For those who haven't seen any of my annoying mentions of it yet, large threads on HN are currently paginated for performance reasons (yes we're working on it) so you need to click More at the bottom of the thread to get to the rest of the comments—or like this:
There is a difference between bank accounts, Visa/MasterCard access and Internet service, on one hand, and App Stores, Twitter accounts and payment providers, on the other hand.
The First Amendment promises both free speech and free assembly. Core to the latter is the freedom not to assemble. This freedom is regulated. You can’t refuse to do business with protected classes. But political affiliation is not a protected class.
There are utilities, which have limited freedom not to assemble. Then there are private persons and private businesses. Stripe and Twitter are clearly the latter. AWS and Visa feel like the former, though they are legally the latter.
The cost of switching private activity to a utility model is a loss of innovation and an increase in political involvement. We are re-evaluating, as a society, the balance between the freedoms of speech and assembly. Let’s not forget these are freedoms in balance, not a spectrum of tyranny and anarchy.
> Stripe and Twitter are pretty clearly the latter.
They might be the latter, but I wouldn't consider it obvious. Regarding social media, we've gotten to the point where even US Visa applications ask for social media handles (and I understand they consider it as a negative datum if you don't provide one). And we're also at the point where some companies won't provide you with respectable service unless you @ them on social media. Regarding payment platforms, generally people expect them to be quite neutral, since getting locked out of the financial system is not exactly going to lead to a great life in the modern digital economy.
I don't know at what point these cross into "utility" territory, and I'm willing to entertain the idea that they might never do so, but I find it quite debatable and very much not clear.
(Note: None of this is to opine on the reactions to this particular incident. Just commenting on the more general idea.)
I'm confused, payment processors often stop working with criminals, or even non-criminals that are just in "unseemly" industries. PayPal arbitrarily freezes people's accounts for even possibly being scams, why not obvious billion dollar ones?
I have never thought they were neutral when it came to actual crimes. That's so much liability, why would anyone expect them to take it on given how risk averse they are?
I don't have a twitter account and login to Facebook once a month. If both went away tomorrow, my life would continue, very much as now. And I think this is true for most people.
If my water, power, or internet was cut off, I would immediately suffer real, life changing inconvenience and hardship.
To me, the difference between these things is incredibly stark.
Wasn't there a sort-of reverse issue a year or two ago, when the President was blocking people on twitter and a court ruled that he was violating their 1st amendment rights?
Is it exclusively because of his office? Could it be construed the other direction?
> And we're also at the point where some companies won't provide you with respectable service unless you @ them on social media.
Real-world example: T-Mobile. Their Twitter and Facebook representatives (called T-Force) have better customer service (they are more empowered to help you without supervisor escalation and fix things faster) than calling 611.
> I don't know at what point these cross into "utility" territory
I think there's an obvious midpoint missing in the discussion between private and utility, which is monopoly, which do have additional set of laws and checks in place precisely for their strength against the free market.
preemptive "there are plenty alternatives so they are not monopolies" - if turns out these alternatives are acting in concert, it configures a cartel, which can get regulated in all the same ways.
the economical concepts behind these events aren't so alien as the folk around made them to be, their novelty is in their application to intangible assets (views and online services) but most of the issues are the same as they were decades ago and the same concepts apply, to the same conclusions.
I buy this argument as the law currently stands, but this is also such a moral double standard (Colorado bakery for instance).
Also, how far do we go with this reasoning? Stripe and PayPal refuse service so they're supposed to "Go build their own" (it costs billions to create a new service like stripe or PayPal that can compare). AWS shut you down? Build your own data center... (Again, costs millions or billions). What if next Intel or AMD decides to not sell you processors? Go build your own fab and develop your own hardware? What if the silicon miners won't sell you silicon, are you now supposed to go build your own mine?
The issue isn't that companies have a right to do it, it's that there are no viables alternatives to these large duopolies, and that "creating your own" is not an alternative.
What happens if the party in power next decides to attack religious organizations who congregate during that pandemic with the same type of concerted de-platforming? What if it's people who advocate against raising taxes who are next as deemed "morally corrupt"?
It's not hard to imagine this type of anti competitive, semi-concerted effort to de platform a new company being targeted at other things in the future. We need laws to catch up to our modern society and either break up the monopolies or put a lot more protections around the types of discrimination that are illegal, which should include political affiliation (this is law in California for employment discrimination so it's not that far fetched of an idea).
>What happens if the party in power next decides to attack religious organizations who congregate during that pandemic with the same type of concerted de-platforming?
I didn't realize that Stripe's actions were due to a government order. Probably because they weren't.
You're conflating a private organization's decisions with government action. If the government were to attempt do as you suggest, the courts would slap them down hard.
Actually I think you might have the Colorado case misrepresented here. The baker was ruled in favor due to objecting based on his religious beliefs. Part of this was that he was okay with baking a cake for the gay couple but NOT one that had certain messaging that would violate his faith. [1]
If the baker had altogether refused to bake a cake for the gay couple, it would have been discrimination on a protected class.
I don't see how it's anti competetive. The free market advocates on HN would say that other people will create other companies and gain the market share current companies have turned down. Or that existing niche companies will find an expanded market serving them.
It's also important to note that companies aren't cutting ties with Trump because of his political ideology, they're cutting ties with him because there's a strong argument he broke the law, and they don't want to be in the awkward position of facilitating that, especially as it could open them to their own legal liability.
> But political affiliation is not a protected class.
Classes that are protected now, were not protected at some point.
I think the discussion revolves not around whether political affiliation is a protected class, but whether it should be, in a sense- whether what is going on is good or bad for society, not whether or not it is illegal.
You are entitled to believe that it is good, of course.
> Classes that are protected now, were not protected at some point
Creating protected classes significantly curtails neighbouring freedoms while increasing the government’s role in day to day interactions.
One hallmark of existing protected classes is they are somewhat objective (counterfactual: race). Political affiliation is totally subjective. If someone believes in violent death for Blacks, Jews and gays, should a Holocaust memorial group be forced to accept them? If no, then you need someone deciding which groups do and don’t merit protection. And who is and isn’t actually a member of that group.
It’s not impossible. But it has unintended consequences. More than re-delineating the private company / utility boundary. More than expanding antitrust enforcement.
Protected class should. be reserved to things you cannot change. People don't choose to be black, gay, trans etc. They choose their political affiliation and even their religion.
I feel that right now, there's a lot of people conflating the status quo with the way they think things ought to be.
I've seen a lot of comments that act authoritative about the legal consequences, but heavily editorialized to say "the government shouldn't".
I'm not going to state my personal stance, because it's complicated and frankly, I haven't put enough thought into it to be comfortable presenting it. But, you (the reader) should be willing to forgo your kneejerk reaction (if you have one) and think about the consequences of what you're proposing when discussing changing the status quo and desired legislature to "solve" these issues.
Freedom of speech was created when there were many distributed newspapers. If one newspaper decided not to publish your piece, you could go to another. There was not a cabal of newspapers that controlled 99% of information distribution, like do Twitter, Facebook, and Google. This is not something the founders ever could have foreseen.
For all intents and purposes, freedom of speech has flatlined in America. What will bring it back?
Freedom of speech has nothing to do with newspapers or news, and never has done.
It only protects you from government, nothing else.
There are legitimate concerns regarding monopolistic behaviour of large digital gatekeepers. But we don’t solve that by deciding to restrict their speech (which is what forced speech would be). You solve it by either making them utilities or breaking them up to create more competition.
"For all intents and purposes, freedom of speech has flatlined in America."
No - 'Freedom of Speech' is at an all time high.
The internet gives every single person a giant soap box to stand on.
You can communicate, in public, with anyone in the world.
25 years ago, you had no voice.
Now, everyone can be a 'journalist' or 'agitator' or whatever.
The level of open communication possible today was unthinkable 25 years ago.
25 years ago most people didn't have access to 'most news'. The NYT maybe was accessible by the elite in most towns, but the LA times was not. Now it's all available to everyone.
> But political affiliation is not a protected class.
This is a distraction. Political speech enjoys the highest level of protection in the US, political speech is one of the primary motivators behind the existence of constitutionally protected speech in the US.
Non-US-citizen here: Isn't the first amendment protecting private people and entities (e.g. newspapers) from government influence into free speech?
Private companies deciding not to service the head of the executive seems to be nearly the opposite of that, unless I understood this wrongly (which is entirely possible). Think of a newspaper (=private entity) decides to boycott a president and not write anything about him. Wouldn't it be the polar opposite of free speech if the president then had the power to force them to write about him?
I get that a payment service is not the same as a newspaper, but it is still a private entity.
"We are re-evaluating" - I imagine for many people it's not re-evaluation but learning for the first time, people who haven't critically thought through any of this - of what freedom of speech means and its boundaries or how the relative sovereignty of private businesses is a feature, and it's not you being persecuted if they remove unwanted users; the private companies aren't preventing free speech, these people can still speak freely in America and on the internet - just not on the platforms that don't want the incitement of violence, etc. on their platform.
> AWS and Visa feel like the former, though they are legally the latter.
Back in the day, you had to rack your own servers in your own data centers and manage them yourself. Had any of these 'free speech' services spent any time considering how reliant they were on 3rd party services, they should never have engaged those companies in the first place.
There was a day when you had to build your own servers to host your own websites. Not that long ago, imo.
Gab does this- they run their own servers and payment processing. For better or for worse, they have remained online and seen a huge uptick in traffic [0] while Parler has been kicked off every cloud vendor. I suspect Gab will displace Parler as the QAnon crowd's platform of choice.
It is incredible that people on HN can be against Visa/Mastercard banning payments to Wikileaks or Pornhub, against PayPal making arbitrary decisions about their customers, but somehow in support of Stripe banning Trump. All of these companies are providing utility services, and they should all be regulated as if they were public agencies. They should have to uphold the freedom of speech and other principles enshrined in our system of laws, because these organizations are so powerful and influential that they might as well be government agencies. The services they provide are completely fundamental and necessary today, and the fact that they are operated by private entities does not mean that we cannot require them to do what is right by implementing our nation's founding principles. If we can regulate power utilities or force all businesses to shutdown during a pandemic, we can absolutely update our laws to regulate these companies, require them to uphold the first amendment, and provide due process. We should also definitely revamp our anti-trust laws and break them up where possible, so that there is real competition and choice.
it's not incredible. It's pretty much an open double standard at this point, because political leftism is seen as the only true ideology a rational person can have. The rhetoric about conservatism is increasingly casting conservatives as vulnerable to irrational forces like fake news or algorithims that can override their will and make them believe patently absurd things.
If you are conservative or lean to it, its incredibly disheartening. You have to consistently justify to these people you aren't brainwashed, because their default idea is that you are. Sort of the same way about serious religious belief if you have one; people default assume you are nuts and at best you can work your way up to "he's nuts but he is our nut."
It's scary to me, and to be honest my political views are starting to move towards "limit the power other people can affect you as much as possible" because its now evident how people will happily deplatform any unpopular person beyond the real justification. I can buy removing Trump's speech due to incitement, but it keeps going and going-like we literally see fox news next, and what then?
> political affiliation is protected from discrimination in CA, NY, and DC
Lawful political activity is protected from workplace discrimination. That’s a far stretch from making it a general protected class, and wouldn’t prevent Stripe from refusing to work with the Trump campaign.
When we're talking tech giants, like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth, it strains credulity to think that there isn't some connection between what they do and currying political favor. Politicians are holding a big hammer over the heads of these giants, in terms of laws, regulations, and even tax and trade policy. On paper, they are private enterprises making decisions that are within their right, as opposed to governments censoring speech and prohibiting association. The reality is almost certainly more complicated, and involves nuanced levels of political pull, "understandings," and backroom deals.
These tech giants have made themselves into a lattice on which modern society attaches itself, and their pervasiveness will only continue to grow in 21st century America. We risk them being in bed with government. And when nominally private, major industry is aligned with government to effect political ends, there's a word for that, and we've seen that before.
To be honest, I firmly evaluate this behavior as negative irrespectable of the legal issues. It might look clear in the case of Trump. Freedom of speech is something civil society defines and the refusal to let people speak is something I regard very negatively. Never would have thought to say something like this in 2015, but the opposition to Trump looks inept as does this behavior from Stripe. They just didn't have an answer, so they just needed to ban him.
It’s not a legal issue. People and companies have the freedom to put what they want on their websites or not.
Trump just stood up and asked for his people to go to the capitol - one of his former campaign managers called for beheading members of government.
Calling out his lies - a la politifact and many others - hasn’t worked to deradicalize. Fact check verifications next to the content haven’t. So - just shutting off the calls for violence and lies are the next step.
“Opposition to Trump looks inept”(?) The opposition just swept congress and the presidency, crushed the popular vote, and even members of his party are strongly against his actions. Ineptitude is the Trump’s legal challenges against the election and the “4 Seasons Total Landscaping” fiasco.
Trump can raise funds in many ways. He can get checks. No one is required to allow someone to raise funds on their site - let freedom ring!
some previous names for cloud compute entities were "grid compute" and "utility computing". some veneer of old-school small fries still exist thank the stars but absolutely, more & more of the internet is powered by the hyperscalers. absolutely terrifying seeing the scales keep tilting heavier & heavier towards fewer & fewer options.
Very well said. The critical point is that society is constantly balancing different factors. Sometimes, the balance has been good enough for long enough that we don't even see it. We were in that situation until Trump arrived. During that time, we grew accustomed to talking about our liberties in a way that lacks any depth or nuance.
There are plenty of comments on HN in opposition to Visa and MasterCard stopping to work with Pornhub. Volume might not be the same, but that's hardly surprising.
> If Visa is a "utility," why are we clutching pearls when Trump is banned by them, but not Pornhub?
Visa is not a utility.
I would be open to debating whether they should be one.
The flip side of such a designation is it would likely require the government indemnify Visa against fraud losses. The line between deplatforming for fraud risk (the ostensible reason for Visa’s aversion to porn) and for objectionable content is difficult to draw.
Stripe isn't preventing the Trump campaign from fundraising. You can feel free to withdraw cash from your bank account and mail it to the Trump campaign. Stripe also isn't prohibiting all Republicans from using Stripe. It seems that the people claiming that this the end of free speech are unaware that demonstrating that freedom of speech can have consequences. In this case, that free speech was arguably inciting an insurrection.
> But political affiliation is not a protected class.
Perhaps these bans are happening not because of political affiliation but due to the messages these particular people (e.g., Trump) are espousing.
Parler go banned because it's full of message calling for (e.g.) Mike Pence to be hanged and other such things, and Parler isn't / can't do much about it, and its infrastructure providers (AWS, app stores) do not want any part of it per their ToS.
No one has cut off Mitch McConnell because he hasn't been calling forth angry mobs to storm Congress (or the White House).
Maxine Waters called for her supporters to harass government officials. She’s still on Twitter. A Bernie Sanders supporter ambushed and shot a US Congressman and yet no penalties to various Sanders organizations. Supporters of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard are on Twitter. Mumia Abu-Jamal, a convicted murderer of cops is even on Twitter! AOC stormed and occupied Pelosi’s office in a climate protest in the Capitol and she’s on Twitter.
Notice a pattern? Left wing heroes can say anything they want and Twitter doesn’t ban them.
Twitter is flooded with calls for violence 24/7. Exclusively left wing celebrities openly call for violence all the time on there, nobody does anything about it. That has been going on for the past four years non-stop.
Actor Peter Fonda called for violently assaulting Trump's underage child on Twitter in 2018 (his account was not permanently banned), and that's very typical posting from leftist celebrities on Twitter these past four years.
Thousands of violent posts were in the "Hang Mike Pence" Twitter trend that was going on the other day. People have been openly calling for executions for treason and similar on Twitter in relation to the Capitol riots. There was widespread cheering and celebrating when that woman got shot in the neck by Capitol Police, I read thousands of Tweets that were literally cheering for her death, all on Twitter, and nobody gives a fuck.
The double standard by Twitter is beyond disgusting. It's psychopath behavior.
The assumption that a government model would cause a loss of innovation seems dismissive of what the government model has brought us in the past (DARPA, Space Program, nuclear energy, etc., etc.)
> The assumption that a government model would cause a loss of innovation seems dismissive of what the government model has brought us in the past
Government program != utility designation. DARPA, NASA and the Manhattan Project were not utilities. PG&E is a utility. It requires political consent to make significant changes.
I’m not saying utilities can’t be innovative. Amtrak and the Post Office are utilities, and they experiment. But they have obligations private businesses don’t, and that slows things down.
> But political affiliation is not a protected class.
The ongoing purge -- would it not be seen as treason, as an act to in fact subvert/weaken a position of POTUS and therefore directly destabilize the US government?
> Then there are private persons and private businesses. Stripe and Twitter are clearly the latter. AWS and Visa feel like the former, though they are legally the latter.
Twitter and Stripe are acting in coordination - literally conspiring - with every other big tech company to take a specific action. When they do that they're acting as an illegal cartel and must be prosecuted accordingly. This is the kind of coordinated cartel behavior that banana republics and third world countries have that behave exactly like these companies are and do so out in the open (and always with the political support of the group with the most power, to target their foes). We're supposed to have anti-trust laws to deal with conspiring mega corporations.
I was on the fence about this, but reading the comments convinced me it was the absolute right decision.
The fact that all these institutions just allowed this horrible hateful speech for four years, in the name of free speech etc, despite all the harassment, harm (mental and otherwise) it caused to so many people in America actually emboldened so many to the extent that now that they crossed this invisible line, they can't even really understand the ramifications of what happened. That what gets me.
To be hyperfocused on the free speech or "big brother" aspect of these bans, not the fact that a small group of rioters were just a few feet away from irreversibly staining American history with the blood of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in the chain of command of the United states of America, as well as overrunning the seat of power of the most powerful nation in the world, on national TV ... just tells me that things really went too far and should have been shut down much sooner.
I'm sure a lot of the people at the capitol that day have the narrative running in their minds that they are the heroes of America democracy, but the reality is that there is simply no justification for any of this, that can be told. A smarter group of individuals would take all this on the chin, make penance in some way while staying under the radar to regroup and reconfigure their message/approach instead of citing private business overreach as some sort of justification for what happened
Your point about the 'invisible line' is astute. We're in a crisis of perception and reality right now, and this has caused many to lose sight of the very real lines that we have agreed upon to preserve society and democracy.
I think the other important factor here is we are in a very vulnerable moment right now because we are in the midst of a transition of power. It takes time to transfer the apparatus and operations of state, and during this time there is a power vacuum that can be taken advantage of by adversaries foreign and domestic. Every state throughout history has struggled in these times.
The failure to secure the Capitol was in no small part due to how the President has run the state in the waning months of his term. His cabinet and administration are running a skeleton crew, he's acting erratically, and he's making false claims about election results and inciting crowds in a bid to stay in power. Whether one supports his policies or not, it should be abundantly clear right now that his actions and rhetoric put the country in further danger during this vulnerable time, and that perhaps he need not have access to platforms that make this easier and more convenient. It should be hard to dismantle the state, to whip people into a frenzy, to cause the damage that has been caused.
I am also worried. It feels like Big Tech flourished in last 4 years with advertisement revenue while staying hush about these issues, but all of a sudden they have an epiphany now.
Big Tech leaders are selfish, cowards, clueless and just as vulnerable as the government leaders. They were interested in milking billions in Ads from these hate speech, particularly Twitter.
If I were employees at these big companies, I would raise internal questions - why wasn't this done earlier? What changed? The US Capitol riots is the specific moment that made them all wake up?
These are rhetorical questions. All big tech leaders appeared in front of Congress in last 4 years, and weasled and squeeked instead of prowl and roar. Spineless and immoral, speaking double speak to appease the board of directors and the shareholders. At some point, the world would be destroyed but we've created a lot of value for our shareholders. Reminds me of this [1]. Pardon my cynicism, open for your comments.
Thing is you can dress it up with ideas of vulnerable moments and apparatus and operations and a uniquely challenging time and all this. But this isn't about Trump, this isn't about now, this is about precedents. If something new and extreme is being done, almost always some extenuating factor will be found to try to justify it.
Trump is an unfortunate edge case and has set bad precedents that can hopefully be wisely washed away in time.
We need clearer and consistent norms in the digital space that are seen to embody the fundamental civic aspects of the nation from which this digital space arose. Such as equal access to certain things, the "dumb-pipes" model for the certain baseline trappings of modern society. Whether or not that means stripe here, I'm talking about the broader moment.
We don't want an escalating tit for tat of one bad thing leading to another. If the violence this summer had been dealt with more soundly, voices of leadership tamping it down instead of egging it on, it seems a good bet the recent activity at the capitol would have been more tame.
Similarly, we don't want to respond to a grasping, ineffectual, quasi-autocrat in the executive branch, with more effective autocratic tendencies in the techno-social sphere.
I feel like your analysis misses the forest for the trees.
Even if Facebook, Twitter, etc, had banned all these platforms and politicians, I'm confident people still would have come out for the protest. Taking away people's ability to organize on mainstream platforms didn't stop the HK protestors from organizing against the CCP. The lack of online platforms didn't stop the Color Revolutions in Eastern Europe. Even the Arab Spring, while often attributed to Twitter, happened in the face of mass censorship and Internet shutdowns.
IMHO the decisions to de-platform these groups will do nothing to put a dent in their political ideology, and will only serve to throw gasoline on the fire at a contentious period where many millions of people feel like they don't have a voice. And it's likely that peaceful discourse and political thought will be wiped out as collateral damage as a result of the decisions these companies are making.
It doesn’t need to work perfectly for it to be useful.
Btw do you know what doesn’t work? Appeasement. That only lets bad actors know that they can go even further. Resisting taking reasonable action for fear of violence is plain old appeasement.
Trying to engage with the MAGA crowd has been an exercise in futility. Despite no evidence of election fraud on the scale that would overturn the result and every institution in the country asserting the election was free and fair, they refuse to accept it. When they do not act in good faith, incite violence and commit terrorist activity - I think these actions, which were the last resort, is the only sane thing to do.
Far from merely lacking evidence, there is plenty of evidence that Trump was planning to play this hand before the election had even taken place. The accusation effectively pre-dates the supposed evidence for it.
Free speech is about protecting the tolerant from an abusive and intolerant state, not to allow the intolerant to insult and attack the tolerant. A much smarter thinker called Popper came up with an eponymous paradox about this
What counts as “horrible hateful speech?” The media has been publishing articles recently with outright racist slurs against white people (using phrases like “unbearable whiteness”). Is that hateful speech? (I think so but then again I’m an elder Millennial.) And does the fact that it’s the President saying something warrant giving him more or less latitude?
The right and moral thing to do was to give the duly elected President latitude until it was massive in scope and objectively false. In my mind, that didn’t happen until last month when he continued to claim the election was stolen after the rejection of his lawsuits.
I'm surprised you keep bringing this up, because you know the counterargument here. "Whiteness" is in fact a problematic term. Italians, Jewish people, and the Irish have all been excluded from "whiteness" at times. The term expands as needed to provide solidarity against Black people. "Black", on the other hand, is an actual ethnicity --- the one we created when we kidnapped millions of people in Africa and stripped them of their original culture.
Anti-whiteness crusaders can and frequently do go too far, but I object, strenuously, to the idea that mainstream articles about problematic whiteness are somehow comparable to anti-Black racism. That isn't true, and I think you know that.
It was massive in scope and objectively false when he claimed Covid-19 was completely under control, compared favorably to the flu, was just misdiagnosed sniffles/flu, that it was going to miraculously disappear, etc
That is by design. The Republican party only serves the wealthy who want government to serve them exclusively. Their numbers are too small to vote themselves into power so they cook up ways to convince disenfranchised groups to glom on. By not enacting policies that satisfy these people, the GOP elites maintain an agitated base that keeps voting for them because they believe all the party propaganda. It's 1984 as an operators manual.
This scheme was almost too successful when the tea partiers got elected and weren't fully on board with the real game plan. They were either assimilated or fell out of favor. Boehner's inability to contol them is why he was reduced to tears.
I have been having ongoing arguments on this forum with people who just refuse to accept the reality of what is happening.
I think there is a serious mental health crisis in the US right now, and that the majority of Trump supporters are mentally incapable of acknowledging that they have been lied too, taken advantage of, and as a result are on the wrong side of history.
I have been having meaningful conversations with my family about this, and I feel like I am starting to break through.
Unfortunately I just don't have the emotional bandwidth to coddle the bullshit I see people posting these days in defence of this attempted coup and the resulting murders.
Perhaps a better person than me can be civil with these people, but I just don't give a fuck anymore.
One of the more concerning tactics I've witnessed over the past few years that Trump and other parts of the GOP rhetoric machine were using in service of lying to people.. Convincing people who don't understand very well their rights, democracy, civics, and etc that their RIGHTS were being infringed; by others exercising their rights.
"Stop The Steal" is just another flavor of conflating 1st amendment "freedom of speech" protections with a "RIGHT" to be on some platform or another, or to talk at some venue or another.
> Convincing people who don't understand very well their rights, democracy, civics, and etc that their RIGHTS were being infringed; by others exercising their rights.
I dont think we need to infantilize Trump supporters. They are capable of evaluating claims made by the GOP.
But I get the sense people are talking past each other to a degree because there are levels to this.
It goes beyond trying to figure out what the hell happened at the capitol and figuring out how best to prevent it in the future, while maintaining a healthy non-repressive society.
One issue is that these private businesses have become something close to, if not de facto public utilities/infrastructure.
If you ask around you can learn that this "private business overreach" of "big brother" drawing the bounds of "permissible free speech" has actually been going on for some time.
The "private business overreach" part of the story is getting more attention because it has been directed at the most visible person on the planet. Or, was the most visible until Twitter et al, performed "private business overreach" reducing his visibility considerably and simultaneously getting people's attention and raising questions about the nature of power, communication, etc. in the current age.
Another issue is that the "rules" for who and what gets booted and censored from these realms by an always shifting, opaque, and selectively enforced set of rules is to a statistically significant degree clearly bunched in certain areas of the ideological matrix. Are the actors in these areas of the matrix just more prone to breaking the rules
or are "the rules" whatever they are today, selectively and over-zealously enforced in order to repress certain ideas and perspectives?
Is there some objective standard against high level US politicians doing things that could be interpreted as inciting, instigating, or glorifying violence?
How about Kamala Harriss posting a bail fund for violent rioters and criminals this past summer, wouldn't that fall squarely over the line of inciting, or instigating, or glorifying violence?
Curiously, crickets around that one...
> just tells me that things really went too far and should have been shut down much sooner.
So is this advocating for enforcement of "pre-crime?" We should keep an eye out for people saying things we don't like then repress their ability to act in the digital age, to prevent them from committing a future crime we have projected onto them?
> The fact that all these institutions just allowed this horrible hateful speech for four years, in the name of free speech etc, despite all the harassment, harm (mental and otherwise) it caused to so many people in America actually emboldened so many to the extent that now that they crossed this invisible line, they can't even really understand the ramifications of what happened. That what gets me.
Hate is an emotion, emotions are subjective. There is no clear objective measure of what is "hateful speech." "Speech" is a noun, an objective thing. Free speech, as in, as little restrictions on speech as are feasible was a great insight by America's founding fathers as to what would contribute to a healthy, dynamic, non-repressive society. Turns out they were right about a lot of things.
Americans today have to be adults and understand that content of speech and someone's actions are different things. The speech of someone like Trump is actually much closer to being an action. But you can't just start repressing speech no matter how "hateful" unfortunately. How about contributing with Love wherever you see hate?
> a few feet away from irreversibly staining American history
Sometimes I think back to another time in the recent past when there was an even more clear and present danger to members of the highest level of the federal govt. I think back in a shocked disbelief of "Holy cow... what if some large fraction of the Congress was murdered in one day?"
Does anybody even remember that?! It was just a couple years ago, multiple shots were fired at Congressmen at a baseball game. It's shocking to think what could have been then.
But it just seems to have dropped off the radar. I wonder why there wasn't a crackdown then on speech about things like Rachel Maddow/NYT/Media Establishment type conspiracies, or even any interest in a public airing of the attacker's motivations.
> ...not attending the inauguration was a call for violence. I don't buy it.
It's a soft signal, one that really you should be looking at the wider context of the last 4 years and especially the last few months, rather than just in isolation.
And to the mind of someone willing to use violence (such as say, those involved in the capitol riot), it becomes "hey guys, I still believe the election was stolen by those dirty libs and I won't be at this location, so if anything bad happens there, I won't be hurt. Wink Wink, nudge nudge."
We have seen what his base will do. There is no longer a time to discuss hypotheticals, they will storm a goverment office with weapons, they will kill people, they will use IEDs, and they will put the Trump cult ahead of America; because that is what they did, in a Western capital of all places.
The left (including prominent politicians and media figures) are more than willing to provide cover or excuse political violence conducted for their side, and left-wing extremists used FB, Twitter, etc. to coordinate their actions over the past summer.
This is not about removing "hate". This is about removing political opposition.
The WalkAway campaign's FB page was removed, despite no violent content.
The Articles of Unity project has been deplatformed from Twitter (and I believe FB) for a while with no justification and absolutely no hateful content whatsoever.
Yes, there are many high-profile targets that seem easy to justify, but a much larger swath of those affected are completely unjustifiable.
I'm one of those people who has always loathed both liberals and conservatives, but the attack on the capitol went way too far. You guys want to march around and yell in the streets, I actually don't have a problem with it. I find it annoying, but as long as you're not killing anyone, I don't care. However, you want to go into congress and subvert the Constitutional order? Yeah, that's a whole different issue.
I'm sorry if the conservatives can't understand the difference between BLM people yelling in the streets, and Trump people searching the capitol for senators and representatives to stop a Constitutionally mandated vote count. (Actually that was a lie, I'm not sorry. I don't give a mosquito's dick about either of you. I was just trying to be nice.) I'm done trying to explain the difference to these people, and I think these terrorists have pushed a lot of people off the fence with me. People are fed up. You don't understand the difference? You think too much of it's unjustified? Too bad. This is the way it's gotta be. We're not going to live in anarchy because conservatives and liberals want to play out crips and bloods on our republic.
End rant.
Edit: Man I'm getting old. That reads like I just told some kids to get off my lawn. But that's how I feel.
> To be hyperfocused on the free speech or "big brother" aspect of these bans, not the fact that a small group of rioters were just a few feet away from irreversibly staining American history
This. Violence, intimidation and death are the ultimate forms of censorship. Much more so than having to switch your digital payment processor or having to self-host your blog or social media app.
Germany decided after WWII that it was better to mass-censor Naziism than it was to let Nazis freely organize or spread their ideas again. It's not that Germany doesn't like free speech, it's that Naziism and free speech are diametrically opposed and forced to make a choice, they choose free speech.
It seems like a contradiction where censorship promotes free speech, but it all depends on your timeline. In the short term banning Nazis limits free speech, in the long run banning Nazis increases free speech.
When we give violent groups space to grow and organize, we're more anti-free speech than we realize because the capital riots are the inevitable arc (and only the opening act) for very small groups to violently oppress large numbers of peaceful citizens who love democracy.
1) The most radicalized are by Q. Which itself is a disinformation campaign, contributed to by government entities.
2) Bernie sanders brags about occupying government buildings. Would he be held to the same standard? OAC praised BLM protesters marching on the White House a few months ago, with Antifa trying to breach police lines and storm the White House. Should we throw her in jail for sedition. How about Pelosi that asked the army to ignore orders from Trump.
The US might be a democracy. But just because you can vote, does not mean you have any meaningful amount of power. The powerful cabal of corrupt politicians, and their rich backers, they have power. And they have been there for a very long time. They are almost impossible to displace. This breach shook them, because it was common, everyday people that did this. The same people that have had their livelihood destroyed, and have been hurt by all the COVID rules, rioting, trade deals with foreign countries, and so on.
Trump is great for democracy. At every turn he exposes the hypocrisy of the current system. He needles them, and each time they over react. Exposing all their flaws. The amount of backstabbing he gets just from the Republican party, is waking up millions of people.
Thanks to him, we found out how convoluted and non transparent the election process is. How biased the media is. How the Supreme court cowers to political pressure.
And now how big tech is working in collusion.
All things that a democratic movement can help to fix.
> Bernie sanders brags about occupying government buildings. Would he be held to the same standard? OAC praised BLM protesters marching on the White House a few months ago, with Antifa trying to breach police lines and storm the White House.
This is "what about"-ism. It deflects responsibility and puts the focus on other's behavior. In this philosophy for one side to accept that what they did was bad, it requires every single other person in the world to be perfect, which is obviously impossible and therefor insulates the person from criticism.
But, I'll indulge anyway.
Occupying a building is a form of civil disobedience, which in the US is a respected form of protest. I don't know what incident you're talking about with Bernie, but the results matter. Did he schedule the occupation of a government building that threatened the lives of elected officials and killed a police officer? Or was it a peaceful protest?
For AOC, was she praising the mass of peaceful protestors and what they stood for or was she praising an attempt to breach the White House? There's a big difference, so I want to be clear. If it was the later, then that is definitely dangerous.
But praising or bragging is a far cry from planning, persuading and instigating. Plus, Bernie and AOC aren't the leader of the free world. The President has a responsibility to serve the entire US, all 330M, regardless of who voted for him or against him. Bernie has a responsibility to Vermont and AOC to the Bronx. It's apples and oranges. If you want the highest public office in the country, you need to be held to the highest standards and not complain about how those with far less power might have acted.
> ...the fact that a small group of rioters were just a few feet away from irreversibly staining American history with the blood of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in the chain of command of the United states of America...
Let me ask for a quick accounting here - what is the evidence for this? My understanding is 100% of the gun deaths were from guns in the hands of law enforcement officers who were perfectly capable of defending themselves when pushed. There are a bunch of instantly iconic photos [0] with basically no weapons in the hands of protestors. They clearly didn't plan on breaching the Capitol or they'd have realised that they were all about to go to jail forever.
There were gallows, bombs, armour, zip ties and guns brought to the protest. On many of the videos you can hear the trump supporters shouting cries to kill certain members of the government, calling them traitors. Oh and they beat a police officer to death.
If they had found a senior official I don’t think they would have been safe.
> what is the evidence for this?
>
> ...this is a not a mob out for literal blood.
No, this was 100% a mob out for literal blood. There is a STAGGERING amount of evidence.
There's video of a large crowd of the rioters chanting "hang Mike Pence!" They erected a gallows with a noose outside the Capitol. There's video of people yelling that they came to get Pence and Pelosi. Squads of milita wore tactical armor and helmets, and carried not just assault rifles and handguns, but also flexcuffs. You don't get that stuff in the spur of the moment. They came prepared. Other rioters were carrying lead pipes and wooden rods. There was even one rioter caught on video carrying a literal pitchfork.
They beat one police officer to death with a fire extinguisher and injured more than 50 others. That is clearly a mob out for blood.
As for more evidence, for months in advance, Trump supporters filled Parler, Gab, Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, Facebook, and many other social media outlets with detailed detailed discussions of plans to commit violence and in many cases murder at this event. NYPD and the FBI received a ton of reports from concerned citizens who saw this social media chatter. The insurrectionists talked about what weapons to bring, which politicians to target in order of priority, and so much more. It was reported that they had maps with them of the tunnels under the Capitol building so that they could cut off escape routes.
Freshman lawmaker Lauren Boebert tweeted Speaker Pelosi's whereabouts multiple times during the riot. She did not tweet anything which indicated any degree of surprise that the riot was occurring.
Jim Clyburn has two offices in the Capitol, one right next to the front doors and one way up on the third floor. It was reported that the rioters ignored Clyburn's obvious office next to the doors and instead made a beeline for the more secluded office on the third floor.
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
— George Orwell, Animal Farm
I understand the moves by Stripe, Twitter, and co. However, I would argue that the long term implications set by this precedent are much worse. When the Snowden story first broke back in 2013, many on HN argued that, hey it's all good, I have nothing to hide, and I trust our President. Three short years later, who took the office? Would you have every imagined that? The same goes for this. Think five minutes into the future if you will.
If the leader of the free world can be banned from all social media and co, who are based in the very same nation, and who are monopolies, then what hope is there for the rest of us?
> If the leader of the free world can be banned from all social media and co, who are based in the very same nation, and who are monopolies, then what hope is there for the rest of us?
1. "leader of the free world" is an incredibly arrogant statement.
2. He can be banned for the same reason that the rest of us can: inciting violence. I'd argue that having equal rules for everyone (or even _stricter_ ones for politicians) is good and healthy. The banning of people inciting violence gives me hope.
> When the Snowden story first broke back in 2013, many on HN argued that, hey it's all good, I have nothing to hide
Wow, that's some impressive revisionist history, unfortunately for you its possible for us to actually look back in time and see exactly what was said.
Can you prove that the same people who said "so what" to Snowden said "this is fine to these tech actions? My personal experience is that the people who opposed to mass surveillance are fully in support of these actions. At least I do.
It's fairly clear where these companies are drawing a line, and for most people like me, it's a perfectly acceptable line. Being the cause of actual violence and death means you get to be banned. Fairly clear?
The more murky question is people who think all cake shops should serve gay weddings but twitter should also be allowed to ban trump.
Tough call and nuance involved there, but I doubt there's much ambiguity separating where one stands on Snowden's revalations and these recent bans
I'm one of those "murky question" people, and here's my take on it.
Discrimination is discrimination, and can and should be prohibited. Free speech was not invented when Twitter and Stripe were created, and thus it cannot be deprived by being banned from these platforms. Fomenting violent revolution is most certainly worth preventing, as is discrimination against people for their immutable traits. Fomenting violence is not an immutable trait.
I see the point people try to make when they equate the two, but I don’t think it’s a good one, because then it equates lgbt discrimination with private company platform bans for fomenting violence, implying that if you have one, you must tolerate the other, but that’s not true. One can ban discrimination while at the same time allowing Twitter or whoever to ban people promoting violence on/with their platforms. The principals are internally logically consistent, even if one disagrees with them.
>When the Snowden story first broke back in 2013, many on HN argued that, hey it's all good, I have nothing to hide, and I trust our President.
Wtf? Nobody said anything of the sort, and if they did they would have been downvoted to the maximum. This is just totally absurd revisionist, we were only five years removed from the W Bush administration, which committed legitimate war crimes and left office with a 22% approval rating.
> When the Snowden story first broke back in 2013, many on HN argued that, hey it's all good, I have nothing to hide, and I trust our President
This is … not even remotely how I remember that period, more of a sense of outrage and companies rushing to encrypt internal connections and deploy PFS.
> If the leader of the free world can be banned from all social media and co, who are based in the very same nation, and who are monopolies, then what hope is there for the rest of us?
This isn’t a great fit: Trump isn’t being banned for being a conservative or talking policies, but for inciting violence which lead to a deadly mob. If all that happens are companies enforcing their terms of service against violence or hate speech evenly, that bothers me a lot less — especially since in this case it’s treating everyone consistently rather than singling him out for special treatment.
Strength through adversity? Maybe this will be the fire needed to improve decentralization and alternative currencies that are more censorship resistant?
> “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Actually, the problem is that those with power can get away with this but others can’t.
Think five minutes into the future if you will where there are no consequences if you have enough political power. Some day that might be a socialist or a communist or a white nationalist or a fascist encouraging an armed group to intimidate the legislature. Will we encourage companies to continue to do business with them as well? Or do we specifically grant Republicans and Democrats the privilege to abuse the power of their office?
Imagine Jamal from down the road hammering his neighbors with lies about an election and then organizing a march into the capital that beats a police officer to death with the goal of killing the VP of the US. Jamal had no status, no privilege, no financial resources and no one to pardon him. No one is worried about Jamal or his supporters ever attaining political power and seeking revenge because they have no connections, no wealth and no access to the halls of power. No communities are “healed” by not prosecuting Jamal, so he ends up going to jail for a long time. On the flip side, Stripe has never heard of Jamal so he gets to keep his preferred payment processor after he’s released from prison. Meanwhile Trump who’s been pardoned and is living under Secret Service detail at Mar a Lago is still somehow “not as equal” as Jamal because Trump is only able to make money online through other payment processors but not his preferred Stripe gateway.
You're pointing out Snowden in 13 and Trump in 16 and implying there's a causal relationship between the two. This is ludicrous, Trump was elected due to numerous factors, it'd be hard to place Snowden in even the top 10. immigration, trade, feckless GOP, crowded primary field, biased dem primary, weak dem candidate, I could make massive list more important than Snowden. All trump's supporters would say about Snowden is that he's a traitor, they'd understand or care little about what he leaked.
Maybe this is a HN bubble, the vast majority of Americans wouldn't be able to tell you what Snowden even specifically leaked...or rather, the journalists leaked on his and our behalf.
Trump is not the leader of the free world any longer. He's clearly on the way out, and he invited violence while the door was closing. Even the weakened GOP must admit he is a wannabe dictator, and his rhetoric led to 5 deaths, nevermind untold thousands to pandemic.
So no, I think there is not much slippery slope implication to deplatforming insane people like Trump, Alex Jones, KKK members, Nazis, terrorists, etc. Why should these people retain the privilege of posting harmful and murderous content on a company's website? Where in the constitution is tweeting an enshrined right?
> You're pointing out Snowden in 13 and Trump in 16 and implying there's a causal relationship between the two.
Your are misinterpreting his comment. He says that you can't 100% trust in long term government/administration. There will always be a bad guy somewhere at some moment.
Not to be reductionist but I don’t see this as a totalitarian issue. This is a free market decision. $Company decides to sever ties with another organization. That choice can be good, bad, reactive, overreactive, misguided, etc but it’s still a market participant choice.
Market remains open for other market participants to make other choices.
On one hand it feels completely appropriate and even deserved. On the other, yes, this is unfortunately a path to a very serious totalitarian issue. Situations like this one underscore the future importance of cryptocurrencies.
Without an uncensorable currency, any political adversary -- especially an incumbent -- can just coerce payment processors into blocking payments to their opponents through threats of imprisonment or violence against a handful of executives.
> Without an uncensorable currency, any political adversary -- especially an incumbent -- can just coerce payment processors into blocking payments to their opponents through threats of imprisonment or violence against a handful of executives.
How is this a good faith argument. You’ve jumped a situation where somewhere is being deplatformed and banned from various services for encouraging violence. To someone will use violence to kick someone off platforms. Coercing payment processors in that manor would be illegal. So, how exactly are we on the path to fascism? This is absolutely wild to me, that a textbook fascist being banned from things is being spun as... fascism.
> Without an uncensorable currency, any political adversary -- especially an incumbent -- can just coerce payment processors into blocking payments to their opponents through threats of imprisonment or violence against a handful of executives.
That has always happened, Visa/Mastercard have been used that way since forever. The Swift system is designed to exercise financial control. Paypal bans anyone for merely looking suspicious to them.
The very idea that cryptocurrency is an "uncensorable currency" is just fundamentally false, yet is a common refrain of crypto supporters who somehow think crypto can exist outside the realm of government control.
Governments can choose to make anything they want illegal, and they have the guns to back up that decision. Sure, it may be easy to make crypto transactions more surreptitiously, but at the end of the day someone is going to want to spend that crypto on something that has real value, and governments can, and do, control what method of payments are acceptable.
Going from bans due to ToS violations all of the way to government coercion of executives through imprisonment is an enormous leap in logic. There's quite a few steps along that path in between.
And if course given that bitcoin has to be sent and received, if we ever arrived at your dystopia, bitcoin would not help: the political rival would simply jail the executive for receiving bitcoin payments instead of USD currency. Bitcoin isn't preventing your dystopia.
I don't think it is a totalitarian issue. One problem is that the SEC and FTC have sat on their hands in the 21st century. There is no competition anymore. At worst this leads to party supporting companies in each market who will still allow it.
If alternative chat, payment, etc. are prevented from being created, that is not a "free market" decision. This smells like a politically aligned cartel, with key companies enjoying de facto monopoly positions in effect legislating what is and what is not acceptable.
Right now, we haven't heard from ISPs. The entire suite of services that are controlled by the monopoly FANGs can be recreated, including clouds and cloud-fronts.
If that line is crossed as well then we'll have a modern society entirely dependent on information infrastructure that is controlled by a handful of companies with pedigree rooted firmly in the defense and intelligence sectors. You can call that whatever you please, but it will not be pleasant.
I'm inclined to agree with you. I realize that the term has been abused to the point of meaninglessness, but Fascist economics is defined by corporate monopolies in symbiosis with the state.
It will likely be pleasant for the vast majority of people, who have no objectionable views one way or the other. It might even be better, not having to deal with the constant disruption.
To me this just smells like a bunch of companies finally booting people off for violating ToS. Especially given a reasonable argument that President Trump committed a crime, failing to enforce their ToS could open them to their own legal liability for facilitating activity that went against their ToS and is later found to be criminal. Shareholders would sue for securities fraud at the very least.
You could look at countries as being part of a market. If one country decides to ban your speech, you just move to another one, right? But that's not how it works because switching countries is very difficult. We demand free speech from a government even if we theoretically have the option to move.
If you have a colluding oligopoly in something crucial to do business such as payments or communication, where it's difficult to switch due to network effects, being banned by them is like being banned by government.
...which could be viewed as the overall market is deciding not to cater to these views... which is also absolutely legal (and creates a market opportunity for someone else if the group not supported supports it)
First they banned those they deemed to have wrong think from Social Media, crying Build your own Social media, it is a private company...
So they did, but the totalitarians were not satisfied, so then they banned them from app stores users used to connect and find the new service... crying Build your own service it is a private company
So they did, but the totalitarian were not satisfied so they banned them from the network infrastructure used to connect them to the service... crying build your own network infrastructure it is private company
So they did, but the totalitarians were not satisfied so they banned from the payment services used to generate revenue for the service... crying build your own payment service it is private company
So they did, but totalitarians were still not satisfied, still hiding behind the "but its a private company" the totalitarians continue to demand anyone that disagrees with them be banned from all services everywhere all the while screaming that they are not in fact totalitarian, no they are upholding freedom for all...
see in 1984 war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength
As a counterexample: The Pirate Bay have successfully dealt with this sort of thing for many years, and they were subject to much harsher and more sustained censorship. Including legal attacks by various nation states.
Is it really totalitarianism in this case? Or, just some private companies inconveniencing people by choosing not to do business with them?
The author implies it’s worse to be censored by a company because with government you in theory can influence it with voting... but in practice you have about as much direct influence as reversing tides in the ocean by splashing against them.
Interesting, but no, it doesn't change my mind. What I agree with is that the ban decision making process should be open and transparent, which this was not.
It's so interesting when people cheer on censorship because, don't worry, they've been convinced that it's good censorship. Still doesn't change what it is though.
I'm sure anybody that's been censored, dehumanized, and removed from society by an evil regime has been comforted by the fact that the people doing it think it's fine to do it, or because the people doing it are doing it legally. Those facts don't make it right ...
I have a feeling that at least half of people here are using the free market argument ironically. Because until last week it was usually republicans who advocated for the free market, no government regulation, and believing that markets sort themselves out magically. And now they are angry when the free market is going in the direction they don't like.
The debate here seems like fuel for antitrust issues. A single company deciding not to do business with someone (over actions, not innate stuff like protected classes) should be fine, but when you let them get to be a backbone service, then issues surface like those discussed by everyone here.
If google, for example decided to stop surfacing trump stuff in results, that could be a real issue. Not because it’s google doing a bad thing, but because google has become so big. Maybe “what happens if this service started banning folks?” is a useful thought exercise for whether a platform has accrued too much market share/power/influence.
Stripe (and every other credit card processors) have long refused to do business with a broad amount and types of businesses. For example, Stripe themselves don't serve most travel sites.
What your missing is they are advocating for violence against people. Why is it is an issue to disrupt that?
No one is removing groups that say taxes should be lower. They are distancing them selves from a groups whose core policy is now attempt to violently overthrow the government because they lost an election. If I started discussing on this site how to kill government officials, I'd be banned pretty quick.
To the extent that these separate companies are actually coordinating a takedown of a third party, they could run afoul of anti-racketeering / RICO statutes.
Not that I would hold my breathe waiting for the Department of Justice to press charges.
But private companies do not actually have the right to coordinate takedowns of other companies.
Even if they're talking to each other about it, there's no racketeering or other criminal issue involved when this is the companies enforcing their established ToS. Getting together and saying "hey I think this latest incident really shows we should pay more attention to ToS enforcement" isn't racketeering.
But arguably CloudFlare is such a service and it is still hosting quite a bit of content that actively incites to violence on inauguration day. I won't link to it here though.
Exactly. I'm even sort of glad all of this is happening, because it shows more clear than ever to everyone who can think calmly because he isn't into all this political bullshit (which are few, sadly), how broken all this stuff really currently is. And it's broken on so many levels.
First off, I don't see why, philosophically, the owner of a service shouldn't be allowed to decide, who he wants to do business with. And despite I do remember some stories when the same people who are cheering for Trump to get banned everywhere were defending, quite hypocritically, the opposite point of view, it really wasn't something new and outrageous, even back then, especially when dealing with all these internet-machines. We are long used to the fact, that getting banned on some internet forum is ok and you generally don't have the real option to appeal. The host is the host, and he bans whoever he wants. And while sometimes it may be much much more than a little inconvenience for the person getting banned, people never really cared, because it's rare enough for the consequences of it to be really tragic for people to feel empathetic: society doesn't give a fuck about the problems of an individual unless enough people fear the same might happen to them.
Second, it's never been a secret, where Silicon Valley (HN folks included) is leaning politically. So let's not pretend there are some justifications why they had to do all this shit to Trump for some greater good. The truth is, the entities involved just hate the guy, pretty much everyone in big tech except for Thiel was donating generously to his opponents. So no big surprise here either.
But the first thing that was really special about Trump being bullied by Twitter (quite a while ago) is that this was not some random guy, it was the acting president of a country that hosts Twitter, elected by (more or less) half of the country (on both occasions). So, while (arguably) playing by the rules, Twitter was basically showing that their opinion was more important, than the opinion of the guy half of their the country voted for. And there wasn't some other platform which he could move to, Twitter is Twitter and the rest is, well, the rest. So this was the first point.
Fast forward to now, Trump being banned from everywhere and apps that refuse to ban Trump being banned from Amazon/Apple Store/Google Play themselves, we arrive to the second point: things look a little differently, when there are like 3 major service providers that are supposedly competing with each other, and if they all agree that you're a person non-grata, you are fucked. Even if the half of the country supports you, it's nothing. What really matters that 10 guys on top of these big companies don't like you.
I don't really care about USA elections bullshit, so here is the real point: we don't usually see this, because, first off, there's supposedly not that many reasons for all of FAANG and such to dislike some random person, and second, if it happens, we'll never hear about it anyway. But if the guy half of the country supports (nevermind he is even so called POTUS) struggles to deal with this, everyone else is completely at their mercy.
So either there is decentralization, or there is this.
I think our history books do a disservice when they teach McCarthyism by focusing only on the falsely accused-- many Americans really did support the USSR and some even swore an oath to Stallin. The lesson should be that it was still a mistake to take civil liberties away from these people who passionately supported a horrible cause, not that McCarthyists were just bad prosecutors who arrested the wrong people.
I believe Trump supporters, especially the QAnon weirdos, are wrong to believe the things that they do, but they are less wrong than the people who supported the Soviet Union during its genocidal reign. Unless people are charged and convicted of a crime, their livelihoods should not be taken away by the whims of these powerful companies selectively enforcing their rules. McCarthyism was wrong then and it's wrong now, even though its targets are wrong too.
Hollywood is a private business as well. They were within their rights to make a blacklist. And people cheered on big business for protecting them and snitched on their friends to their employers, just like they're doing now
The QAnon folks are no less irrational than any other (pseudo-)religious devotees and should be afforded the same protections under the first amendment.
This is like the millionth time this has been posted on this website in the past few days, but the first amendment applies to the government, not private companies.
Maybe I'm being naive but it seems like a larger problem is being ignored here that I feel I should call attention to.
This is going to piss people off and some of those people are going to be real, nothing-to-lose extremists. Actions like these though seemingly harmless in the short-term are going to radicalize the exact person/type of people that you do not want to radicalize.
Because a lot of high-ranking SV folks (and patrickc) are on here, please, for the sake of stability in the country, do not continue down this path.
This may seem innocuous now and purely a matter of principle, but this is a match to gasoline (in a multitude of ways).
---
Please do not read this through whatever political lens you occupy, but instead through the lens of civility.
On the other hand, avoiding conflict in the short-term will only embolden those who create and thrive on conflict. For these types of people, their next move is usually to escalate. You see this with bullies, abusive relationships, rapists, serial killers, terrorists, etc. They learn what they can get away with, they like the power it gives them, and they try something more.
Therefore, we can't make decisions based on the fear of their response, even if we have a personal aversion to conflict. That's falling into the trap of the abused. We have to make decisions based on defending our principles and standing up for what we believe is right.
No matter what, some people are going to be pissed off at any sufficiently meaningful decision (or indecision). If the people pissed off are violent types, well, then perhaps that's a sign the right decision was made.
I understand that there's a hell of a lot of nuance to this - sometimes you don't poke the sleeping bear. I think Wednesday showed the bear is absolutely not asleep.
Nobody is saying “don’t arrest and prosecute the people who invaded the Capitol”.
This is about the campaign finance/social media account/etc of the current sitting POTUS.
You don’t need to condone the actions of the Capitol terrorists to take issue with him being banned from every platform having committed no crime (or at least, not having been convicted of any crime).
A few hundred people invaded the Capitol, but tens of millions of people voted for Trump. We’re not talking about the former; I think it’s very reasonable to be concerned that this divisiveness might radicalise the latter.
I don't agree with this at all and I am tired of seeing "sensible" people here explain how it's important to reach out to fascists and make them feel loved. You're only advocating further normalisation of fascism, and depriving them of the consequences of their actions—consequences that have always been a part of civil society. What's more, that you seem to be more preoccupied with not upsetting these fascists rather than that just a few days ago these very same fascists either attempted a coup or supported a coup does indeed speak of your self-professed naivety (at best). These fascists are a cancer on the body politic and the solution is not to listen to many of the posters here who think that somehow magically the best course of action is simply to do nothing at all, lest we upset the poor lickle fascists.
Just categorizing everyone protesting as "fascists" is ignorant. These people think the election was rigged, and they don't trust institutions. They think that our democracy is at risk, and your solution is to push them, deplatform them, and remove all hope of legal political influence?
Reacting to this anxiety with force is going to cause a war if it continues.
The people you refuse to reach out to by and large are not made up of fascists. And so we will get what always happens when this kind of mindset takes root en masse.
I don't agree with the sentiment. You cannot be responsible for people's opinions/reactions for actions you take that you feel are right. Moreover, by placating the very people you would upset otherwise by punitive actions you send a signal that their actions can go unpunished and further entrench the idea that they are right in their actions which is much more dangerous than a temporary outrage.
> This is going to piss people off and some of those people are going to be real, nothing-to-lose extremists
Sometimes certain things need to be dealt with by force, there's no way around it.
It seems that that freedom of speech is not the cause of stability, but stability gives rise to (certain degrees) of freedom of speech. It's a slippery slope, but each country has to have a moral basis on which to decide where to draw the line.
It really won't. It'll be cited as a the grievance that drove them over the line in manifestos or court testimony, but generally people are radicalized by themselves or peers and then cast around for an exterior excuse afterwards. The grievances vary with circumstances, the target or out-group disliked by the extremist person stays the same.
You are correct, I have been saying this for months/years. The reason this is escalating is for the same reason this always does: unwillingness to believe war is a possibility, then unwillingness to forgive until the suffering has gone on so long it is intolerable.
I am concerned about all the normal employees of these companies, that are taking these political actions. The higher up people can afford round the clock security. The normal SDE at these companies did not sign up for political activist company. What do they do now?
The idea is if you remove enough of their ability to communicate with the general population, their influence will be significantly reduced. It would remove the feedback loop that's feeding the fire.
It also sends a message that their behavior is unacceptable. That has a very strong influence on culture as a whole. Messages like this are how a lot of civil rights movements have worked.
The larger problem is that the United States Congress was, just four days ago, invaded by a violent mob and forced into hiding for hours. People are going to be a lot more radicalized if they think they can get away with that! It would be like refusing to cut business ties with a mafia don because you're afraid of radicalizing his soldiers - maybe there's some short-term benefit, but in the long term all you accomplish that way is legitimizing the violence.
I agree with this, instinctually. However, I think the political calculus here is that it's better to really piss off a "small" amount of people than allow a potentially larger group to get radicalized.
It's interesting to consider whether the (soon to be former) president of the US deserves similar treatment to a terrorist organization responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths.
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25722027&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25722027&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25722027&p=4
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25722027&p=5
The First Amendment promises both free speech and free assembly. Core to the latter is the freedom not to assemble. This freedom is regulated. You can’t refuse to do business with protected classes. But political affiliation is not a protected class.
There are utilities, which have limited freedom not to assemble. Then there are private persons and private businesses. Stripe and Twitter are clearly the latter. AWS and Visa feel like the former, though they are legally the latter.
The cost of switching private activity to a utility model is a loss of innovation and an increase in political involvement. We are re-evaluating, as a society, the balance between the freedoms of speech and assembly. Let’s not forget these are freedoms in balance, not a spectrum of tyranny and anarchy.
They might be the latter, but I wouldn't consider it obvious. Regarding social media, we've gotten to the point where even US Visa applications ask for social media handles (and I understand they consider it as a negative datum if you don't provide one). And we're also at the point where some companies won't provide you with respectable service unless you @ them on social media. Regarding payment platforms, generally people expect them to be quite neutral, since getting locked out of the financial system is not exactly going to lead to a great life in the modern digital economy.
I don't know at what point these cross into "utility" territory, and I'm willing to entertain the idea that they might never do so, but I find it quite debatable and very much not clear.
(Note: None of this is to opine on the reactions to this particular incident. Just commenting on the more general idea.)
I have never thought they were neutral when it came to actual crimes. That's so much liability, why would anyone expect them to take it on given how risk averse they are?
If my water, power, or internet was cut off, I would immediately suffer real, life changing inconvenience and hardship.
To me, the difference between these things is incredibly stark.
Is it exclusively because of his office? Could it be construed the other direction?
Real-world example: T-Mobile. Their Twitter and Facebook representatives (called T-Force) have better customer service (they are more empowered to help you without supervisor escalation and fix things faster) than calling 611.
I think there's an obvious midpoint missing in the discussion between private and utility, which is monopoly, which do have additional set of laws and checks in place precisely for their strength against the free market.
preemptive "there are plenty alternatives so they are not monopolies" - if turns out these alternatives are acting in concert, it configures a cartel, which can get regulated in all the same ways.
the economical concepts behind these events aren't so alien as the folk around made them to be, their novelty is in their application to intangible assets (views and online services) but most of the issues are the same as they were decades ago and the same concepts apply, to the same conclusions.
Stripe and Twitter are not utilities. Some may want them to be. But I don’t think anyone says they currently have utility obligations under the law.
Could you give an example of this? Sounds fascinating.
Also, how far do we go with this reasoning? Stripe and PayPal refuse service so they're supposed to "Go build their own" (it costs billions to create a new service like stripe or PayPal that can compare). AWS shut you down? Build your own data center... (Again, costs millions or billions). What if next Intel or AMD decides to not sell you processors? Go build your own fab and develop your own hardware? What if the silicon miners won't sell you silicon, are you now supposed to go build your own mine?
The issue isn't that companies have a right to do it, it's that there are no viables alternatives to these large duopolies, and that "creating your own" is not an alternative.
What happens if the party in power next decides to attack religious organizations who congregate during that pandemic with the same type of concerted de-platforming? What if it's people who advocate against raising taxes who are next as deemed "morally corrupt"?
It's not hard to imagine this type of anti competitive, semi-concerted effort to de platform a new company being targeted at other things in the future. We need laws to catch up to our modern society and either break up the monopolies or put a lot more protections around the types of discrimination that are illegal, which should include political affiliation (this is law in California for employment discrimination so it's not that far fetched of an idea).
I didn't realize that Stripe's actions were due to a government order. Probably because they weren't.
You're conflating a private organization's decisions with government action. If the government were to attempt do as you suggest, the courts would slap them down hard.
If the baker had altogether refused to bake a cake for the gay couple, it would have been discrimination on a protected class.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/04/politics/masterpiece-colorado...
It's also important to note that companies aren't cutting ties with Trump because of his political ideology, they're cutting ties with him because there's a strong argument he broke the law, and they don't want to be in the awkward position of facilitating that, especially as it could open them to their own legal liability.
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Classes that are protected now, were not protected at some point.
I think the discussion revolves not around whether political affiliation is a protected class, but whether it should be, in a sense- whether what is going on is good or bad for society, not whether or not it is illegal.
You are entitled to believe that it is good, of course.
Creating protected classes significantly curtails neighbouring freedoms while increasing the government’s role in day to day interactions.
One hallmark of existing protected classes is they are somewhat objective (counterfactual: race). Political affiliation is totally subjective. If someone believes in violent death for Blacks, Jews and gays, should a Holocaust memorial group be forced to accept them? If no, then you need someone deciding which groups do and don’t merit protection. And who is and isn’t actually a member of that group.
It’s not impossible. But it has unintended consequences. More than re-delineating the private company / utility boundary. More than expanding antitrust enforcement.
I've seen a lot of comments that act authoritative about the legal consequences, but heavily editorialized to say "the government shouldn't".
I'm not going to state my personal stance, because it's complicated and frankly, I haven't put enough thought into it to be comfortable presenting it. But, you (the reader) should be willing to forgo your kneejerk reaction (if you have one) and think about the consequences of what you're proposing when discussing changing the status quo and desired legislature to "solve" these issues.
For all intents and purposes, freedom of speech has flatlined in America. What will bring it back?
It only protects you from government, nothing else.
There are legitimate concerns regarding monopolistic behaviour of large digital gatekeepers. But we don’t solve that by deciding to restrict their speech (which is what forced speech would be). You solve it by either making them utilities or breaking them up to create more competition.
No - 'Freedom of Speech' is at an all time high.
The internet gives every single person a giant soap box to stand on.
You can communicate, in public, with anyone in the world.
25 years ago, you had no voice.
Now, everyone can be a 'journalist' or 'agitator' or whatever.
The level of open communication possible today was unthinkable 25 years ago.
25 years ago most people didn't have access to 'most news'. The NYT maybe was accessible by the elite in most towns, but the LA times was not. Now it's all available to everyone.
This is a distraction. Political speech enjoys the highest level of protection in the US, political speech is one of the primary motivators behind the existence of constitutionally protected speech in the US.
Private companies deciding not to service the head of the executive seems to be nearly the opposite of that, unless I understood this wrongly (which is entirely possible). Think of a newspaper (=private entity) decides to boycott a president and not write anything about him. Wouldn't it be the polar opposite of free speech if the president then had the power to force them to write about him?
I get that a payment service is not the same as a newspaper, but it is still a private entity.
Back in the day, you had to rack your own servers in your own data centers and manage them yourself. Had any of these 'free speech' services spent any time considering how reliant they were on 3rd party services, they should never have engaged those companies in the first place.
There was a day when you had to build your own servers to host your own websites. Not that long ago, imo.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/gab-reports-growth-in-the-mi...
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Just FYI, some countries have made it a protected class, e.g.: https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0082/latest/... (see 21(1)(j))
If you are conservative or lean to it, its incredibly disheartening. You have to consistently justify to these people you aren't brainwashed, because their default idea is that you are. Sort of the same way about serious religious belief if you have one; people default assume you are nuts and at best you can work your way up to "he's nuts but he is our nut."
It's scary to me, and to be honest my political views are starting to move towards "limit the power other people can affect you as much as possible" because its now evident how people will happily deplatform any unpopular person beyond the real justification. I can buy removing Trump's speech due to incitement, but it keeps going and going-like we literally see fox news next, and what then?
FYI, political affiliation is protected from discrimination in CA, NY, and DC.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-employers-discri...
Lawful political activity is protected from workplace discrimination. That’s a far stretch from making it a general protected class, and wouldn’t prevent Stripe from refusing to work with the Trump campaign.
These tech giants have made themselves into a lattice on which modern society attaches itself, and their pervasiveness will only continue to grow in 21st century America. We risk them being in bed with government. And when nominally private, major industry is aligned with government to effect political ends, there's a word for that, and we've seen that before.
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Trump just stood up and asked for his people to go to the capitol - one of his former campaign managers called for beheading members of government.
Calling out his lies - a la politifact and many others - hasn’t worked to deradicalize. Fact check verifications next to the content haven’t. So - just shutting off the calls for violence and lies are the next step.
“Opposition to Trump looks inept”(?) The opposition just swept congress and the presidency, crushed the popular vote, and even members of his party are strongly against his actions. Ineptitude is the Trump’s legal challenges against the election and the “4 Seasons Total Landscaping” fiasco.
Trump can raise funds in many ways. He can get checks. No one is required to allow someone to raise funds on their site - let freedom ring!
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- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25381920
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25379213
Visa is not a utility. I would be open to debating whether they should be one.
The flip side of such a designation is it would likely require the government indemnify Visa against fraud losses. The line between deplatforming for fraud risk (the ostensible reason for Visa’s aversion to porn) and for objectionable content is difficult to draw.
Perhaps these bans are happening not because of political affiliation but due to the messages these particular people (e.g., Trump) are espousing.
Parler go banned because it's full of message calling for (e.g.) Mike Pence to be hanged and other such things, and Parler isn't / can't do much about it, and its infrastructure providers (AWS, app stores) do not want any part of it per their ToS.
No one has cut off Mitch McConnell because he hasn't been calling forth angry mobs to storm Congress (or the White House).
Notice a pattern? Left wing heroes can say anything they want and Twitter doesn’t ban them.
Actor Peter Fonda called for violently assaulting Trump's underage child on Twitter in 2018 (his account was not permanently banned), and that's very typical posting from leftist celebrities on Twitter these past four years.
Thousands of violent posts were in the "Hang Mike Pence" Twitter trend that was going on the other day. People have been openly calling for executions for treason and similar on Twitter in relation to the Capitol riots. There was widespread cheering and celebrating when that woman got shot in the neck by Capitol Police, I read thousands of Tweets that were literally cheering for her death, all on Twitter, and nobody gives a fuck.
The double standard by Twitter is beyond disgusting. It's psychopath behavior.
Pretty sure it is in California.
Government program != utility designation. DARPA, NASA and the Manhattan Project were not utilities. PG&E is a utility. It requires political consent to make significant changes.
I’m not saying utilities can’t be innovative. Amtrak and the Post Office are utilities, and they experiment. But they have obligations private businesses don’t, and that slows things down.
The ongoing purge -- would it not be seen as treason, as an act to in fact subvert/weaken a position of POTUS and therefore directly destabilize the US government?
Twitter and Stripe are acting in coordination - literally conspiring - with every other big tech company to take a specific action. When they do that they're acting as an illegal cartel and must be prosecuted accordingly. This is the kind of coordinated cartel behavior that banana republics and third world countries have that behave exactly like these companies are and do so out in the open (and always with the political support of the group with the most power, to target their foes). We're supposed to have anti-trust laws to deal with conspiring mega corporations.
The fact that all these institutions just allowed this horrible hateful speech for four years, in the name of free speech etc, despite all the harassment, harm (mental and otherwise) it caused to so many people in America actually emboldened so many to the extent that now that they crossed this invisible line, they can't even really understand the ramifications of what happened. That what gets me.
To be hyperfocused on the free speech or "big brother" aspect of these bans, not the fact that a small group of rioters were just a few feet away from irreversibly staining American history with the blood of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in the chain of command of the United states of America, as well as overrunning the seat of power of the most powerful nation in the world, on national TV ... just tells me that things really went too far and should have been shut down much sooner.
I'm sure a lot of the people at the capitol that day have the narrative running in their minds that they are the heroes of America democracy, but the reality is that there is simply no justification for any of this, that can be told. A smarter group of individuals would take all this on the chin, make penance in some way while staying under the radar to regroup and reconfigure their message/approach instead of citing private business overreach as some sort of justification for what happened
I think the other important factor here is we are in a very vulnerable moment right now because we are in the midst of a transition of power. It takes time to transfer the apparatus and operations of state, and during this time there is a power vacuum that can be taken advantage of by adversaries foreign and domestic. Every state throughout history has struggled in these times.
The failure to secure the Capitol was in no small part due to how the President has run the state in the waning months of his term. His cabinet and administration are running a skeleton crew, he's acting erratically, and he's making false claims about election results and inciting crowds in a bid to stay in power. Whether one supports his policies or not, it should be abundantly clear right now that his actions and rhetoric put the country in further danger during this vulnerable time, and that perhaps he need not have access to platforms that make this easier and more convenient. It should be hard to dismantle the state, to whip people into a frenzy, to cause the damage that has been caused.
Big Tech leaders are selfish, cowards, clueless and just as vulnerable as the government leaders. They were interested in milking billions in Ads from these hate speech, particularly Twitter.
If I were employees at these big companies, I would raise internal questions - why wasn't this done earlier? What changed? The US Capitol riots is the specific moment that made them all wake up?
These are rhetorical questions. All big tech leaders appeared in front of Congress in last 4 years, and weasled and squeeked instead of prowl and roar. Spineless and immoral, speaking double speak to appease the board of directors and the shareholders. At some point, the world would be destroyed but we've created a lot of value for our shareholders. Reminds me of this [1]. Pardon my cynicism, open for your comments.
[1] https://twitter.com/Benioff/status/549339156854214656/photo/...
From an outside-the-US perspective, the waning 47 and a half months of his term...
Trump is an unfortunate edge case and has set bad precedents that can hopefully be wisely washed away in time.
We need clearer and consistent norms in the digital space that are seen to embody the fundamental civic aspects of the nation from which this digital space arose. Such as equal access to certain things, the "dumb-pipes" model for the certain baseline trappings of modern society. Whether or not that means stripe here, I'm talking about the broader moment.
We don't want an escalating tit for tat of one bad thing leading to another. If the violence this summer had been dealt with more soundly, voices of leadership tamping it down instead of egging it on, it seems a good bet the recent activity at the capitol would have been more tame.
Similarly, we don't want to respond to a grasping, ineffectual, quasi-autocrat in the executive branch, with more effective autocratic tendencies in the techno-social sphere.
Even if Facebook, Twitter, etc, had banned all these platforms and politicians, I'm confident people still would have come out for the protest. Taking away people's ability to organize on mainstream platforms didn't stop the HK protestors from organizing against the CCP. The lack of online platforms didn't stop the Color Revolutions in Eastern Europe. Even the Arab Spring, while often attributed to Twitter, happened in the face of mass censorship and Internet shutdowns.
IMHO the decisions to de-platform these groups will do nothing to put a dent in their political ideology, and will only serve to throw gasoline on the fire at a contentious period where many millions of people feel like they don't have a voice. And it's likely that peaceful discourse and political thought will be wiped out as collateral damage as a result of the decisions these companies are making.
It doesn’t need to work perfectly for it to be useful.
Btw do you know what doesn’t work? Appeasement. That only lets bad actors know that they can go even further. Resisting taking reasonable action for fear of violence is plain old appeasement.
The right and moral thing to do was to give the duly elected President latitude until it was massive in scope and objectively false. In my mind, that didn’t happen until last month when he continued to claim the election was stolen after the rejection of his lawsuits.
Anti-whiteness crusaders can and frequently do go too far, but I object, strenuously, to the idea that mainstream articles about problematic whiteness are somehow comparable to anti-Black racism. That isn't true, and I think you know that.
This scheme was almost too successful when the tea partiers got elected and weren't fully on board with the real game plan. They were either assimilated or fell out of favor. Boehner's inability to contol them is why he was reduced to tears.
I think there is a serious mental health crisis in the US right now, and that the majority of Trump supporters are mentally incapable of acknowledging that they have been lied too, taken advantage of, and as a result are on the wrong side of history.
I have been having meaningful conversations with my family about this, and I feel like I am starting to break through.
Unfortunately I just don't have the emotional bandwidth to coddle the bullshit I see people posting these days in defence of this attempted coup and the resulting murders.
Perhaps a better person than me can be civil with these people, but I just don't give a fuck anymore.
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"Stop The Steal" is just another flavor of conflating 1st amendment "freedom of speech" protections with a "RIGHT" to be on some platform or another, or to talk at some venue or another.
I dont think we need to infantilize Trump supporters. They are capable of evaluating claims made by the GOP.
But I get the sense people are talking past each other to a degree because there are levels to this.
It goes beyond trying to figure out what the hell happened at the capitol and figuring out how best to prevent it in the future, while maintaining a healthy non-repressive society.
One issue is that these private businesses have become something close to, if not de facto public utilities/infrastructure.
If you ask around you can learn that this "private business overreach" of "big brother" drawing the bounds of "permissible free speech" has actually been going on for some time.
The "private business overreach" part of the story is getting more attention because it has been directed at the most visible person on the planet. Or, was the most visible until Twitter et al, performed "private business overreach" reducing his visibility considerably and simultaneously getting people's attention and raising questions about the nature of power, communication, etc. in the current age.
Another issue is that the "rules" for who and what gets booted and censored from these realms by an always shifting, opaque, and selectively enforced set of rules is to a statistically significant degree clearly bunched in certain areas of the ideological matrix. Are the actors in these areas of the matrix just more prone to breaking the rules or are "the rules" whatever they are today, selectively and over-zealously enforced in order to repress certain ideas and perspectives?
Is there some objective standard against high level US politicians doing things that could be interpreted as inciting, instigating, or glorifying violence?
How about Kamala Harriss posting a bail fund for violent rioters and criminals this past summer, wouldn't that fall squarely over the line of inciting, or instigating, or glorifying violence?
Curiously, crickets around that one...
> just tells me that things really went too far and should have been shut down much sooner.
So is this advocating for enforcement of "pre-crime?" We should keep an eye out for people saying things we don't like then repress their ability to act in the digital age, to prevent them from committing a future crime we have projected onto them?
> The fact that all these institutions just allowed this horrible hateful speech for four years, in the name of free speech etc, despite all the harassment, harm (mental and otherwise) it caused to so many people in America actually emboldened so many to the extent that now that they crossed this invisible line, they can't even really understand the ramifications of what happened. That what gets me.
Hate is an emotion, emotions are subjective. There is no clear objective measure of what is "hateful speech." "Speech" is a noun, an objective thing. Free speech, as in, as little restrictions on speech as are feasible was a great insight by America's founding fathers as to what would contribute to a healthy, dynamic, non-repressive society. Turns out they were right about a lot of things.
Americans today have to be adults and understand that content of speech and someone's actions are different things. The speech of someone like Trump is actually much closer to being an action. But you can't just start repressing speech no matter how "hateful" unfortunately. How about contributing with Love wherever you see hate?
> a few feet away from irreversibly staining American history
Sometimes I think back to another time in the recent past when there was an even more clear and present danger to members of the highest level of the federal govt. I think back in a shocked disbelief of "Holy cow... what if some large fraction of the Congress was murdered in one day?"
Does anybody even remember that?! It was just a couple years ago, multiple shots were fired at Congressmen at a baseball game. It's shocking to think what could have been then.
But it just seems to have dropped off the radar. I wonder why there wasn't a crackdown then on speech about things like Rachel Maddow/NYT/Media Establishment type conspiracies, or even any interest in a public airing of the attacker's motivations.
Seeing a dozen news articles the best argument seems to be that the mention of not attending the inauguration was a call for violence. I don't buy it.
It's a soft signal, one that really you should be looking at the wider context of the last 4 years and especially the last few months, rather than just in isolation.
And to the mind of someone willing to use violence (such as say, those involved in the capitol riot), it becomes "hey guys, I still believe the election was stolen by those dirty libs and I won't be at this location, so if anything bad happens there, I won't be hurt. Wink Wink, nudge nudge."
We have seen what his base will do. There is no longer a time to discuss hypotheticals, they will storm a goverment office with weapons, they will kill people, they will use IEDs, and they will put the Trump cult ahead of America; because that is what they did, in a Western capital of all places.
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This is not about removing "hate". This is about removing political opposition.
The WalkAway campaign's FB page was removed, despite no violent content.
The Articles of Unity project has been deplatformed from Twitter (and I believe FB) for a while with no justification and absolutely no hateful content whatsoever.
Yes, there are many high-profile targets that seem easy to justify, but a much larger swath of those affected are completely unjustifiable.
I'm sorry if the conservatives can't understand the difference between BLM people yelling in the streets, and Trump people searching the capitol for senators and representatives to stop a Constitutionally mandated vote count. (Actually that was a lie, I'm not sorry. I don't give a mosquito's dick about either of you. I was just trying to be nice.) I'm done trying to explain the difference to these people, and I think these terrorists have pushed a lot of people off the fence with me. People are fed up. You don't understand the difference? You think too much of it's unjustified? Too bad. This is the way it's gotta be. We're not going to live in anarchy because conservatives and liberals want to play out crips and bloods on our republic.
End rant.
Edit: Man I'm getting old. That reads like I just told some kids to get off my lawn. But that's how I feel.
This. Violence, intimidation and death are the ultimate forms of censorship. Much more so than having to switch your digital payment processor or having to self-host your blog or social media app.
Germany decided after WWII that it was better to mass-censor Naziism than it was to let Nazis freely organize or spread their ideas again. It's not that Germany doesn't like free speech, it's that Naziism and free speech are diametrically opposed and forced to make a choice, they choose free speech.
It seems like a contradiction where censorship promotes free speech, but it all depends on your timeline. In the short term banning Nazis limits free speech, in the long run banning Nazis increases free speech.
When we give violent groups space to grow and organize, we're more anti-free speech than we realize because the capital riots are the inevitable arc (and only the opening act) for very small groups to violently oppress large numbers of peaceful citizens who love democracy.
1) The most radicalized are by Q. Which itself is a disinformation campaign, contributed to by government entities.
2) Bernie sanders brags about occupying government buildings. Would he be held to the same standard? OAC praised BLM protesters marching on the White House a few months ago, with Antifa trying to breach police lines and storm the White House. Should we throw her in jail for sedition. How about Pelosi that asked the army to ignore orders from Trump.
The US might be a democracy. But just because you can vote, does not mean you have any meaningful amount of power. The powerful cabal of corrupt politicians, and their rich backers, they have power. And they have been there for a very long time. They are almost impossible to displace. This breach shook them, because it was common, everyday people that did this. The same people that have had their livelihood destroyed, and have been hurt by all the COVID rules, rioting, trade deals with foreign countries, and so on.
Trump is great for democracy. At every turn he exposes the hypocrisy of the current system. He needles them, and each time they over react. Exposing all their flaws. The amount of backstabbing he gets just from the Republican party, is waking up millions of people.
Thanks to him, we found out how convoluted and non transparent the election process is. How biased the media is. How the Supreme court cowers to political pressure. And now how big tech is working in collusion.
All things that a democratic movement can help to fix.
Your whataboutism fails when I ask you how many police officers Bernie Sanders bludgeoned to death.
This is "what about"-ism. It deflects responsibility and puts the focus on other's behavior. In this philosophy for one side to accept that what they did was bad, it requires every single other person in the world to be perfect, which is obviously impossible and therefor insulates the person from criticism.
But, I'll indulge anyway.
Occupying a building is a form of civil disobedience, which in the US is a respected form of protest. I don't know what incident you're talking about with Bernie, but the results matter. Did he schedule the occupation of a government building that threatened the lives of elected officials and killed a police officer? Or was it a peaceful protest?
For AOC, was she praising the mass of peaceful protestors and what they stood for or was she praising an attempt to breach the White House? There's a big difference, so I want to be clear. If it was the later, then that is definitely dangerous.
But praising or bragging is a far cry from planning, persuading and instigating. Plus, Bernie and AOC aren't the leader of the free world. The President has a responsibility to serve the entire US, all 330M, regardless of who voted for him or against him. Bernie has a responsibility to Vermont and AOC to the Bronx. It's apples and oranges. If you want the highest public office in the country, you need to be held to the highest standards and not complain about how those with far less power might have acted.
Let me ask for a quick accounting here - what is the evidence for this? My understanding is 100% of the gun deaths were from guns in the hands of law enforcement officers who were perfectly capable of defending themselves when pushed. There are a bunch of instantly iconic photos [0] with basically no weapons in the hands of protestors. They clearly didn't plan on breaching the Capitol or they'd have realised that they were all about to go to jail forever.
This is a not a mob out for literal blood.
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/07/us/capitol-mob-deaths/ind...
If they had found a senior official I don’t think they would have been safe.
There's video of a large crowd of the rioters chanting "hang Mike Pence!" They erected a gallows with a noose outside the Capitol. There's video of people yelling that they came to get Pence and Pelosi. Squads of milita wore tactical armor and helmets, and carried not just assault rifles and handguns, but also flexcuffs. You don't get that stuff in the spur of the moment. They came prepared. Other rioters were carrying lead pipes and wooden rods. There was even one rioter caught on video carrying a literal pitchfork.
They beat one police officer to death with a fire extinguisher and injured more than 50 others. That is clearly a mob out for blood.
As for more evidence, for months in advance, Trump supporters filled Parler, Gab, Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, Facebook, and many other social media outlets with detailed detailed discussions of plans to commit violence and in many cases murder at this event. NYPD and the FBI received a ton of reports from concerned citizens who saw this social media chatter. The insurrectionists talked about what weapons to bring, which politicians to target in order of priority, and so much more. It was reported that they had maps with them of the tunnels under the Capitol building so that they could cut off escape routes.
Freshman lawmaker Lauren Boebert tweeted Speaker Pelosi's whereabouts multiple times during the riot. She did not tweet anything which indicated any degree of surprise that the riot was occurring.
Jim Clyburn has two offices in the Capitol, one right next to the front doors and one way up on the third floor. It was reported that the rioters ignored Clyburn's obvious office next to the doors and instead made a beeline for the more secluded office on the third floor.
— George Orwell, Animal Farm
I understand the moves by Stripe, Twitter, and co. However, I would argue that the long term implications set by this precedent are much worse. When the Snowden story first broke back in 2013, many on HN argued that, hey it's all good, I have nothing to hide, and I trust our President. Three short years later, who took the office? Would you have every imagined that? The same goes for this. Think five minutes into the future if you will.
If the leader of the free world can be banned from all social media and co, who are based in the very same nation, and who are monopolies, then what hope is there for the rest of us?
1. "leader of the free world" is an incredibly arrogant statement.
2. He can be banned for the same reason that the rest of us can: inciting violence. I'd argue that having equal rules for everyone (or even _stricter_ ones for politicians) is good and healthy. The banning of people inciting violence gives me hope.
If you ask Trump opposition, they will all say he should go to jail for 1000 years for hundreds of crime that Trump committed.
I'm not close to he situation, but I'd feel much better if a judgement like this actually comes from a trained judge with a proper due process.
Wow, that's some impressive revisionist history, unfortunately for you its possible for us to actually look back in time and see exactly what was said.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5849932
It's fairly clear where these companies are drawing a line, and for most people like me, it's a perfectly acceptable line. Being the cause of actual violence and death means you get to be banned. Fairly clear?
The more murky question is people who think all cake shops should serve gay weddings but twitter should also be allowed to ban trump. Tough call and nuance involved there, but I doubt there's much ambiguity separating where one stands on Snowden's revalations and these recent bans
Discrimination is discrimination, and can and should be prohibited. Free speech was not invented when Twitter and Stripe were created, and thus it cannot be deprived by being banned from these platforms. Fomenting violent revolution is most certainly worth preventing, as is discrimination against people for their immutable traits. Fomenting violence is not an immutable trait.
I see the point people try to make when they equate the two, but I don’t think it’s a good one, because then it equates lgbt discrimination with private company platform bans for fomenting violence, implying that if you have one, you must tolerate the other, but that’s not true. One can ban discrimination while at the same time allowing Twitter or whoever to ban people promoting violence on/with their platforms. The principals are internally logically consistent, even if one disagrees with them.
Most of the public was pro-Snowden, especially the tech community. Telegram rose like a rocketship as a result of concerns over NSA backdoors.
Wtf? Nobody said anything of the sort, and if they did they would have been downvoted to the maximum. This is just totally absurd revisionist, we were only five years removed from the W Bush administration, which committed legitimate war crimes and left office with a 22% approval rating.
This is … not even remotely how I remember that period, more of a sense of outrage and companies rushing to encrypt internal connections and deploy PFS.
> If the leader of the free world can be banned from all social media and co, who are based in the very same nation, and who are monopolies, then what hope is there for the rest of us?
This isn’t a great fit: Trump isn’t being banned for being a conservative or talking policies, but for inciting violence which lead to a deadly mob. If all that happens are companies enforcing their terms of service against violence or hate speech evenly, that bothers me a lot less — especially since in this case it’s treating everyone consistently rather than singling him out for special treatment.
Actually, the problem is that those with power can get away with this but others can’t.
Think five minutes into the future if you will where there are no consequences if you have enough political power. Some day that might be a socialist or a communist or a white nationalist or a fascist encouraging an armed group to intimidate the legislature. Will we encourage companies to continue to do business with them as well? Or do we specifically grant Republicans and Democrats the privilege to abuse the power of their office?
Imagine Jamal from down the road hammering his neighbors with lies about an election and then organizing a march into the capital that beats a police officer to death with the goal of killing the VP of the US. Jamal had no status, no privilege, no financial resources and no one to pardon him. No one is worried about Jamal or his supporters ever attaining political power and seeking revenge because they have no connections, no wealth and no access to the halls of power. No communities are “healed” by not prosecuting Jamal, so he ends up going to jail for a long time. On the flip side, Stripe has never heard of Jamal so he gets to keep his preferred payment processor after he’s released from prison. Meanwhile Trump who’s been pardoned and is living under Secret Service detail at Mar a Lago is still somehow “not as equal” as Jamal because Trump is only able to make money online through other payment processors but not his preferred Stripe gateway.
The prevailing idea on HN is however “let’s have no regulation than bad regulation”... Guys, there’s such thing as good regulation.
The very most dangerous thing that could be done right now is to say "glad that's over and nothing happened".
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Maybe this is a HN bubble, the vast majority of Americans wouldn't be able to tell you what Snowden even specifically leaked...or rather, the journalists leaked on his and our behalf.
Trump is not the leader of the free world any longer. He's clearly on the way out, and he invited violence while the door was closing. Even the weakened GOP must admit he is a wannabe dictator, and his rhetoric led to 5 deaths, nevermind untold thousands to pandemic.
So no, I think there is not much slippery slope implication to deplatforming insane people like Trump, Alex Jones, KKK members, Nazis, terrorists, etc. Why should these people retain the privilege of posting harmful and murderous content on a company's website? Where in the constitution is tweeting an enshrined right?
Your are misinterpreting his comment. He says that you can't 100% trust in long term government/administration. There will always be a bad guy somewhere at some moment.
Market remains open for other market participants to make other choices.
Without an uncensorable currency, any political adversary -- especially an incumbent -- can just coerce payment processors into blocking payments to their opponents through threats of imprisonment or violence against a handful of executives.
How is this a good faith argument. You’ve jumped a situation where somewhere is being deplatformed and banned from various services for encouraging violence. To someone will use violence to kick someone off platforms. Coercing payment processors in that manor would be illegal. So, how exactly are we on the path to fascism? This is absolutely wild to me, that a textbook fascist being banned from things is being spun as... fascism.
That has always happened, Visa/Mastercard have been used that way since forever. The Swift system is designed to exercise financial control. Paypal bans anyone for merely looking suspicious to them.
Governments can choose to make anything they want illegal, and they have the guns to back up that decision. Sure, it may be easy to make crypto transactions more surreptitiously, but at the end of the day someone is going to want to spend that crypto on something that has real value, and governments can, and do, control what method of payments are acceptable.
And if course given that bitcoin has to be sent and received, if we ever arrived at your dystopia, bitcoin would not help: the political rival would simply jail the executive for receiving bitcoin payments instead of USD currency. Bitcoin isn't preventing your dystopia.
Right now, we haven't heard from ISPs. The entire suite of services that are controlled by the monopoly FANGs can be recreated, including clouds and cloud-fronts.
If that line is crossed as well then we'll have a modern society entirely dependent on information infrastructure that is controlled by a handful of companies with pedigree rooted firmly in the defense and intelligence sectors. You can call that whatever you please, but it will not be pleasant.
[p.s. I vote Green.]
If you have a colluding oligopoly in something crucial to do business such as payments or communication, where it's difficult to switch due to network effects, being banned by them is like being banned by government.
So they did, but the totalitarians were not satisfied, so then they banned them from app stores users used to connect and find the new service... crying Build your own service it is a private company
So they did, but the totalitarian were not satisfied so they banned them from the network infrastructure used to connect them to the service... crying build your own network infrastructure it is private company
So they did, but the totalitarians were not satisfied so they banned from the payment services used to generate revenue for the service... crying build your own payment service it is private company
So they did, but totalitarians were still not satisfied, still hiding behind the "but its a private company" the totalitarians continue to demand anyone that disagrees with them be banned from all services everywhere all the while screaming that they are not in fact totalitarian, no they are upholding freedom for all...
see in 1984 war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength
Is it really totalitarianism in this case? Or, just some private companies inconveniencing people by choosing not to do business with them?
does this make you reconsider at all?
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I'm sure anybody that's been censored, dehumanized, and removed from society by an evil regime has been comforted by the fact that the people doing it think it's fine to do it, or because the people doing it are doing it legally. Those facts don't make it right ...
If google, for example decided to stop surfacing trump stuff in results, that could be a real issue. Not because it’s google doing a bad thing, but because google has become so big. Maybe “what happens if this service started banning folks?” is a useful thought exercise for whether a platform has accrued too much market share/power/influence.
https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed
It's a super common practice to deny some customers for basically all financial services companies.
No one is removing groups that say taxes should be lower. They are distancing them selves from a groups whose core policy is now attempt to violently overthrow the government because they lost an election. If I started discussing on this site how to kill government officials, I'd be banned pretty quick.
Not that I would hold my breathe waiting for the Department of Justice to press charges.
But private companies do not actually have the right to coordinate takedowns of other companies.
There’s absolutely nothing preventing the Trump campaign from using a different payment processor.
It would be a different matter if Visa and MasterCard had blocked them.
First off, I don't see why, philosophically, the owner of a service shouldn't be allowed to decide, who he wants to do business with. And despite I do remember some stories when the same people who are cheering for Trump to get banned everywhere were defending, quite hypocritically, the opposite point of view, it really wasn't something new and outrageous, even back then, especially when dealing with all these internet-machines. We are long used to the fact, that getting banned on some internet forum is ok and you generally don't have the real option to appeal. The host is the host, and he bans whoever he wants. And while sometimes it may be much much more than a little inconvenience for the person getting banned, people never really cared, because it's rare enough for the consequences of it to be really tragic for people to feel empathetic: society doesn't give a fuck about the problems of an individual unless enough people fear the same might happen to them.
Second, it's never been a secret, where Silicon Valley (HN folks included) is leaning politically. So let's not pretend there are some justifications why they had to do all this shit to Trump for some greater good. The truth is, the entities involved just hate the guy, pretty much everyone in big tech except for Thiel was donating generously to his opponents. So no big surprise here either.
But the first thing that was really special about Trump being bullied by Twitter (quite a while ago) is that this was not some random guy, it was the acting president of a country that hosts Twitter, elected by (more or less) half of the country (on both occasions). So, while (arguably) playing by the rules, Twitter was basically showing that their opinion was more important, than the opinion of the guy half of their the country voted for. And there wasn't some other platform which he could move to, Twitter is Twitter and the rest is, well, the rest. So this was the first point.
Fast forward to now, Trump being banned from everywhere and apps that refuse to ban Trump being banned from Amazon/Apple Store/Google Play themselves, we arrive to the second point: things look a little differently, when there are like 3 major service providers that are supposedly competing with each other, and if they all agree that you're a person non-grata, you are fucked. Even if the half of the country supports you, it's nothing. What really matters that 10 guys on top of these big companies don't like you.
I don't really care about USA elections bullshit, so here is the real point: we don't usually see this, because, first off, there's supposedly not that many reasons for all of FAANG and such to dislike some random person, and second, if it happens, we'll never hear about it anyway. But if the guy half of the country supports (nevermind he is even so called POTUS) struggles to deal with this, everyone else is completely at their mercy.
So either there is decentralization, or there is this.
I believe Trump supporters, especially the QAnon weirdos, are wrong to believe the things that they do, but they are less wrong than the people who supported the Soviet Union during its genocidal reign. Unless people are charged and convicted of a crime, their livelihoods should not be taken away by the whims of these powerful companies selectively enforcing their rules. McCarthyism was wrong then and it's wrong now, even though its targets are wrong too.
I agree. No one should take Stripe's civil liberties away from them.
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This is going to piss people off and some of those people are going to be real, nothing-to-lose extremists. Actions like these though seemingly harmless in the short-term are going to radicalize the exact person/type of people that you do not want to radicalize.
Because a lot of high-ranking SV folks (and patrickc) are on here, please, for the sake of stability in the country, do not continue down this path.
This may seem innocuous now and purely a matter of principle, but this is a match to gasoline (in a multitude of ways).
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Please do not read this through whatever political lens you occupy, but instead through the lens of civility.
Therefore, we can't make decisions based on the fear of their response, even if we have a personal aversion to conflict. That's falling into the trap of the abused. We have to make decisions based on defending our principles and standing up for what we believe is right.
No matter what, some people are going to be pissed off at any sufficiently meaningful decision (or indecision). If the people pissed off are violent types, well, then perhaps that's a sign the right decision was made.
I understand that there's a hell of a lot of nuance to this - sometimes you don't poke the sleeping bear. I think Wednesday showed the bear is absolutely not asleep.
This is about the campaign finance/social media account/etc of the current sitting POTUS.
You don’t need to condone the actions of the Capitol terrorists to take issue with him being banned from every platform having committed no crime (or at least, not having been convicted of any crime).
A few hundred people invaded the Capitol, but tens of millions of people voted for Trump. We’re not talking about the former; I think it’s very reasonable to be concerned that this divisiveness might radicalise the latter.
Reacting to this anxiety with force is going to cause a war if it continues.
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Sometimes certain things need to be dealt with by force, there's no way around it.
It seems that that freedom of speech is not the cause of stability, but stability gives rise to (certain degrees) of freedom of speech. It's a slippery slope, but each country has to have a moral basis on which to decide where to draw the line.
It should be obvious where this road leads unless we have a leader wake us up.
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It also sends a message that their behavior is unacceptable. That has a very strong influence on culture as a whole. Messages like this are how a lot of civil rights movements have worked.
Vice did an article on this recently, when Telegram tried to kick off ISIS: https://www.vice.com/en/article/vb55bd/telegram-deplatformin...
It's interesting to consider whether the (soon to be former) president of the US deserves similar treatment to a terrorist organization responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths.