These aren't conservative voices, they're hate voices and should be banned. There's lots of legitimate conservative voices out there who are not being listened to. And, they're not banned either.
The rebelious streak in me has been seeking out and reading so-called “banned books”— books that were at one point banned by a community for some reason or another— since I was a teen. Many of these are classics that ran afoul of norms or the party line at some point, somewhere.
The problem isn’t that the voices of hate are being banned. The problem is that the mechanisms used to lower the volume on or silence hate speech can lower the volume or silence any other form or speech. This is why the US enshrined free speech as the first amendment of the constitution.
Technical means of defying censorship, like this one, help to preserve that right.
Are you under the impression that it's the government running Twitter or any other online forum?
I really don't understand why people are having issues understanding that a private enterprise is free to censor as they see fit.
I don't think anyone has a problem understanding that these are private companies and that they are well within their rights to censor whatever they see fit.
What is concerning is that these particular companies are the main platforms used nowadays for conveying ideas and expressing thought, and there are no alternatives that offer the same level of reach. Sure, you can put your video up on another hosting platform. Nobody is going to find it like they would on YouTube.
In order to disseminate ideas widely authors have always been at the mercy of editors, publishers and distributors.
It's an impossible situation because if you force someone to publish something they find objectionable then you've stripped them of their own rights just so some arsehole can write shit about Jews/Muslims/Gays/Blacks/insert minority here.
> This is why the US enshrined free speech as the first amendment of the constitution.
You're right, it wasn't very charitable, I took it quite literally, and that means the 1st amendment has absolutely no bearing on preserving the right of one person when that is trampling on the publishers rights.
> Technical means of defying censorship, like this one, help to preserve that right.
I did miss the nuance there because I get angry that there appears to me an impression in the general populace that the 1st amendment applies everywhere and gives people carte blanche to say whatever they please without consequence.
I think the issue arises with how powerful these social media platforms are. If your Twitter/FB/etc accounts get shadow banned, you now essentially have no voice on the internet.
I don't use Facebook, and I only log into Twitter once every couple of months or more rarely than that. I don't use any other of the super-popular social networks (I guess I have a linkedin profile that I haven't logged into in 5 or more years.)
My own access habits are in practice similar to one who is banned or suspended regularly.
I have never felt like I essentially have no voice on the internet.
I understand that if some popular person with lots of followers gets banned then it seems like they would risk losing a lot of their audience that they may rely on for income etc etc etc, but that's hardly the reality of the average 10/100/1000-followers user, is it?
Just because the big social networks are really big doesn't mean that they are the only places you can find a way to have a voice on the web. I don't mean to diminish your feelings if you feel that way. If you love twitter or fb or whatever and you get kicked out, then I certainly get that would be hard. But there are other places on the web. Lots of other places. Maybe some alternative places let you have even more of a voice precisely because they're smaller and it takes less to cut through the noise.
They are certainly influential, but so are talk radio and the news media, should those platforms also be forced to broadcast content they disagree with? I don't see any differences between Facebook and any other private businesses that have built media platforms.
The problem is that private enterprise is becoming the centralized controller of both personal and "public square" communications, being a ubiquitously editorializing middle man of common case and important speech.
This is completely different than, and carries higher stakes than the role that telecoms, hosting companies, and publishers have played in the past.
It isn't, but for a good number of people it certainly does appear to be a more comforting approach to stop short of making any sort of ethical claims about the 'free speech' question because it means getting what they want: uncomfortable ideas punted into the closet.
Lead dev on the service here. Please have a look at the page, especially the comments about how unpopular views can change over time, and how the views you hold are certain to seem deplorable to someone out there (hn user nostrademons has a good quote about this which I used).
At core though, for me this is about protecting access to information and the importance of decentralized (uncensorable) identity, not about who private companies should or shouldn't allow on their platforms.
I love the Keybase project (I'm user @mattasher)! You guys are on my list of people to contact as we get closer to public rollout. Anyone at Keybase I should contact specifically?
I can't believe this needs to be stated, but the objection that normal people have to censorship is that we don't want a small handful of corporations and celebrity bullies to be the ones who get to decide what is or isn't "legitimate voice", as you put it.
This is a discussion that has some serious points on both sides. I don't believe throwing judgments on the people who choose a side that differs from your own will be helpful.
This is slightly different. It's to differentiate between individual entity and legal entity.
But normal/regular person can be used as opposed to celebrity, or billionaire. Both Jeff Bezos and myself are natural persons. Only one is a normal/regular person :).
Maybe this is true, but it seems like this claim needs some evidence.
Shaming people sometimes makes them rebel, and sometimes makes them reform.
Maybe you drive more people into radicalization than self-reflection when you shut them down. I'm not sure I've ever seen evidence of that either way, have you?
However, it seems almost axiomatic that if a person cannot be heard (as easily) then that person cannot recruit (as easily). I would guess that this is at least part of the purpose behind de-platforming tactics. Maybe. Maybe de-platformers just want to stop hearing from their opponents.
I'm wary of de-platforming as a universal tactic though I might be convinced that it is sometimes the right approach. At any rate, if it's effective, then people will keep doing it. And it seems to be pretty effective.
Disclaimer: I don't have emperical evidence for anything I'm about to say.
I think that someone isn't hateful because they're an inherently hateful person. People are a product of their environment. If they only communicate with hateful people, it shapes their worldview.
Everyone has flaws, but somehow hateful speech is that One Thing we cannot tolerate in a person. Bob might be a racist, but he's also a good carpenter, and there's some common ground there. If you just want to get hateful people out of your feed, then ban away. If you want to reduce the number of hateful people in the world, then treat them with respect and gradually show them a better way.
Seems like there is a difference between the racist who has a real, seething resentment but is quiet about it and doesn't act on it, and the person (sincerely held racist beliefs or not) who proselytizes hate, isn't there?
I'm not a good data point, because I have never been a target of that kind of resentment/anger/hatred/etc. At the same time, I can imagine the quiet racist is easier to tolerate than the inflammatory provocateur.
I probably agree with your solution in the long term. I just don't know who is supposed to do the tolerating and way-showing. Certainly I don't think that social media/tech/publishing platforms are required to tolerate viewpoints they think could hurt their business.
For what it's worth, I can tolerate hate speech. I'm not quite a free speech absolutist maybe, but pretty close. But it's easy to tolerate it when I'm rarely if ever a real target of it.
Edit: If you feel I am unfairly calling you out by asking if you have evidence for your previous claim about banning users for content causing radicalization, then I'm sorry. That's not my intent. I really am just curious if that's been studied. I've seen similar claims but not any evidence.
That's a strong statement. I can immediately think of one exception to your rule: the "Unabomber," Ted Kaczynski, who both held radical ideas and was notably isolated in a remote mountain cabin with no electronic communications.
Tom Fitton or JudicialWatch was shadowbanned at Twitter. You go ahead and find the “hate speech” posts.
Candace Owens, a black conservative woman was temporarily banned from twitter for making the same comments NYT’snew editor made but replaced “white” with “Jewish” and all of a sudden twitter decides those are racist. She did it prove a point and twitter played right along.
I said find the hate speech. Not does your biased website doesn't approve of them.
JW is one of the only groups out there actually winning lawsuits to disclose information on the 2016 election and FBI mishandling of basically everything.
Sorry, they're real lawyers, in real cases, using actual facts that stand up in a court of law. I can see why your favorite website there doesn't like that.
ALSO... FWIW... My local news paper is EXTREMELY BIASED, and your site lists them as Neutral.
Your source is itself notorious for not being what it claims to be. I would argue that any website that claims to be a fact checker (whether left or right politically) is automatically less trusted, since their entire raison d'etre is to claim the right to declare whether others are biased or not. The reality is that everyone is biased. Claiming to not be so means starting from a false premise.
Honestly, this talk of Twitter “shadowbanning” strikes me as full on conspiracy theory. “I’m shadowbanned! No one can see my tweets!” gets retweeted 10k times. I don’t even follow these people, and it shows up in my TL.
Um... You should probably look at how their "Quality Filter" is shaddowbanning without actually removing tweets.
The short version is unless you follow that person already, you won't see them organically in any feeds. They could #JonathonKoren and you won't see it because they are effectively hidden unless you already followed them.
What Twitter is doing is absolutely political censorship.
EDIT: There are tools to detect the "Quality Filter" there is a hidden cam interview with an engineer from Twitter explaining it. Hardly conspiracy theory. I don't know why it doesn't seem to be an issue for you, or anything about your anecdote of not seeing it.
This doesn’t sound like a shadow ban at all. It’s a term that actually means something.[0] This is just people whining that they don’t have a high enough quality score.
I’d take this a lot more seriously if this wasn’t being peddled by same folks that complain about “conservative purges” when Twitter bans a bunch of obvious bot accounts.
What makes this a conspiracy theory is the assumption of some grand covert political agenda. That’s really really hard to believe. Twitter is infamous for not enforcing their own TOS when it comes to hate speech or even calls for violence.
While I’ve never worked at Twitter, I’ve seen how fringe groups start spreading rumors of dark political agendas when it comes to these sorts of algorithms. It just doesn’t happen. It’s just spreading false outrage for clicks. It’s bullshit sold to people desperate for validation of their unpopular ideas.
Apple decided many years ago that they were going to make it rich by controlling as much of their product/software as they could. In the past, when I guess they put out unique and well crafted products it worked. Today, not so much. Their stuff is garbage. Apple has continuous problems with production and have used strong-arm tactics to control what people can find out and fix on their own.
You hit the nail on the head with "In 5-10 years, native iOS apps will be as common as Win32 C apps. Apple will go kicking and screaming, keeping iOS Safari behind the curve, blocking PWA progress where they can. " Personally, I don't think (hope?) that it will take 5-10 years. Right now they have less than 80% of the market. As more and more people figure out that their products are not what they used to be that market share will become less and less. At some point it will no longer matter.
To the argument that the "sales are there" all I can say is look at the statistics. I believe it's less than 1% of all app store products (regardless of which one) make money. And, the average user goes to five apps on their phones all the time. The chances you're going to write an app that actually makes anything is between slim and none. If the user can't install your app for free you're never even going to get it installed on their phone/tablet at all.
Further, the vast number of apps in the future will be PWAs and many of those will be business oriented. As you said, programmers don't want to have to write three different sets of code (realistically only two: JS and Apple - whatever they're pushing recently). And, most of those apps will be "installed" from the web page for that SaaS or your own enterprise.
Apple is done. Stick it with a fork and take it out of the oven. Obviously, with all the dumb money they've collected over the last 10+ years they could do well without ever shipping another product. And, without a doubt, they will continue to get people to buy their products for sometime in the future. But, they will either come to the realization that they have no choice but work with MS and Google in allowing PWAs or they will become irrelevant. It will take them some time to understand that since they no longer have forward thinking management and just surround themselves with "protect our business" types. Eventually, those turkeys will be replaced (hopefully sooner rather than later - we still need competition) or Apple will become the next Oracle. No longer a player in today's world.
And for those doubters out there, don't forget, Apple was going down when they brought Jobs back the last time. Unfortunately, they have no one to go back to this time. It can, and will, happen again.
This is what's going to happen now that Ajit Pai and his band of dick heads are trying to go back to the 90s. Their next step will be to try to kill off these services. In the end, they (Ajit Pai, Verizon, Comcast, etc) will all lose. It's just a matter of months or a year. And, when they lose their customer's connection to the Internet their companies will become toast. I look forward to it. Along with Pai being escorted out of the FCC office on the day he's fired!
With these changes, especially in younger people, will hopefully come more acceptance of the other and rationality. I'm not sure that's true, but I keep up hope. I truly believe it's our only chance.
To be honest, I believe what's killing the Protestants is the new faith in wealth. When someone drives a Bentley or Porsche, lives in a huge mansion and still portrays himself as a "man of God" it's just too much to swallow. Eventually even the dumbest of folks realize that the money they give to him/her is just making that individual wealthier and they're never going to get anything. It's truly the penultimate Ponzi Scheme. Except the folks at the bottom never get back a penny! And, the Feds aren't able to go after the perps at all due to "freedom of religion."
Before you hire anyone make sure you just can't live without them and then wait longer. Before you hire your first developer read the Mythical Man Month. Yes, it's old, it still applies. And, especially today, try your best to use contractors. And, make sure you have a Work for Hire agreement!
I concur 100%. BTW, Apple doesn't pay the tax they owe in this country either due to moving IP to Ireland and other tax favorable countries. Of course, they'll just move to Panama.
I'm 62. Still excited about what I'm doing. Love the fact that I can write programs in languages that actually work (as opposed to M$ Basic back in 1980s). Hardware that doesn't fail every 10 minutes, etc. O/S that does what you expect! I plan to continue creating new apps until 65 or 70. Who knows what happens then. It keeps me going and is better than hitting a little white ball into the woods!
In ~1983 I wrote the first iteration of Sensible Solutions for O'Hanlon Computer Systems using MASM. Of course, it had to run in less than 64k. Basically, it was a VM that would run pseudo code. And, the compiler was written in ASM also.
In 1985 I wrote TAS, again using MASM. Again, a VM. The language it compiled (in both cases) was written to create business accounting applications, which I also wrote. Originally I called them Level 1, 2 and 3 where Level 2 was basic bookkeeping and Level 3 was a full blown Accounting package including invoicing, purchasing, etc.
Unfortunately, this was during the time of dBase and I got clobbered in Infoworld for not being like dBase. So, I wrote a compiler for dBase and called it dBFast. Sold a lot of copies through Egghead and others.
In all three of these we made a ton of money and, even more, created a whole group of people who became "pseudo programmers." I say pseudo because they could program in TAS, not necessarily in anything else.
I was very proud of what I did and hope there is one more language in me to make programming on the web significantly easier than it is now.
If you've never programmed in assembler I recommend it to anyone. Just try something simple. Until you do, you won't appreciate what we have today. Especially if you're running on CP/M or early DOS!
> If you've never programmed in assembler I recommend it to anyone. Just try something simple. Until you do, you won't appreciate what we have today. Especially if you're running on CP/M or early DOS!
I found very pleasant write a clone of Wozniak's machine code for my toy CPU/Computer
I used to do some assembly on 68000, 6502 and some Z80. It's nice to have those simpler CPUs and the simpler hardware to learn an assembly language on.
I did 6502 in high school from a book and later did 6809 (EE class) and 8088 in college. The funny part was our compiler target for the CSci Compiler Course was an IBM 370 on which they taught the required assembler course. Of that group I liked the 6809 best. The 370 was ok and it sure had a lot more registers. We didn't write our compilers in assembly, but instead used the department's chosen language: Modula-2. It was very odd translating from the dragon book to Modula-2.
NB: Just a comment, could not (yet) watch the video.
Our course was very simple with 8051 compiled with IAR, IIRC. I hated the experience: quite a lot of logic is backwards and you have to come up with something like ABI in order not to make huge mess.
Anyway, this actually skyrocketed my understanding of C: C is nothing more than (rather thin, I would say) wrappers around assembly, which in turn is wrappers around machine instructions. That's why C is fast. That's why you cannot have first-class functions, return multiple (compile time unknown) values, etc..
But nothing beats spending 10+ hours debugging simple I2C (or SPI, can't remember) baremetal ARM program, first weeding out vendor libs, then actually diving into assembly only to find out that CPU is buggy.
This is similar to what I experienced, sort of like an enlightenment moment. In C, I see a thin veneer over assembly, but that veneer has been designed to look thicker than it actually is. I came to appreciate the abstraction and now understand why it's so long lived.
Argh! Modula-2, that brings back memories. They were still teaching it as an introductory language when I went to uni in 1997. The language seemed a tad irrelevant.
It wasn't bad and did well to teach a lot of concepts, but it being on an IBM 370 made for some pain. I will say XEDIT did have some ok features but was a painful experience overall.
I've always had a soft spot for assembler code. I've been writing hobby kernels for almost a decade now ala Plan9 - haven't every really taken any of them far enough to be useful, but it's a rich journey of discovery. I love discovery.
Now there is a language I haven't heard about in a very long time. I actually briefly worked for a company that developed a whole system with TAS, that they then sold to optometrists.
I hope one of these companies takes the troll to the very end and gets their money back from the scum bags (excuse me attorneys) at the head of the troll. That will stop this very quickly and completely. Then this embarrassing history of patenting software can come to its logical end.
If any piece of software should've/could've been patented it was the original OS. And, Bell Labs took care of that when they gave Unix to the public domain. Ditto for the original BIOS. When IBM didn't bother to defend it that option was over too.
