I don't think we are as aware of what that comment means as you'd think.
Yes, we know that Google can delete whatever they want whenever they want. And yet we might get angry as hell... buy we keep hosting our content with them.
You want to get angry? Sure, go for it. You want to get change, though? Then I suggest we stop giving them money to keep doing what they are doing. That, I believe, is the spirit of the parent comment .
Well why do you think DuckDuck Go continues to thrive in the first place?
Even Google itself said that their "don't be evil" motto is quite stupid.
I personally try to ban them from my life as much as possible. Just recently in Google Maps a window popup with history of all the places I drove to. That was a shocker but how naive was I thinking they don't keep this data. Since then I bought TomTom for cash and said goodbye to Google Maps. You should do the same!
I wholeheartedly agree with this. First Amendment was written at the time when government was almost the only organization powerful enough to silence dissenters. Nowadays corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc have more effective control of the venue of speech, and they should be subject to the same scrutiny then, not be given leeway as "private entities".
The government still is the only entity that can silence dissenters. All the entities you listed are limited to merely kicking you off their platform. Facebook can't 404 your posts on Reddit, and none of them and none of them can stop you from standing on the sidewalk with a sandwich board.
Saying that social media platforms should be subject to "scrutiny" (which is pretty vague and non-actionable), or are somehow beholden to public opinion, is nonsense. They're beholden to users, at most. And it's not like Google shut down the blog of of someone saying "GOOG's target price should be about $12". Let's see how much backlash they gets from their users over this, ha.
The government still is the only entity that can silence dissenters. All the entities you listed are limited to merely kicking you off their platform.
From the standpoint of the one being silenced, what's the difference?
The fact of the matter is, the Googles and the Facebooks and the Reddits of the world hold a tremendous and frightening amount of control over public discourse and public opinion. I feel less and less comfortable with them wielding that power unaccountably.
You know how we hold companies to a higher and more stringent standard when they reach monopoly status in a market? Perhaps it's time to look into something similar for large social media sites.
- There are time (and money) consuming technical issues in migrating to another platform, and with the dominance of software-as-a-service platforms, it's often not even possible. Can you migration comments? Is the date going to be set correctly? Can you keep your current layout and images? So even on a purely technical level, you can't "easily" get your blog running again on another platform.
- Access to content: I'm hoping he has backups. Of course, if you developed the content on-platform, it may be nebulous what exactly you need backups of. E.g., did you think to include all the images+comments? If his account was deleted, he may simply not have all the data anymore.
- Network effects (this is the big one): a web site isn't just a bunch of bits; it's a place people visit. Being down for any considerable length of time means those visitors will drift away; the attention you've gained will be partially lost permanently. And that's the best-case scenario. In many cases, you cannot keep url intact, in which case even after you restore service, people won't find you. In a very real way, companies like google and especially facebook own your social connections to others - so even if you manage to find another platform, they're not going to give you your contacts back.
E.g. if you switch phone provider, you may keep your telefone number (here, at least, even against the will of the original provider). If you migrate from facebook, you cannot keep your profile url. That's probably a bad thing for society; but it's hardly surprising companies aren't dying to prevent lock-in. Even google, which nominally allows extracting your data, the most valuable assets cannot be transferred (not to mention that the data extraction process results can't be trivially imported elsewhere because there is no standard for these types of things).
It's absurd to suggest the user has much practical freedom when it comes to switching communication platforms. Any freedom he does have tends to mean he must have had the foresight to use only a small subset of the available features, including onerous restrictions such as limited social interaction or interaction via unusual means. More realistically, if you switch platforms, you're likely to lose readers.
I think your comment is just pointing out that freedom isn't free, there are always trade-offs to submitting oneself to the will to any platform.
If "practical freedom", means to get all the best parts of a platform while expecting that you can do whatever you want, then it's not surprising that some will be shocked when such costs suddenly come due having had ignored the writing on the wall. Although most never explore the boundaries of such to make a difference in distinction to them, such "practical freedom" never truly exists in anything we do.
I learned the "hard" way, bootstrapped a company that crowd sourced data seeded from "open" graph, only to get hit with a c & d and "my" facebook used account banned indefinitely 4 years ago. I can still create multi accounts and use them, but I don't think I'll be naive enough to use them in the same way as I did "my" main used account and not expect similar results as before. And if this is related to CP, its not like this is the first time ever someone has been censored by a private entity for this on the internet prior to this account becoming another stat in that book, and considering how general society sees these things, I'd be more surprised if the author is really surprised or just upset because it finally happened to them.
It's false if my point were that he wasn't being inconvenienced. My point is that he wasn't being silenced. If he wants to speak, he can put his voice on another platform. With all the news around the destruction of his blog, he might even reach more people than before if he's quick about it.
> The fact of the matter is, the Googles and the Facebooks and the Reddits of the world hold a tremendous and frightening amount of control over public discourse and public opinion.
They're not even as powerful as the editor of one of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, never mind the man himself.
I never read any articles from Murdoch's newspapers unless they're surfaced to me by one of those services. Do you buy a Murdoch paper, or do you get a link on Google News, your Facebook feed, or your favorite Reddit subs? I'm pretty sure I'm a 90% case, not unique.
Of course, it's all just rich people controlling the discourse. Murdoch can buy pieces of Google, Facebook, and Reddit too.
Now, they just get to micromanage it. Micro-censorship, Micro-surveillance.
Gonna disagree with you there. It's the same kind of power, just with a different (sometimes overlapping) set of demographics. Facebook is one of the most used websites in the entire world. Just the simple act of hiding one story to promote another one changes what millions upon millions of people will see and talk about.
To play Devil's advocate, these platforms help people engage in discourse, but much like HN, has its own set of rules. HN shadow-bans and moderates with gusto, but I suppose it doesn't qualify as big enough?
Google provides more walls for people to hang their art, but they aren't required to hang yours and I'm not sure compelling them to is a good thing.
The same voices calling foul on Google raise hell when Reddit shows what truly unmoderated platforms look like.
Just because you (the colloquial "you") call yourself an artist doesn't compel the Met to hang your art and neither does it compel Google.
> HN shadow-bans and moderates with gusto, but I suppose it doesn't qualify as big enough?
Actually, I do think the current moderation model of most forums are wrong. The users should be the ultimate arbiter of what they see or not. The power to block certain users should be in the hands of those who browse it, and the moderators simply give a recommendation that most users follow. Similar to how spam folder works, in that you can always override the recommendation by moving the spam into your inbox.
> but they aren't required to hang yours and I'm not sure compelling them to is a good thing.
If not all opinions are allowed on their platform, then those they allow come with a stamp of approval from them. The logical conclusion is that they should be held liable for any libelous claims made by the users, since the users' opinion actually reflect the platform's own. They cannot have it both ways by claiming to be independent from users' opinions while simultaneously influencing and filtering them.
They are, in my imaginary world, to deny me only for reasons not related to my content. For example, they can reject me if the pictures are too large or not in a specific format, but not if it expresses any views they dislike.
> The same voices calling foul on Google raise hell when Reddit shows what truly unmoderated platforms look like.
You give no evidence that it is the same voices. I am, for one, consistently opposed to Reddit's policy on banning subreddits and to Google and Facebook's manual interference on public discourse.
It's more like Google says 'yeah, you can hang your art here' then once the walls fill up, burns your artwork, moves out of the house and wont answer your texts.
At minimum, artists and other specialty individuals need extra allowances and certainties. Were they a corporate entity, this wouldn't have happened. Personally, I value culture at least as highly as most businesses.
My guess is that the reason why freedom of speech only protects you from being made to shut up by govt through prosecution, and not being made to shut up by a private company due to the space it occupies in the world's technology and information zeitgeist, is because when the freedom of speech laws were formulated, the govt threat to your speech is the only major threat that existed. A Google kind of threat to freedom of speech didn't exist.
The question then becomes, is Google stifling freedom of speech? Can their impact on your freedom of speech by deleting your blog or posts be compared to the govt's impact on your freedom of speech through prosecution?
I say yes. Freedom of speech and similar laws seek to give you an immunity against govt, not because govt is evil, but because govt is powerful, and you are not. Google is powerful, and they were alive to just how powerful they were going to be when they came out with that don't be evil admonition.
Whereas Google took it upon themselves to not be evil, the writers of freedom of speech and similar laws tool it upon themselves to tell govt to not be evil. Should our societies protect individuals against entities who have power beyond some kind of threshhold? I'd say yes.
If you make the argument that a private company, by shutting down a user's account, is like government restriction on free speech, then how do you determine the balance between the right of free speech and the right of free association?
Remember, freedom of speech is only one part of the First Amendment. Those same writers also included the freedom of association. An organization like Google, Fox News, Amazon, or the Wall Street Journal is not obligated to associate with everyone.
We can change things. We can pass laws which mandate that certain things are public spaces. For example, the rise of the malls means that the migration from public shopping streets to private shopping areas, where mall owners like the Mall of the Americas can shut down protest much more readily than the police could do in a truly public area. We can pass laws which force malls to be public areas. The Supreme Court decided that in Pruneyard v. Robins. But only a handful of states have done so.
We can similarly pass laws which say that any content hosting site must be content neutral. Eg, if you want to use Stack Overflow to post your diatribes against whale hunting, SO cannot shut you down.
That doesn't make sense. Okay, so we only require that of "powerful" sites, which you suggest. Which is defined as .... what? Who gets to decide? Who gets to challenge that? If Yahoo was once powerful but is no longer so, who gets to decide when the transition occurs?
One possibility is to set up a common carrier status, where a company offers its services without discrimination to the general public. This is how the phone system works. But why would a company want to do this?
Does using Google products qualify my relationship with them as an association? In the same way that me buying you a cup of coffee is association?
I realize that I'm suggesting calls that are difficult to make, but my wider contention is that the current status quo, legal and valid as it is, is missing something that we are going to have to address at some point.
Yes. Though they are different associations. They are subject to federal and state laws which don't affect personal transactions.
For example, they are available to the general public so are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of sex, race, and several other protected classes. California and other states place even more restrictions on their ability to discriminate.
On the other hand, you are free to discriminate as you wish. (Though not without risk of criticism; such is free speech.)
There's another difference in your example. Google provides services to the general public. You use their services. However, I do not provide a drinking-coffee service. I don't even like the taste of coffee. There is no reason I need to accept your offer to give me a cup of coffee any more than I need to accept a flyer from someone in the street. But if I were a company which provided coffee consumption services, then I would have less ability to turn you down than I do as a private person.
My wider contention is that we have plenty of historical examples of public/private space which help us understand what's going on. For example, can a company town prevent someone from coming to town to distribute religious materials? Decided in Marsh v. Alabama. Are AOL email addresses "public", so AOL cannot block spammers? Decided in Cyber Promotions v. America Online.
>My guess is that the reason why freedom of speech only protects you from being made to shut up by govt through prosecution... is because when the freedom of speech laws were formulated, the govt threat to your speech is the only major threat that existed
No. I think it would be hard to write a policy that sought to prevent censorship on private property. How would something like Reddit (or Hacker News) work in such a world? How do you deal with spam? Or off-topic posts? Or hateful and incendiary comments? All those things are protected speech today, but that doesn't mean the relevant service wants to have them on their network.
I feel like the logical outgrowth of an argument like this is that we could compel companies to allow certain types of speech and not others. This seems like a pretty clear violation of both free association and freedom of the press. You would never think to compel a newspaper to publish a certain type of news or a certain columnist, why should Google be compelled to publish anything it doesn't like?
>My guess is that the reason why freedom of speech only protects you from being made to shut up by govt through prosecution, and not being made to shut up by a private company ... is because when the freedom of speech laws were formulated, the govt threat to your speech is the only major threat that existed.
That's not the framework to use.
What's happening is that the government can allow "free speech" to criticize the government because they can just leave you alone. They don't have to spend money to leave you alone. Arresting everybody that criticizes the government means spending money for agents to round up citizens and also spending more money on prisons to hold dissenters.
The other form of "free speech with zero negative consequences from private entities" is impossible for a government or a society to provide for you. I'm not being hyperbolic -- it literally is impossible to give you that type of freedom. That type of of "commercial free speech" has a cost and other citizens are not going to pay for it. This leads into my response to your other statement...
>Does using Google products qualify my relationship with them as an association? In the same way that me buying you a cup of coffee is association?
You are misunderstanding how Freedom of Association affects "freedom of speech in a private business".
Using Facebook as an example, consider that some of their biggest advertisers are Coca-Cola, Proctor Gamble, and Samsung.
Let's say you want a law that forces Facebook to host posts (text not photos) espousing the benefits pedophilia. Pedophilia text is legal. Facebook user is happy that his legal viewpoint isn't deleted. This is now "free speech in private space" nirvana right? Not really. What the proponents of free-speech-on-private-platforms didn't consider is that there's no parallel law that forces Coca-Cola, ProctorGamble, Samsung to keep paying Facebook for ads. If Coca-Cola marketers say, "we don't want to run ads on Facebook that has child sex posts", they are free to abandon that platform and spend their ad dollars elsewhere. (Freedom of Association). The so-called "private treated as public space" that people wanted to spread alternative and marginalized viewpoints won't exist because nobody else wants to pay for it. ((The users of Facebook is also an "association" and if they freely leave the platform because they don't want their profiles intermingling with pedophiliacs, that will further erode Facebook's value.)
Freedom of speech on private platforms has a cost and this is why the society can't give it to you. Society doesn't want to pay for all viewpoints.
Some may think the obvious answer to the paradox of Freedom-of-Association vs Freedom-of-Speech is to collect taxes for a government-sponsored "public social network". Such a platform wouldn't be dependent on voluntary advertisers and their discretionary dollars. Unfortunately, that won't solve the problem for free speech either. If you think it through beyond the surface level appeal of such a platform, you'll see why it won't work.
This line is getting way over-used. Please notice the last sentence in grandparent's comment: "This is not a Google issue; this is a law enforcement issue".
No in the US the 1st amendment protects you from Government Prosecution, codifing the Concept of Freedom of Speech into the very foundation of our Legal System
Freedom of Speech however is a concept that applies to everyone, and everything including Google
Companies that proclaim the desire to respect Freedom of Speech, that claim to operate platforms in the promotion of Freedom of Speech, and make a profit doing so, should be HEAVILY criticized when they violate that principle
The first amendment protects Americans from Government prosecution for expression their opinions. Freedom of speech is a principle that extends beyond the US Constitution.
