
White House drafting order on tech industry 'censorship' - ga-vu
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/07/white-house-tech-censorship-1639051
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tdb7893
This doesn't sound good. The government choosing what's on my feed is way
worse than Silicon Valley companies doing that. I've switched companies over
not liking my feeds but it's much harder to do that with governments.

Edit: it's not that I don't think they should have any control but this is
explicitly that they don't like how they are being treated politically
(instead of threats of violence, or other more established reasons that censor
things).

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blockmarker
It was inevitable when they started censoring the red team. I for one am glad
that they are researching how to do it, social media is the new public square,
and no entity should be able to control it.

The article itself says that Republicans are skeptic about the government
deciding when it is politically fair, so it will probably end up being a more
elegant solution, like removing CDA 230.

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pacerwpg
I really don't believe it's Twitter's fault that a small subset of users are
unable to follow the rules of their service. People get reported for breaking
the rules and if they do it often enough they get banned. They can't relax
their enforcement because one group of people breaks the rules more often.

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m0zg
The problem is not that users aren't following the rules. The problem is that
enforcement is, shall we say, very selective. To give but one example, Mitch
McConell's account just got banned for posting a video of a protest outside
his house.

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pacerwpg
The Mitch McConnell campaign account got frozen after it was reported for
posting a video that contained threats (towards the candidate), which is
against the Twitter TOS.

I don't agree with this action, but it's consistent with their TOS. I don't
believe I've seen other campaigns that have posted videos of people
threatening the candidate so I can't make a judgement call about enforcement
consistency.

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m0zg
I don't know if you're intentionally trying to mislead by not mentioning
_which_ candidate, or if you've been misled yourself by fake news, but the
violent threats in the video were agains McConnell himself, from a crowd
gathered outside his house, and not by McConnell himself against anybody else.

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pacerwpg
I said towards the candidate while only mentioning one candidate. That's not
obfuscating in any way.

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quotemstr
Good. People ought to have a say in the rules that govern their lives. Tech
companies shouldn't get to make those rules unilaterally.

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olliej
The problem is that a group has decided that hate speech is a critical part of
the conservative platform. It isn’t, and there are plenty of conservatives who
aren’t hate mongering bigots. But we have an administration that seems hell
bent on censoring anything critical of them and claiming that any limits a
platform may put up to block racism, violence, or general bigotry as being
“censoring conservatives”.

I see no way that this would pass any kind of constitutional review - the fact
that this is coming from the same political group that religiously opposed any
legislation to limit the ability to sell automatic weapons to people who go on
murderous rampages is all the more depressing

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jrcii
Why don’t they start with Hacker News, where you’re permanently silenced if
you express a non-left political opinion.

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patrioticaction
Let’s start by banning hateful people like Donald Trump from Twitter. Let them
find and fund their own platforms for that willful ignorance. They know it’s
hard to survive alone — look at 8chan — so maybe they are willing to play by
the rules if we enforce them.

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ilaksh
Censorship is occuring and it is very dangerous. Just as bad or worse is the
fact that there are such widely divergent worldviews and polarized camps. It's
like people are living in parallel universes.

What's even worse is that both of those universes are highly biased and
distorted.

Society may need to come to terms with the idea that reality is a social
construct rather than a rational one.

