Content moderation is a form of censorship. Censorship isn't always bad. You can look up the history of the term if you want (hint: it shares the same origin as the term "census").
A closely related phenomenon to the pathological applications of censorship is the abuse and redefinition of language for political purposes like what you're doing.
Hunter Biden left his laptop at the repair shop and never paid for the repairs. After waiting the legally required 90 days, the repair shop became the rightful owner of the laptop and its contents.
Once they owned those photos, they had every right to publish them or do whatever they wanted.
The least the press could ask VP Biden would be, "will you pledge that your son will not be involved in any sensitive discussions or allowed access to any sensitive material?"
Even if there were no corrupt actions at all, Hunter Biden represents every kind of HUMINT leverage imaginable.
So if I sell my laptop that still has some photos on it, the buyer would own the copyright over those photos because they own the laptop?
If I deleted the photos from the laptop, but they used a recovery tool to restore them from the disk, would they still own the copyright then?
What if I have the same photo on two different USB drives, and I sell those to two different people, who owns the copyright then?
That doesn’t seem right. Copyright is not generally attached to a physical medium. You don’t lose copyright by losing ownership of the physical medium that holds a copy of the photos/source code/etc.
Oh yes, you're referring to the pictures of Hunter with a crack pipe in his mouth and things like that. You're correct. I took that to be just proof that they had the laptop. Everyone knows that Hunter has a crack addiction problem.
I think I totally forgot about that because of the censored sex tapes and nudes being published by Gnews which are way more salacious.
Content moderation decisions can adhere to this principle or not. Removal of viagra bot spam from a blog comment section is a clear example where content moderation adheres to the principles of free speech.
Removing content on a platform like Twitter simply because the Silicon Valley elitists/leftists that run Twitter don't like it is not in keeping with the principle of free speech (for the record I interviewed and got an offer from Twitter but declined). A good razor to use is to see if the rules are being applied in an uneven way. The principle of freedom of speech is an application of the idea of epistemic humility.
The point you were trying to make is "Content moderation falls under the first amendment" which I can't disagree with.
It's important to understand the difference between a moral principle and a legal instantiation of it (the first amendment). I hope that helps clear things up for you.
How does removing “Viagra bot spam” adhere to the moral principle of free speech? Why does the New York Post get special moral privileges that Bob’s Viagra Store does not?
This is the frustrating thing about this debate: one side tries to position itself as “anti-censorship”, when really that position only extends to cover speech they care about.
To accept the legitimacy of the principle of freedom of speech is to make a value judgement. If you want some pure criteria you can use to make content moderation decisions, then the purest criteria is no content moderation at all.
You can remove obvious spam (e.g. viagra advertisements posted by bots) and still adhere to principles of free speech. Advertisements posted by bots are not written by human beings acting in good faith in the pursuit of truth. And I mean that very broadly. Even trolling can be done in good faith.
> Advertisements posted by bots are not written by human beings acting in good faith in the pursuit of truth.
So if Twitter didn't believe that the New York Post article was written by people acting in "good faith in the pursuit of truth", it's okay to censor?
The intentions of the speaker and the value of their speech are subjective. It's fine to argue that we should be okay with censoring some thing you don't like. But at least acknowledge that you're not making an appeal to "the principle of freedom of speech" — you're just arguing for others to adopt your own boundaries of what's acceptable.
> you're just arguing for others to adopt your own boundaries of what's acceptable
By virtue of operating under the principle of respecting free speech you are making a value judgement and asserting a set of values. There is no panacea or pure criteria you can use besides no content moderation at all. I give the example of spam posted by bots as what I think is an obvious and non-controversial example of content that can be removed that doesn't violate the principle of free speech. Another example might be someone who simply replies "f* you" to every comment on a thread.
I don't know how to further explain this or qualify this. I think you just fundamentally don't understand or haven't actually reflected on what I'm saying.
You are correct, I don’t understand what you’re saying. I agree that there is no panacea or set of pure criteria other than not moderating at all. But there is also no singular principle of free speech beyond that, either — just different sets of tradeoffs that try to cultivate discourse that the moderator thinks is valuable. My issue is that people tend to present their own preferred set of tradeoffs as the One True Set that embodies the principle of free speech.
You mentioned “good faith” before, so let’s say that’s our operating principle: all parties must be speaking in good faith. Now consider that Twitter suppresses the New York Post because they believe they’re publishing in bad faith. Twitter is still adhering to our set of free speech tradeoffs. So why is this comment section full of people saying they’re not upholding the spirit of free speech?
It’s because they want Twitter to make a different set of tradeoffs. That’s fine, and I’m happy to have that discussion. But not when it masquerades as a discussion about whether Twitter suppressing this article is somehow incompatible with free speech as a concept.
It really comes down to whether or not you believe in objective morality. If you do then there is a sensical notion of free speech (or any other principle) even if no one person has a complete picture or understanding of what it is right now (although I would argue that we have a much better understanding of free speech than we do 6000 years ago). It is something we can strive for and recognize since it is an objective thing.
To reiterate my example, I would say a reasonable person living in 2020 would say that removing bot spam from a comment section is a content moderation decision that is in keeping with the idea of free speech.
Even if you believe in objective morality, I think my point about how the discussion should go stands.
Let's say that your definition of free speech is the objectively correct one. You then have to convince people to adopt that framework. You can't appeal to the objective definition; that's a circular argument. So you have to do it on the merits of the tradeoffs, like "bot spam is noise that detracts from a conversation".
To your example specifically, my own opinion is that it depends. I'm fine with removing bot spam from a comment section. But move down to more "infrastructural" layers, and I become less okay with it. For example, I don't think ISPs should try to block spam; they should be entirely agnostic to what content passes through their pipes.
"Content moderation" is about the speech someone running a website is willing to participate in. Requiring them to publish everything their users post would be what's called "coerced speech", which happens to be single biggest no-no of the legal concept of freedom of speech.
Forcing someone to say something against their will is considered far worse than preventing someone from saying something they want to say. That's how "warrant canaries" work: the government can stop you from disclosing the court order you received. But they cannot force you to continue saying that you never received such an order.
I think you're stretching the idea of compelled speech to the point where it loses its essential meaning. Compelled speech is when someone forces you to say something, not when you are prevented from disallowing someone to say something under their own name on your website/property.
When I comment on HN I do not comment as HN itself.
What you're talking about seems like an application of the idea of private property rights (i.e. kicking someone out of your house/office for saying something you don't like).
So this would make censorship a form of free speech.
We've reach a contradiction, so there must be an error in the chain of reasoning. My money is on "content moderation is a form of free speech" being wrong.
No, it’s only that people are using differing definitions of “censorship” and talking past each other.
Content moderation is, in fact, a form of free speech. Twitter (for example) is allowed to choose what they want to host on their website, and what they want not to host on their website. This is free speech – it’s their site, one can’t make them host what one writes. If choosing what to remove from their website is deemed “censorship”, then there’s no contradiction.
Content moderation isn't free speech, it's freedom of association, or in constitutional terms, freedom of assembly.
Consider that Ben Franklin wouldn't publish libelous or slanderous material submitted to his newspaper - clearly a form of "content moderation." He believed in the right of the people submitting such things to express them and would suggest they try elsewhere, but also believed in his right not to publish those views on his "platform."
I don't think anyone would accuse Ben Franklin of not believing in free speech, so clearly a reasonable person can square the apparent circle. Freedom of speech isn't the only right relevant to speech, and freedom of speech doesn't guarantee a right to speak on all platforms.
I'm not sure. What is the exact contradiction that you see?
Viewing moderation as another form as speech seems reasonable to me, or at least as reasonable as viewing a campaign contribution as a form of speech. Perhaps the actual issue is that "free speech" cannot be a guaranteed right shared by all, but is inherently a rivalrous good.
My money is on censorship being a form of free speech. Not a concept that I've heard before, or that (at a glance) makes any kind of sense to me. Can you walk me through that equality?
That is a really loose definition of censorship. Most dictionaries say it is the "prohibition or suppression" of content, which I don't think a content moderation is. It requires trying to stop the spread of the content itself, not just the content on a particular medium.
It's really not. Not legally or in the common use of the word.
If I kick an abusive troll off my message board that is moderation. If a judge orders someone not to use a computer for two years, that is censorship.
To conflate the two is to make the term "censorship" almost meaningless. Platforms all over the web filter spam, pornography, abusive behavior, off-topic posts, etc all the time. It's not censorship.
Similarly, if Twitter was legally forbidden from marking tweets with their fact-checking tags, that would be censorship.
A closely related phenomenon to the pathological applications of censorship is the abuse and redefinition of language for political purposes like what you're doing.