If people on an app continually call for violence and violate your TOS you can boot them off. Especially if the app in question has no good faith moderation of content to meet your terms of service and their terms of service are either lacking or winkwink levels of enforcement.
You can have ANY political perspective you want! Lower taxes, raise taxes, immigration policy, school choice, charter schools WHATEVER! You just can’t have hate speech against protected classes or call for violence. If you have an issues with the protected classes then VOTE!!! Also debate on what should and shouldn’t be a protected class is also OK!
These companies exist to make money. They have a fiduciary duty to shareholders. Aiding and abetting political violence is a sure fire way to hurt shareholder value. The market has judged that “pro violence” speech is to be de-monetized.
I suspect they could even have the hate speech against protected classes. Voat survived. 4chan survives. Numerous hateful websites survive. The KKK has websites. Parler was no better a week ago.
These sites all get eliminated when they are tied to a violent attack.
Agreed. The bottom line is very clear: do not (directly) cause violent attack. The society is already bearing with them, they may even be able to indirectly cause violent attacks.
You can't expect everyone to love everyone. But violence is the red line.
How do you link (legally) hate speech (protected by constitution) -> “direct” violence -> individuals -> charges?
Haven’t seen evidence of that in any of these cases, by companies, MSM, legal parties, or honest people—- especially when looking at riots earlier in the year.
Probably many. Especially in countries where organized lynching is still a thing.
You can certainly find reports of people proudly sharing the videos of doing the lynching on social media. So I don't see why it wouldn't be organized via social media too.
Yes hopefully this is people trying to do the “right” thing in the face of a tragedy (whether you think it is the right thing or not)
However, even from a cynical pragmatist view the attack causes previously high engagement “viral” content that stirred controversy/discussion and most importantly ad views/clicks into something that advertisers will most likely refuse to allow their ads to be displayed alongside.
It essentially shifted from financial asset to liability and so the companies dumped it...
>You just can’t have hate speech against protected classes
"hate" speech is fully protected by the US constitution. Though I have to ask where you got the idea that in a world where it's ok to ban hate speech the powers that be somehow decided to only ban it in the case of protected classes? What a strange morality.
The Constitution does not impel corporations to provide a platform for hate speech. It is mostly about limits to government powers or rights of citizens vis-à-vis their government.
As a free market fundamentalist that usually gets massive pushback, I'm having trouble believing that most people making this argument normally promote free markets.
It certainly seems politically slanted in a single direction. Either way, I hope more people join the Fediverse and get away from these walled-gardens.
> I'm having trouble believing that most people making this argument normally promote free markets
I’m a staunch free marketer and First Amendment advocate. I think this is a freedom of assembly issue. Amazon should not be forced to assemble with these customers.
If anything, this same group has fought for a more extreme version of this freedom through its don’t-sell-cakes-to-gays schtick.
(To be clear, I support e.g. the Westboro Baptist Church’s right to speech. They say awful things. But they have the right to. If they started organising murders or lootings of gay-owned businesses, on the other hand, I would not consider their actions protected.)
I think an argument like this is consistent with free (i.e. few rules) markets. Isn't it the same argument as saying businesses should be allowed to refuse customers based on, say, sexual orientation? People may not agree with that and would want government to require businesses to serve some customers and, in this case, not others. However, I tend to think business and customer relationships should be voluntary as much as possible.
He says in the third paragraph that the normative claims in the 2nd paragraph are true insofar as they risk shareholder value, not because they violate the Constitution.
Protected from persecution by the government, which means it has absolutely ZERO relevance to the actions of a private company that has its own right to free speech. They can ban whatever they want! They could say “if you don’t use the oxford comma GTFO” It is their platform. If your solution is to nationalize Twitter, FB etc. then well China is right over there....
Also and because people were apparently deeply failed by their civics classes in HS, “publicly traded” does not mean a company still isn’t private. Private means not owned/run by the state.
The paragraph I pulled that quote from is clearly about the law and government, not corporations. It makes no sense otherwise. When was the last time you saw a corporation make a list of protected classes?
This is true for what the government can do legally that infringes on your right to free speech. Yes they can violate your first amendment rights in that case.
However, this does not apply at all to private companies. They could, theoretically, have ridiculous rules “Everyone must refer to themselves in the 3rd person or we ban you” and it is totally legal because it is their platform. 1st amendment applies to private companies only to guarantee their OWN right to free speech.
Correct. You can't falsely shout "fire" in a crowded theater, you can't obstruct an existential war, you can't spread anti-vaccine propaganda during a pandemic.
These are all legal arguments with a well-established history.
I was saying the individual app’s TOS typically prohibit hate speech against classes that typically align with judicial cases of what constitutes a “hate crime” against a certain class or category of people
The market didn't decide anything, it's not like any stock prices are reacting to this speech being allowed by these corporations or not. These decisions are made by a handful of unaccountable, anonymous people in closed rooms, hiding by the institutions they work for.
> Much like gay wedding cakes or nazi cupcakes, you cannot force a company to host your content if they choose not to.
Elane Photography paid thousands and thousands of dollars in fines for choosing not to work a lesbian wedding at a time when lesbian weddings were not legal in New Mexico. They never got their money back. It's not as cut and dried as you imply.
> you cannot force a company to host your content if they choose not to.
Thats actually not true. There are numerous businesses that are absolutely forced to distribute your content, even if they don't like it.
The obvious example is the phone network, and other common carriers. There are a whole set of laws that do indeed force these companies to distribute your content.
What we call carriers or other monopoly service providers (think power and water, possibly ISP).
Are you going to take the next step and consider AWS, Twitter, and Facebook monopoly carriers or service providers? Under their current definitions they are not and can cut ties with you for what ever reason they want (barring protected class issues I assume).
I think the problem for me is the monopoly status this all reveals about the companies involved (Twitter, Amazon, etc.).
If you step back a bit too, there's another issue I have, which is that it seems to me these companies are coming down hard against the idea of free speech. Let's look at it this way: some group believes the Big Social Media Companies are being politically biased in a way they disagree with, in part because of active moderation that reflects decisions by that company about what's "correct" or "incorrect". So they say "hey we're going to start a new social media platform that we don't moderate." This gets used by violent extremists.
Then some other Big Tech companies tell this new company, predicated on unmoderated speech, to moderate their speech too or they will cut resources.
As others have noted, plenty of violent behavior has been organized on Twitter or Facebook, and it hasn't received the same sort of punishment and ostracism. So why Parler? Because some groups on it are supportive of Trump? Because it's the US government? It's hard for me to take appeals to quashing violent behavior seriously when they're so arbitrary in their application at some level.
At some level, it doesn't matter to me, because there's another argument, which is that the platforms should be very removed from the content on them, like a phone company. They could be promoting that, and instead they're going hard in the other direction, which is to support heavy "moderation" by monopolies. I don't want big business "moderating" speech, or having that much power to do so.
My political inclinations are very different from Trump or anything in these insurrections but I don't like the way it's headed, and I don't see the gay wedding cakes as remotely the same.
If there were three wedding cake companies in the entire English-speaking world, and wedding cakes were a universal requirement for getting married, I might feel the same. In fact, in some ways I do feel the same, but I also would say maybe there should be a lot more wedding cake companies.
> plenty of violent behavior has been organized on Twitter or Facebook
Twitter and Facebook made a concerted efforts around 1st-party paid employees that are responsible for macro-moderation across their platforms. Parler instead just replied "our volunteer moderators will handle it". Even reddit has 1st-party moderation, despite their large volunteer moderator community.
Why would they need to be accountable? They aren’t breaking any laws and they aren’t elected officials...
Sure the government could interfere and make more laws and regulate but the typical conservative position would not be in favor of government meddling....
That is how the market works. Nothing in capitalism says 'you must be transparent in how you conduct business'... in fact, it's literally the opposite! Most things must be kept secret if you don't want your business to get outcompeted.
Businesses are almost as big as state governments, but are undemocratic. They are run like dictatorships. If you don't like this, you don't like markets.
Yeah by the fact that the free market created these platforms and gave them power.
Us on the left have been fucking telling everyone for years that these companies are dangerous but everyone else embraced them.
These companies yanked the plug on many leftist communities and dozens of social media networks for sex workers. To this day VISA and Mastercard don't allow payments to come in if the website is mainly sex related.
Where the hell was the outrage then? We begged people to support us and tell these companies to back off but no one did.
The inaction of everyone has lead to this. Welcome to how "free market capitalism" actually just means dozens of small unaccountable governments with more power than hundreds of countries combined. You asked for this. Take it.
My only quibble with this is that “the left” is a bit broad — SESTA/FOSTA was bipartisan legislation unfortunately spearheaded by my Democratic representative, Carolyn Maloney.
Other than that, this is spot on. Conservatives have been happy to tell everyone to let the free market decide, only to cry foul when the market makes a decision they don’t like. Turns out you can’t have it both ways.
As a big proponent of the free market, I think the problem stems from "sometimes free market."
Also, it seems that these moves by tech companies are acting in unison (Apple, Google, Amazon) to the satisfaction of one political party (that just happens to have won 2 branches of the federal government).
It’s possible that that they’re trying to get in the good graces of the incoming administration. It’s also possible that they’ve wanted to do this all along, but feared legal retaliation from the outgoing one. (The latter feels kinda gross, as they could certainly weather the retaliation better than the people they’re trying to protect now).
It’s also possible that this truly just happened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Regardless, my general inclination with regard to these companies is that we should have a free market but break up any one that gets large enough such that getting kicked off presents a moral issue. VPS is highly commoditized, so I don’t really care that they got kicked off AWS, but Facebook and Twitter are a bit thornier.
Hopefully condemnation of violence and the removal of digital systems that enable violence is bipartisan?
If it isn’t then morally they should side with the party who is against violence.
If it isn’t then financially it is prudent to side with the side that will keep the advertiser dollars flowing. (Biden won 70% of the economy and the majority of the people, especially the wealthy and well educated)
> the free market created these platforms and gave them power.
I'm pretty sure our tax dollars fund DARPA. [+] A substantial portion of the technology we're talking about here was funded by Public money.
[++] So when making all these fine points about discretion of private companies regarding the use of their platforms, it must be remembered that none of FANGs would even exists without technology and both military contracted private and academic research that were funded by American taxpayers' money.
This is pretty lackluster reasoning, it would follow that since Benjamin Franklin was the discoverer of electricity and DARPA Net came from that so....
Taxpayer funding has no bearing on the commercialization of products down the road. It is not a special case of intellectual property...
I'll return the favor and consider your reply as a strawman. But even then, let's compare Ben Franklin's capital outlay vs the Federal government's in DARPA.
Issue is not IP. Did I mention IP? There are extant congressional records of discussions in Congress regarding gifting this technology to "business" in service of the American public (one presumes). There is an implicit social contract at work here.
DARPAnet is as far from
Twitter as the Wright Brothers Flyer is from a 747. There is no implicit social or legal contract. A gift is well a gift. No backsies.
>Where the hell was the outrage then? We begged people to support us and tell these companies to back off but no one did.
>The inaction of everyone has lead to this. Welcome to how "free market capitalism" actually just means dozens of small unaccountable governments with more power than hundreds of countries combined. You asked for this. Take it.
There was no inaction. The inactivity was intentional. Things were going great. Bank balances were going up, everything was centralizing, everyone else putting off the difficulty of learning to actually make something and keep it free.
The last 4 years has injected more jade into my worldview than the rest of the years of my life combined.
It's because people on this site are largely sympathetic to the views espoused on Parler. If this were something else, we would hear them railing about "property rights".
Your whole second paragraph is incorrect, people posting that on Parley had their forum shut down. 99.99% of Parler is benign (often conservative) content, yet they are being shut out for having some of the wrong people around them.
That doesn't matter though in the context of what I said above though, what someone else may post on HN or their moderation policies shouldn't impact my content or my access to it.
Amazon is a private company and can do whatever it wants. It could ban apps that don’t use the oxford comma in written communication just for giggles.
Parler repeatedly refused to take down TOS violating speech. As far as 99% vs 1%, well persecuting the majority for the actions of a minority is very “patriotic” and an american tradition just ask a muslim ;)
That is the market deciding. Twitter's market is liberals and leftists, so twitter changes the platform based on their demand. If you don't like this, then you don't like free markets.
I don't particularly like free markets but I have a very specific qualification for Twitter.
If an American platform hosts public officials who use that platform for political purposes, then it should follow that all American citizens should have access to engage, comment and react.
Public officials relying on private platforms for public policy purposes, fundraising etc seems absurd and grotesquely undemocratic.
Twitter’s only duty is to maximize shareholder value like good capitalists without breaking laws. It isn’t breaking laws. It is making a bet that kicking of certain people will help the platform in the long run (same bet that AWS, Google etc are making) If your views are so fringe that the majority of the tech co’s are telling you to GTFO well then society as a majority is voting against you getting a bullhorn. Otherwise they would be worried about a boycott by users/advertisers. If you think the giants have misjudged then I am sure you could find funding for a competing site and infrastructure. Free market capitalism is about allocation of capital in a democratic society not about deciding what the rules of that should be that is the govts job. Please vote!
Strongly agree on public officials using private platforms for policy, but they must have seen something attractive about it. Free people and whatnot...
> The market has judged that “pro violence” speech is to be de-monetized.
“The market” seems to reach this conclusion en masse immediately after it’s clear that the political and regulatory winds have changed.
I don’t know much about Parler, and for the record am about as opposed to Donald Trump and his supporters as one can be. I view these moves by tech companies quite cynically.
They exist to maximize shareholder value within the bounds of the rules of law. I think you are right, content that was controversial and highly engaging/debated became a massive liability. When an asset becomes toxic you dump it.
It just happened to be that Google, Apple and Amazon all banned Parler within hours of each other, shortly after all the big social media companies banned President Trump, thus boosting Parler as an alternative social media platform.
This is not about fiduciary duty, nor is it about legal liability, this is a Silicon Valley hivemind moving in unison, arguably as a result of unhealthy discourse on their own social medias.
Maybe just no hate speech in general? I'm not totally clear what a protected class means in this context. Like what would hate speech towards a non protected class look like?
You can have ANY political perspective you want! Lower taxes, raise taxes, immigration policy, school choice, charter schools WHATEVER! You just can’t have hate speech against protected classes or call for violence. If you have an issues with the protected classes then VOTE!!! Also debate on what should and shouldn’t be a protected class is also OK!
These companies exist to make money. They have a fiduciary duty to shareholders. Aiding and abetting political violence is a sure fire way to hurt shareholder value. The market has judged that “pro violence” speech is to be de-monetized.