any and all freedoms we previously had can be temporarily, permanently, or conditionally suspended in the name of harm reduction (saved lives, fewer offended, etc.)

jayd16• 5 years ago

This is not what is currently up for debate. The current conflict is over control of private forums.

Its not a cut and dry issue either. If you were to own a site, anyone forcing you to post things to your site you don't believe is also an infringement of your rights. It cuts both ways.

In my eyes the major issue is the consolidation of discourse onto a few private forums, not whether or not those forums should be able to police themselves.

another_story• 5 years ago

While this is great in principle, some people's voice is much louder, and their words can devastate the lives of individuals, the economy and our society. Should there not be something in place to prevent people from spreading falsehoods that can lead to harming others? The solution is not as easy as what you've stated. In fact, I don't think there is a solution, only a continual rebalancing.

jerf2• 5 years ago

"Misinformation" is one of the most brilliant propaganda coups of my life time.

It does not exist. There is no such thing as "misinformation".

There is only misinformation according to some party.

"Google is going to remove misinformation from YouTube." sounds incredible laudable to the modern ear.

"Google is going to remove things that are misinformation according to Google corporate policy." is much less compelling.

A challenge for anyone reading this: From now on, whenever you read the word "misinformation", fill out the "according to ..." yourself. I've been doing it for a while now. It really improves your perspective.

(I do believe in objective truth. However, if we had a mechanism for objectively determining it in a way we all agreed upon, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place. Whatever the objective truth may be, I seriously doubt "according to the corporate policy of X" is it.)

CarelessExpert3• 5 years ago

It does not exist. There is no such thing as "misinformation".

Talk about highschool level sophistry. "Nah bro, there are no facts, everything is meaningless, the truth is a lie and all lies are true, man!"

Please.

I do believe in objective truth.

Oh good, I'm glad you took the time to contradict yourself.

However, if we had a mechanism for objectively determining it in a way we all agreed upon

So misinformation exists but we'll never be able to identify it?

I repeat: please.

The world is not flat. The anunaki don't exist. COVID vaccines don't contain microchips.

This isn't even a little bit hard.

Does it get hard in the muddy middle? Sure. But your claim that 'There is no such thing as "misinformation"' is pure bunk.

shkkmo5• 5 years ago

It does not exist. There is no such thing as "misinformation".

I'm sorry, but this is complete BS. If someone makes statements that they know are false, then they are a liar and are spreading misinformation. If someone makes statements for which they have incontrovertible proof, this is absolutely not misinformation.

Just because the gradients between those two are complex, doesn't mean that misinformation doesn't exist, just that the definition of "misinformation" is fuzzy (like so many other words.)

(I don't believe in objective truth or meaning. I do believe that communication is impossible without mutually shared subjective truths and meanings.)

Edit: The reality is that there is a significant amount of misinformation put out by all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons. Some of it (e.g. some press releases) is widely recognized but also generally tolerated. Some of it is partisan. Some of it is widely accepted as truth by almost everyone.

irrational3• 5 years ago

There is objective truth. Trump did not win the last election if you look at it in the right light. The absolute truth is, he lost. That isn’t misinformation. That can be applied to a myriad of other things. The earth is not flat. The vaccine does not contain microchips. Masks do prevent the spread of airborne disease. Jan 6th was an insurrection by the Republicans and not a tourist trip.

refenestrator3• 5 years ago

That last one is a choice of descriptive words, not an objective truth.

Personally, my bar for 'insurrection' involves at least one gunshot. You can differ! But it's not objective.

tayo422• 5 years ago

You're getting mixed up. Good and bad isn't the same as misinformation. The intent is important. Bad faith arguments and presenting misleading conclusions to further an agenda is misinformation.

temporalparts• 5 years ago

I think it's a good point, but... what information do we use to determine intent? And aren't they subject to the errors of normal information in addition to possible ill-intended misinformation?

irtigor2• 5 years ago

Yes, sometimes it is hard to distinguish between extremely dumb and dishonest behavior. Like, a few years ago in my native language someone made a news piece about some women that were working for Google suing the company for unfair wages (according to them, they were making less for the same work) and whoever edited the piece decided to include that according to glossdoor women in tech make less than men, but completely forgot that the same glossdoor said that google was a exemption (based on the information they got).

ralusek2• 5 years ago

And this isn't even limited to the hypothetical. Just in the last year we've had completely egregious examples of abuse of misinformation classifications. An article about Hunter Biden's laptop, posted by the oldest newspaper in the country, the New York Post, weeks before the election, got them banned from Twitter and Facebook. Any mention of Hunter Biden's laptop would get the post flagged as misinformation and banned.

Now, I don't care about Hunter Biden's laptop. What I do care about is that this was absolutely not misinformation. And then the same happened again for the lab-leak hypothesis. Given pants-on-fire dismissal and declared "debunked," when it wasn't then, and has been shown to very clearly not be now.

So, yes, the abuse of the authority is obvious in the hypothetical, but the relegation to the abstract isn't even necessary to condemn the legitimacy of these self-proclaimed institutions.

smsm42• 5 years ago

The answer to this question is obvious - it's an exercise of pure power. Any time you hear anything about "misinformation" the real thing they are talking is power. Whoever has the power can censor those that do not have it and deny them chance to express their views. The guise under which it is done is immaterial - today it's health, tomorrow it's climate change, next day it's electoral politics or terrorism or vegetarianism or gender issues or bee colony collapse. Anything can be used as a basis for censorship, once you have the power and the will to censor. And the power to define what "misinformation" is and the power to censor is one and the same. It's not about seeking the truth, it's about seeking control and domination.

Once, in America, it was universally acceptable that censoring speech is not the power somebody should get. Neither the government, nor anybody else. Of course, as with every ideal, the reality sometimes came short of it - there are many infamous examples of censorship, both governmental and otherwise, that happened in America. But those ultimately were realized as conflicting with the ideal - and ultimately, the ideal won and they have lost.

Today, this ideal is increasingly being abandoned - for the large parts of the Left, have already completely been abandoned - for the ideas of "safety" and narrow partisan political considerations. The nation - and the whole culture we call "Western culture" - will suffer a lot and regret a lot if we don't find a way to stop it.

bena5• 5 years ago

By like the second sentence I was able to deduce pretty much most of what this guy was going to complain about and what side he was on every issue.

I do miss the days before "big tech" and social media when every asshole with half an opinion wasn't given a bullhorn to shout it from the rooftops as if they had something worthwhile to say.

When you are complaining about the Associated Press, maybe take a step back and consider whether or not you're just wrong.

Because the Associated Press is one of the most milquetoast, boring, middle-of-the-road, non-opinion-giving, dry ass, plain organizations out there. They really don't give a shit. They report on things so other newspapers can run the story.

And it seems like all he wants to do is commit the fallacy fallacy. He thinks by saying something is a fallacy, that makes them wrong. It doesn't.

Not to mention, the authorities people are "appealing" to are experts in this field. Not to mention, we can turn that "appeal to authority" around on Ivermectin as well. He's just pimping it because "a doctor said so". And when you point that out, they'll point out why we should blah blah blah. But that's the rub. It's something they want you to do for them, but won't do for you. No one is listening to these people simply because they're in charge, but because they're proven experts in their field.

And so on, with the rest. When he's not just completely misrepresenting a situation to claim something is fallacious when it's not.

achenatx• 5 years ago

Since the beginning of forums there have been trolls and misinformation. There has always been the option to ignore, either by not replying or by blocking an offender from their view. However my experience has been that 1) people are almost universally incapable of ignoring trolls. 2) it is somehow almost impossible for people to stomach banning a troll knowing the troll is still posting.

The closest system that seems to work is for people to downvote whatever it is they dont like and for that to cause posts to have lower priority.

distantsounds• 5 years ago

We see Fauci removing his mask the moment the cameras stop rolling. We see AOC sitting amongst a fairly close knit crowd put one on for the express purpose of a photo op and then take it off again. But if you send an email to your own subscribers via Mailchimp wondering out loud if masks are nothing more than performative theatre, you’ll get shut down.

no, when you nitpick an _extremely complicated scientific matter_ to where you are actively going against CDC guidelines for the sake of pushing your own argument, you get shut down. imagine that. it's almost as if Mailchimp would rather you believe scientists than some tech bro with a podcast.

devwastaken3• 5 years ago

James Charles, a very popular individual on Twitter, has been cancelled about 5 times. Guess what? They're still there. That's because "Cancel Culture" is largely made up by talking heads. Very few people actually get "cancelled", and when they do, it's not because of posts on Twitter by themselves.

Youtube houses plenty of conspirators, right wing news, gun channels, and they're monetized. Not only that, but youtube comment sections are notorious for being inline with "conservative" views.

Some gun channels have been demonitized. Not because Youtube doesn't want the money, but because Google doesn't control what advertisers do. In one of the demonitization dramas it was revelead that Youtube as a company would stop generating revenue if a big advertiser like Pepsi or Disney stopped doing business with Youtube.

If you want to see "cancelling" how about the crowds of hate that target minority groups with significant harassment? Why is online canceling from Twitter talked about, but not actual real life militia groups and violent groups that gather to kill transgender individuals? One of those actually harms people.

Do you see these "cancellers" showing up to city council meetings, forming actual physical protests? Nope. Everyone is actually quite free to ignore it. The only time things change is when those in positions of power decide to change it. They make those changes not on the outrage on Twitter, but on their own personal beliefs on whom they want to do business with.

Ontop of this, "cancel culture" can be translated to "protest culture". Somehow critisizing and stopping business with people is "cancelling", and not "protest" now?

No tech company should be enforcing their Terms of Service based on what they think their users have done or might do off of their own platforms. Yet Twitter, Facebook, Patreon and who knows who else do that.

Reworded: No individual should be enforcing their morals based on what they think someone has done or might do when not next to them.

These "I should be able to say anything I want on someone elses platform" is uniquely american privledge talking. If Youtube, or Twitter, or Facebook allowed whatever people want, guess what? They'd be regulated tomorrow to not allow it. Words actually do have harm, and words do not inherently have 1st ammendment protections.

There are already plenty of misinformed people whom want a "repeal of 230". These companies have both a moral and financial responsibility to enforce their terms of service.

A mailer company like Mailchimp has no business even parsing the content of their paying clients, let alone summarily judging whether it is misinformation or not. Mail providers should care about two things and two things only:

Yes, they do. They have to parse them for illegal content, and then they have to parse for content that might have their services used in ways that harm others. Disinformation can easily be harmful, and a company like Mailchimp does not want to be implicated in it regardless of 230 protections or not.

stereoradonc• 5 years ago

When companies market themselves as the "medium for public discourse", it is easy to cross lines between staying "neutral" or influence it the way they see fit. "Social Media" has served no useful purpose beyond generating these kind of moralistic arguments. We are better off without them.

motohagiography2• 5 years ago

I'd take it a step futher and borrow an adage to say platforms and media mainly say they are fighting misinformation to convince you that the rest of their content is meaningful.

Base reality is, they all make money on selling your attention to advertisers, and they need for you to believe that your encounters with them are "real," serendipitous, and that you aren't just being managed like an animal in an existential zoo. Sure, there are true believers who think abusing trust and technical power to shape narratives is honest and necessary work, and via Twain, there is no argument that will change their mind so long as they are being paid to believe in it. These would not be the first managers to mistake their own credulity for skill.

I'd reject that any of the platforms are seriously combating misinformation, and state it is just another trope in support of the same end, which is the global brandsafing of all public discourse on behalf of their main essential coalition members - the worst, wideley acknowledged, most objectively evil and mendacious organizations in the history of world. If you don't like how a platform puts you on a target list and actively wipes out your social capital and isolates you from your relationships and ability to make a living, people are perfectly free to just go and start up their own purges...

kook_throwaway• 5 years ago

Thank you, this is one of the best posts I've read on here.

on behalf of their main essential coalition members - the worst, wideley acknowledged, most objectively evil and mendacious organizations in the history of world.

Very few people seem willing say this out loud. These groups are not your friends, and are often the biggest offenders of many of the things they claim they are trying to prevent. 'the coalition' is social engineering on an industrial scale and it's disgusting regardless of the stated or unstated intentions.

acituan• 5 years ago

I agree with your thesis in general with several nitpicks;

Sure, there are true believers who think abusing trust and technical power to shape narratives is honest and necessary work

Narrative warfare exists and is not a single agent game. I am not saying this makes narrative shaping defendable, but in the absence of some meaning-making work opportunist opponents will happily fill in the vacuum. This is the slippery slope that escalates to being a true believer of power (ab)use.

In the past, opponent processes of meaning-making was between differing, well-paced journalistic outlets somewhat within consilience distance. Today a) the inter-narrative drift is impossibly larger and b) heavily clustered around partisan dimensions which are themselves pushed away and c) comes out of a 24hr infotainment firehose because finances favor that. We're denial-of-service'd out of thinking for ourselves and the narratives we're given are hopelessly irreconcilable.

most objectively evil and mendacious organizations in the history of world

There is no such cabal of coordinated evil. In fact, this gnostic belief is part of the narrative that creates ressentiment and nihilism. Emergent foolishness can just be as evil. And it can be countered with emergent, distributed wisdom, not necessarily another billions of dollars worth of a "good" platform.

Base reality is, they all make money on selling your attention to advertisers,

Selling your attention to advertisers is a relatively minor harm. We are actually pretty good at suppressing noise and get to the signal we want. But the shaping of your attention and emotions that maximize time on site is harmful in a much more durable way. Not only it directly attacks your noise-suppression and relevance-detection heuristics, the more you stay on site the more you're actively trained to be more foolish, reactive and receptive. This bleeds to the rest of your life. It is like an anti-mindfulness training that stupefies you.

The solution is bound to be in the form of a suite of counter-trainings that gives back each individual their agency to realize this is not good for us.

raxxorrax2• 5 years ago

There is no Evil Incorporated®, but there are certainly moneyed interests in every major industry and countless examples of more or less directed propaganda campaigns from oil to defense contractors.

I agree with the solution though, which shouldn't rely on platform moderation whose customers are advertising and PR. The platforms won't have leverage against their own customers here.

This isn't nihilism, nihilism would be ignoring the problem. And on angle to tackle the specific problem of parties wanting to clean up the net in their purpose was the insistence on neutrality and laissez faire moderation.

I think it still is the best course but requires education like you suggested.

zeteo• 5 years ago

Some of the smartest people I know went to work for Facebook or Google. Heck, most people on this site probably would too if offered the chance. Suggesting that thousands of highly skilled, well paid employees who could have their choice of a job anywhere are just "paid to believe in it" is frankly insulting to a lot of people.

The fact is we are in the middle of a pandemic and spreading some types of misinformation is directly akin to facilitating the spread of the virus. If you were in a situation where your basic choices were a) use whatever means you have to limit the spread of harmful misinformation or b) do nothing and watch as the thousands of extra dead and suffering pile up, I hope you would have the same basic human decency as these "true believers who abuse technical power" and choose the former.

vannevar• 5 years ago

"Supposed to be" according to whom? It's fine that the author wants to run a social media company like an email service, and of course he's free to do that. But none of the major social media sites share that business model. Their revenue is based on engagement, and that model is deeply and inextricably entangled with their content and how it is pushed out to users. Are social media sites qualified to be arbiters of truth? Of course not, that's not their business model. But they're well within their rights to decide what content gets exposed to who on their service, and they've done that from the very beginning. People who are upset at being "deplatformed" are in the exact same position as SEO optimizers whose business gets gouged when Google changes their search algorithm.

If you want to make Facebook some kind of common carrier, you're going to have to outlaw all of its engagement-optimizing AI and targeted marketing, the very core of its business model. When you get on a platform to take advantage of exactly those tools, you can't complain when they change the rules on you---you knew the score when you signed up, you can save the crocodile tears.

proactivesvcs• 5 years ago

If an organisation provides a service transparently, such as Akamai, Level3, DNS root servers etc. then they're plumbing and they should shift packets unless you or your systems are trying to break their plumbing.

If they run a service that you patronise as an end user then they can do what they want because if you don't like their terms of service you can go elsewhere.

Don't like f*c*book's terms or behaviour? Leave. YouTube keeps mistreating you? Leave. AWS repeatedly asks you to stop your users breaking the terms you agreed to? Leave.

I don't care if you can't get the clout or customers you want on Vimeo or Mastodon. I don't care if you don't think there is no viable alternative. You obey the contract you agreed to or you get kicked off. Organisations are not obliged to agree with you or serve you.

Lumping Internet-based organisations into "Big Tech" is a misnomer and I find it is frequently a sign that someone's about to go on a rant about something they either don't understand or are purposefully being obstinate about.

borland• 5 years ago

A horrible person got deplatformed and they're all angry with the world. Companies get to decide how to run their platforms; if you don't like it, send your money to other horrible companies, or try and convince lawmakers that your horrible case should be protected. Ultimately though, stopping being horrible is probably the easiest option but these people never seem to want to take it?

HN doesn't allow downvotes so I upvoted literally everything else on the front page to compensate. Thx

emodendroket3• 5 years ago

Says who? We're seeing some negative side effects to certain kinds of content flowing through social networks, and perhaps more importantly, from the tech company's perspective, politicians do not actually want them to sit back and not touch this content. If they did that, they'd likely end up getting regulated.

Also, a truly unmoderated social network would quickly become a clearing house for garbage content nobody wants to look at.

whatever1999• 5 years ago

The power of blocking content should give to state government, because they are supervised by the people. Big tech are not, and they probably use this power as a bargaining chip deal with politicians under table.

kktkti9• 5 years ago

Maybe that says a lot about the real value of digital social networks as we know them now.

Perhaps we should just have dumb pipes, and let people network over them without a MITM running psychology and behavioral economics experiments on people who merely want to connect with friends and family

shadowgovt• 5 years ago

You’re using their mailservers, and in their mind that’s what gives them the right and the moral authority to monitor the content of your communications to your own audience.

Yes, how strange that somebody would believe they should have a say in how you use their services.

justbored123• 5 years ago

Why? The media companies have always done so. The press is and always was "patricians" of printing press discourse. You can't say whatever you like on a news paper. The TV companies and Cable companies are and always were "patricians" of tv programming. You can't say whatever you like on a tv program. The publishing companies are and always were "patricians" of the books. You can't say whatever you like on a book and get them to print it, promote it and distribute if they disagree. Radio companies are and always were "patricians" of the radio waves, you need a license to operate a radio and they decide what gets on air.

Why the double standard?

Now, you can say whatever you like on the internet, you just are not entitle to force other people and companies to give you a platform to do so. Facebook, Youtube, this site, etc., doesn't owe you sh#t. If you want to publish something that they don't like, host it and promote it yourself, just as if you want to put something in the news that they don't like, or on TV or on the radio or on a book.

The insane and childish authoritarianism of the author of this article that believes that "Mail Chimp" doesn't tell him what to do with their service but instead he is the one that tells them how to run their private for profit company is both comical and sad. If you don't like the terms of service, stop using their service. That's how that works. If you think that they are infringing on your rights, them take them to court, don't click bait about it.

robertlagrant5• 5 years ago

There's no double standard. The post wouldn't decide whether to deliver a newspaper based on its contents.

3grdlurker• 5 years ago

Isn’t this just a consequence of American capitalism? Incentivise companies to optimize for profit, and they’ll do anything to rake in more ad money including violating people’s privacy and curating user-submitted content. We’ll have to fundamentally rethink entire economies before we could see large companies (if they would be, at all, allowed to exist) acting ethically.

freedomben3• 5 years ago

I don't know why you're downvoted, because I think this theory on the cause is among the more interesting and nuanced comments. I think you've got an interesting observation there worth considering deeper. Perhaps they disagree with your Marxist conclusion?:

We’ll have to fundamentally rethink entire economies before we could see large companies (if they would be, at all, allowed to exist) acting ethically.

iammisc• 5 years ago

I just closed all my social media accounts. Let them plumb cake.

lsiebert• 5 years ago

This links to Doug McKenty's twitter, where he is retweeting people saying that Covid-19 is a hoax.

Make of that what you will.

lostmsu• 5 years ago

An attack on the title: what the author does not realize, is that plumbing is not limited to the person who comes to their house to fix pipes. The majority of plumbing is from some water source to cleaning facility to your house and then back to treatment facility and finally back into nature. And that major part is actually mostly managed by "patricians".

Not that I support tech giants invasion in private lives. But when thought through the analogy works against the author's favor.

Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse

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