An interesting twist on free speech on the internet is that almost all speech on the internet is being done on private companies' websites.
No private company is considered required to promote or protect free speech. Each forum is able to say "don't like our policies, then go somewhere else".
This even seems quite reasonable. Why should any particular forum be forced to allow any particular kind of speech? Should Facebook be forced to allow porn as something that is protected by freedom of expression?
On the flip side, as more and more of meaningful speech occurs on these not-really-public forums of Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, there exists quite a bit of unease on my part for these global companies to insist on narrowing expression on these platforms to that which they deem acceptable by whatever internal process they desire.
Facebook's study that showed they could manipulate people's feelings by altering the feed algorithm indicates this is an awful lot of power handed to a company focused on making profits and staying on the good side of governmental organizations.
YouTube recently started changing their policies that has started to create problems for people using their platforms.
This would likely be okay if there were real public space on the web, but it currently operates more as a series of visits to other people's private property. The release valve is a persons ability to create their own corner of the internet, but even this must leap through various ISP and web host providers terms of service. Additionally, is it really speech if you're just doing the internet equivalent of talking to yourself on an island in the middle of nowhere?
Cases like this photo will only become more apparent as time goes on. I'm not sure how society will negotiate these ideas, but at present, the commercial interests are leading the conversation in their favor.
I agree with you. To continue your internet-as-a-physical-place analogue, Facebook is basically a mall where you are encouraged to hang out and intermittently enticed to buy things.
-No porn on Facebook is the equivalent to no nudity allowed at the mall.
-Banning users is the equivalent of kicking a person out of the mall.
-Censoring messages is the equivalent of... uh.. gagging a person just before they can say something you didn't want them to say.
-Direct messaging people or groups is the equivalent of talking to your friends, while an anonymous person videotapes and listens without really letting you know they're doing that.
-Posting a status is the equivalent of shouting what you're feeling or thinking to nobody in particular
-Facebook curating newsfeeds is the equivalent of putting you in a room and showing videos of the things your friends are shouting, intermittently throwing in advertisements, and just kind of letting you believe that what you're seeing is real and unadulterated.
Point is, if you look at Facebook like a physical establishment, it's a pretty weird place.
But as long as people continue to recognize that censorship and surveillance are not cool, they will continue to complain to the groups who engage in it, and constantly be on the lookout for better alternatives.
I personally recommend Snapchat for un-surveilled interaction with friends, Hacker News for news with uncensored commentary, and LinkedIn to stay connected with people. And I'm glad that there are reasonable alternatives to all of these
I know that to some extent, Facebook saves data on me using private messages I've sent to friends. I know that Google Hangouts does too. Snapchat tells me that nobody has access to messages I've sent to friends except for me and my friend, and that the message is deleted after the message is viewed. I have no evidence to show that they don't, and thus far no precedence not to trust them.
Trust by definition is not evidence-based. Even if it were "open source", you would have no proof that the actual production code was the open source version. I understand and even subscribe to the default attitude of lack of trust, but it is not an actionable attitude when it comes to the web and saas.
> Even if it were "open source", you would have no proof that the actual production code was the open source version.
There are ways to prove that. You can provide reproducible builds, where someone who builds the software will end up with bit-for-bit identical binaries to the production version. Then, anyone can verify that the available binary matches the available source.
Why don't people talk about https://wire.com/? It's encrypted and mostly open source. It has the most features I've seen including multiple devices, group chat, audio, desktop app.
Is it really a solution to the walled gardens people are stuck in now? The clients are open, so presumably it would be possible (and encouraged?) to write a custom client. That is definitely a big plus.
But it still looks like a centralized communication protocol that depends on proprietary servers and a private network to use. The issue with the walled gardens we're seeing (this week with this iconic photograph) is that there is no escape valve; no truly open alternative to the social network provided by these services.
With email we can (despite the difficulties) set up our own servers and clients, and communicate with anyone (again, assuming we manage to set up things correctly) who uses email today. We can even use encryption verified and trusted by many independent experts (i.e., OpenPGP). Despite all its warts, there is a safety valve there, and for now it maintains the balance between corporate and public interests.
With these chat services it seems that you are stuck with what their proprietors allow and assert.
Federation is hard to get right, but isn't it simply a base requirement for any truly free and open alternative to the WhatsApps and Snapchats of the world?
I understand that feeling, but it's too idealistic to be practical right now. We have to accept that convenience has won. These types of social networks depend on a critical mass of users. If the choice is to hold onto principles and lose, or compromise for now closer to the direction we want, then I think we should use Wire. It is the best chance we have for a service that could become popular enough, with people behind it who might embrace it being an open standard. There are no realistic alternatives in this mobile dominated walled-garden world. Most don't even have a desktop client, and require a phone number.
Even if we disregard its flaws, why would the masses migrate to Wire? Or Telegram, or Signal for that matter. I don't deny that it's a lot better than WhatsApp, but it still faces the same problem as any other alternative; the masses aren't using it.
The masses have expectations of free services, and there is no way to monetize privatized data (encrypted data) while providing the service for free. Peer to peer networks will suffer heavily from today's infrastructure due to the cost required to track and process millions of different certificates, as well as symmetric sessions.
There are some creative applications that could be useful, like the models used in East Asia through micro payments. However their culture is conducive to the micropayment model (I.e. emojis, etc) whereas the West is not. A micro payment service on privatized data would be ideal if it could be profitable, yet there is no profitable model to sustain it in the West.
Edit: also, no matter what micro payment model you use, if it is successful or trends, the established free non privatized services will exploit it and provide it for free.
I can see this possibly working doing in enclaves outside the US surveillance apparatus, but directly competing against it by taking on their grandfathered companies is extremely difficult.
We don't need the masses to migrate now, it doesn't need to be either
- "everyone away from Facebook, Whatsapp, Google, everybody use only GPL and nothing for NSA, ФСБ etc to see"
or
- otherwise utter fail.
Getting people to try alternatives goes a long way. We have seen Microsoft changing massively over the last few years after Apple started eating away at the high end prosumer market for phones and laptops.
Facebook just caved after one head of a nation and a couple of newspapers, one of them in a tiny tiny country, stood up and said NO.
I, and many with me, also think the majority of the police force in most western countries is good hardworking people, (I'm personally in no position to judge eastern or African countries and even my opinion on western police is to be taken with a grain of salt) what we object to is just the warrantless dragnets etc.
And the reason why we are objecing them often isn't necessarily because we distrust our police, but as an insurance against future police and politicians, against future hackers who might get access to a raw dump, against unstable neighbouring countries and the occasional bad apple we see. Oh, and as a matter of solidarity to people like the Turkish who now seems to have reason for worry if they ever said or did anything that might have offended their (somewhat easily offended it seems) president:-|
(BTW: If you have spare time and/or cash consider supporting EFF. They seem to be very focused and reasonable to the point where they are taken seriously by politicians.)
Ah I see. Getting people used to a status quo where having multiple chat networks in use is normal is better than a monoculture in the long term. I can agree with that.
The real issue is the brass tacks. Who can afford to run their own private servers, or pay for data throughput for synching. Not to mention the enormous waste of energy and resources due to duplicated posts kept across millions of peer to peer networks. Convenience is King as usual, and places like Facebook have the motivation and ability to monetize and optimize.
The idea of private data atolls in the day of free services is a luxury and they are exploiting that facet. Cloud services like Gcloud, AWS, etc reflect this from their premium pricing.
Low maintenance, easy to ignore, clear purpose. I can use it to stay connected with colleagues without seeing photos of their wedding or baby pictures. There's no wall where people can publicly write to me, I don't get notified when it's my friend's birthday, my friends can't tag me in photos. I don't like the LinkedIn newsfeed very much but at least on mine I mostly only see people who have changed jobs or see jobs that are hiring.
I guess in general that being connected with your friends is a really useful tool, but Facebook does so much to try to keep you engaged that it becomes draining.
And yes, the more that LinkedIn tries to mirror Facebook or force engagement, the more I resent LinkedIn
Thanks for your reply. I have an account on LinkedIn but don't login often. LinkedIn keeps bombarding me with reminders about people work anniversaries, reminders of waiting invitations, etc. It gets annoying very quickly. Whenever I do login, I see stories that my friends have shared, who they have endorsed, etc. It does appear as irrelevant as Facebook
What, you mean you don't want to add some dude you sold a couch to on Craigslist in 2009 to Your Professional Network?! Why not??? (No thanks, Linkedin. No thanks.)
> easy to ignore... I don't get notified when it's my friend's birthday
LinkedIn is a lot noisier than Facebook. The notifications that I get from it are even more useless: people who you've never worked with who want to connect, people who LinkedIn feels you want to connect to but again you've never met them, ... the list goes on. Back then they also used dark patterns to make it hard to unsubscribe to their email notifications. Facebook isn't the best corporate citizen, but it's still better than LinkedIn
Would also recommend Whatsapp. But I like the transient nature of Snapchat.
Hacker News is moderated but not censored in any sense that I worry about. With zero moderation you get pretty much just spambots. With bare minimum moderation you get trolls, schills, and harassers, so cohesive conversations don't happen because points can't be made in full. Hacker News is the best source I know of for news + discussion because the rules and moderation censor the noisy, unsubstantive comments that would otherwise derail an important conversation.
That said, I wish there were more forums like HN because I would like to follow the same quality of conversation that I see here on subjects besides computer science and tech companies.
Once upon a time 'censorship' referred to restrictions imposed by governments. Newspapers, magazines, and publishers curating the content of their publications was considered editorial discretion (rules and moderation) and distinctly different than government censorship.
Unfortunately all these activities are now simply tossed together into the general category of 'censorship' and as such we've lost the ability to clearly communicate some important distinctions in the process. I would also argue that this loss of clarity has resulted in the negative connotations of government censorship being attributed to private editorial activities with the deleterious effect that private entities are vilified for completely reasonable editorial policies.
Counterexample: zuccotti Park. It's privately owned, but the place for Occupy Wall Street.
It used to be that life happened on the streets, i. e. public property. If you get a hundred people to walk down Main Street at noon, 2/3 of the city will see it.
Over the last 50 years, life has moved (a) indoors, (b) onto private commercial property (mall, airport...) and (C) online, while some properties that used to be public are now private (parks, even the mayor's office is now often a lease-back arrangement.
That's why the rules need to be updated. Otherwise we'll be left with a Free Speech Zone(tm)(sponsored by McDonalds) on some empty parking lot for each city.
Public spaces and public accommodations are an interesting topic, but I think that is somewhat different from the idea of government blocking publication or other dissemination of information.
Prior to internet, speeches are controlled by newspapers and televisions. They won't even publish your speech if they don't like it. In that sense, Internet is still a huge step forward.
The difference is network effects. There are tons and tons of newspapers (over 1000 in the US alone), and one can plausibly start their own. There's a tiny number of social networks and it's extremely difficult to break into that market.
Low barriers + large numbers is at least a nudge in the direction of intellectual diversity.
Internet also offers you large audience instantly. If you really wants your speech to been seen and not censored, you can setup your own website for it.
The US used to have a vibrant newspaper scene with all kinds of papers ranging the spectrum. This was in the 29th century. Since then a handful of giant corporations have dominated the media industry.
Three if you count Perth's local daily, The West Australian, which is owned by Seven West Media. That doesn't really change your point though. But, Australia is a small country (in population terms), and it only has six or so major cities, so I don't think we could expect vastly wider media ownership than we've currently got.
One could argue that we could add should, but we don't. We just think 23 million people can only support two news papers. That way we can claim there isn't a monopoly.
Go back 30 years. TV and newspapers were (and are) private companies too. We had free speech when speaking with friends or at a political meeting, and sending mail.
Now we're doing more of that kind of communication inside social networks. They can't censor preemptively so they censor after we publish. But it's not different than wanting to write to friends using a newspaper as intermediary. The reason we were not doing that was the extreme inconvenience of the method but censorship would have been the same.
What we're doing now is forcing free speech protection on some companies that became a communication medium almost indistinguishable from free air. It's an uphill battle but not an impossible one.
> Well, outside of California and New Jersey, the First Amendment’s strong protection for free expression — particularly speech involving public issues — likely won’t apply in your local mall if it’s privately owned.
There was a while when news services at least paid lip service to the idea that they told people what they needed to know, not just what they wanted to hear. Obviously it wasn't perfect, but a lot of journalists took it very seriously.
Facebook just fired the last of its on-staff journalists.
I was thinking about this the other day. I'm of the opinion that the main problem with Socialism or Communism is exactly the same problem as with Capitalism or "Free Market" economics.
Human greed.
They're all viable theories of how to structure a society, but they all fail when the people in power decide to put their own interests in front of the needs of the general populous.
Capitalism ends up being better because it usuallytries to have a separation of powers between those who control production resources and those who control policy and politics. In real-world Socialism and Communism, they are the same, allowing for greed to have a much harder impact.
Most forms of socialism are entirely compatible with private enterprise. Totalitarian media and production control like the Soviets used, yeah, that's different.
Why are we having this conversation here rather than on Reddit or Twitter? For me it's because I prefer a moderated forum. We don't have pictures at all here (though you can link to them) which makes some issues non-problems.
Many people are more interested in avoiding spam and abuse than they are in seeing something outrageous. As long as you have forum-shopping the more highly moderated places have an advantage, at least some of the time.
Facebook is in the moderation business. They're going to screw up sometimes but they're not going to stop moderating. On the other side you often have people saying they're not doing enough about abuse.
Side note: Reddit has lots of heavily moderated subs of excellent quality. HN is perhaps a bit less focused than them. I don't see why r/hackernews couldn't be a thing.
> YouTube recently started changing their policies that has started to create problems for people using their platforms.
Not at all recently. But youtube's policies and the community's reactions to them are very much a case of "First they came for the x". Happens very regularly, and only the affected ones speak up, which is just not enough when we're talking about a web giant like google/youtube.
The idea that Freedom of Speech is just a thing from the US constitution is particularly odd if you're not from the US. Freedom of Speech is, surely, a measure of how free you are to communicate your message to other people.
The two ideas are certainly related but they are also different in very significant ways. Conflating the two makes discussion of these concepts imprecise and muddled.
The notion that the government should have limited power to restrict communication is quite different from the notion that private entities have some legal obligation to publish content (i.e. that individuals can assert the right to publish via platforms that they don't own).
Legal obligation, of course not. I don't think anyone involved in the current incident was arguing for a legal obligation for Facebook to do anything in particular.
Moral obligation, now that's a different beast. Assuming that free speech is valuable to society as a whole, one might argue that everyone (including Facebook employees) has a moral obligation to promote it, or at least not inhibit it too much.
Your response is somewhat an example of what I was talking about. By not clearly distinguishing between the different concepts you end up with muddled arguments.
You've clarified here and said that in the private case there is a 'moral obligation'. Really? What exactly is the obligation? Falling back on the generic notion of 'free speech' doesn't actually clarify the argument.
For example, if I managed a public forum for discussion of roller coasters, am I 'obligated' to accept all user generated content? What if a controversial post was about labor practices at an amusement park. Perhaps that is tangently connected to 'roller coasters' but maybe I don't want my site politicized and so I moderate/delete that content. Is that some sort of ethical violation (I'm assuming for this thought exercise that my terms of service say that I'm going to moderate content, i.e. this isn't a surprise to the participants).
What if my forum is oriented around a concept, such as regulatory reform? Is there an obligation to accept and publish content that is inflammatory, off topic, superfluous, or perhaps just contrary to my goals? What guidance would help me decide when I am 'morally obligated' to publish the content?
To be clear, I think there is value in healthy debate, I just struggle with the unqualified appeals to 'free speech' to put 'moral' requirements on publishers and unfortunately I think the power of the concept of 'free speech' is often wielded in these cases to advocate for legal requirements, which I think goes way to far.
I agree with you for the most part, but I also think that we can expect organizations above a certain size or influence to have a bigger moral obligation than the little players. Unlike law, morality is a gradient.
It doesn't sound unreasonable to say that the more power you have to shape the world around you, the more obligation you have to use that power for the greater good. This kind of noblesse oblige is not a foreign concept to most people.
It might also make a difference if a company is actively trying to become the platform for everyone to express their thoughts. Whether or not your actions actually impede free speech or not depends a lot on whether or not there are alternatives of a comparable size and influence. For example, I have no obligation to let random people put up "TRUMP 2016" signs on my lawn, because they are free to put up signs on their own lawns, windows, cars, etc. But if all the HOAs in the city banned election signs, that could be a problem even though HOAs are not run by the city.
The closer you are to having a monopoly on deciding what people can or can't say in their daily life, the more your moral obligations will resemble that of a government. This becomes so extreme in the case of the government itself, that smart people in the past have decided to codify some of the government's moral obligations into a legally binding document.
It is particularly odd if you're in the US too though, but yes that is accurate.
Freedom of speech is not a measure of those things, it is a concept we, in the US, exported to conform other democracies to our will, with mixed success.
It became a meme amongst private persons. And it is still a meme, virally spreading words that have no congruence with the reality the words are used in.
Freedom of speech is a limitation of the government retaliating on a person solely on the basis of their speech. It is not a limitation of private persons using the government's courts to create a consequence for someone else's speech, it is not a limitation on private persons for restricting or censoring other people's speech.
Both Twitter and Facebook were trumpeting their dedication to freedom of speech and liberty during Arab Spring.
If they had just said, "Look we have all these shareholders we have to appease with money, and right now this is the best way to make more money" I would have no problem with that.
Don't pretend to be anti-censorship and then turn around and censor things.
> No private company is considered required to promote or protect free speech
They are liable to offer the service in good faith. If their service to the user is communication, then I don't see how that promises any less than free speech. Publication of pornography to minors is an offense, so it's not covered by free speech to begin with. The picture in question is not pornography.
Furthermore, it's not just a matter of ISPs. Because of its refusal to censor various kinds of content, sites like 8chan have been refused service from various sites that process donations.
No private company is considered required to promote or protect free speech. Each forum is able to say "don't like our policies, then go somewhere else".
This even seems quite reasonable. Why should any particular forum be forced to allow any particular kind of speech? Should Facebook be forced to allow porn as something that is protected by freedom of expression?
On the flip side, as more and more of meaningful speech occurs on these not-really-public forums of Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, there exists quite a bit of unease on my part for these global companies to insist on narrowing expression on these platforms to that which they deem acceptable by whatever internal process they desire.
Facebook's study that showed they could manipulate people's feelings by altering the feed algorithm indicates this is an awful lot of power handed to a company focused on making profits and staying on the good side of governmental organizations.
YouTube recently started changing their policies that has started to create problems for people using their platforms.
This would likely be okay if there were real public space on the web, but it currently operates more as a series of visits to other people's private property. The release valve is a persons ability to create their own corner of the internet, but even this must leap through various ISP and web host providers terms of service. Additionally, is it really speech if you're just doing the internet equivalent of talking to yourself on an island in the middle of nowhere?
Cases like this photo will only become more apparent as time goes on. I'm not sure how society will negotiate these ideas, but at present, the commercial interests are leading the conversation in their favor.