It's hard to overlook that the political class is suddenly up in arms about this primarily because they suddenly perceive themselves as being under threat from it. Ordinary individuals and businesses have had to deal with the hegemony of the platforms for a long time and it hasn't really mattered until now.
I fear the outcome of this is going to be that it translates into massive regulatory overreach and splitting up of companies instead of what would be healthy - encourage competition through enforcing open standards and mandating interoperability and sharing of personal data. Those things would go a lot further to ensuring actual free speech as well as creating a healthier internet at the same time.
The hypocrisy of the political class is even deeper, at least in Germany. Just recently, laws were passed to make platforms like Facebook filter, censor and rapidly delete content that might be against some law. Not after a court decision or at least an official order, no no, nothing so formal. A user complaint is sufficient to trigger the need to check within a few hours, have the platform decide to delete and report. No due process, nothing.
Penalties for insufficient reaction by the platform are steep and of course set after the fact. Therefore platforms will err on the side of caution and delete far more than they would have to.
And people like Merkel who are responsible for that law have the gall to complain when something their censorship law stipulated is done to a fellow politician...
I don't agree with her but her only argument is the government should make these calls rather then private companies. She probably even agrees with what they did just doesn't think anyone except the government should have that power.
There is a due process if the creator of whatever was complained about decides to do something about it.
Additionally, this is only a flagging process for plainly illegal content, it can (and is on FB and other platforms) be a separate process from normal reports.
Germany is so wrong about this, and this is not the way we should go.
We Americans needs to grow thicker skin and cherish our free speech more. If we don't, we're going to slip into a world with less liberty.
Libel, slander, and "yelling fire" are sufficient limits on free speech. Seeing or hearing people say things you don't like isn't going to kill you. Society already has the tools to shun those who act egregiously.
We have other legal mechanisms to quell the events that happened last week. Prosecute for politicians inciting violence, fine trusted news organizations spreading misinformation, jail those who destroy property, trespass, or assault another person.
We have ways to stop radicalization too: being better to one another and making sure people have their needs met.
I vehemently disagree with Voat, Parler, thedonald.win, /r/sino, J. K. Rowling, and many other communities and persons. But they have a right to carry on, and we shouldn't deplatform them.
If we didn't have free speech, we wouldn't have gotten to where we are today. I'd rather live in America than a country that has less free speech.
I think one big issue is the federal trade commission has been too shy about fighting trusts or anti-competitive behavior because they believe(d) tech is different.
They allowed FB and Google to gobble up competitors unimpeded.
Amazon is another. Their integration and breadth are a threat to businesses and consumers alike but we’re too busy enjoying next day deliveries to care.
You ask for competition but these behemoths either buy them out or smother them via anti competitive behavior; at that point breaking them up is very palatable.
Even with anti-trust, I think the EU comission is probably correct that social media platforms may need more direct lines of contact with platform regulators in exchange for being larger players, just because of the intrinsic network effects that exist in the space.
What would breaking them up even mean? I feel we would be in the same situation as brexit - How do we split them without collapsing all the pieces? You can point to microsoft but modern american has brought an entirely different, much larger, more entrenched behemoths than what we've seen.
I agree, in the sense that "break them up" seems to be an undefined action left as an exercise for the reader.
I'm not necessarily against reasonable regulations, but it is hard to agree or disagree if there is nothing on the table other than "break them up". Some specific framework or principle or proposal is needed to have any sort of a cogent discussion.
Interoperability can make a market more consolidated than it otherwise might be. Look at how GitHub dominates the DVCS hosting market.
Ben Thompson's idea that social networks shouldn't be able to buy other social networks would be better IMO for avoiding problems like Facebook having too much power from also owning IG and WhatsApp. Not sure what a good solution would be for other companies such as Amazon having so much power.
Agreed that regulatory overreach is on the horizon. Hell, pretty sure it's going to happen (or at least be full steam ahead) in the first 100 days of Biden's presidency. While I don't agree with sweeping regulatory practices and would like to see a thoughtful plan of trying to increase competition instead, I can't blame the political class' position. I find it even fascinating how far reaching this event has been and how anti-Trump politicians and organizations NOW finally see how dangerous Silicon Valley has become. In essence, Twitter went to war with the Office of President of the USA (not just Trump, but the position of USA president itself), right or wrong (I'm ignoring the moral/ethics going on for the sake of this debate, though, Trump did overstep his bounds... putting it mildly). This fact shows they can and will do it again and to lesser politicians.
"We took Trump's voice away, we can do it to you too. We pushed anti-Trump rhetoric and silenced pro-Trump rhetoric... do I need to replace Trump with your name if you don't do as we say?" If there is no fallout for Twitter, how far can they push it? What if Biden decides to do some policies that Twitter isn't in favor of? Does he get shut out too? The EU can see very well that the same thing can happen to them easily as well. Shit, even the ACLU threw an objection and concern over this and they hate Trump just as must as any other democrat. The big problem is, and you have to be fair, Trump put up a hell of a PR fight the past 4 years and did rather well up until the very end. Most politicians have crumbled from less pressure than what he experienced. Not many others will be able to hold out as long as he did. This extra weapon of social media and Silicon Valley taking down the public voice of politicians is really fucking dangerous, no matter the political spectrum. They're a handful of billionaires or near to billionaires who have direct control of what a large portion of the human population sees as fact and truth... and they have no one to oversight them.
It is actually disturbing in that it seems by implication that many politicians are portraying what Trump was doing as legitimate speech - and in doing so they are effectively legitimising it. Whereas anybody I am sure in the big tech decision making on this was treating this as "shouting fire in a theater" exception to speech. I think it will be very harmful if the "legitimate speech" interpretation becomes the dominant view - in that case we are effectively setting a precedent here that inciting a riot to overturn your own government is legitimate free speech.
In 2019 Court in NY in final instance denied Trump rights to ban twitter users(even the ones, that did not belong to US citizens) based on the The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which is guaranteeing Free Speech.
I assume, that he was not allowed to ban people who were simply toxic and posted death threats - all the things that are considered norm in twitter(but other users are able to ban at least some of them to maintain healthy discussion). Also, it is not consistent with how just recently twitter allowed all those death wishes, when it was announced, that Trump had covid.
And I am even more curious about banning of other key Republican politicians - on what grounds? Were they also inciting violence?
> encourage competition through enforcing open standards
Big Tech destroyed this hope the moment it banned Parler and everyone cheered this ideological censorship.
Big Tech crossed every line in launching a coordinated attack on a rival. The damage this has done cannot be quantified. The ideal way to have gone about this is involvement of Courts/Legislature to decide if Parler should be banned or not. Not a group of private companies deciding to fuck a competitor. It is a horrible horrible precedent which has absolutely zero excuses.
I think the EU understands the precedent this sets.
The tech giants have established that if they disagree with something (using their preferred value system), they feel they have the right to take action.
Let’s say the an EU minister proposes something that’s antithetical to US principles but is lawful in the EU, now tech giants feel emboldened with the right to take action _unilaterally_ without the right to an appeal.
I believe this is what the EU fears and wants to avoid.
Here's a less flattering angle on the same worry. Europe is caught pants-down. They are realizing how weak they are in tech and scrambling to fix it. The facts:
- None of the 20 most valuable companies in the world are European. Most are US or China based, and many are tech.
- A tiny number of successful startups are European. I think their biggest in the last 20 years is Spotify...
- This is a sad showing for a continent with a $20t GDP and 500 million citizens (EU + UK).
- Software is eating the world. This was a lukewarm take when pmarca wrote that famous essay a decade ago, now you could almost restate it past-tense.
Europe is simply not participating in that process meaningfully. Sure, there have been vast shifts in many aspects of life--Europeans spend just as much time on their iPhones as we do, on Twitter, no FB, on Insta, on Gmail. But they neither invented nor control the development of any of those things.
So yes, European world leaders are belatedly realizing that a guy in SF with a footlong beard could ban them from Twitter at will. But that is the tip of the iceberg. They have developed deep dependency on US tech in all kinds of ways. If GSuite or O365 went down tomorrow, how many EU governments would be able to get any work done?
This situation mirrors the (more extensively discussed) military situation. Europe has complacently decided that the US can manage it for them, and are now experiencing a rude awakening.
If EU doesn't have valuable companies and cannot produce valuable products how come that EU is not much different for living standarts than the US then? Is EU a petrostate? Where the money comes from if USA makes all the good stuff and EU none? From pumping out the Bulgarian crude or mining the Spanish rare earth metals?
The thing is, Europe missed out on the Software&Internet and the reality is, it is not the only tech or only high value product out there. However, software creates enormous monopolies, therefore when you do a top list USA has everything.
If you can look further than the toplists, Europe is doing strong on the long tail and that is how you got your 20T economy with no single unicorn in the charts.
Europe's biggest problem is its demographics - People are getting older and dying, not enough young people replace them. That's why it's percentage on the world economy is shrinking, it's not because Europeans can't code.
I think the last part is a deep concern and if it’s not should be.
Google, Salesforce or Microsoft should not be able to wake up one day and say, you know what, I don’t like those people in Czechia, let’s cut their GSuite/O365 Access with no time to migrate.
These companies have too much heft and influence. And democratic governments have not caught up to that.
Authoritarians know the deal and that’s why they control them. They know how they can sway elections, not through ‘bots but via their algorithms and suppression or promotion of narratives as they see fit.
I have similar observations and concerns in regards to the United States’ overdependence on China as its supplier. I believe COVID-19 has revealed how dependent we are on China for even the most basic of supplies. America’s inability to domestically manufacture simple things such as masks is deeply worrisome. Think about it. We are unable to manufacture basic things at scale to fulfill basic needs of the country. We are no longer self-dependent. America’s generals have voiced concerns for years about how the majority of rare earth metals are derived from China. Metals of which are used in all of our sophisticated technology, such as computers, missiles, jets, satellites, etc. But COVID has revealed that these concerns span far greater than just technology and weapon systems. Similar to how the tech conglomerates can unilaterally erase the president of the United States in one fell swoop, China can also pull the rug from under us when it comes to supply chain. It’s a national security issue. We shouldn’t make ourselves so vulnerable.
This is an entirely different issue. Europe can never compete within the 'western' sphere as long the US wil just gobble up every EU software company that threatens to become relevant with unlimited free petrodollars.
Be careful what you wish for. The Europeans might decide to import the GFW technology from China, and grow their own social media inside the new walled garden.
The point is to regulate social media for European citizens. They set the rules. If facebook or twitter cannot follow them they will pull out of that market allowing space for a local platform to take over.
In an internet ruled world, were mass communication was now possible, existed a company who became so powerful that the product in which they developed was treated as important as a telephone, electricity, or the internet itself. As its power and influence grew, it aligned itself politically and ideologically. Those influences meant that individuals who expressed beliefs contrarian to those aligned with the organisation were met with digital ostracism. At first it was just normal individuals, but as time went on even world leaders were having their communications silenced or interfered with.
Those who were on the receiving end of this censorship were often forced to form alternative means of communication, but often it was the case that these powerful groups colluded to ensure this was not possible.
What does it mean when the only objective voice to comment on matters originating within the borders of the USA comes from outside of those borders.
Silicon Valley has become so powerful and moneyed that they believe they are supra government.
Tristan Harris comments that the laws that are designed to protect us, don't exist within the realms of social media.
Assuming that a company's terms of service are deemed fair and legal, why would it be "no longer acceptable" to apply them? I couldn't care less how high profile someone is, what public office they hold; if they break the agreement they made with a service provider, they should be subject to the consequences they agreed to.
What I would like to see is a company being obliged to enforce its terms of service promptly, and not allow profitable rule-breakers to continue. Especially when their abuse of the service also breaks laws.
Because terms of service are vague and, more importantly, selectively enforced.
Selective enforcement of private contracts is totally legal, and the EU('s executive branch) is uncomfortable with the public policy implications of that when it comes to social media and would like new laws passed to add extra regulation on uniformity and specificity of moderation policies.
The selective enforcement - particularly when it's overt - really grinds my gears. When they are finally applied that doesn't make said application invalid or incorrect.
I think that some cases whereby $importantperson isn't banned because they're important are valid. It helps to have a public and verifiable record of a public office holder making provably false claims, particularly when a warning is then slathered over said bullshit. But the thought of a government body deciding when a company may and may not enforce its rules is chilling.
I think we need to acknowledge that a lot of what these agreements outline is, to a large degree, subjective. If human language, or expression in general, weren't contextual and up for interpretation, then I think this would be a viable way of looking at things, but that simply isn't the case.
So long as there is room for interpretation, and the consequences (politically, economically, etc.) of those interpretations are potentially far reaching, leaving it up to private companies with no oversight isn't a good option.
So you have n companies each applying their own subjective judgement over their own networks, or you have 1 government applying its own subjective judgement over all networks in that country.
It's highly unlikely that the latter is more friendly to fringe or extremist views (setting aside whether or not that's a good thing).
"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." [0]
-- Winston Churchill
For any kind of platform that allows arbitrary users some level of control over the content that will be hosted, the options for ensuring that content is not harmful are:
* Community Moderation: users control contributing and moderating content. The platform chooses moderators, or enables voting for them. This gives users and all people (i.e. citizens) the most power, but has the most potential for abuse of the system to enable using the platform to host, spread and share harmful content.
* Platform Moderation: wholly moderated by platform chosen moderators. This is probably the most common system. The platform will use its own set of values and policies to decide what to moderate, and will likely target the most popular content deemed harmful. Per platform, this gives platforms the most power, but platforms much compete with each other
* Government Moderation: moderation likely by the platform, but with oversight from government - policy and values may be defined by the government; failure to moderate according to the government legislation could result in penalties or termination of the platform. If the government has sufficient checks and balances and citizen influence, this may be a desirable system, but if the government is not "of and for the people", it could also be used by the government to moderate opponents of the government as decided by that government. Anyone opposing the absolute power of the government may find their content "moderated" away. This is the stuff of nightmares for the founding fathers.
"When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny." [1]
That's a fair statement but as long as a company is not found to be applying bias to their application of their rules, again I see no problem. In the instances we're discussing though, there has been clear violation of terms over a sustained period of time.
this argument seems well & sound to me, if I replace "private companies" with "private monopolies". right now I don't think we know how monopolistic these companies are & i don't think we've tried doing much competing. so yes we are under the seat of a few big entities. it's our fault. athe failure of us, our unwillingness to compete, does not give the nation's of the world preimminent domain. the rights of the private entities to converse as they would is to be respected, including excluding unwanted voices. if you have something to say find your own places to say it.
these garbage fire bonanzas ablaze with calls for violence & insurrection with the flimsiest fakest of fabricated basis underneath are unfortunately really bad tests of how monopolistic big tech is, because they doom themselves, seem rankly incompetent, destined to self immolate. competitor platformsust follow some law, which is in many cases what companies do when they kick people off: protect themselves & the rest of the platform from grave risks. i believe companies should be encouraged to find their own ways to remain safe, that nation's ordering them around to control speech in certain governmentally dictated ways would be horrific. cyberspace doesn't deserve this infringement, people don't, even big tech, sucky g useless as it is, doesn't. this isn't china. we don't do that here.
Please, continue to spell this out. Laws that forbid an organisation from applying its rules because that organisation is popular? Laws that compel an organisation to allow users to perpetrate abuse if they're important in one country? Where does liability now fall when say, incitement to violence end up with someone losing an eye, a life?
Don't misunderstand me - I absolutely think that those who allowed Trump to directly incite violence for years have blood on their hands. They absolutely have liability for this. They disgust me. But now suddenly the conversation seems to be that Twitter, for example, should have been forbidden from kicking Trump off now or years ago when they should have. So who would share the blame now?
A corporation is an abstraction, an artificial person created to pool resources and do business at scale. It's a good, useful abstraction --- but like all abstractions, it's leaky, and sometimes the abstraction does more harm than good. Governments are run for the benefit of natural people, not artificial ones, and when the latter behave in ways detrimental to the interests of the former, there's nothing wrong with setting rules.
Well, for one, democratic countries are supposed to be governed by representatives elected by people, not by corporate boards.
Ability to selectively enable or disable people from being able to access voters is tantamount to having a huge influence on election results.
While in the past you could avoid using social media, today this is THE way to reach most of voters. Most people no longer pay substantial attention to what happens on television, forgot what radio is (it is a little bit of noise your car gives so that it is not quiet) and don't read printed papers.
Now, this time it happened for Trump and we can discuss whether this was or was not a good decision, but the question is who is going to wield the power like that in the future and whether it is even permissible do to something like that.
On one side you have the idea of free speech, but then added to social media you have inevitable disinformation as anybody can get amplified and amount of information is such that it is not possible to verify and vet it.
In the past you would have handful of news-generating organizations and it was easy to spot and call false information. But this is forever gone, there seems to be a need to find out some kind of new equilibrium that will allow detect and filter misinformation without anybody having power to singlehandedly "vanish" people from public life.
You discuss governance, access to voters, wielding of power and free speech but not the meat of my comment: a customer not playing by the rules they agreed to, and the implication that they should be allowed to break the rules they agreed to simply because they're important. An organisation must now allow people to flaunt their rules, helpless to remove them despite the abuse that they perpetrate?
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right includes freedom to change religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or in private, to manifest religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.
2. The right to conscientious objection is recognised, in accordance with the national laws governing the exercise of this right.
Article 11
Freedom of expression and information
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
2. The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.
Does that mean, in the EU context, that the EU (whatever EU organization that may be), or the individual EU nations can compel private companies to publish certain speech?
Are all EU citizens entitled to publish on Twitter for instance, and can the EU force Twitter to publish?
Is that the EU version of freedom of expression and information?
Just realised that this charter contains a rule against double jeopardy:
"No one shall be liable to be tried or punished again in criminal proceedings for an offence for which he or she has already been finally acquitted or convicted within the Union in accordance with the law."
which slightly surprised me, as the UK has allowed this for about 10 years, (I think). (I guess "finally" may be a getout.)
The power imbalance means companies can use all sorts of crazy leverage to do all sorts of things that wouldn't really be fair in a free market, and certainly not a free market of ideas etc..
I'll bet $100 that companies would love to wash their hands of a lot of this stuff, and just be able to 'comply' with some regulatory things so they can't be blamed or get into trouble one way or another.
I'd take that bet. Leaked conversations from Twitter and Google insiders show that the platform owners are well aware of the power their platforms give them. That's a power that can't be accurately measured in dollars, and speaking purely selfishly on their behalf, one that they'd be fools to give up.
It's not just as simple as you make it sound. What this Censorship has done is conveyed to the World that American Government cannot be trusted. That America has 2 power centers not 1. The two power centers being American Government and Big Tech.
Any ban or removal should come from the elected Government. In this case it is the US Congress. This is what the World expects as this is how all Democratically elected Governments all over the World function. It is the Government which has a final say.
Now when Big Tech unilaterally decides to censor a sitting US President and bans a rival competitor this will cause every World leader and Government to sit up and take note. Everyone will ask themselves: are we now supposed to trust US Government for its word? What if tomorrow a private company decides to censor the US Government? If they can ban the US President's account they wield more power than even elected representatives. Why then should we liaison with US Government and why not directly talk to Big Tech as they seem to hold the power over even the US President.
Then it goes further than that: how do we trust that the incoming President won't be censored? Since all communications happen through a digital forum where one of the Big Tech companies is an intermediary in relaying such communications what is the guarantee that the communication is not tampered with? When Big Tech enjoys so much power in US, that it can censor the Government itself, then why can't this also be possible? If Big Tech can attach disclaimers to a sitting US President's content then why can't they tamper with the messaging too?
This sort of confusion existed for countries like Pakistan which has dual power centers: the elected Government and the military. You won't know whom to talk to as one can override the other. Which is why you have so many successful coups in Pakistan. What Big Tech has done is set a very dangerous precedent. Now no World leader will trust the word of the American Government at face value and will double/triple check every communication.
I know this is a heated topic but I really don’t understand what the other options are. Having businesses dictate who they want to serve seems like censorship but having the government dictate it seems way worse. I’m not sure how to decouple or balance the freedom of will as a business, freedom of will as a person and the societal mandate of the majority (which is how democracy works? It’s always about the majority values).
The problem is these companies are too big and powerful now. If a small business refuses someone its no big deal, go to another business. But when these titans join together to make an action that affects you and there are no alternatives left, thats a different case.
If both Apple and Google ban your app when the app is legal and useful, is it good for society that there is no way around this?
An unrestricted democracy can be exactly that. But hopefully, a country has sufficient guardrails in its constitution to prevent it from becoming a mob rule.
> Having businesses dictate who they want to serve seems like censorship but having the government dictate it seems way worse.
Leaving B2B aside, for B2C it is basic consumer protection laws common in EU. If a service is offered to a general public, then provider may not arbitrarily exclude someone from using it. If a provider excludes someone for violating ToS, then the excluded one may dispute that at appropriate authority / state office.
Surely there is a middle ground: let businesses operate how they please so long as they follow the law, and have the law require them to act in a way which is considered reasonable. If you’re a business trying to sell something then you are required to be somewhat honest in how you represent the thing, especially if you are selling some kind of food. If you’re a bank then you are required to be fair to a certain extent in how you choose the customers you serve and what services you offer them.
I don’t see why a business that presents itself as a quasi-public space that is generally open to all at no cost should not have some duty to be faithful to the way it represents itself and to treat its users fairly.
> Surely there is a middle ground: let businesses operate how they please so long as they follow the law, and have the law require them to act in a way which is considered reasonable.
A lot of people would argue that is the situation we have now.
The government wasn't against twitter because they were looking like they were going to remove right wing stuff, they were angry because they were being fact checked.
No freedom is absolute. As a society, we choose where to draw the line for the common good. We can choose to make whatever laws we want to regulate business and technology. Indeed, we already have made many, many of them.
Tech benefited enormously from moving fast and being mostly unregulated as a result. Looking at the finance industry though, every new law was written in blood or tears over the course of centuries. Now blood has been spilled by social media in the US Capitol and the world has taken notice.
It's not going to be easy or fast, but good policy can help keep Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg from controlling the political outcomes of every democracy in the world.
We have other more democratic models of handling this in distributed social networks that aren't under centralised corporate control. Email, telephone system, Mastodon... Federation and regulated platforms, and some other ways of organisation let you have localised systems of censorship that aren't all-powerful in the network.
It doesn't have to be a system where the government can pick and choose who they want to ban/keep, but rather a system where businesses must go through a legal government process to ban someone themselves. That platforms need to be held to the same freedom of speech standards the US government is held to.
No, just have certain businesses operate just like utility providers do which means they can't decide who they provide service too as long as it's within their service area.
You local electrical company probably can't shut off the power even to a meth lab as long as they are paying their bills, and even if they do not you are usually required to go through a rigorous process before you can take action.
This isn't really about freedom of will, this is about the bottom line and companies trying to score cheap points. If it was pretty darn clear that no amount of pressure that does not go through the courts could make Amazon or Twilio cancel Parler there wouldn't be as much noise about it.
There's a reason why no one is tweeting at the power or water companies to cut off their services to the Trump campaign, it's not because there aren't people that would like to see that happening, but because even the most deranged of them know that it cannot happen.
You already have precedence for this, back when corporate towns were a thing that's where the public square concept emerged despite the entire town technically being corporate property it was deemed that people cannot be silenced on the streets or in the town square.
The issue here is that the Internet isn't treated as a public square but as solely corporate property and yes sadly without a bunch of corporations the internet doesn't actually exists.
You cannot get to the point that you need to essentially become a global Tier 1 ISP before you can put on a service that does not break any laws but that would essentially be immune to being canceled, and if you want to monetize it you probably need to become major payment processor if not an an acquiring and and issuing bank too because as we've seen in the past PayPal/PCI can easily prevent you from taking any payments.
We do not have an open and distributed network a handful of companies can block any content they want at any time, TOR, VPN's or anything else won't save you and won't help you your ISP can block anything it wants with a single line in a config file and if it's not on Google it might as well not be accessible.
Your hosting options today are rather limited especially for a platform that needs to have a global reach and that you couldn't take down with a single 5G connection.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft and a tiny handful of others are the only ones who can provide you with that infrastructure, if you are going with a smaller or more traditional hosting provider then there are only a handful of CDNs that can provide you with content distribution and DDOS protection/mitigation services.
If you want to grant companies the same freedom you grant to people when it comes to making decisions you need an actual free market for that, but globally the internet isn't a free market and no one can make the argument that it is free yet alone a free market when in order to provide a legal service (regardless of how distasteful it is) without any of the existing market players being able to completely shut you down you have to build a Bank of America, a Visa,a DeepOcean and a Cloudflare first.
add political views into the list of non-discrimination laws and let the courts decide, if it's important enough to have to be legislated, that's the closes framework upon which to model it.
I'm impressed that the EU is taking action in this case and I hope they also look into the shutdown of Parler under antitrust legislation.
Parler was the number one downloaded social media app in the app store after all. According to BBC the most popular accounts on Parler were people like Sean Hannity and Ted Cruz, who each had followers in the millions.
Of course Parler had a problem with some - maybe even many - violent people, like the Washington rioters, but it seems to me that the vast majority of Parler users were not violent people, but fairly normal republicans of the kind that are still not banned on Twitter and Facebook (like the two persons I mentioned).
Removing the hyperbole on each side, I think it'd be interesting if the EU looked into this to conclude if the shutdown of Parler was ok or not.
I think EU doesn't have an opinion on Parler, that's a business relationship gone wrong.
The leak of the Parler content shows that they were actively moderating the platform to push it on the far right side, using millions of fake accounts with admin privileges.
So Amazon terminated their account.
The ban of Trump from social networks is a different topic, I don't think Trump has a big fan base in EU, but it's the perfect excuse to demand what many have been advocating for years now: political control of the social network decisions, given that they can influence the public opinion (Facebook admitted today that their platform was used to spread violence in Myanmar)
I have personally advocated for putting social network under public scrutiny or close their operations in EU.
I am glad that the European Union is finally taking steps in that direction.
> According to BBC the most popular accounts on Parler were people like Sean Hannity and Ted Cruz...fairly normal republicans of the kind that are still not banned on Twitter and Facebook (like the two persons I mentioned).
The two persons you mentioned as "fairly normal republicans" had their contact information carried by an armed terrorist who invaded the Capitol on the hunt for "bad guys": https://twitter.com/johnkruzel/status/1349061894418685953
I see the argument the commission is making, but when it comes to the question of inciting violence on privately owned systems, is it really the right idea to move it to some sort of public committee when the target is "too big to censor?"
Remember that Facebook and Twitter only acted after the fact. For them, Trump was too big to censor too. They only took action days before he is out of office when it was guaranteed he would leave.
FB and Twitter didn't deplatform Trump because he was a nasty bastard who was inciting revolt. They did it because the Democrats won and they want to suck up.
Is it me or have we come full circle on this? I remember a not long ago when internet companies were told they were publishers and liable for their content and then Zuckerberg asking for more regulation. I can’t keep up.
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I fear the outcome of this is going to be that it translates into massive regulatory overreach and splitting up of companies instead of what would be healthy - encourage competition through enforcing open standards and mandating interoperability and sharing of personal data. Those things would go a lot further to ensuring actual free speech as well as creating a healthier internet at the same time.
Penalties for insufficient reaction by the platform are steep and of course set after the fact. Therefore platforms will err on the side of caution and delete far more than they would have to.
And people like Merkel who are responsible for that law have the gall to complain when something their censorship law stipulated is done to a fellow politician...
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-trump-germany-twitter/ge...
Additionally, this is only a flagging process for plainly illegal content, it can (and is on FB and other platforms) be a separate process from normal reports.
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Germany is so wrong about this, and this is not the way we should go.
We Americans needs to grow thicker skin and cherish our free speech more. If we don't, we're going to slip into a world with less liberty.
Libel, slander, and "yelling fire" are sufficient limits on free speech. Seeing or hearing people say things you don't like isn't going to kill you. Society already has the tools to shun those who act egregiously.
We have other legal mechanisms to quell the events that happened last week. Prosecute for politicians inciting violence, fine trusted news organizations spreading misinformation, jail those who destroy property, trespass, or assault another person.
We have ways to stop radicalization too: being better to one another and making sure people have their needs met.
I vehemently disagree with Voat, Parler, thedonald.win, /r/sino, J. K. Rowling, and many other communities and persons. But they have a right to carry on, and we shouldn't deplatform them.
If we didn't have free speech, we wouldn't have gotten to where we are today. I'd rather live in America than a country that has less free speech.
They allowed FB and Google to gobble up competitors unimpeded.
Amazon is another. Their integration and breadth are a threat to businesses and consumers alike but we’re too busy enjoying next day deliveries to care.
You ask for competition but these behemoths either buy them out or smother them via anti competitive behavior; at that point breaking them up is very palatable.
I'm not necessarily against reasonable regulations, but it is hard to agree or disagree if there is nothing on the table other than "break them up". Some specific framework or principle or proposal is needed to have any sort of a cogent discussion.
https://mobile.twitter.com/finshots/status/12653067031861616...
What adverts and next to what contents they can shown.
You could keep right to free speech but you don't have right to monetizing any speech.
Ben Thompson's idea that social networks shouldn't be able to buy other social networks would be better IMO for avoiding problems like Facebook having too much power from also owning IG and WhatsApp. Not sure what a good solution would be for other companies such as Amazon having so much power.
"We took Trump's voice away, we can do it to you too. We pushed anti-Trump rhetoric and silenced pro-Trump rhetoric... do I need to replace Trump with your name if you don't do as we say?" If there is no fallout for Twitter, how far can they push it? What if Biden decides to do some policies that Twitter isn't in favor of? Does he get shut out too? The EU can see very well that the same thing can happen to them easily as well. Shit, even the ACLU threw an objection and concern over this and they hate Trump just as must as any other democrat. The big problem is, and you have to be fair, Trump put up a hell of a PR fight the past 4 years and did rather well up until the very end. Most politicians have crumbled from less pressure than what he experienced. Not many others will be able to hold out as long as he did. This extra weapon of social media and Silicon Valley taking down the public voice of politicians is really fucking dangerous, no matter the political spectrum. They're a handful of billionaires or near to billionaires who have direct control of what a large portion of the human population sees as fact and truth... and they have no one to oversight them.
It is actually disturbing in that it seems by implication that many politicians are portraying what Trump was doing as legitimate speech - and in doing so they are effectively legitimising it. Whereas anybody I am sure in the big tech decision making on this was treating this as "shouting fire in a theater" exception to speech. I think it will be very harmful if the "legitimate speech" interpretation becomes the dominant view - in that case we are effectively setting a precedent here that inciting a riot to overturn your own government is legitimate free speech.
I assume, that he was not allowed to ban people who were simply toxic and posted death threats - all the things that are considered norm in twitter(but other users are able to ban at least some of them to maintain healthy discussion). Also, it is not consistent with how just recently twitter allowed all those death wishes, when it was announced, that Trump had covid.
And I am even more curious about banning of other key Republican politicians - on what grounds? Were they also inciting violence?
Big Tech destroyed this hope the moment it banned Parler and everyone cheered this ideological censorship.
Big Tech crossed every line in launching a coordinated attack on a rival. The damage this has done cannot be quantified. The ideal way to have gone about this is involvement of Courts/Legislature to decide if Parler should be banned or not. Not a group of private companies deciding to fuck a competitor. It is a horrible horrible precedent which has absolutely zero excuses.
The tech giants have established that if they disagree with something (using their preferred value system), they feel they have the right to take action.
Let’s say the an EU minister proposes something that’s antithetical to US principles but is lawful in the EU, now tech giants feel emboldened with the right to take action _unilaterally_ without the right to an appeal.
I believe this is what the EU fears and wants to avoid.
Here's a less flattering angle on the same worry. Europe is caught pants-down. They are realizing how weak they are in tech and scrambling to fix it. The facts:
- None of the 20 most valuable companies in the world are European. Most are US or China based, and many are tech.
- A tiny number of successful startups are European. I think their biggest in the last 20 years is Spotify...
- This is a sad showing for a continent with a $20t GDP and 500 million citizens (EU + UK).
- Software is eating the world. This was a lukewarm take when pmarca wrote that famous essay a decade ago, now you could almost restate it past-tense.
Europe is simply not participating in that process meaningfully. Sure, there have been vast shifts in many aspects of life--Europeans spend just as much time on their iPhones as we do, on Twitter, no FB, on Insta, on Gmail. But they neither invented nor control the development of any of those things.
So yes, European world leaders are belatedly realizing that a guy in SF with a footlong beard could ban them from Twitter at will. But that is the tip of the iceberg. They have developed deep dependency on US tech in all kinds of ways. If GSuite or O365 went down tomorrow, how many EU governments would be able to get any work done?
This situation mirrors the (more extensively discussed) military situation. Europe has complacently decided that the US can manage it for them, and are now experiencing a rude awakening.
The thing is, Europe missed out on the Software&Internet and the reality is, it is not the only tech or only high value product out there. However, software creates enormous monopolies, therefore when you do a top list USA has everything.
If you can look further than the toplists, Europe is doing strong on the long tail and that is how you got your 20T economy with no single unicorn in the charts.
Europe's biggest problem is its demographics - People are getting older and dying, not enough young people replace them. That's why it's percentage on the world economy is shrinking, it's not because Europeans can't code.
Google, Salesforce or Microsoft should not be able to wake up one day and say, you know what, I don’t like those people in Czechia, let’s cut their GSuite/O365 Access with no time to migrate.
These companies have too much heft and influence. And democratic governments have not caught up to that.
Authoritarians know the deal and that’s why they control them. They know how they can sway elections, not through ‘bots but via their algorithms and suppression or promotion of narratives as they see fit.
Those who were on the receiving end of this censorship were often forced to form alternative means of communication, but often it was the case that these powerful groups colluded to ensure this was not possible.
What does it mean when the only objective voice to comment on matters originating within the borders of the USA comes from outside of those borders.
Silicon Valley has become so powerful and moneyed that they believe they are supra government.
Tristan Harris comments that the laws that are designed to protect us, don't exist within the realms of social media.
What I would like to see is a company being obliged to enforce its terms of service promptly, and not allow profitable rule-breakers to continue. Especially when their abuse of the service also breaks laws.
Selective enforcement of private contracts is totally legal, and the EU('s executive branch) is uncomfortable with the public policy implications of that when it comes to social media and would like new laws passed to add extra regulation on uniformity and specificity of moderation policies.
I think that some cases whereby $importantperson isn't banned because they're important are valid. It helps to have a public and verifiable record of a public office holder making provably false claims, particularly when a warning is then slathered over said bullshit. But the thought of a government body deciding when a company may and may not enforce its rules is chilling.
So long as there is room for interpretation, and the consequences (politically, economically, etc.) of those interpretations are potentially far reaching, leaving it up to private companies with no oversight isn't a good option.
It's highly unlikely that the latter is more friendly to fringe or extremist views (setting aside whether or not that's a good thing).
-- Winston Churchill
For any kind of platform that allows arbitrary users some level of control over the content that will be hosted, the options for ensuring that content is not harmful are:
* Community Moderation: users control contributing and moderating content. The platform chooses moderators, or enables voting for them. This gives users and all people (i.e. citizens) the most power, but has the most potential for abuse of the system to enable using the platform to host, spread and share harmful content.
* Platform Moderation: wholly moderated by platform chosen moderators. This is probably the most common system. The platform will use its own set of values and policies to decide what to moderate, and will likely target the most popular content deemed harmful. Per platform, this gives platforms the most power, but platforms much compete with each other
* Government Moderation: moderation likely by the platform, but with oversight from government - policy and values may be defined by the government; failure to moderate according to the government legislation could result in penalties or termination of the platform. If the government has sufficient checks and balances and citizen influence, this may be a desirable system, but if the government is not "of and for the people", it could also be used by the government to moderate opponents of the government as decided by that government. Anyone opposing the absolute power of the government may find their content "moderated" away. This is the stuff of nightmares for the founding fathers.
"When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny." [1]
-- Thomas Jefferson
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_democracy
[1] https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/whe...
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these garbage fire bonanzas ablaze with calls for violence & insurrection with the flimsiest fakest of fabricated basis underneath are unfortunately really bad tests of how monopolistic big tech is, because they doom themselves, seem rankly incompetent, destined to self immolate. competitor platformsust follow some law, which is in many cases what companies do when they kick people off: protect themselves & the rest of the platform from grave risks. i believe companies should be encouraged to find their own ways to remain safe, that nation's ordering them around to control speech in certain governmentally dictated ways would be horrific. cyberspace doesn't deserve this infringement, people don't, even big tech, sucky g useless as it is, doesn't. this isn't china. we don't do that here.
Don't misunderstand me - I absolutely think that those who allowed Trump to directly incite violence for years have blood on their hands. They absolutely have liability for this. They disgust me. But now suddenly the conversation seems to be that Twitter, for example, should have been forbidden from kicking Trump off now or years ago when they should have. So who would share the blame now?
Ability to selectively enable or disable people from being able to access voters is tantamount to having a huge influence on election results.
While in the past you could avoid using social media, today this is THE way to reach most of voters. Most people no longer pay substantial attention to what happens on television, forgot what radio is (it is a little bit of noise your car gives so that it is not quiet) and don't read printed papers.
Now, this time it happened for Trump and we can discuss whether this was or was not a good decision, but the question is who is going to wield the power like that in the future and whether it is even permissible do to something like that.
On one side you have the idea of free speech, but then added to social media you have inevitable disinformation as anybody can get amplified and amount of information is such that it is not possible to verify and vet it.
In the past you would have handful of news-generating organizations and it was easy to spot and call false information. But this is forever gone, there seems to be a need to find out some kind of new equilibrium that will allow detect and filter misinformation without anybody having power to singlehandedly "vanish" people from public life.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12...
--- https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
Article 10
Freedom of thought, conscience and religion
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right includes freedom to change religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or in private, to manifest religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.
2. The right to conscientious objection is recognised, in accordance with the national laws governing the exercise of this right.
Article 11
Freedom of expression and information
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
2. The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.
Are all EU citizens entitled to publish on Twitter for instance, and can the EU force Twitter to publish?
Is that the EU version of freedom of expression and information?
"No one shall be liable to be tried or punished again in criminal proceedings for an offence for which he or she has already been finally acquitted or convicted within the Union in accordance with the law."
which slightly surprised me, as the UK has allowed this for about 10 years, (I think). (I guess "finally" may be a getout.)
I'll bet $100 that companies would love to wash their hands of a lot of this stuff, and just be able to 'comply' with some regulatory things so they can't be blamed or get into trouble one way or another.
Any ban or removal should come from the elected Government. In this case it is the US Congress. This is what the World expects as this is how all Democratically elected Governments all over the World function. It is the Government which has a final say.
Now when Big Tech unilaterally decides to censor a sitting US President and bans a rival competitor this will cause every World leader and Government to sit up and take note. Everyone will ask themselves: are we now supposed to trust US Government for its word? What if tomorrow a private company decides to censor the US Government? If they can ban the US President's account they wield more power than even elected representatives. Why then should we liaison with US Government and why not directly talk to Big Tech as they seem to hold the power over even the US President.
Then it goes further than that: how do we trust that the incoming President won't be censored? Since all communications happen through a digital forum where one of the Big Tech companies is an intermediary in relaying such communications what is the guarantee that the communication is not tampered with? When Big Tech enjoys so much power in US, that it can censor the Government itself, then why can't this also be possible? If Big Tech can attach disclaimers to a sitting US President's content then why can't they tamper with the messaging too?
This sort of confusion existed for countries like Pakistan which has dual power centers: the elected Government and the military. You won't know whom to talk to as one can override the other. Which is why you have so many successful coups in Pakistan. What Big Tech has done is set a very dangerous precedent. Now no World leader will trust the word of the American Government at face value and will double/triple check every communication.
If both Apple and Google ban your app when the app is legal and useful, is it good for society that there is no way around this?
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
Large part of the bill of rights exists to protect individuals from the majority.
Anti-discrimination, fair housing many other laws exist to protect against majority.
Democracy is not autocratic rule of the majority. It is rule by compromise.
Leaving B2B aside, for B2C it is basic consumer protection laws common in EU. If a service is offered to a general public, then provider may not arbitrarily exclude someone from using it. If a provider excludes someone for violating ToS, then the excluded one may dispute that at appropriate authority / state office.
I don’t see why a business that presents itself as a quasi-public space that is generally open to all at no cost should not have some duty to be faithful to the way it represents itself and to treat its users fairly.
All the leverage is in the margins. Are the people we're kicking off arguing for a change or are they supporting people arguing for violent change?
You want to make that call? Or more honestly would you like _me_ to make that call for you?
A lot of people would argue that is the situation we have now.
The government wasn't against twitter because they were looking like they were going to remove right wing stuff, they were angry because they were being fact checked.
Tech benefited enormously from moving fast and being mostly unregulated as a result. Looking at the finance industry though, every new law was written in blood or tears over the course of centuries. Now blood has been spilled by social media in the US Capitol and the world has taken notice.
It's not going to be easy or fast, but good policy can help keep Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg from controlling the political outcomes of every democracy in the world.
You local electrical company probably can't shut off the power even to a meth lab as long as they are paying their bills, and even if they do not you are usually required to go through a rigorous process before you can take action.
This isn't really about freedom of will, this is about the bottom line and companies trying to score cheap points. If it was pretty darn clear that no amount of pressure that does not go through the courts could make Amazon or Twilio cancel Parler there wouldn't be as much noise about it.
There's a reason why no one is tweeting at the power or water companies to cut off their services to the Trump campaign, it's not because there aren't people that would like to see that happening, but because even the most deranged of them know that it cannot happen.
You already have precedence for this, back when corporate towns were a thing that's where the public square concept emerged despite the entire town technically being corporate property it was deemed that people cannot be silenced on the streets or in the town square.
The issue here is that the Internet isn't treated as a public square but as solely corporate property and yes sadly without a bunch of corporations the internet doesn't actually exists.
You cannot get to the point that you need to essentially become a global Tier 1 ISP before you can put on a service that does not break any laws but that would essentially be immune to being canceled, and if you want to monetize it you probably need to become major payment processor if not an an acquiring and and issuing bank too because as we've seen in the past PayPal/PCI can easily prevent you from taking any payments.
We do not have an open and distributed network a handful of companies can block any content they want at any time, TOR, VPN's or anything else won't save you and won't help you your ISP can block anything it wants with a single line in a config file and if it's not on Google it might as well not be accessible. Your hosting options today are rather limited especially for a platform that needs to have a global reach and that you couldn't take down with a single 5G connection.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft and a tiny handful of others are the only ones who can provide you with that infrastructure, if you are going with a smaller or more traditional hosting provider then there are only a handful of CDNs that can provide you with content distribution and DDOS protection/mitigation services.
If you want to grant companies the same freedom you grant to people when it comes to making decisions you need an actual free market for that, but globally the internet isn't a free market and no one can make the argument that it is free yet alone a free market when in order to provide a legal service (regardless of how distasteful it is) without any of the existing market players being able to completely shut you down you have to build a Bank of America, a Visa,a DeepOcean and a Cloudflare first.
add political views into the list of non-discrimination laws and let the courts decide, if it's important enough to have to be legislated, that's the closes framework upon which to model it.
That's what judges and courts are for. Neither government nor platforms should be able to make these decisions unilaterally.
Parler was the number one downloaded social media app in the app store after all. According to BBC the most popular accounts on Parler were people like Sean Hannity and Ted Cruz, who each had followers in the millions.
Of course Parler had a problem with some - maybe even many - violent people, like the Washington rioters, but it seems to me that the vast majority of Parler users were not violent people, but fairly normal republicans of the kind that are still not banned on Twitter and Facebook (like the two persons I mentioned).
Removing the hyperbole on each side, I think it'd be interesting if the EU looked into this to conclude if the shutdown of Parler was ok or not.
The leak of the Parler content shows that they were actively moderating the platform to push it on the far right side, using millions of fake accounts with admin privileges.
So Amazon terminated their account.
The ban of Trump from social networks is a different topic, I don't think Trump has a big fan base in EU, but it's the perfect excuse to demand what many have been advocating for years now: political control of the social network decisions, given that they can influence the public opinion (Facebook admitted today that their platform was used to spread violence in Myanmar)
I have personally advocated for putting social network under public scrutiny or close their operations in EU.
I am glad that the European Union is finally taking steps in that direction.
EDIT:
source -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25731121
Do you have a source for this? I tried googling it for ~5 minutes, but my google-fu is too weak.
The two persons you mentioned as "fairly normal republicans" had their contact information carried by an armed terrorist who invaded the Capitol on the hunt for "bad guys": https://twitter.com/johnkruzel/status/1349061894418685953
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