The problem with censorship and I've posted this on HN plenty of times: Today it's the voice of those you disagree with, tomorrow it's your voice.
Can you give an example of someone being banned for voicing an opinion? I'm not from the US so i may not have been paying too close attention. But lies aren't opinions. The truth isn't an opinion for that matter either. Example: The earth revolves around the sun (fact), there is a 5g microchip in the vaccine (lie), the US education system is really bad because I have to give you these examples (opinion).
It is not about the topic. It is about how it is phrased. If I were to say you rank the worst, it would be a lie.
So I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if what you are saying is true. (they are censoring opinions). But it's not an opinion. It's either true or you are a liar.
>We've only just now reached a point where politicians are being targeted, which is kind of insane.
That your politicians can tell prvbable lies but that your electorate doesn't instant fire them is crazy. No accountability. Seems like a much larger problem to me. And people not distinguishing between objective and subjective matters like you will cause the US to collapse. That is my opinion though. I don't have facts, because I can't actually tell the future.
Caution: Admitting ignorance on the topic and then levying an accusation that failure to discern is responsible for nation-state collapse seems like a large leap that one might want to avoid.
As to the rest: Most of the bans I've seen have been based around what I'll call controversial opinions, which I won't bother expounding on but some examples include references to Caitlyn Jenner's Olympic achievements, or whether they are biologically male or female.
Beyond that, I've seen a large number of bannings from those who questioned official government narratives:
* COVID vaccines have affect menstrual cycles
* COVID likely originated in Wuhan
etc.
These all seem to fall under the concept of 'opinion' and at least to the bulleted items, both of those opinions seem to have consensus support now, despite that they might have gotten you deplatformed just a year ago.
There has to be room for civil discourse to question official narratives (for the citizenry and elected representatives alike) and for elected representatives, it seems that "I think the narrative is incorrect and so I should resign to give voice to it" then leaves the politician ineffective at countering what may well be a disaster, and leaves open the possibility of a heckler's veto of sorts wherein the executive could merely inject insincere poison pills into the official narrative and then wait for their ideological opponents to resign in objection.
Point of order on this dichotomy. There is a third option, they could just be wrong. It's only a lie if it is wrong and he knows it is wrong.
I also note that hackernews has stricter rules than those services.
Edit: maybe the popularity of hn is because you can't attack someone and must be civil
Many would argue that this isn't the case, and the "goal" of these services is actually to manage the public narrative at the behest (both directly and indirectly) of the wealthy and the powerful. Did Jeff Bezos really buy the Washington Post because he thought that it would offer the best return on his investment, or because he wanted to hold the bullhorn of one of the largest and most influential newspapers in the USA? Does Twitter choose which people to ban and what information gets promoted/demoted based on what's most popular, or based on the narrative they want to create and/or reinforce? Did the Twitter board really reject Musk's offer because it was too low or because they didn't want to give up control of the narrative to Musk?
Elon musk has stated that free speech is important to him. Let's assume if he purchases Twitter he'll decrease the amount of censorship. I'll make the claim that the less censorship a service has the less money it can make from advertisers.
Some have suggested that, maybe Musk did himself?, that he'll start charging users for the service however a survey stated that 74% of people would prefer an ad based service, if they were forced to choose the numbers are closer depending on the age bracket [3]. I'll claim that people wouldn't pay in sufficient numbers and would flee the service. What other popular social media service requires a subscription?
Therefore Twitter's action is in the best interest of the shareholders.
[1] https://www.tvrev.com/news/whos-still-advertising-with-tucke... [2] https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/tucker-carlson-fox-news-mob... [3] https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/would-people-pay-to-us...
The problem with large social media companies is that:
1. Due to their size and scope, publishers often have to have a presence on there (giving them market power)
2. Due to their size and scope, the platforms often fail to properly adjudicate their rules correctly, and as a policy are often opaque or outright hostile towards their users regarding moderation (you're banned, we can't tell you why, now shut up and stop doing the thing you know you did)
The underlying problem is that these platforms do not properly fund their own moderation staff because it would cost too much. It's specifically the "make money by remaining popular" thing that causes this.
The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story right before an election is a shining example of the problem with Twitter. All sorts of “fact checkers” claimed it was a false story. Some even claimed it was a Russian plot (none of those who claimed such things had their Twitter accounts suspended by the way.) Two years later WaPo and The NY Times verified what the NY Post said all along.
Hillary Clinton maintains the 2016 election was stolen. Yet she’s still on all of the socials. There are still Democrats that claim 2004 was stolen and videos of their theories are still on YouTube.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=77i_pC3lp04
The problem isn’t one of moderation. It’s a problem of so-called fact checking. Twitter, by “fact checking” has become a publisher. Moderation isn’t the same thing as fact checking. HN users do the fact checking (as opposed to HN itself,) but it’s left to the reader to decide for themselves.
Secret algorithms promoting content and opaque fact checking is the real problem with Twitter.
Can you elucidate an instance of someone you know getting banned from Facebook with the actual content they posted? I am genuinely interested because the only person I know banned from Facebook was hurling obscenities at someone's every post and comment over a period of time and got turfed. I would really like to see what benign content can trigger it.
Look at their partners: Facebook, Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Twitch, Discord, Twitter, Reddit. This is how they all derive their terms of service. I noticed any time Discord had new rules or policies usually reddit followed suit.
I also noticed Discord has a new TOS update recently that put a lot of their known policy into black and white, but included an interesting tidbit about being able to ban people for off-platform TOS violations. I forget the name of a Twitch streamer who got banned recently for off platform behavior but if you are still following you will note how a policy in one becomes law in another and vice versa. They are all in some alliance and Elon Musk would likely ruin this.
This is extremely uncommon knowledge that you only run into it if you moderate on Discord and Reddit and dig deep enough. But also it should frighten you that if you do anything wrong all these platforms will ban you in unison and they absolutely can based on their TOS.
