
Silicon Valley Censorship - smsm42
http://www.meforum.org/6844/silicon-valley-censorship
======
jordigh
I hate the idea that just because it's fuzzy to define what constitutes
unwanted behaviour online that we must allow all behaviour. That we'll be
censors destroying free speech if we ban trolls.

That's just not how society works. All of our laws are fuzzy and open to
interpretation. Everything is uncertain. But just because we can't robotically
and unambiguously define all undesirable behaviour doesn't meant that we have
to allow all of it. We don't have to let everyone do whatever they want in the
comments section of every website online. We should do with online
undesirables the same thing with do with any other kind of undesirable: shun
them and remove them from polite society.

Automatic moderation won't be perfect, but neither will human moderation. I,
for one, would be super happy if the bottom half of the internet were readable
again.

~~~
justicezyx
I guess Chinese government shares the same idea.

Joking aside, this is why social science is inherently intractable. The only
way to mitigate is to educate citizens, not censorship or regulations. But
education is not only hard, also highly profitable...

~~~
spaceseaman
The whole point of his post is that ALL governments are founded on this idea.
You would not have a need for government in the first place if it wasn't for
undesirable people doing undesirable things. In the United States, we founded
our government on the principle that governments shouldn't get involved with
the concept of free speech. This doesn't mean all speech is free. We put
certain limits on when free speech takes effect, and this is actually a
perfect example of how the law must take imprecise definitions into
consideration. [Insert the usual, "free speech isn't really what you think it
is" that I'm sure the internet has seen millions of times over].

The poster's point was that commercial platforms must address the same issue
of undesirables. People realized that allowing the government to prohibit
certain forms of speech has the negative externality that governments also
gain the power to regulate _all_ speech. On the other hand, corporations can
never feasibly have that much power. They can only limit speech on their own
platform. There's always another place to speak freely if you wish.

This is why I find the "free speech" argument for not regulating internet
comments intractable. It assumes that since we don't want governments
regulating all speech, we don't want corporations regulating speech on their
platform. But that simply doesn't make sense for idealogical reasons, which I
believe was the top-level poster's point.

~~~
throwanem
> On the other hand, corporations can never feasibly have that much power.
> They can only limit speech on their own platform.

Facebook has more users than any government in the world.

------
sewercake
"Conservative news, it seems, is considered fake news. Liberals should oppose
this dogma before their own news comes under attack."

These policies are, it seems, affecting Left wing organizations as well:
[http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/07/27/goog-j27.html](http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/07/27/goog-j27.html)

~~~
vvanders
My beef with that line is how can I trust a news source that gets something
basic like climate change totally wrong?

I'll happily read a conservative news story that understands facts but many
ignore/lie about them to drive their political agenda.

~~~
nvahalik
> I'll happily read a conservative news story that understands facts but many
> ignore/lie about them to drive their political agenda.

The same can be said about the other side. All too often our ideology drives
what we believe rather than being able to see and sift through people's
arguments.

The problem is that "both sides" tend to read to reinforce what they know
rather than to challenge it. Why not try to understand someone's argument.

For example I've talked to several people who 1) agree climate change is
happening but 2) disagree with most of the people who are very pro cap-and-
trade or emissions limiting.

~~~
vvanders
I have plenty of conservative people(one of the benefits in living in a rural
area) who I love having a solid discussion with. I was specifically talking
about conservative news sources.

Fiscal conservatives I totally grok(and don't disagree with some select
things). However the current mainstream conservative bent seems far from that.
If you have no basis in facts how can you even work towards any common ground?

------
jaredandrews
I think there is a serious conversation to be had about the implications of
this sort of technology but this article reads more like a lazy propaganda
piece.

My understanding is that this tech is meant to be used on a website
forum/comments/etc to organize comments. I find the text that the author
tested against particularly bizarre. Does he disagree with the assessment
these are "toxic" statements? I would love to see an online conversation where
these comments did not lead the thread into flames.

~~~
mikeyouse
> Does he disagree with the assessment these are "toxic" statements? I would
> love to see an online conversation where these comments did not lead the
> thread into flames.

He's kind of a nutter.. his entire raison d'être is to sound the alarm about
Islamism.

The irony of his piece about the evils of algorithms labeling sources is
apparently lost on the person who founded an organization explicitly to police
speech on college campuses: [http://www.campus-watch.org/](http://www.campus-
watch.org/)

~~~
smsm42
You seem to be confusing "monitoring" and "policing". Hint: "police" has power
of coercion, "monitor" has only free speech rights to publish information.

------
subliminalpanda
"The Middle East Forum (MEF) is an American conservative[2] think tank founded
in 1990 by Daniel Pipes, who serves as its president.[3] MEF became an
independent non-profit organization in 1994. It publishes a journal, the
Middle East Quarterly." [0]

A quote, emphasis mine:

"Both these groups are designated terrorist organizations in the United Arab
Emirates". So the UAE doesn't like them. Why should we care that the UAE
doesn't like them? Why specifically the UAE and just them?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_Forum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_Forum)

~~~
yongjik
Clicking through links gave me this gem[1] by a Daniel Pipes:

> "If I were a Muslim I would let you know," Barack Obama has said, and I
> believe him. In fact, he is a practicing Christian, a member of the Trinity
> United Church of Christ. He is not now a Muslim.

> But was he ever a Muslim or seen by others as a Muslim? More precisely,
> might Muslims consider him a murtadd (apostate), that is, a Muslim who
> converted to another religion and, therefore, someone whose blood may be
> shed?

...

> These statements raise two questions: What is Obama's true connection to
> Islam and what implications might this have for an Obama presidency?

Hmm, yeah, definitely someone qualified to lecture Silicon Valley on free
speech.

[1] [http://www.danielpipes.org/5286/was-barack-obama-a-
muslim](http://www.danielpipes.org/5286/was-barack-obama-a-muslim)

~~~
subliminalpanda
The irony in the linked article is also somewhat lost when he cites the UAE, a
country which threatens people to a fine and/or a jail sentence if you
empathize with Qatar in any way [0].

[1] [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-
east-40192730](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-40192730)

------
fosco
The irony, the thread appears to have been knocked off the front page and in
my opinion is the equivalent of being censored.

This happened recently on this thread -->
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14868133](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14868133)

~~~
atom-morgan
Anything politically negative related to SV or YC seems to be almost
immediately flagged.

------
scythe
The solution to online "censorship" IMO is to allow _users_ to choose to view
content which has been stripped of trolling vs. raw content. If this user
control is effective and accurate, most people will choose to hide trolls, and
they'll lose most of their power.

The big problem, more than anything, is that it isn't just "fuzzy" to define
what constitutes trolling; it's very hard, and _furthermore_ it's one of those
problems where human-controlled fail-overs don't work. Individual moderators
suck at controlling trolls on average, both because of their biases and their
limited experience as finite people. I've seen this in action behind the
scenes moderating more than one large Internet forum; sometimes it's very hard
to determine whether a particular user deserves to be banned, particularly
when people are vocal about controversial topics. The most effective way to
promote civility, in my experience, is to ban certain topics _altogether_.

So when people say "should we automatically remove trolls"", I think, well,
should we build a fusion reactor? Should we desalinate all the water used in
Los Angeles? Should we give people an MRI every time they might have fractured
a bone? Should we pull a third of the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere?
Should we eradicate mosquitoes? Should we build Hyperloop?

Sure...

------
magicfractal
Decentralized services is the only way to have the public discourse owned by
the public. We should take the matter into our own hands, use technology to
solve this issue and stop entrusting these big corporations to defend our free
speech rights because it's clear they're more worried about profits for the
next quarter than supporting the environment that allowed their rise in the
first place.

------
1_2__4
Oh look more Daniel Pipes nonsense. As in, conservative idiots complaining
that their desperate attempts at gaslighting, distraction and vilification
don't work so well in a world where their agenda is on full display to anyone
who cares to pay attention.

It's not censorship to ignore efforts to mislead the public. And I'm not at
all sensitive to exhortations from such people that their message is t making
it out.

------
tlb
Are they claiming that the 5-word comment "Radical Islam is a problem" adds
something worthwhile to some debate? Evidence of HN threads where people make
such provocative but unsubstantive comments is that they quickly devolve into
hate-fueled bickering.

I don't know what their filters do, but if they're any good a thoughtful
critique of radical Islam (or anything else) would pass.

------
dan-compton
I find it strange that just a few individuals might codify the language of the
masses and delegate its enforcement to a black box.

------
dustingetz
You don't have to censor it! You just have to categorize it! Use all the fancy
recommendation algorithms to let the scholars scholar, and the trolls happily
troll with other trolls. Users get a birds eye view of everything, and can
zoom in on the content they are looking for. You don't even need an algorithm,
you can crowdsource this stuff with simple moderation tools, just a little
more sophisticated than an up/down button, and don't notify me for content
that i dont appreciate.

~~~
smsm42
Categorization is often a very short distance away from censorship, if it is
made in terms of value judgements such as "toxic".

> Use all the fancy recommendation algorithms to let the scholars scholar, and
> the trolls happily troll with other trolls.

The problem is that this algorithm has nothing to do with scholarly value of
the uterring, while it will be widely perceived as an objective judgement on
such value. If you call somebody a "troll", it's just your opinion, if you use
blackbox algorithm to do it, it's kinda objective truth. That's the worrying
part - because there's no evidence blackbox algorithm is better, and actually
so far plenty of evidence it's worse.

~~~
dustingetz
IRL i am free to choose who i talk to and who i allow to talk to me

~~~
smsm42
But not by using blackbox bots.

