People need to stop being so lazy and throwing around the word censorship. If a bunch or teenagers come into my coffee shop and start loudly calling each autists and retards I'm going to kick them out. I'm not censoring them by kicking them out.
This is a tired old argument and it isn't convincing or effective. There's a big difference between some kids screaming in your coffee shop and a community on a website supposedly dedicated to free discussion. A more apt comparison would be a group in a corner having a conversation at a rock concert. Suddenly this argument appears less apt.
And while some are screaming for these sites to get shut down over it, most of us aren't. What you see from most of us is recommendation to stop using services that silence you. This is a reasonable response, if someone doesn't like you, go somewhere where they do like you. That's what the comment you're responding to is advocating, embracing and even getting excited about. The internet needs a true public square, not a private entity masquerading as one that for some reason totally unbeknownst to them has to constantly remind everyone that they are not a public square.
"Do not organize, promote, or coordinate servers around hate speech. It’s unacceptable to attack a person or a community based on attributes such as their race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or disabilities."
Calling someone a "retard" or "autist" is considered by Discord to be mocking people with disabilities.
Also IRC exists and is still in use by many people.
Anyone can set up a server.
I saw a comment on WSB that said they have bots that remove all swear words etc but some people use unicode etc to write the words anyway. I don't know if its true but where is the line for a ban if a genuine effort is being made to moderate?
The worst part about this observation is that this is the very reason being given for why twitter isn't getting kicked off of AWS. Because they're putting in a good faith effort to moderate, it's just "hard".
This is just about power and money, the chances that many of these HNers aren't losing money due to the actions of /wsb is low. I have no doubt many of the posters trying to defend the move are being a bit disingenuous. Not all for sure, but certainly some of them.
I'm 100% with you. People that don't want their discussion controlled by a private entity with conflicting interests should absolutely not depend on that entity's services. Everyone upset about this should stop using discord.
Have you read the content on WSB? Here's a link that I found on the top of the top thread of the subreddit [0]. Let's be completely clear here, this isn't someone speaking out about issues they face in everyday life.
> ive been folowing this saga since GME was 60 or so but sadly i was too afraid to become autistic, and have now gone full retard
They probably meant that because the guidelines discord has setup are automated bots that occasionally hit innocent people while trying to enforce the rules. I think they were speaking in the broader context of Discord servers rather than the WSB Reddit or Discord specifically.
Then they should make that clear, as the thread and the GP's comments are specifically about the situation with WSB. Otherwise, someone who comes in not knowing anything about the situation, and sees the comment and assumes that the WSB discord was banned because its uers were describing their day to day issues living with disabilities.
Yes, I was talking about hasanabi's discord server (a twitch channel) in particular, but I'm sure it's not alone and there are reasons. I don't blame them at all, it's the system that sets these incentives.
With all due respect, that's not what you said in your comment, and it read to me as an attempt to deliberately spread FUD about discord's moderation practices. If you're thinking of a specific incident, and introducing it as a discussion point, you need to actually mention it. Re-reading your original comment, I still can only read it as Discord banning WSB because people are speaking out about their real life issues
It's not discord themselves who enact the harsh moderation (which quite often includes bots banning some words, with punishments from alerting a mod to banning you for a bit), but rather server "owners" who risk platforming if discord deems them unable to police themselves.
The problem is, that discord uses certain criteria to determine if a server is able to police itself, and those criteria happen to be fairly harsh on repeat (even if swallowed by the noise/message stream) disability mocking.
I'm criticizing the incentives Discord's polices create for moderation.
I'm sorry my wording was bad. I certainly did not intend any FUD spreading.
I have worked as a tutor at university. The best and most "free" discussions I experienced were all happening in a space where everybody was after finding some sort of insight.
This delicate balance was at times destoyed by a single person that started attacking people aggresively for who they were rather than attacking the argument they made in a way that makes them understand. Allowing that person to freely speak was reducing the classes freedom over all, because that person wanted to dominate the discussion so much, they fostered a climate were all other discussion was not possible anymore and free speech was prevented from happening.
In that case throwing someone out is a totally acceptable option. In fact this is the reason why discussion on this very site work out: because we are after insight and we punish behavior that is pure sophistry, aggressive, snarky, etc.
I am convinced that to speak freely as a collective, sometimes we must stop certain individuals from abusing their freedom of speech within our forums.
Not everyone shares your ideas about what the "best" and most "free" discussions are. Apparently, the crowd at this Discord channel were ok with calling each other gays, autists, retards, or whatever. It may not be the highbrow enough for some, but that is no reason to shutdown their community.
Sure, but most people agree on what makes a discussion worse. E.g. if one person constantly interrupts others and leads agressively voiced monologous with no real substance, most people might agree that person might not improve the climate of the discussion to much
I have seen a few times now what happen when optimistic people goes with such rationale and attempt to apply it universally. To be more precise, people have tried to ban generalizations of group of people, banning the usage of gender where specifying gender is unnecessary, and of course banning the attacking people for who they were rather than attacking the argument. I have yet to see one community where it worked.
The outcome of such experiments always end up the same. People want to generalize about groups of people when its against the right group of people. We want to specifying gender when it is unnecessary, as long it not in the wrong situation. And we want to attacking people for who they were rather than attacking the argument, if its against people which is socially accepted to attack and dismiss.
People just love violence when its done for the right reasons and abhor it when it done for the wrong reasons. At the same time we try to apply principles like freedom of speech and find it completely incompatible with our split view on violence.
Unless we rise above it. Certain things are never okay. But being intolerant and demanding tolerance is a shitty move as well. And it is nowhere near as clever as the people who try this think it is.
The discourse about whether and how much we should tolerate the intolerant is old and has be well discussed by post WWII philosophy. If we want to defend the freedom of all, we need to restrict those freedoms for the people who try to get rid of them.
Or as a neo nazi once said to me: "we want to establish the old power again, so we can silence you. until that happens, we want free speech".
Being consistent and avoiding hypocrisy is not the same thing as tolerating the intolerant. Our most common tool to do so are laws that governments everyone equally, and which enforcement is designed for consistency.
The trouble comes back to the issue when a community and places such as universities tries to mimic laws without actually consider the problem of consistency, and at the same time wanting to believe in principles that they then don't apply to everyone. The result is inconsistency, hypocrisy, and often in order to escape the fact, removal of transparency.
>This delicate balance was at times destoyed by a single person that started attacking people aggresively for who they were rather than attacking the argument they made in a way that makes them understand.
I'm sorry I don't understand, are you arguing on behalf or against Discord who called the wsb crowd a bunch of white supremacist Nazis? I'm not being snarky, I genuinely can't tell if you're defending the open discussion about stock trading or the people that came in and called them names and got them shut down.
I am all for a discussion focused group having rules and expecting participants to adhere to them and booting them out if they don't. What I am opposed to is businesses that market themselves as places to freely discuss, wait til they have market control, then change their terms and kick people out based on tenuous accusations, in this case for the apparent reason of protecting hedge funds from the market. It is egregious what Discord did.
Because when you can brand any idea as radical or dangerous, you get to dictate what radical or dangerous is, and when you do that, you control the narrative and people.
Yes this most recent operation was a smashing success, in terms of convincing shallow thinkers that it's wrong for subjects to bother their rulers. Just look at what Seattle city council member Kshama Sawant has to deal with right now. Amazon is sponsoring a recall election "justified" because she had the audacity to talk to protesters who were physically inside city hall. (In reality, because she wants Amazon to pay taxes.) Perfect timing!
Unequivocally. What is the alternative? Banning every single idea besides a pre-approved list of topics? That's Nineteen Eighty Four all over again.
If anything, public discourse enables people to observe and see potential clusters, covid could be traced to tweets talking about pneumonia in November and December of 2019.
If, instead of squashing them, we figured out the underlying problem, which almost always is lack of prospects, we can act accordingly.
Oh come off it. There was no "insurrection at the capital." There was a bunch of rowdy types running around with their shirts off and a bunch of old people taking selfies. A few bad things happen. I'd call it a mostly peaceful protest and you would too if you were using objective criteria that was equally applied.
It's a primary source of information for over a billion people at this point. It's probably not a good idea to have that monopolized by corporate or government interest
Because when the people are allowed to freely share their ideas with one another and talk about them without interference the cream rises to the top.
There is historical evidence of this, the monarchs of the centuries past, the Catholic church, they all stifled the ability for people to freely discuss ideas, and even killed people for sharing the wrong ones. As soon as the printing press was invented that allowed people to share ideas freely you had revolts against them all over the next few centuries leading to representative democracies and republics, the enlightenment and development of ideas such as human dignity and individual rights, diversity of religion in the west took hold, the end of theocratic rule over Europe, and it all culminated in the creation of the US and an end to global colonialism mid 20th century. We owe our great way of life and our emergence from theocratic and monarchical shackles in large part to the ability to express and share ideas freely, this is a big reason why western societies hold that right in high esteem, it was a resounding success, it worked for us up until now and it will continue to do so if we let it.
For one thing, conversations are a lot easier to have when there is an implicit rule that context is always considered when evaluating word usage. For example, the word 'autist' in the context of 'stonks' and 'wsb' is not understood to mean an attempt to mock people with disabilities and therefore unlikely to get anyone offended as a result.
People get offended because they want to get offended. They then rationalize it after the fact, usually by resorting to “certain words are always wrong”. But if a friend occasionally does something annoying, you could either elect to ignore it, or you could take a stand and make it a make-or-break issue. But the choice to make it an issue is yours.
So that those with the currently loudest voices can silence all others?
So that the "invisible hand of the market" may decide who is wisest (as demonstrated when we look at all the instances where this happened)?
I think all of these wishes of a true public space are usually colored by the (mis?)perception of certain opinions being opressed, when in fact they are often just socially unacceptable because of their destructive nature.
Not to be that guy, but I grew up in Austria inbetween old Nazis and young Neo-Nazis. When they said: "you are trying to silence us" what they meant is "we want to establish the old power again, so we can silence you. until that happens, we want free speech". This is literally (translated from a very thick accent in Austrian German) what one of the neo nazis said to me after the 8th beer and a heated discussion. To assume these people want free speech for anybody other than themselves is naive. For them tolerating others is a vehicle to convince them of their cause: Once they have what they want they will get rid of it.
The question how much tolerance we have to show those who themselves are intolerant is a old one and still not easy to answer. However to me it is quite clear that we should sacrifice the free society we have without a fight.
It appears to me that our society is currently threatened by a group using the exact strategy that those Nazis were using in your home country, except they're at the next stage, past the using free speech and actively now attempting to destroy it.
I'm of the belief that to protect your free society you protect it's virtue, even when people take advantage of it. If you hold steadfast to "free speech", no group ever gets past that first stage, so they can never take power. It means sometimes tolerating hearing reprehensible views of the world, but it is either that or giving someone all the guns and the power to control what you say, and if history teaches us anything, that always ends badly for the regular people no matter the initial intention of the person doing the censoring, a power like that is irresistible to those who want to use it to benefit themselves.
> A more apt comparison would be a group in a corner having a conversation at a rock concert. Suddenly this argument appears less apt.
This is a tired old argument and it isn't convincing or effective. There's a big difference between having a conversation in a corner at a rock concert, and having a conversation in an online service hosted by someone else outside of that conversation, in a territory owned by a state where the host has to comply with laws which place the accountability of user-generated content on the host. A more apt comparison would be... I don't know, I actually don't have any idea. How about simply not being deliberately offensive or hateful or using whatever rhetoric that could ultimately translate into real-world violence?
Do you want a change in this society? I'd guess you do, most people want to change something. Espousing a desire for any change will always be offensive to someone, and so wanting any improvement necessarily includes being deliberately offensive. The right to speak is the right to offend.
Real world violence, sure. Let's ban that. And asking people to be nice, that's not a bad thing. And banning name calling in your private forum to promote substantiative discussion, that's probably a good idea. But deciding what unappetizing ideas are allowed and are not allowed to be discussed is a bad idea, I thought we learned that lesson in the last century. Free speech isn't what leads to fascist dictatorship, control of ideas does.
All this and I just want to remind you that we are discussing a web site using "white supremacist Nazis" as a pretext to prevent people from organizing against wall street hedge funds.
> Espousing a desire for any change will always be offensive to someone, and so wanting any improvement necessarily includes being deliberately offensive.
This is not true. Whatever you’re disagreeing with another person, you don’t have to call that person any politically incorrect slur, which is really the kind of “offensive” that we are talking about here.
It seems once a platform gets to a certain size, an entitlement to service regardless of whether it's against the terms of service grows.
"Retard" is considered a slur by some. It doesn't matter if others don't consider it to be. The one making the judgement is the service provider.
Same with Parlour complaining about being kicked off AWS when they violated their terms of service.
There's a copy of the letter AWS sent to them that's public [0]
"
Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms. It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. {...} You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. Your CEO recently stated publicly that he doesn’t “feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform.”"
"
It's just a desire to have freedom from consequences.
If they self hosted in Alabama, I'm sure they would have been fine.
Your coffee shop is not relevant on the global scale. But with big platforms like Facebook, it's not easy to opt out from them. Facebook and other platforms aren't just social media for teenagers. Many companies nowadays only have a Facebook/Whatsapp profile as their only contact point. If you get banned from these services you miss out on accessing a wide share of services, not related to social media.
Also, if you have people coming to your coffee shop and acting badly, people can judge it for themselves and form their own opinion. On the internet, bans are quiet and you can easily silence a large chunk of the userbase without making a noise.
You may cheer these big platforms now because it's only "racists, white supremacists and crooks" being banned, but as soon as the first group of people you agree with gets blocked from these platforms you'll be the first one to fight for freedom of speech.
By your standard every newspaper, every TV channel, every website that refuses to publish my views is censoring me. It's an absurd standard to call censorship.
Discord has made no attempt to stop anyone saying anything, they're just chosen not to lend these people their megaphone.
This is one of the more stupid soundbites the pro-censorship crowd has come up with. A good red flag, though.
Discord reacted to how the platform they had already given was being used. That's different, practically and morally, from NBC not giving them a TV show.
"Pro-censorship" is such a ridiculous, extremist term. You can't just pretend everyone in the world falls into either a "for" or "against" censorship group. Everybody (well, 99.99%, maybe) accepts that some censorship is necessary, but that not everything should be censored.
Let's start with the basics. Forget the selective enforcement aspect and the lawyering over the definition of "censorship" - can anything a private company does with its private property ever be criticized?
Terms of service are not above criticism, did not say it and did not imply it. I don't understand how you came to think that considering that in your previous post there is no criticism of discords TOS.
I was simply replaying to your statement that: "Discord reacted to how the platform they had already given was being used.". I don't understand why anyone would think that the owner of the platform should not be able to dictate the terms of use of their platform or react if those terms are not followed.
Lets apply this idea further: google maps could refuse to probide navigation to strip club, water company could cut off water supply if they think you are having a swinger party, and electric company could threaten to cut you off if you install solar panels.
Can you point me to where I said that TOS can not be criticised or where I said that private entities can apply any rules they want? No? Can you then explain how what you wrote applies to what I wrote?
Discord is not a public utility. Discord guilds are not public service points either. All the services offered by Discord are strictly capped too. This is the opposite of what you get from a public utility.
Discord did lend these people their megaphone, though. What they
did is like a news show interviewing a guest and then quickly
cutting to advertisements because the guest started to make
uncomfortable statements. And that sort of thing is very unusual
in democratic countries, maybe unless a certain political figure
starts spreading obvious misinformation with the goal of
undermining the election process.
and it just "happened to be" done after the short fiasco. Or is your argument that they weren't using dirty words until after the fiasco started?
That they can is not being argued, that they did it now is the issue.
In the same vein, no one would argue that a male manager shouldn't be able to schedule a female employee on their shifts. But when that male manager asks for a date and is refused, the action takes on an entirely different tone.
Why is it a wrong comparison are you not being censored (according to the definition you provided).
I’m pointing out a ridiculous application of what you’ve pointed out, private business, or an individual stoping you from speaking while technically censorship, happens all the time and no one raises an eyebrow.
Would shushing a whole crowd of people talking in the cinema be untoward?
True, great point. Reddit is not part of the “real world”. Got it!
But in this case, it’s a perfect analogue, that illustrates why decrying censorship here is odd.
Reddit can kick people out if they don’t like the behaviour. This happens every day in businesses all over the world (virtual and non virtual) and it is not decried and for the most part is approved of.
I haven't said that. I said that there isn't always a real world counterpart for virtual things. You can replace "real" with physical. At least you tried to not make the usual car comparison.
No it's not a perfect analogue. To make the cinema comparison work: There is a cinema. You can rent rooms in that cinema. You and your friends go in to talk about stuff. Someone else comes in and "shushes" you instead of going to another room where nobody is in.
Reddit can also kick out people for having the wrong opinion, as they do, as was observed. Banning for the wrong opinion is of course censorship. Banning for specific lingo used by those people is also censorship.
There is difference between banning for wrong opinions and banning for eg. spamming. The line is slim.
Supposedly, until you criticize the idea of taking their money and giving it to everyone who claims to need it more than them.
Arguments like these are all to often made out of convenience, but should be made in good faith and on principle. Do you truly believe in their right to private property?
Are you trying to argue some kind of Marxist position in order to show censorship can exist without government involvement.
I’m happy to have a discussion on why capital owners probably stole their wealth at some point. But you need to take me on the journey to how that’s related to censorship
My point is, this argument that "they're a private company" is great, and I 100% agree with it. But I usually find that people that make this argument don't actually believe that these companies have the right to their private property, they just use it because they're ideologically opposed to the people getting banned for whatever reason. They'll say that a private company has the right to it's property and then in the next breath call them evil for having a lot of property and demand that they get taxed out of existence.
You can if you want, but if you don't believe corporations should have a right to their property, tossing "they have a right to ban you from speaking" in someone's face is a bit disingenuous.
And also, counterproductive. If you'd like to change the rules, perhaps defending them every time they're used to hurt your ideological opponents is not the way to do that. Maybe it would be more effective to agree with them and help them.
I don’t have any ideological opponents... I’m pretty happy to be convinced either way on most issues. But colour me unconvinced on this one.
They aren’t banning you from speaking, just stopping you from doing it in their house, you can continue your message everywhere else.
This meta discussion about the actual point feels awkward. Is the alternative you are suggesting that you have to accept whatever anyone says always? Is it more nuanced than that?
It's more like a group of people open a coffee shop in your mall and you decide to close their shop once you learn they serve people who don't speak your language.
I don't think the metaphore holds. Everyone can hear the coffee shop kids regardless of whether they want to or not, but only those who seek it out can read the discord.
Okay cool, let's invent a new term. How about: "Politically motivated minority persecution?"
Maybe a bit too much. How about: "Social Engineering via Targeted Group Deplatforming?"
Because that is how these look-like to me and to a lot of these "persecuted" groups. These groups aren't necessarily "hateful" or "organizing" violence. A lot of the time it's just distasteful, kinda sexist etc and the "platform" owners simply don't like them and want to keep them from growing because (I think) they think that there is a real fear that societal opinion might swing their way. However the missing key here is that a lot of times, these are genuine "political movements" before they've cooled & solidified, and exist solely as mis-directed or nebulous emotion, hence the "hateful" and distasteful content.
Not all, but a good chunk of them of course. Sometimes you just get bad groups, but in a lot of those cases, I think it's more clear that they're doing something blatantly evil. For lack of a better example: coordinating and sharing info on how to sabotage deforestation using dangerous methods like putting nails inside trees, which would cause chainsaws to snap and hurt the operators.
You would also be censoring people if you ran an upscale restaurant with a dress code and standards of behavior, or if you didn't let them post ads on the walls.
As long as you make your rules clear and enforce them fairly, censorship and standards of behavior are completely fine.
The very large social media platforms all market themselves as being neutral. They got to be the largest by providing a space for everyone.
So the ask here is "please enforce the rules fairly the way you have always promised you would." Asking a business to deliver on the promises they've made and continue to make is not an entitled attitude.
After all, all these businesses are in complete control of what they promise. If they don't like the old promise, they have a first amendment right to make a new promise that suits them better.
Anyone has community guidelines, i could write on my wall with a crayon "we get pissed at the pub on tuesday' and call that community guideline. It does not convey moral rights or place you above criticism
I think you're confused. Their community guidelines are part of their terms of service. You can write whatever on your wall, it's your home, your community.
If you want to use their service you have to follow their rules.
Turns out that Discord doesn't like people using the terms "Retard" and "Autist" in a disparaging way.
They don't want that kind of discourse to be part of their community.
In the same way, I'm guessing that you're not going get far on this forum calling people "retards"
If you want to have your own community where you want to have that kind of discourse, you can self host a forum.
Instead of Discord consider IRC, it's an open standard, and anyone can host a server.
You don't need AWS, you just need an internet connection. You just need to find a hosting provider that's willing to host it. Of which there are plenty.
"Turns out that Discord doesn't like people using the terms "Retard" and "Autist" in a disparaging way."
I dont think you have any proof of that - it's not actually written clearly in their term of service what level of calling each other names is allowed.
Considering that people were calling each-other retards on Discord for years, any judge would conclude that they are happy with this behaviour.
On the other hand, timing of these bans are very suspicious, maybe they recieved a phonecall and banned the community under false pretences.
I really hope we can subponea some documents and find out if this is coming from corruption or cosmic coincedence
It would only be a fair parable if your coffee shop was the only coffeshop in the entire city or that it exists like 1-3 others but you all talk with eachother on the phone and collectively agree to deny those people service.
There are many coffee shops in the city and there are plenty of social media platforms online (Youtube, Facebook, Tiktok, Reddit, Twitter, Whatsapp, Telegram, Twitch, Pinterest, WeChat, Snapchat). Also, there's really no evidence they're coordinating. If the guys I kick out of my coffee shop walk down the road and start shouting Retard at each other in a different coffee shop they're going to get kicked out of that one too. Not because we're in some big cabal to censor these people, but because actually most people have a fairly similar definition of offensive language, and most coffee shop owners know what's going to drive customers away. At no point does that suddenly turn into censorship.
I disagree, it is censorship. We all know how hard it is to build a community. To just say go use another platform is really not a fair comparison.
Discord and Reddit in this case, even if they're not banned from Reddit yet, is their only means of communicating with eachother. Sure people can create some kind of group / channel on another platform, but if they are banned from one there is no way for them to know where to go.
Obviously the group is going to be mostly dispanded when they are banned or removed. I would say this is a kind of censorship. If they would've been given some time, like a week or a month before the banning then I would agree it would not be censorship because then they can assemble somewhere else.
All of the big social media networks are corporate property. It is not a public space. So it is their house rules. And rightfully so. If you took their free cookie, choke on it, but don't complain.
All journalists, nearly all politicians, and lots of other people as well communicate largely on social networks owned by these giant amoral artificial creations. What does "public space" even mean anymore? Should we stand on the stroad median with the panhandlers? Would anyone even read our signs?
It is possible for citizens to impose conditions on the existence of the corporations their elected government creates.
No ofc not, but that is a coffeshop and not a place where the business is sharing stuff. If the business is a town square where everyone is and your excluding a specific group that is censorship.
And you need to review the code of conduct for this platform, as you are in violation and, according to your own logic, should be kicked. (Which I oppose)
No, it's like a bunch of teenagers came into your coffee shop, and before you could throw them out your coffee shop [in a mall] was permanently closed down by the mall owners.
//Been told I'm posting too fast again by the benevolent left wing moderators on HN so this is what I would have replied:
"From the comment on WSB that was a story on here before it got flagged off the front page:
"We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore."
In other words, they told the kids not to swear and enforced it but someone came up with a new swearword that the cafe owner didn't recognise (it's hard to think of an analogy for using weird characters to say a bad word) and so the cafe got shut down. "
At most, it is a mall telling a coffee shop owner that they need to take care of a small subset of regulars - the teenagers - because they are regularly using offensive speech. If they don't, the coffee shop is in violation of the malls' leasing agreement. Coffee shop does nothing, so they are evicted.
It isn't like a place got shut down because they let the general public in.
