7 ms·

Yes, It’s Censorship

77 points by timf 4y ago

olliej 4y ago
jleyank 4y ago
Gresham’s law applies to discussions as well. There’s two ways to deal with an obnoxious participant: endeavour to eject or mute them or go elsewhere and leave them their empty room. If everywhere on the internet is private space (per the article), then nobody really has a right to be anywhere - my house, my rules. Don’t like my rules, then go elsewhere and set up your rules. Commercial sites need customers, so they have to edit the clientele in order to survive. Smaller sites, commercial or not, are like clubs and they can set their membership rules as desired. The former gets the bland middle ground. The latter handles the edges. Most people will just go elsewhere when faced with noise.
scarface74 4y ago
> Imagine that every place in the city was privately owned, and again, 90 percent of those places were managed by No Politics Holdings (International) Ltd, and they did not permit political discussion. And there is no monopoly on being able to set up a web server at a colo and create your own social media website where like minded people can listen to themselves - ie Parlor.
- 4bpp 4y ago
  There kind of is, insofar as you will need Cloudflare if you don't want anyone willing to rent some botnet time to have a veto on your presence and most likely need MasterCard/Visa to pay for your colo. Both of those are subject to the US government, the latter enthusiastically, and have demonstrated a willingness to refuse service based on political preference.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    There are at least 10 CDN providers in the US. Mastercard and Visa don’t habitually keep people from using their networks to make payments. They may stop businesses from accepting payments. Besides, the “true believers” are willing to send money orders and get other funding. People these days with unpopular views lack imagination. The entire civil rights movement thrived against a much more hostile environment than Gab. No one is burning down their houses, lynching them etc
    - woojoo666 4y ago
      Monopolies don't need to have all the market share, there just needs to be no viable substitutes. And a social network that is tiny with barely any content, is not a viable substitute. Another characteristic is high barriers to entry, which for social networks, includes overcoming the network effect as well as dealing with Cloudflare, Mastercard, etc. It doesn't matter if there are work arounds, if the cost of these workarounds is high, it's a monopoly. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
      - scarface74 4y ago
        Movements are started by people creating their own “networks”. You know people were getting their voices heard way before social media was a thing. The entire legal (at least in states where they are legal) weed industry has a viable business without banks, credit cards, etc. If you truly believe in your message and enough other people are interested, you don’t let minor roadblocks stand in your way. The civil rights movement didn’t boo hoo that things were “hard to work around”.
        woojoo666 4y ago
        > The civil rights movement didn’t boo hoo that things were “hard to work around”. I'm quite confident that the civil rights movement did complain that things were hard to work around. That didn't stop the movement of course. Just like people are still fighting the big tech monopoly, despite the uphill battle
CM30 4y ago
Thank you, this is something I've said for ages now. If a company has an almost defacto monopoly and stops people from talking about something, it's effectively the same as a government doing it. And when about 98% of internet communities are hosted by and controlled by large corporations, the whole 'go elsewhere and start up your own service' thing feels kinda clueless, as if it's deliberately ignoring how powerful network effects are. It's also clueless because it's extremely difficult to run a business or service online if your views/product/service is despised by a large enough percentage of the population, due to every single layer of the stack being controlled by someone that can and will shut down anyone they disagree with. ISPs, web hosts, anti DDOS providers, software providers, domain name registrars, payment processors... all of them think of themselves as the internet moral police, and will boot customers/clients if enough people scream at them to do so (or in the case of things like porn or gambling, because it's 'convenient'). So running an alternative gets more and more costly and impractical the more controversy you bring, to the point you're probably required to run your own datacentre and networking links if people hate you enough. That's not true of a real life business or organisation, which gets services provided by utilities and where (assuming they own the building), only the government could boot them out.
- scarface74 4y ago
  There is no “monopoly” on getting a computer on the internet where you can express your views. Parlor’s issues for example is not “censorship”. It is a badly run business.
  - Jiro 4y ago
    Good luck building your own payment processor for such a company. Payment processors are regulated and you can't just make your own.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      If you have anything worth saying and you have “true believers. You can find a way to get around the establishment. That’s the whole idea behind grass root movements. It’s shear laziness or the fact that none of them believe strongly enough to get their words across.
jacooper 4y ago
What, Doctorow posing on Medium and not his blog Pluralistic?, why?
- hairofadog 4y ago
  I was wondering this as well. Medium seems opposite polarity from Doctorow.
Proven 4y ago
There's censorship, but it's mostly legal (we'll see of the Deep State gets away with what they've been doing). There are alternatives, they are just not convenient. There are no monopolies except for governmental - that's where the game is rigged the most.
MilnerRoute 4y ago
The last line... "The problem isn’t the calls they make — it’s the lack of an alternative when they get it wrong." But as much as he says that... do we really believe there will ever be an alternative?
- Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  The internet is still changing from year to year. It was totally different 10 years ago, and that was different from what it was 20 years ago. It seems safe to project that it will be different in 10 years. The nice thing about the internet is that it is a "dumb pipe", actual protocols are determined at the end points. This aside from eg. current web browsers allowing anyone to set up a UI anywhere to do anything at any time. This means that there were alternatives in the past, alternatives right now, and there will be in future too.
root_axis 4y ago
The discourse around "censorship" has been bastardized to push an agenda. The waters have been muddied so that Elon suspending Kanye on Twitter goes into the same bucket as the Chinese great firewall. If you say "I like social media platforms that ban avowed Nazis" you're bashed over the head with disingenuous rhetoric likening you to an advocate for authoritarianism.
jmull 4y ago
The problem is, at Doctorow’s Anything Goes Cafe, a bunch of people shout loudly and abusively at other tables, incessantly go table-to-table to sell things, and even organize mobs to attack other tables. He’s ignoring this, which makes the essay weak and pointless.
- smrtinsert 4y ago
  Yep more petulant whining from the faux marginalized. Nevermind I actually wasted time reading this on a very popular website.
- poulsbohemian 4y ago
  For that matter, I have an issue with the way he paints the list of the most prominent tech companies as though they each have some master agenda and are all approaching speech in the same nefarious way. There's a big spread there such that his approach here does a disservice to the reader. As you point out, there's a lot of nasty hateful speech being spewed, and cooler heads are asking if there's a way to simmer it down. If we believe that such a request is a path to censorship, then perhaps the real answer is that those with different political / social / ideological points of view need to become more aggressive with their counter approach.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  Doesn't make it weak and pointless, it's just about a different topic than you wish it was.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  This is the oldest criticism of freedom of expression. It could be used for bad purposes. It has never been correct though.
  - peterashford 4y ago
    Hmm... I've heard people from many minorities say that this is their daily lives on social media. I find your "it has never been correct" statement a little hard to believe
byyll 4y ago
I've often seen the argument that freedom of expression is somehow equal to the US constitution. I am glad someone addresses it in a proper way.
musicale 4y ago
> The 30 year old decision to fully privatize the internet without any public speech forums means that we live in a city without any sidewalks or parks or school auditoriums where the First Amendment applies. The metaphor is interesting but the existence of .gov and .mil domains indicates that the internet isn't fully privatized, while the .edu domain indicates that schools are still on the internet as well. Public schools do seem to have digital auditoriums, and the question of whether first amendment rights are violated in them is an interesting one. I have noticed that many public libraries have web sites. I like Doctorow's idea of having digital town squares and parks as well, assuming they're not ruined by crime, garbage, pollution and advertising, as many physical spaces are.
isitmadeofglass 4y ago
> It’s pretty clear that Anything Goes is a more robust promoter of free expression than No Politics. It’s also clear that when a restaurant manager eavesdrops on your dinner-table conversation and then tells you to shut up because they don’t like your subject that they are abridging your free expression. This article follows the age old and wrong pattern of defining freedom of speech as some absolute freedom based on nothing but it’s name and ignoring context and contents, then calling everything censorship. Imagine if the constitution was explicit about citizens having “freedom of popcorn”. Here made with a stupid name that has no relation to what it is defined as to highlight the distinction between name and definition. This freedom of popcorn would state that the government shall not inhibit the freedom of movement of its citizens without due process. That would be a fairly ok freedom to establish. Essentially saying “the government cannot just put you in jail for no good reason”. Now comes the dumb part. We would then have authors like OP arguing that when their neighbor prevents them from camping in their kitchen, they are infringing on their freedom of popcorn, and are thereby effectively putting them in jail without process unless they let them camp out in their kitchen.

77 points by timf 4y ago

Gresham’s law applies to discussions as well. There’s two ways to deal with an obnoxious participant: endeavour to eject or mute them or go elsewhere and leave them their empty room. If everywhere on the internet is private space (per the article), then nobody really has a right to be anywhere - my house, my rules. Don’t like my rules, then go elsewhere and set up your rules. Commercial sites need customers, so they have to edit the clientele in order to survive. Smaller sites, commercial or not, are like clubs and they can set their membership rules as desired. The former gets the bland middle ground. The latter handles the edges. Most people will just go elsewhere when faced with noise.

scarface74 4y ago

> Imagine that every place in the city was privately owned, and again, 90 percent of those places were managed by No Politics Holdings (International) Ltd, and they did not permit political discussion. And there is no monopoly on being able to set up a web server at a colo and create your own social media website where like minded people can listen to themselves - ie Parlor.

4bpp 4y ago
There kind of is, insofar as you will need Cloudflare if you don't want anyone willing to rent some botnet time to have a veto on your presence and most likely need MasterCard/Visa to pay for your colo. Both of those are subject to the US government, the latter enthusiastically, and have demonstrated a willingness to refuse service based on political preference.
- scarface74 4y ago
  There are at least 10 CDN providers in the US. Mastercard and Visa don’t habitually keep people from using their networks to make payments. They may stop businesses from accepting payments. Besides, the “true believers” are willing to send money orders and get other funding. People these days with unpopular views lack imagination. The entire civil rights movement thrived against a much more hostile environment than Gab. No one is burning down their houses, lynching them etc
  - woojoo666 4y ago
    Monopolies don't need to have all the market share, there just needs to be no viable substitutes. And a social network that is tiny with barely any content, is not a viable substitute. Another characteristic is high barriers to entry, which for social networks, includes overcoming the network effect as well as dealing with Cloudflare, Mastercard, etc. It doesn't matter if there are work arounds, if the cost of these workarounds is high, it's a monopoly. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Movements are started by people creating their own “networks”. You know people were getting their voices heard way before social media was a thing. The entire legal (at least in states where they are legal) weed industry has a viable business without banks, credit cards, etc. If you truly believe in your message and enough other people are interested, you don’t let minor roadblocks stand in your way. The civil rights movement didn’t boo hoo that things were “hard to work around”.
      - woojoo666 4y ago
        > The civil rights movement didn’t boo hoo that things were “hard to work around”. I'm quite confident that the civil rights movement did complain that things were hard to work around. That didn't stop the movement of course. Just like people are still fighting the big tech monopoly, despite the uphill battle

CM30 4y ago

Thank you, this is something I've said for ages now. If a company has an almost defacto monopoly and stops people from talking about something, it's effectively the same as a government doing it. And when about 98% of internet communities are hosted by and controlled by large corporations, the whole 'go elsewhere and start up your own service' thing feels kinda clueless, as if it's deliberately ignoring how powerful network effects are. It's also clueless because it's extremely difficult to run a business or service online if your views/product/service is despised by a large enough percentage of the population, due to every single layer of the stack being controlled by someone that can and will shut down anyone they disagree with. ISPs, web hosts, anti DDOS providers, software providers, domain name registrars, payment processors... all of them think of themselves as the internet moral police, and will boot customers/clients if enough people scream at them to do so (or in the case of things like porn or gambling, because it's 'convenient'). So running an alternative gets more and more costly and impractical the more controversy you bring, to the point you're probably required to run your own datacentre and networking links if people hate you enough. That's not true of a real life business or organisation, which gets services provided by utilities and where (assuming they own the building), only the government could boot them out.

scarface74 4y ago
There is no “monopoly” on getting a computer on the internet where you can express your views. Parlor’s issues for example is not “censorship”. It is a badly run business.
- Jiro 4y ago
  Good luck building your own payment processor for such a company. Payment processors are regulated and you can't just make your own.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    If you have anything worth saying and you have “true believers. You can find a way to get around the establishment. That’s the whole idea behind grass root movements. It’s shear laziness or the fact that none of them believe strongly enough to get their words across.

jacooper 4y ago

What, Doctorow posing on Medium and not his blog Pluralistic?, why?

hairofadog 4y ago
I was wondering this as well. Medium seems opposite polarity from Doctorow.

Proven 4y ago

There's censorship, but it's mostly legal (we'll see of the Deep State gets away with what they've been doing). There are alternatives, they are just not convenient. There are no monopolies except for governmental - that's where the game is rigged the most.

MilnerRoute 4y ago

The last line... "The problem isn’t the calls they make — it’s the lack of an alternative when they get it wrong." But as much as he says that... do we really believe there will ever be an alternative?

Kim_Bruning 4y ago
The internet is still changing from year to year. It was totally different 10 years ago, and that was different from what it was 20 years ago. It seems safe to project that it will be different in 10 years. The nice thing about the internet is that it is a "dumb pipe", actual protocols are determined at the end points. This aside from eg. current web browsers allowing anyone to set up a UI anywhere to do anything at any time. This means that there were alternatives in the past, alternatives right now, and there will be in future too.

root_axis 4y ago

The discourse around "censorship" has been bastardized to push an agenda. The waters have been muddied so that Elon suspending Kanye on Twitter goes into the same bucket as the Chinese great firewall. If you say "I like social media platforms that ban avowed Nazis" you're bashed over the head with disingenuous rhetoric likening you to an advocate for authoritarianism.

jmull 4y ago

The problem is, at Doctorow’s Anything Goes Cafe, a bunch of people shout loudly and abusively at other tables, incessantly go table-to-table to sell things, and even organize mobs to attack other tables. He’s ignoring this, which makes the essay weak and pointless.

smrtinsert 4y ago
Yep more petulant whining from the faux marginalized. Nevermind I actually wasted time reading this on a very popular website.
poulsbohemian 4y ago
For that matter, I have an issue with the way he paints the list of the most prominent tech companies as though they each have some master agenda and are all approaching speech in the same nefarious way. There's a big spread there such that his approach here does a disservice to the reader. As you point out, there's a lot of nasty hateful speech being spewed, and cooler heads are asking if there's a way to simmer it down. If we believe that such a request is a path to censorship, then perhaps the real answer is that those with different political / social / ideological points of view need to become more aggressive with their counter approach.
andrewflnr 4y ago
Doesn't make it weak and pointless, it's just about a different topic than you wish it was.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
This is the oldest criticism of freedom of expression. It could be used for bad purposes. It has never been correct though.
- peterashford 4y ago
  Hmm... I've heard people from many minorities say that this is their daily lives on social media. I find your "it has never been correct" statement a little hard to believe

byyll 4y ago

I've often seen the argument that freedom of expression is somehow equal to the US constitution. I am glad someone addresses it in a proper way.

musicale 4y ago

> The 30 year old decision to fully privatize the internet without any public speech forums means that we live in a city without any sidewalks or parks or school auditoriums where the First Amendment applies. The metaphor is interesting but the existence of .gov and .mil domains indicates that the internet isn't fully privatized, while the .edu domain indicates that schools are still on the internet as well. Public schools do seem to have digital auditoriums, and the question of whether first amendment rights are violated in them is an interesting one. I have noticed that many public libraries have web sites. I like Doctorow's idea of having digital town squares and parks as well, assuming they're not ruined by crime, garbage, pollution and advertising, as many physical spaces are.

isitmadeofglass 4y ago

> It’s pretty clear that Anything Goes is a more robust promoter of free expression than No Politics. It’s also clear that when a restaurant manager eavesdrops on your dinner-table conversation and then tells you to shut up because they don’t like your subject that they are abridging your free expression. This article follows the age old and wrong pattern of defining freedom of speech as some absolute freedom based on nothing but it’s name and ignoring context and contents, then calling everything censorship. Imagine if the constitution was explicit about citizens having “freedom of popcorn”. Here made with a stupid name that has no relation to what it is defined as to highlight the distinction between name and definition. This freedom of popcorn would state that the government shall not inhibit the freedom of movement of its citizens without due process. That would be a fairly ok freedom to establish. Essentially saying “the government cannot just put you in jail for no good reason”. Now comes the dumb part. We would then have authors like OP arguing that when their neighbor prevents them from camping in their kitchen, they are infringing on their freedom of popcorn, and are thereby effectively putting them in jail without process unless they let them camp out in their kitchen.