
'Conservatives Will Cease to Exist Online' Speakers Fret About the Tech Bogeyman - haroldkicks
https://reason.com/2020/02/28/at-cpac-anxieties-over-the-tech-bogeyman/
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scarface74
And this is the government that HN posters routinely want to “legislate big
tech”.

But why is this the minority opinion at a _conservative_ conference:

 _I can 't believe I'm doing this, because I'm here to convince you at a
conservative conference that government shouldn't regulate speech,"_

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AlchemistCamp
One doesn't have to be conservative to see an issue with world-straddling tech
companies flexing their ability to shape public discourse.

People use Facebook/Whatsapp/Twitter/Reddit for many of the same things they
used to use email and personal blogs to do in 2005. But with centralized
control and the ability to shape what messages get broadcast to whom, it's far
too great of a concentration of power.

Google is probably the most extreme. Consider the "Evil Larry" thought
experiment. If Larry Page woke up one day in 2016 while he was still CEO and
decided to use Google and YouTube purely to further his own goals, how many
national elections could he tilt while maintaining plausible deniability from
the outside?

My guess is, it would be quite a few. It wouldn't have to look that different.
Counter-narrative results would still show up in search. They'd just be down-
regulated. Links and videos supporting EL's preferred candidates and positions
would be up-regulated and be shown up perhaps 10% more often than previously.
With plausible deniability, election after election could be tipped by a few
percentage points. That's often enough to change the outcome.

There are almost certainly some internal company safeguards that would have
made this kind of crime a difficult, uncertain proposition and I do NOT think
the real Larry Page would ever have done this. But being completely
unconcerned would be a grave mistake. Giant tech companies _already_ lobby
extensively in nations all over the world and do not have goals perfectly
aligned with each of those nations—e.g., Free Basics in India.

It's naive to dismiss concerns about such extreme concentrations of power
being wielded to suppress speech along political lines simply because we're
currently benefactors of the action.

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defertoreptar
Companies have always supported candidates and political parties of their
liking with political contributions. What's different now is that these
companies can now contribute not just with money, but by influencing the
online discussion we see and the search results we get.

~~~
AlchemistCamp
Yes. I see the current tech giants as analogous to a Standard Oil that _also_
owned the New York Times and one of the top two or three papers in every other
city of the country.

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bediger4000
I'm old, so I remember the media consolidation of the 80s. FCC rules about
ownership of newspapers and radio/TV stations, and number of stations in a
given market went away. Soon after, the fairness doctrine did too. This lead
directly to conservative radio. All objections got waved off and laughed away:
the free market has spoken.

Now we have a situation where the same conservatives are getting cut out, and
it's no longer the free market speaking, and the government is supposed to
step in to protect and affirm a particular set of opinions.

I don't think this is a particularly consistent viewpoint, and it makes me
wonder how much the free market had to do with ditching the fairness doctrine
and the less conservative radio and TV voices.

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rektide
Yet they don't support network neutrality. Hahaha.

They don't seem to be interested in keeping 230 protections so companies can
host content without having to be immediately responsible for every word they
host.

They are either incompetent defenseless dolts. Or maliciously picking at
platforms. They certainly aren't doing anything to safeguard & protect hosting
speech online.

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alphabettsy
It’s almost like modern conservatism doesn’t actually believe in free markets
and personal freedom considering this and their stance on things like gay
marriage, cannabis legalization.

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scarface74
Of course they will believe in cannabis legalization the minute it is good for
big corporations.

Also see how drugs became a “disease” and not a “moral failing of culture” the
minute it start hitting “rural America”.

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foolzcrow
The censorship is going to result in civil war.

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cultus
Vague predictions of violence coming from your side only confirms what
everyone thinks about you guys.

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thu2111
This looks like the paradox of tolerance, in the mirror form of how it's
usually invoked.

A key tenet of conservatism is free speech. All together competing in the
market of ideas. The first amendment came from this tradition and implicitly
makes the assumption that only governments are big and powerful enough to
control speech. It dates from a time when pamphlets and newsletters were the
dominant form of political communication. That assumption is no longer valid.

What happens if your opponents systematically attack anyone who speaks ideas
they don't like in an organised way, but they aren't the government? Then they
win because they aren't forced backwards to pamphlets and paper newsletters.
Being tolerant of this kind of intolerance means losing.

The simplest fix is probably to extend the first amendment to large, dominant
providers of communication services. But that's unsatisfying because it's so
unclear what a dominant service is, and anyway, can't fundamentally force
providers to do things they don't want to do.

The core problem is the culture war itself, in which the extreme left see the
right as an evil to be wiped out by whatever means necessary. Fixing that will
require a much more complex set of legislative and cultural changes. These
companies didn't _used_ to be in the grip of leftist hated. Google and Twitter
both used to have strong free speech cultures, which degraded over time.

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krapp
>The first amendment came from this tradition and implicitly makes the
assumption that only governments are big and powerful enough to control
speech.

On the contrary, the First Amendment makes the opposite assumption, that _only
the Federal government should be prohibited from controlling speech,_ implying
that the power to do so organically devolves (as do all powers not explicitly
granted to the Federal government by the Constitution) to the states, the
people, and by extension any private enterprise created by the people.

>What happens if your opponents systematically attack anyone who speaks ideas
they don't like in an organised way, but they aren't the government?

That's what free speech _is_. If you don't like that, fair enough, but people
being able to organize and oppose ideas they don't like, as well as exercising
their freedom of association both to choose with whom they will and will not
associate, is the way a marketplace of ideas in a democracy is supposed to
work.

~~~
thu2111
By "attack" here I didn't mean, respond with an argument agains their ideas. I
meant retaliate in ways unrelated to the topic being discussed using free
speech: banning people, trying to get them fired, etc. There's no legal,
constitutional or philosophical tradition of this sort of thing that needs to
be protected.

~~~
krapp
Venues have rules, so they're allowed to ban people. You don't have a right to
do business in an establishment, regardless of your conduct. That's a
traditionally conservative principle.

A lot of the content you're including in "banned behavior" doesn't come from
mainstream conservatives simply expressing their political views, but from
egregious behavior defended as being conservative in order to strengthen the
narrative of liberal media persecution. Roseanne Barr, for instance (literally
because it's early and she's first example I can come up with off the top of
my head) wasn't banned merely for being conservative but for going on a racist
tirade on Twitter.

Gab and 8Chan weren't deplatformed for expressing conservative views, but
because their cultures encouraged and exploited racial violence for
entertainment. You can disagree with the validity of that versus those sites'
free speech rights, or their responsibilities for the second-order effect of
their "memes," but the fact remains they weren't a victim of anti-conservative
persecution. T_D's treatment isn't due to their conservative views, but their
violations of Reddit's TOS.

Even the case of Carpe Donktum in the article appears to have been banned due
to violent threats, not merely conservative views.

Yet conservatives refuse to even concede that the courtship by the Republican
party and NRA of the extremist right and the shifting of the Overton Window of
conservative activism in the direction of neo-reactionary hatred post Trumpism
is even a problem, much less a relevant factor in this specific debate. The
only thing conservatives seem willing to do is state that exactly the same
phenomenon exists on the left, then proceed to ignore the issue completely, as
if somehow they were proving "the left" hypocritical, and thus invalid. But
even if the left were hypocritical, being hypocritical doesn't make them
wrong... conservatism has a problem with its lunatic fringe regardless, and in
most cases, an unwillingness to clean their own house is why they're getting
banned, deplatformed, etc.

As far as trying to get people fired goes, employment in the US has almost
always been at the sole discretion of the employer. That is due to
conservative efforts and conservative belief in the free market, and they have
fought tooth and nail against unions, labor rights, minimum wage increases,
maternity leave, protected classes, environmental regulations, _anything_ that
would prove an encumbrance to employers' ability to fire at will or do
business as they choose. I'm sorry but I have to play the world's tiniest
violin for them in this case.

The premise that "conservatives will cease to exist online" is FUD and
hyperbole. It's a conspiracy theory. It's not true. I have plenty of social
media accounts, and I see plenty of conservative speech online. The typical
conservative answer to this problem, if it exists, should be the free market -
if it is the case that most or all conservative speech is under threat, then
that presents a clear market opportunity for platforms to serve conservative
speech.

And in fact, that's been done. And those platforms tend to fail because
they're unnecessary, and because they get brigaded by Nazis and trolls. The
marketplace of ideas has decided that it doesn't want to tolerate the sort of
views that conservatives refuse to disassociate themselves from.

