Twitch and Reddit enacted bans simultaneously:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/29/reddit-bans-pro-tru...
https://www.engadget.com/twitch-suspends-donald-trump-accoun...
Seems odd for multiple independent companies to act in concert like this.
Twitch and Reddit enacted bans simultaneously:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/29/reddit-bans-pro-tru...
https://www.engadget.com/twitch-suspends-donald-trump-accoun...
Seems odd for multiple independent companies to act in concert like this.
It is coordinated. Remember when Alex Jones got banned from literally everything on the same day?
The reddit bans wave was leaked in advance. The more actors involved in a coordinated action the harder it is to keep a secret.
Original leak: https://old.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hh1pjd/redd...
> Apparently they're going to ban a large number of subs on Monday and frame it as an anti-racism initiative
Has this been announced or was this just speculation?
https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/hi3oht/updat...
It actually happened today. Check Reddit‘s /r/announcements for the official thread.
"Apparently they're going to ban a large number of subs on Monday and frame it as an anti-racism initiative"
Frame it? It is an anti-racism initiative. It may have side effects as well but that is the main driver.
They did not ban racist subreddits like /r/blackpeopletwitter and /r/fragilewhiteredditor.
If you don't know, to post on /r/blackpeopletwitter you have to send a photo of your skin color to the moderators. They are literally racially segregating users.
Exactly.
Just because someone claims something is anti-racist doesn't make it so. Almost all organized evil is done in the name of something good. Look at how laws like the The Patriot Act are named.
The people behind these bans are leftist extremists going after their rightist extremist enemies. Their "good intentions" are paving our path towards hell.
“While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”
https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/acc...
> “While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”
The majority where? I can't find any specifics on what the majority qualifier is applied to (ex: the community in which the speech occurs, the geographic community of the user, etc).
It's even worse than that. People can honestly disagree about whether the term "racism" accurately describes something or whatever, but that's a far cry from actively condoning ("..this rule does not protect...") the whipping up of hate towards a majority of the population. The internet is full of nihilists and misanthropes who genuinely hate everyone and everything - I'm sure they can't wait to abuse this weakness in every way they can possibly think of. All for teh lulz, of course.
I’m guessing the whole thing is very USA centric, and they haven’t really thought through the implications of having users from across the world.
In the majority... in the United States?
> “While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.”
So according to this rule, a racial minority can call members of a "majority race" sub-human, but not vice-versa. And yet, majority/minority are regional properties. How do you know a redditor's region in order to moderate their comment appropriately? Or are reddit employee regions the only ones that matter?
It's clearly a farce. Majority/minority status is a red herring. It's used only to enable reddit and mods to selectively apply the rules for their own ends. The fact is, it's unethical to call any race sub-human, regardless of whether the majority shares your views.
> So according to this rule, a racial minority can call members of a "majority race" sub-human, but not vice-versa.
According to academia, this is correct: racism only exists in the context of class based oppression.
Of course, many people disagree with this definition.
I don't know how widespread this belief is but I personally know people who believe this and it seems to be only spreading in the current heavily polarized environment. It is truly astonishing to witness
What does “academia” have to do with anything?
> What does “academia” have to do with anything?
Well, when people are arguing over the meaning of words - in this case "racism" - it is sometimes useful to reference what the "experts" think. There are entire fields of study within academia dedicated to this topic (often but not always including the word "critical").
Of course, whether or not said people have anything meaningful to say on the topic is not broadly agreed upon.
These redefinitions probably grew out of "critical theory" which is taught in social studies. The initial protests citing this line of argument seem to have started on college campuses, so there might be some merit to saying it grew out of academia.
> According to academia, this is correct: racism only exists in the context of class based oppression.
Which is silly on its face. If two opposing races that hated each other held equal power, they might not be able to get the upper hand on the other, but they still hate each other solely on the basis of race. Is this the "non-racist" utopia they're after?
But that policy is not even talking about racism, however defined; it's talking about hate. Hate is hate, no matter who it's directed to. Prejudice is prejudice.
Except it's apparently fine to hate the haters. Dehumanization is alive and well, even among progressives.
Yep, hating the new Nazis is just fine. They're still people, no need to dehumanize them.
Hate is innately dehumanising.
Also, don't be so casual throwing around "Nazi". I've also seen liberals calling for conservatives to be put into camps.
So we can never denounce hatred and bigotry without being hypocritical? We don't want to be hypocritical, right? So we should never denounce hatred and bigotry! Brilliant!
I am super, super tired of "if you denounce bigots that makes you just as bad as them."
If you can't denounce without getting into dehumanization, you're guilty of exactly the same kind of hate that the most virulent racists in history are guilty of.
It's never okay. Not for any reason.
I didn't use the word "dehumanize," did I?
No, but you replied to GP in defense of "denouncing hatred and bigotry" (something they didn't even argue against) without directly addressing a pretty important point, i.e. dehumanization (which they did).
Was there another way I should have read your comment with that in mind?
I suppose I am just very weary of a particular style of argument in this debate, which -- in addition to the tactic I called out -- frequently seems to include restating what the other person said as something worse, and then arguing against that restatement. And with all respect, that's what I think is happening here.
The person who wrote "Dehumanization is alive and well, even among progressives" was responding to someone who wrote "But that policy is not even talking about racism, however defined; it's talking about hate. Hate is hate, no matter who it's directed to. Prejudice is prejudice." (That is literally the entirety of their comment.) So at least the way I read this thread, "dehumanization" was introduced as a rhetorical device to equate "prejudice is prejudice" with "dehumanize your opponents."
Given that I'm being downvoted repeatedly, I guess others don't see it that way, but I'm going to be blunt. I just reread the thread and I do not think I'm the one giving things an unfair reading. I don't see a call for "dehumanization" here, and if folks are going to come down on me for failing to address an argument that isn't being made, I don't know what to say. ("Have you stopped beating your wife yet?")
> The person who wrote "Dehumanization is alive and well, even among progressives" was responding to someone who wrote "But that policy is not even talking about racism, however defined; it's talking about hate. Hate is hate, no matter who it's directed to. Prejudice is prejudice." (That is literally the entirety of their comment.) So at least the way I read this thread, "dehumanization" was introduced as a rhetorical device to equate "prejudice is prejudice" with "dehumanize your opponents."
With respect, that's not at all what's happening. I started this sub-thread with this comment [1] criticizing the wording of the policy which emphatically does not focus on just "hate is hate", and "prejudice is prejudice", but is worded specifically towards protecting "marginalized groups".
And it's quite clear on reddit that it's not applied even-handedly to both minority and majority groups. If you think otherwise, go try defending Trump supporters as an experiment and see what happens.
So my comment here [2] to which you objected was not "restating what the other person said as something worse", but was raising the additional point that, despite the policy, hating on the majority is accepted as perfectly fine on reddit, and plenty of other places (Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23682471
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23683058
> So we can never denounce hatred and bigotry without being hypocritical?
How do you get from "don't hate the haters" to "don't denounce hatred and bigotry"? Seems like you're missing a step like, "denouncing entails hatred". Do you actually believe that's true?
There used to be this notion of condemning the act and not the person. It actually used to be a progressive principle arguing for criminal justice reform geared more towards rehabilitation than punishment. It's sad that this nuance has been lost.
i hate the hater-haters
> For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority
Are they serious? So basically racism is OK as long as it's toward people who are the majority?
Reddit adopts the "Prejudice + Power" definition of racism, not the actual definition of racism
Reddit's definition seems more contextual, it weighs the dynamics of current economic, cultural, institutional, etc... racism
Here is the Oxford dictionary definition:
"The inability or refusal to recognize the rights, needs, dignity, or value of people of particular races or geographical origins. More widely, the devaluation of various traits of character or intelligence as ‘typical’ of particular peoples. The category of race may itself be challenged, as implying an inference from trivial superficial differences of appearance to allegedly significant underlying differences of nature; increasingly evolutionary evidence suggests that the dispersal of one original people into different geographical locations is a relatively recent and genetically insignificant matter."
If you look at academic definitions, yes, often they will state racism is from the majority to the minority. It is rather odd.
I don't understand this. For all of my life I thought racism = discrimination against someone due to their race. In the same way that sexist = discrimination against someone due to their sex. Ageist = discrimination against someone due to their age. Is this not the clear cut definition anymore? At what point did it diverge?
>Is this not the clear cut definition anymore?
People who want to discriminate on the basis of race and sex have contrived a definition of racism/sexism that exempts themselves.
>At what point did it diverge?
The 1980s apparently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory
If you haven't noticed, we've spiraled down to the point where group think determines what is real, not facts or logic. If you can convince thousands people to scream that something is racist, then it "becomes" racist, no matter whether it meets any factual concrete definition of what racism is. Once this behavior started, it was then used as justification to change the definition of racism to something it never used to be.
An '-ism' is an ideology which is used for organizing the world. The big difference is whether it's an individual ideology or a systemic ideology.
1 person renting out property = a rentier. Private ownership of land = capitalism.
1 person not hiring women = a misogynist. Companies not offering parental leave and assuming the primary caregiver is the mother = sexism.
Zuckerberg saying "young people are just smarter" = a bigot. Focusing on algorithms in software interviews which new-grads will have an easier time solving = ageism.
It's very common to call a prejudiced or discriminatory individual a "-ist" because the individual is subscribing to an ideology. But, that's emphasizing the individual rather than the society. If you only look at individual people as racist, they feel like isolated cases which don't have good solutions. Furthermore, you're absolving people who aren't explicitly discriminatory but who are still supporting systemic discrimination.
- This company will hire anyone who's qualified, but they're full of ivy-league graduates because they rely heavily on campus recruiters. Even though they aren't prejudiced when hiring, they are classist because they cater to high-class people.
- This bank will offer a mortgage to anyone with a steady paycheck and a safe-investment property. However, due to red-lining and racial covenants, Black people weren't able to purchase safe-investment homes so they didn't get good mortgages.
Granted, it's an uphill etymological battle because the individual usage is so common. When people argue for the systemic definition, they're arguing that we should focus on processes rather than individuals.
Yes. The rule basically says that you can't be racist towards white people.
Asians are the majority, not white people.
Got it, so racism against Asians is the go-to now /s
I've commented about this on HN earlier. Censorship will end up swallowing us all.
Now I guess it's ok to hate me as I'm part of several majorities and people seems to like it.
What am I supposed to do now? Hate myself? Allow others to discriminate me? Make a blind eye to those who think it's ok to hate me?
Damn, I never actually heard this being spoken about on reddit.
It's interesting, I'm not from the US and I find it curious that these situations arise. I can understand and empathise with (as a 'person of colour' as it's called over there) the arguments of both sides, but deep down I find this kind of 'positive segregation' morally wrong.
>Damn, I never actually heard this being spoken about on reddit.
That's pretty much the whole idea of censorship.
> If you don't know, to post on /r/blackpeopletwitter you have to send a photo of your skin color to the moderators.
I think there's a good reason for doing that, given that such a sub can almost trivially become a hate sub for mocking people on Twitter, much like fatpeoplehate. "We want our community to be largely black" seems like a reasonable founding principle.
Let's do a CTRL-H test:
"We want our community to be largely white" seems like a reasonable founding principle.
How do you feel about the statement now?
"White" is a catch-all term for light-skinned ethnic groups with "defaultness" in American society. There is no such thing as "white history," "white heritage," or "white culture," except in opposition to "non-default" ethnic groups.
If you change the founding principle to "we want our community to be largely Russian," that would be totally fine by me.
Additionally, opposition to the "largely black" founding principle implies opposition to women-only spaces and other community groupings that are largely accepted in society.
I think this is a copout answer. "White" usually refers to people of European heritage who have lighter skin in America.
What do generic "Europeans" have in common with each other? As a Russian, I feel like my culture overlaps relatively little with French, German, or English. Moreover, which parts of "Europe" are actually included in this taxonomy? Are Romani considered white? What about Southern Italians? Black people in France? It all boils down to "people of European heritage with white skin (whose ancestors wrote books and stuff that I like)," which is wishy-washy and tautological.
I agree it's a bit wishy-washy. But that's what it means. Everyone (in the U.S.) when they say whites, they pretty much always mean anyone with white skin who have European heritage.
Yup, so even if some poor Croatian guy just got off the boat, as long as he looked white enough for Americans, some of them would say he benefited from American slavery of blacks and must renounce his white privilege.
Spend his whole life being taught about white privilege and is never allowed to say that he understands so he has to get re-educated all the time. If he says he has already heard it before and understands then he is obviously a racist Nazi Trump supporter and must violently be re-educated about his white privilege.
Regardless of your origin or connection to American history, I think it's healthy and socially responsible to face your "default privilege." The point isn't to feel guilty, but to become fully aware of the social structures underpinning your country, and to develop a sense of empathy for those who are forced to consider their skin color every day of the year when you can go weeks without even thinking about it. (And I say this as a first-generation immigrant.)
In any case, this has little to do with the original topic of establishing a black-focused community.
Not sure about whites and blacks in the US, but as far as genetics are concerned, (black) Africans have far more genetic diversity than (white) Europeans.
Africans enslaved in America effectively had their original cultures denied and destroyed. That's why it's appropriate to capitalize Black but not white when referring to American subcultures. (Whiteness isn't genetic. E.g. in South Africa under apartheid Chinese people were legally black but Japanese people were legally white.)
Various whites had their cultures denied and destroyed as well. By your logic White should capitalized as well.
Which "various whites" specifically?
Slavs where taken as slaves and is where the word slave derives from.
We capitalize "Slavs".
(FWIW, Slavic culture didn't originate with the enslaved Slavs.)
Then we should also capitalize White as well as Black.
That doesn't make sense. There is no one "White" culture, so when you capitalize the word in the context of United States of America it refers to the KKK et. al., not to mainstream American culture, which developed in waves of lots of different cultures (not all of which are European-derived.) E.g. the Irish. Treated like shit when they first got here, now we have St. Patrick's Day parades. And so we have Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and so on. They kept their cultures.
Now when we talk about African-Americans you gotta remember that Africa is a huge continent, not a single nation or culture. The people who were kidnapped, beaten, chained, subjected to the horrors of the Middle Passage, then treated like subhumans for hundreds of years, they came from many different cultures, they were forcibly prevented from carrying those with them, and so they have formed a new culture, native to the soil of this continent. That's why it's appropriate to capitalize the word "Black" when referring to Black American culture: it's a proper noun.
When you speak of "white people" in America, you're generally referring to the whole American mainstream culture, which is neither genetically nor culturally Caucasian exclusively. The word "White" capitalized as a proper noun refers to a specific complex of "White supremacist" culture.
In sum:
Black - African American
white - Mainstream American (includes everybody: The fictional character Steven Quincy Urkel could be called "white" in this sense.)
White - racist American subculture
>That doesn't make sense. There is no one "White" culture,
There is no one "Black" culture either.
>so when you capitalize the word in the context of United States of America it refers to the KKK et. al., not to mainstream American culture
And yet if you capitalize Black it doesn't mean black supremacists?
Why do you hold different standards to white and black?
>which developed in waves of lots of different cultures (not all of which are European-derived.) E.g. the Irish. Treated like shit when they first got here, now we have St. Patrick's Day parades.
St. Patrick's Day is not specifically an Irish holiday. It is a Christian holiday which is popular amongst Irish.
>And so we have Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and so on. They kept their cultures.
There are many blacks who kept their cultures as well. Not all blacks were slaves. Many voluntarily migrated to the US.
>Now when we talk about African-Americans you gotta remember that Africa is a huge continent, not a single nation or culture.
You are contradicting yourself. You said "There is no one "White" culture, so when you capitalize the word in the context of United States of America it refers to the KKK" and yet you also admit there is no single "Black" culture.
>The people who were kidnapped, beaten, chained, subjected to the horrors of the Middle Passage, then treated like subhumans for hundreds of years, they came from many different cultures, they were forcibly prevented from carrying those with them, and so they have formed a new culture, native to the soil of this continent.
Not all blacks living in the US were slaves.
>That's why it's appropriate to capitalize the word "Black" when referring to Black American culture: it's a proper noun.
But there is no single black culture. You yourself said that white should not be capitalized because there isn't a single culture.
>When you speak of "white people" in America, you're generally referring to the whole American mainstream culture, which is neither genetically nor culturally Caucasian exclusively.
When I say white people I mean white people. I don't mean anything else. I don't mean culture. If I meant culture I would say culture.
I have never seen anybody saying anything different than I said. Please provide examples of mainstream people using the the phrase differently.
>The word "White" capitalized as a proper noun refers to a specific complex of "White supremacist" culture.
You haven't proven that.
I feel like I was really clear. We don't agree, obviously, but I don't want to argue about it with you any more, so I'm going to go ahead and let you have the last word.
We have a culture in common which encompasses languages, religion, music, architecture, food, etc.
I've only ever heard that question asked about us Europeans, for some reason.
You're literally grouping all dark skin individuals into a group saying they share the same heritage and culture when they don't.
Are black people not allowed to have their own communities?
""We want our community to be largely black" seems like a reasonable founding principle."
Freedom of association is a thing. Now, would you agree with the statement, ""We want our community to be largely white" seems like a reasonable founding principle." ?
See comment above.
According to this post [0] only allowing black people to post was a time limited action. As an Aprils fool joke only black people were allowed to post, which resulted in positive feedback from the community, according to the mods. Now everyone can post again, where as black people can get verified and a special flair (a small visual indication next to their username). Some threads [1] are reserved for verified people, but non-black person can also get verified (but might not get a flair).
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/b93w1j/...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/gumxuy/...
That special flair thing is amazing. I had no idea. I wonder how long before we see forums using it for other skin colors and genetic types. It's exactly the opposite of the trend of text-oriented interfaces democratizing access.
Your [1] has three standards for three groups of people.
1. black people who can verify and get a flair
2. non-white and non-black people who can verify but don't get a flair
3. white people can ask the moderators for entrance, but it only says they will will "receive further instructions." It's not clear what these further instructions are supposed to be.
This is racist and if a right wing subreddit did it, they would have been banned years ago.
I find it odd people aren't bringing up the obvious motivation for this. Simply calling it racism seems obtuse.
Anywhere race is a topic and anyone can join, but there is no verification of identity, trolls can claim anything. How do you think it feels to be a Black member of a forum and see a White person who is taken in by a White troll pretending to be Black? Conversely, how do you think it feels to be Black and be arguing with someone White who is sure you are a White troll pretending to be Black?
It's not a trivial problem, and it's inherent anywhere your online identity isn't linked to your real one.
>but there is no verification of identity, trolls can claim anything.
They aren't verifying identity, they are verifying skin color and using the information to then discriminate against their users. A person with verified skin tone and not verified identity can dress themselves in all sorts of lies just as trolls do everywhere on the internet.
>How do you think it feels to be a Black member of a forum and see a White person who is taken in by a White troll pretending to be Black? Conversely, how do you think it feels to be Black and be arguing with someone White who is sure you are a White troll pretending to be Black?
Maybe we should focus on ideas over identity.
>Maybe we should focus on ideas over identity.
I'm not saying it's a good solution in an absolute sense, nor do I have any idea how well it's working.
I'm just saying I think it's obviously motivated by a real and inescapable issue, and I don't think there is a simple and obviously better solution given the constraint that you want to have an online forum where people can acknowledge and discuss things related to racial identity.
I seem to remember some period in history when people of one race were forced to wear a special flair on them . Yellow six pointed star, on a sleeve, or a chest .
While this is informative, it leaves out one big thing. Rule number 1 in the sidebar is "Posts from black people only".
> This sub is intended for exceptionally hilarious and insightful social media posts made by black people. To that end, only post social media content from black people.
If they do they will be called racists and white supremacists.
And I'm the crazy one when I say social media is only banning right wingers.
Complaining about the /r/fragilewhiteredditor subreddit is kind of just proving their point though.
Why should white people tolerate racism against themselves?
/r/fragilewhiteredditor is not racism. Being a "White redditor" is not a race. The sub is not about hating redditors for being white, but for talking about and possibly getting angry at people who are very blind to their prejudice or priviledges
Honest to goodness, it’s a marketing and advertising initiative. I do think some of the subreddits that are being banned deserve it for violating Reddit site wide rules and refusing to stop, among other things. However, Reddit took on the identity of being free speech oriented early on and gradually eroded it over time, and every time they ban a few bad big subs that are indefensible, they usually coincide bans to a large number of other smaller subreddits that are almost ostensibly somehow adjacent but are not really violating any rules in the same fashion. I think this is intentional, because most of the people who would be annoyed by the collateral damage are celebrating because of the headlining bans. This creates quite a conundrum. Maybe this ban wave is truly different, but it would take me by surprise if so. (I didn’t look into exactly what subs were banned yet.)
At this point it feels like Reddit saves the big important bans specifically so they can be announced in ban waves, because by the time they happen the response is always, “how in the world did this take over a year to be done?”
edit: to my point it looks like they banned over 2000 subs this time. I doubt that list hadn’t been growing over time. I checked out one that was apparently for a podcast and the little bit I could view on Wayback Machine looked pretty damn ordinary, with only mildly edgy jokes. Not immediately casting doubt that there is good reason but it sure feels like every other ban wave I’ve seen from Reddit.
Socialist subreddits being banned for glorifying John Brown (who caused an insurrection against slavery in the South) was not an anti-racism initiative. It was probably a PR move calculated to look good to the mainstream media and co., while being able to "both-sides" conservative media.
Yes they also released a new policy update:
https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/acc...
This sort of multiple-headlines-in-one-day undermines the argument for bans. In the Alex Jones case in particular it appeared he was being selected for a broader community image rather than actions on specific platforms.
Private companies can't (mechanically, not legally) determine who has a moral right to speak. If we had a magic method for figuring that out it'd have been a feature of politics since at least the Roman Empire. Instead we ended up with things like Robert's Rules of Order where the process is controlled as best as possible to let wildly contradictory opinions get aired.
I love Robert's Rules of Order! I'd love to see someone build video meeting software that implemented it somehow. Or does that exist? A brief search was fruitless.
That's a great idea.
The last copy I owned had a great introductory essay, describing the principles a rule of order could help realize: e.g. 1) to focus on potential concrete actions rather than some interminable search for agreement on beliefs; 2) to allow even minority/fringe opinions to get some hearing
> Private companies can't (mechanically, not legally) determine who has a moral right to speak.
Of course not, no one is claiming they are the ultimate arbiters of morality.
But they do have the right to decide who can use their platform (as long as they don’t discriminate against protected groups). The broader public can then judge them positively or negatively for these decisions.
The thing is are these companies platforms like a phone company or are they publishers? Social media companies have argued that they cant be held liable for things posted to their platforms in the past and have tried to position themselves at neutral platforms. When they start to become the arbitrators of what is and is not to be posted they are no longer neutral platforms like the phone company. I do not recall a time when a phone company would cut your service because they found it to be distasteful or controversial.
That said I don't really know what these users were actually banned for saying. It could have been pretty bad and although I might not agree with what they said I hope that people are free to express their thoughts and ideas even though I might find them personally offensive.
>Social media companies have argued that they cant be held liable for things posted to their platforms in the past and have tried to position themselves at neutral platforms. When they start to become the arbitrators of what is and is not to be posted they are no longer neutral platforms like the phone company.
Social media companies don't become more liable just because they moderate. They all do that already. There's no sudden legal line between moderation involving messages with spam or bigotry.
I think anyone amplifying messages on a large-scale in a one-to-many manner, between people that aren't equally engaged in a conversation together, should be considered to start accruing responsibilities over the content of what they're participating in amplifying, in a way that a phone companies largely don't have. I think social media companies have been largely shirking that responsibility by phrasing it as a free speech issue and letting anything go.
It is a gray area and social media platforms sit somewhere in-between being a common carrier and a being a publisher. Your right there is no hard legal line but the more they decide what is allowed and what is not allowed the more they move farther away from being a common carrier.
> Social media companies don't become more liable just because they moderate.
Actually they do:
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/1997-....
And also: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/1997-...
It appears that those links describe the conditions before passage of the communications decency act of 1996. That was all overturned by section 230 of the CDA.
My limited understanding is that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which is apparently one of the most important laws for this topic), passed in 1996, provides very broad protections to web platforms:
1) They can't be held liable for user-generated content, e.g. Facebook can't be sued for a defamatory statement that I make in a post on their platform.
A newspaper that authors and publishes an article making a similar defamatory statement could be held liable. I believe that Facebook could be held liable if the company itself authored and published the defamatory statement, instead of merely distributing my defamatory statement.
2) They can moderate user-generated content visible on their platform as they see fit, without trying to be "neutral" and without losing their liability protections (item 1 above).
Apparently, before this law, internet companies were worried about being held liable for what users said if they did any moderation (and some companies were sued for this).
---
This article seems to be a decent overview: https://www.minclaw.com/legal-resource-center/what-is-sectio...
This longer video (33 mins) from Legal Eagle is nice as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUWIi-Ppe5k. It's been a few weeks since I watched it so hopefully I didn't miss too many important details.
Section 230 protection should not exist. When this was enacted, nothing like Facebook, YouTube,Twitter, etc. existed, and InfoSeek and AltaVista were the leading search engines...
Where does this "publisher/platform" meme come from? It's completely incorrect (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...) but I keep seeing it.
Suggest you give less credence to whoever you contracted it from.
>It is coordinated.
Is there any evidence of this besides the announcements just happening on the same day? It could be companies waiting to announce these moves on Monday morning after days of seeing Facebook embroiled in controversy for not doing this. Or maybe one company decided to make this move and other companies fast tracked anything they had planned on this so they wouldn't be viewed as ignoring this issue.
We have no indication one way or another whether this is coordinated. We shouldn't just assume it is coordinated because it is happening on the same day.
Coordination doesn’t mean collusion, there are plenty of reasons why to coordinate such as to avoid platform hopping and not having to deal with a bunch of angry people flocking to your platform and to share the news cycle.
The likelihood of high profile bans like these not being coordinated is slim.
Collusion has an obvious negative connotation, but any coordination that happens in secret is inherently collusion.
Either way, my request still stands. Is there any evidence to suggest these companies are working together instead of us all just assuming that is the case?
Define evidence, companies share information all the time including their legal departments.
We have had multiple simultaneous ban waves this is not a new occurrence, at this point one would ask for evidence to show its not the case since the fact that this happening is self evident.
I'm pretty sure social media platforms all have the same problematic groups set up for one click deletion. If one pulls the trigger it's trivial for the rest to do it too.
It's the same coordination you see in penguins jumping off an ice flow. They'll all bunch up looking for sea lions they know are lurking. Eventually one jumps in or gets pushed and they all jump in right after.
Ban waves aren’t that simple they take time to prepare the legal, PR, community relations and tech support etc required.
While it probably isn’t as spontaneous as the penguins I also don’t see it as some smokey or well these days vapey dark room where they sit around the table with a bunch of dossiers laid out in front of them taking a vote.
There were several posts predicting this exact outcome yesterday on subreddits drama. The people close to the pulse knew.
Do you care to point to something that backs up that claim? I can't find any mention on that subreddit about anything relating to Youtube or Twitch bans.
https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+site%3Areddit.com%2F...
https://www.google.com/search?q=twitch+site%3Areddit.com%2Fr...
Posts about it have been flying for about a day or two now. Example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DeclineIntoCensorship/comments/hh1s...
That seems to be exclusively about Reddit. How does this show coordination?
You're right. I was more pointing out that "people knew" before hand that a ban was coming, which means other platforms/groups knew about it and so could have prepared for it. If anything that's less of an argument that it's coordinated and more an argument that they're piling on after seeing one platform do it.
Thanks, but in my first comment I described exactly that possible scenario of companies rushing these announcements once they realized a competitor was acting on the issue. Once again, I don't know why so many people are assuming this is coordinated.
Alex Jones lent a camera crew to Wolfgang Halbig when he travelled to Newtown, CT to harass the parents of the first graders murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting. Years and years from now those sites you're referring to will still bear the shame of not having banned him earlier.
In my opinion, while a low point even for a high-functioning schizophrenic with a talk show, that is still small potatoes compared to the journalists who repeated the 'WMD's line. And no one is calling for them to be deplatformed.
FWIW, I think that Bush II, Obama and Trump should all be tried for war crimes. Probably Clinton and Bush I, and all the veeps, but I'm not as informed about them.
I'm sure we don't know the half of it.
Figuring out a widely held opinion is wrong is actually not that easy. As such I have a lot more acceptance for those being wrong while promoting the status quo than those intentionally pushing the overton window. The latter is what should require commitment/conviction, to weed out the bad. And seems to be what is getting axed right now.
Investing into shitty companies will make you loose your investment. Why should this be different with ideas?
Funny, I take the opposite conclusion - figuring out a widely held opinion is wrong is not easy, therefore I think we should be slower to condemn people who get contrarian bets wrong.
To extend your metaphor, if I invest in a bad company, sure, my finances will suffer. But if it were that easy to tell which companies were bad there'd be no reason to invest at all. People who bet against the crowd and are right are generally considered heroes. I agree there should be a cost to trying to be a hero, but I don't think we currently have enough of them and I'm leery of making it harder to be one.
The logic you've provided says nothing about whether we should condemn Alex Jones, so I'm not clear what point you're trying to make. Unless you think we should be slow to condemn people who arrange for the harassment of parents whose children were murdered by a gunman in their elementary school. But that seems like an implausibly villainous thing for anyone on HN to believe.
My point is, he seems to be held to a higher standard than 'mainstream' journalists, despite the fact that these mainstream journalists send signals that they should be taken seriously and he does not. That sticks in my craw.
he seems to be held to a higher standard
He's not. Judith Miller was fired from NYT ending her career as a reporter within a couple of years of her original Iraq reporting. Alex Jones continues to make a living being a repugnant human being.
Honestly, you're dignifying this argument. Judith Miller probably believed the story she was selling about Iraqi WMDs, and in the cause itself. She was wrong. Alex Jones deliberately harassed the parents of first graders who had been crowded into a coat closet and shot at close range. This is the moral difference between a negligent doctor and a serial killer.
The distinction is especially material here, because this is the standard-issue message board argument against journalism, or "the mainstream media": that it must be conducted at the highest standards of scrupulous accountability, a standard far higher than any of us hold our own work to (I like to call this "The Djikstra Amnesia Effect"). And if it isn't, its practitioners are no better than Alex Jones.
Publishing official government statements is bad, including when there is no sane way to independently verify them, but slander you've just made up is fine?
They did a bit more than publishing official statements. They were very vocal about denouncing and shaming anyone doubting those statements including my whole country France was attacked, boycotted and more by these people.
Which specific people and newspaper articles?
Do you not remember the whole "freedom fries" movement?
I remember the meme. My question is, who exactly is culpable of what here? It was promoted by some Republican representative: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2842493.stm
Should the media have .. simply chosen not to report it? ""Censor"" mentions of "freedom fries"?
Is the BBC article itself "denouncing and shaming"? Or just the Republican it's quoting?
For someone who has mostly sat on the sidelines of these debates, the coordination is really disturbing. Who is pulling the strings here?
I'm sure it was done in coordination with the advertisers that pulled their ads. Probably a group coordination between the companies and groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Sleeping Giants, Color of Change, Free Press and Common Sense that spearheaded the original advertising blackout.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/reddit-300-million/
The boogie man, no doubt
I was on ChapoTrapHouse a day before the ban. It was indeed leaked, and the ban happened exactly at the same time that it was leaked. This probably wouldn't have been the case unless it was coordinated.
"WatchRedditDie"? Hilarious. Everything reddit's done today makes me want to use the site more.
I don't think it is a matter of keeping it a secret, my guess is that they don't want bleed over to wherever they haven't been banned yet.
> Seems odd for multiple independent companies to act in concert like this
Yes and no, this is less collusion and more to avoid platform hopping basically if one platform bans them they’ll flock to another even if the medium isn’t identical or the platform is not optimal for their use case any platform would do in times like these.
I’m pretty sure at this point when the behavior pattern is known the platforms inform each other of high profile bans.
The others follow suit to avoid being branded as the one that didn’t or worse as the one that accepted the now pariahs “with open arms”.
I don't know about that. Twitter didn't ban Molyneux and I've not seen people branding Twitter as "The platform that permits Molyneux". (Until me, just now)
If it were platform hopping, it would be ban, then hop, then ban, then hop. It takes time to hop and move all of your content and followers.
This time has not elapsed.
It’s to prevent this, so you don’t have their user base hope to the other platform to express their anger, it also helps when you share the news cycle.
This isn’t an opinion for or against this pattern just an observation on why it makes sense.
Sort of a pre-emptive revenge, then.
Moloenux has been on YouTube for over a decade. He wasn't evading any bans.
Why? There is a massive political movement for racial equality happening all over the country. They are responding to pressure from consumers, which they very much should, because all of these companies have ignored these issues for decades. They aren't coordinating with each other in some conspiracy to silence white supremacists. The -people- want white supremacists to be deplatformed (a good thing!).
The fact that it all happened on the same day does imply some kind of coordination though.
This is why you never give into the mob, even when their point is a good one. That's how individual rights are lost to the collective.
No one has a right to post on Reddit or Youtube.
If we want to be concerned about individual rights, we should at least be somewhat accurate about the definition of the word.
When a set small of companies control your ability to communicate freely on the internet and they act in consort it becomes an issue of free speech.
Honestly, we need to rethink this.
For example, I 'own' my sidewalk, but anyone can protest there. A lot of public space is privately owned, but can still be used for protest.
The internet is the new public square. It can be privately owned, but still forced to recognize the rights of the public.
If by “it” you mean privately-owned websites, then no, it cannot be forced to do so. That would be a violation of the websites’ owners own freedom of speech. Not to mention their property rights! I thought the right to absolutely control one’s own private property was the most sacrosanct of conservative values?
"Private" property becomes morally murky when you extend an invitation to the general public to use that space. Doubly so when a small handful of these privately-owned websites are responsible for carrying a the vast majority of the of the discourse on the internet.
As it stands, Google+Youtube, Facebook, and Reddit (1st, 2nd, 4th, and 6th most popular websites in the country) currently have the power to ban, or worse, guide, all discussion of any topic they wish, with no accountability whatsoever. That is a frightening amount of power to have, and one that I don't believe the free market is equipped to deal with its abuses.
This latter problem is something I'm legitimately surprised more people are not concerned about. Just because they're using this power to target something you don't like doesn't mean it won't be used for more nefarious purposes in the future.
I'm not sure what the laws are for physical protests. Do mall car parks and similar places on "private" but non-enclosed land have to accommodate public protest? Is that sort of thing what you're talking about?
I'm leaning towards the idea that platforms with no barrier to entry should be treated as public to some degree, while those with a sign-up process more involved than email and password are still treated as private.
No... I'm talking about things like 'privately-owned public space' in cities like San Francisco (so Salesforce park), or city sidewalks.
In most cities, the land owner even in downtown will own the sidewalks, but there is an 'easement' that says it's a public right of way. However, it's a public space, and anyone can protest or say what they want there. Their freedom of speech is protected, even though the land is private. The land is certainly private because the landowner is responsible for upkeep and can generally modify it so long as the sidewalk meets certain requirements.
Here's an example in New York City where the Occupy protests took place: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/the-21-million-sidewalk-how...
All this is to say is that we have a model for privately owned public space -- spaces where private interests have certain rights and obligations and ownership but where accomodations for the public must be made.
Here's another example in London and Portland: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/public-space-battle-playing...
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/24/revealed-pseu...
In San Francisco at least -- only using it because I'm most familiar -- certain buildings are required to have public spaces, and you in general have a right to be in this space for free. There are even some beautiful rooftop decks that are privately owned but have been made public to meet the requirement -- like the deck on one kearny.
The pressure is more directly from advertisers. Major consumer brands don't want their advertisements appearing next to objectionable user generated content.
Why not? Because their customers don't like it either.
It all comes down to what is popular and unpopular--which is fine in a marketplace. That's exactly how marketplaces are supposed to work.
It could also be coming from investors. Tencent owns a major chunk of Reddit now.
google legal frequently shares information with legal departments from other tech companies when it comes to moderating/acting upon content/users. in fact, the big tech companies' legal teams share information pretty regularly as they all deal with the same legal hurdles e.g. users from north korea, cuba, ITAR, etc.
it wouldn't surprise me if there was an informal discussion and a decision by google led others to also take action.
This appears to be coordinated election interference from tech monopolists.
People doing political things you don't like is not election interference, anymore than some billionaire bankrolling right-wing SuperPACs is election interference.
Elections aren't held in a vaccum. People 'interfere' with them by persuading, spending money, and by choosing to give political ideas access to their platform.
Media agencies 'interfere' with elections all the time, by exercising their discretion for the last point, and by actively agitating on the first point.
And why would de-platforming racist white nationalists interfere with the election, anyways? Is there a racist white nationalist on the ballot in 2020, who will be hurt by this?
Both kinda sound pretty undemocratic though, so there’s some merit to the claim.
If they were monopolists they wouldn't have to coordinate anything.
Someone doesn’t understand the terms “election interference” or “monopolists”.
Please explain. In which districts in the United States are neo-Nazis affiliated with Stefan Molyneux, David Duke (former leader of the KKK), and Richard Spencer (who was videoed performing a Sieg Heil) up for election, as challengers or incumbents? I was not aware these men were employed by one of the two major political parties, or even one of the two smaller ones.
If the specific figures being banned are not affiliated with any candidate for election, even under a minor party or for local office, how is this "election interference"?
It's probable he is referring to the also announced ban of Donald Trump's Twitch channel.
"coincidence"
> Seems odd for multiple independent companies to act in concert like this.
It shouldn't, all social networks delegate banning "hate content" to the SPLC and ADL. It's much more efficient/effective to do things this way, and more importantly, it assures fair enforcement. Otherwise, you'd have the same content allowed on one platform, but banned on another. This approach is much better for the platforms and their users.
How does outsourcing the decision to the SPLC/ADL “assure fair enforcement”?
Consistency is a big part of fairness, maybe the biggest part. Outsourcing "cancellation" decisions to the SPLC/ADL ensures that people are being consistently banned across all of the major social networks, after a full investigation by non-profits whose entire reason for existence is to do these kinds of investigations. They have, collectively, centuries of experience (and began long before the Internet existed).
Delegating also ensures that cancellations aren't done willy-nilly—the SPLC/ADL are not like a Twitter mob. They have (combined) over a billion in funds to investigate hate speech on the Internet, and to then advise the social networks that they are hosting hate speech—who then make the actual decisions to ban or not ban. Typically, they coordinate and all ban in unison, to avoid weird situations where someone is banned on one (or a few networks), but not all.
Obviously, none of this will feel "fair" to racist Whites, but there are places online (e.g. Gab, Bitchute, etc.) for them to speak freely to other racists where they won't be banned.
This happened a couple years back when they both made some big policy changes related to guns. I'm pretty sure it's just pressure from major advertisers they both share.
Here is an HN link from it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16643040
How coincidental! Surely I am to think nothing of it. Hey, let's talk about COVID-19 real quick ...
The way different actions spread are like watching the Snowcrash virus in real time. Endlessly entertaining.
Act individually, and each company is dragged over the internet rage court individually, and as a bonus the last one to act will be roasted as "only doing it because all others did."
Act together, and they are accused of conspiracy.
I guess their PR teams decided the latter is less hassle for them.
I detest Donald Trump and everything he stands for and enables, but the idea of banning him from Twitch makes me imagine a world where he didn't get banned from Twitch and instead tried to pivot to being a full-time game streamer, and that makes me laugh at least a little bit.
He would probably get banned for cheating
It’s like the nuclear arms treaty. If one company doesn’t ban these accounts, it can gain all the users who subscribe to these people and benefit. All companies agree to potentially lose these users, so no one profits from doing the so called “wrong thing”.
Same thing with mask use in airlines. Some companies do not want to enforce mask use until all airlines do it, because they do not want customers opposed to masks leaving them for competitors that do not require masks on flights.
The public square is owned by private companies and they're enforcing anti-first amendment principles. One can't even argue that these banned people can move to another platform if they're all coordinating.
Leftist extremists are effecting public banishment of their rightist extremist opponents.
It wouldn't be as bad if leftist extremists were getting banned at the same time. The problem is that leftist extremists have bullied the mainstream left into extreme action.
Today, Reddit banned the Chapo Trap House left extremist group. From someone not involved in either extreme, it appears to me like they're being consistent and banning people for behavior and not politics. I've not heard anyone calling for George Will to be deplatformed, for instance.
Just checking, but you know the standard for "consistent" is not "at least one far left extremist group was banned" right?
That is absolutely not the definition of consistent, so I have no idea why you've tried to square this circle. Consistent means proportional enforcement without political bias, which has clearly never been a priority for reddit.
After all, reddit has repeatedly targeted right-leaning subs with shadow bans and stealth editing including directly from the CEO. Which left-leaning subs have received CEO stealth editing treatment?
I don’t know. Which left-leaning subs, specifically, have violated the Reddit ToS in the same way that the_donald and the various “clown world” subs did and were not treated the same?
ChapoTrapHouse regularly called for violence and was never deranked, shadowbanned or had comments stealth edited by the CEO, for example.
There are dozens of affiliated subreddits just there.
People get regularly banned for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and many other kinds of hate, whether their profiles say 'D' or 'R' or something else. If many of their profiles tend to say 'R' or otherwise have similar political views, that's not an indication of bias on the part of platforms.
/r/politics not being banned completely invalidates your point
All people regularly get shot by the police for committing crime and other kinds of violence. Whether they're black white or something else. If many of them happen to be black, that's not an indication of bias on the part of the police.
Just a simple substitution, and now we see that this is just bad thinking.
Absolutely false. It means more of them have been banned, not more of them are participating in that. You're assuming equal enforcement of the rules, with absolutely no evidence to support that.
Reddit after all developed moderation tools like shadow banning and deranking and used them exclusively against right-leaning subs, including stealth editing from the CEO.
What part of the first amendment covers private companies?
but isn't the world of "private property" what the right wants? This kind of world, where there are no longer any public squares, but everything held in private is the world the right asks for. This is the kind of world we end up with. The irony should not be lost on them right?
It's not right-wing as much as a particular kind of very free-market-focused libertarianism. But, yes, I've thought about this discrepancy, too.
In practice, big services like YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, et. al., are going to get heat from all sides of the political spectrum. Right-wingers are positive Twitter is suppressing them, yet left-wingers frequently complain Jack Dorsey is a cryptofascist. Both of them are pushing these theories on... Twitter. And they get thousands of retweets. You would think that irony would not be lost on them, but you would be oh so wrong.
Not quite though. The right -- including libertarians -- often advocate for regulation, just less. You would be hardpressed to find a lot of libertarians disagreeing on whether or not people should be able to protest in privately owned public spaces. For example, sidewalks are privately owned in the United States, but you are allowed to hold a protest on one.
First amendment only protects you against the suppression of free speech from the government. It definitely does not give you the right to say whatever you want, wherever you want. Private companies have complete authority over which speech is acceptable on platforms run by them.