My instinct for self-preservation tells me that this is not a good thing. I understand the need for privacy, but what happens if somebody puts a gun (or a knife) to your face? I think that the need for privacy could be solved through the legislation: we can have very severe restrictions on who could look at this data and why. Also, we can have severe restrictions on the admissibility of such data in court. Unfortunately, I have not seen any credible efforts from politicians, right or left, to introduce privacy protections from the surveillance abuses.
You may be right. The facial recognition does seem to interact with the 4th amendment, at least. But then it happens in the public place? I don't know the answer to that one. I fear that in the age of social media and Antifa, the protections that we had before are no longer enough. Now we have additional actors on the streets who may turn to physical violence on a dime. I feel that the streets should be free from physical violence.
This account has been using HN primarily if not exclusively for ideological battle. That is destructive of what HN is supposed to be for, and we ban accounts that do that, regardless of which ideology they're battling for or against. I've banned this one. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with; doing that will eventually get your main account banned as well.
Well, there's another amendment to the US constitution that is a substantial contributor to the level and severity of physical violence on our streets. But we won't talk about that...
Ok I'm at a loss what amendment don't we talk about that leads to violence on the streets. Are you just being trying to be cute and talk about the 13th?
> what happens if somebody puts a gun (or a knife) to your face?
Nothing. Either they mug you and leave or you get injured (or they didn't see the cop standing behind them.) Facial recognition is not going to solve that problem.
I'm not informed on the issue, but I'd imagine that preventing them from buying the technology is easier than tightly controlling its use.
The article and discussion is not about privacy. The people against facial recognition are against it, at least in this case, because it is racist - or at least, it produces racist outcomes.
Removing bias from facial recognition is the problem you would have to solve to appease the concerns right now, not privacy.
When innocent minorities are getting locked up because the software running it was trained with poor data, the outcomes of using the software is a racism-entrenched legal and justice system.
Someone should let these people know that nobody gets put in jail based on the facial recognition’s decision, so their “concerns” are impossible. Not only that, but if anything, it’s less likely to find darker skin tones at all, so it will favor minorities, not hurt them.
It’s a shortcut for manually digging through databases to identify people. Any identification is followed up with investigation, just as it would be if a human matched it. No decision is made by the machine.
> Someone should let these people know that nobody gets put in jail based on the facial recognition’s decision, so their “concerns” are impossible. Not only that, but if anything, it’s less likely to find darker skin tones at all, so it will favor minorities, not hurt them.
The article directly contradicts both of your claims:
> "Facial recognition technology is still incredibly biased and absolutely creates harm in the real world," said Jennifer Lee with ACLU Washington. "We now know of three black men who have been wrongfully arrested and jailed due to biased facial recognition technology.
The article provides no details on those cases, and I am not willing to trust the ACLU at their word, given how politically biased they are these days (https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/347375-a...). I would like to know whether those incidents involved a human in the loop. It's also worth considering the benefits of facial recognition. Just like policing as a whole, I am willing to accept a small number of incorrectly handled incidents against a much larger body of good policing.
I don't think you read the article, which contains examples to support their claims that are the opposite of yours, which do not have any supporting evidence.
Should we be worried about the future of JetBrains' products? I love their IDEs, especially PyCharm and CLion, but when the "woke" comes in, the competency seems to go out the door next, although it takes a few extra years. What would be the reason for doing this? Especially by the Russian team out of Prague?
Can you give examples of competency going out the door?
I remember a lot of anger and consternation at the Node.js "The power of a pronoun" post, for instance, but Node.js seems to have done just fine in the years since then. (There are plenty of technical criticisms of Node, of course, but it doesn't seem that Node lost competency since that post.)
I remember a lot of anger and consternation at Codes of Conduct, but they seem to be pretty much commonplace now, and not an indicator of low technical quality.
I remember a lot of anger and consternation when GitHub got rid of their meritocracy rug, but they seem to be executing and scaling just fine.
So I can't really think of a concrete reason to worry.
I think this is a prime example of the "narrative engineering" done by Facebook. Before, the narrative was supposed to be X (e.g. no Wuhan leak) and now it's Y (it's Ok to think/talk about Wuhan leak). Who controls the narrative? We don't know, but presumably special interest groups with direct influence over Facebook senior management?
At the end of the article, the author seem to have listed every diversity criteria, except the diversity of thought. With Democrat to Republican ratio of professors in the leading US Universities being 11.5 to 1 [1], there is a growing danger that Stanford will go the way other universities have gone: lowering academic standards, admitting students based in their identity affiliations (and of course rich parents who could skirt the system), lowering faculty standards in technical departments, etc... The Stanford startups will move towards social engineering, disguised as impact investing. Move towards normalizing the discrimination against Asian and Indian male students and entrepreneurs.
I don't see why anyone should get special treatment, but the OP is suggesting that they do whatever they do for other groups to create reserved spaces for Republicans. There's this whole explanation about how it's not technically lowering-of-standards but I don't remember the details. I think it has something to do with only using their demographic to change your decision if they are equally as promising as someone else with a different demographic.
Of course not. I am not actually sure how to solve this problem. I think a good start would be to move back towards encouraging freedom of speech on campus and dialog between people with different opinions.
If one of those sides specializes in ignoring verifiable facts, and is of the "opinion" that entire groups of people shouldn't exist, I'm not sure there's much to be gained by any sort of "dialog".
Are you suggesting that this is fair characterisation of Republicans in a general sense? I'm not sure that all Republicans would agree with this. And I definitely consider myself on the liberal side of the political spectrum.
I can empathise that it's difficult to have a dialog with some individuals who are only interested in convincing you of the correctness of their world view and not understanding others, but inflamatory rhetoric like this doesn't help.
61% of republicans believe the election was stolen and 53% believe Trump is the true president. That is an untenable detachment from facts and reality from a major political party.
The only real obstacle to “freedom of speech on campus” is the college Republicans agitating to get an AP writer fired based on her involvement with SJP as an undergrad.
Why is diversity of thought limited to Democrats and Republicans, two perspectives that are actually quite close when it comes to economics - do you want a mixed-market economy that tilts slightly more in the direction of free market capitalism or not?
There's just not much daylight between Democrat and Republican economic professors compared to say a Marxian Economist vs Chicago School for example. I think the handwringing over D/R splits really boils down to narcissism of small differences.
Unfortunately, the cult of "meritocracy" is a bipartisan issue (though somewhat slanted towards the Democrats now because of cultural realignment over the last decade).
In my opinion, "meritocracy", where "meritocracy" is defined by a narrow scope of skills the dream-hoarder class possesses and the rest don't know about, is the problem.
Stanford's culture may be liberal. But they do support conservative leaders. The Hoover Institute is at Stanford, there isn't really a liberal equivalent at that university. It's members have worked in both Bush administrations, and the Trump administration. It's currently directed by Condoleezza Rice.
The liberal equivalent of the Hoover Institute is the rest of Stanford. Any organization that is not explicitly right wing becomes left wing over time.
The Republican Party has abandoned data and evidence driven policy decisions in favor of ideology. The last Republican Party convention had no official policy platform outside of “whatever Trump wants today.” Why would you expect Professors to be excited to join a party that is a cult of personality that incessantly demonizes the very institutions they lead?
It's not clear to me why this is getting downvoted. This strikes me as a pretty clear description. At this point major Republican figures are getting censured and demoted for saying that lies aren't true. Look at surveys of belief around the election. (Or previously, Republican beliefs on whether Obama is an American citizen.)
If universities are about anything at all, it's about pursuit of truth. At different points in time and space, different political sides have been the one more eager to ban inconvenient truths. Lysenkoism comes to mind, for example, or the Great Leap Forward. But here and now, it's Republicans who have as a group more or less abandoned factual inquiry altogether. And you don't have to believe me on this. You can read prominent dynastic Republican Liz Cheney: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/11/liz-cheney-vows-to-keep-figh...
The abandoning of evidence and data happened long before Trump. Denying evolution, denying climate change, promoting abstinence only education, etc. Look to Liberty University if you want to see what a Republican institute of “higher learning” looks like.
White supremacists like to claim that twin studies prove that black people are less intelligent due to genetics. Apparently Sam seems to think that Democrats refusing to accept the shoddy science behind twin studies (the conclusions of which are often used in service of racist meta-studies) somehow implies that they are also "anti-science". Probably best to just ignore the comment.
Twin studies are mostly used to show that traits are heritable at an individual level.
Edit: It strikes me that the strawman argument you've constructed is a perfect example of left-wing science denial. The endemic use of the technique in fields like psychology, criminology, biology, is something you prefer to ignore.
I wouldn't agree with that either, but most people would, so might as well stick it in there.
Let's say it's part of the causal chain, but also your cells don't even have the same genome, it mutates over time, women integrate cells from their children, so it gets messy.
Yup. "Scientific" racism has a long history. Some of the various Confederate declarations of secession claim natural inferiority as a cause for slaveholding.
Don't fool yourself into believing that conservatives at Stanford value diversity of thought. The college republicans have made plenty of efforts to get people they don't like fired. They've also harassed a number of my friends.
You identified the problem, but not the solution. The Hoover institution, of course, is basically a safe-space for right-wing ideologues in America now.
The problem is Stanford and similarly exclusive institutions. You get more diversity of thought out of greater diversities of backgrounds, like at SJSU, CSULA, Ohio State, NC A&T, and Virginia Commonwealth University (to name a handful of non-elite schools).
I fully support the concerns that the author brings up. It's a big problem and we need to figure out how to address it. At the same time, I can't help but notice that this is coming from the ACM itself. The credibility of ACM has really tanked in my eyes in the last 2 - 3 years. Communications of the ACM magazine is full of articles that belong to the "social engineering magazine" and not to the Computer Science publication. Last time I was renewing my membership, I had to sign some kind of a pledge "not to harass people". Are you kidding me? What are we, 12? Because of that, while it's a very important issue, I am very distracted thinking about ACM itself. I guess this is a lesson that reputation and credibility is important. Once you lose it, everything you say, even if it's truly good, gets colored in a certain way.
Just to make sure: this protects you from your co-worker/spouse looking at your search history at your desk/device. The advertisers and corporations can freely purchase your search history from Google. It does not seem like a significant step towards privacy to me.
Do you know the difference between targeting based on data and having the data? I can show you an AD based on ur search I can't buy ur search history and see you looked up hentai.
Yes and people’s whole careers are built on maintaining that fiction that they’re meaningfully different.
We sent you this ad because we know you like hentai and “we asked Google to look through their data and show ads to hentai watchers” is a distinction without a difference when it’s equally uncomfortable that Google is looking at this information as it would be for Google’s clients.
Yes? The difference between hentaidirect.com buying your data and analyzing it, then buying ad space and serving you an ad based on your search history and hentaidirect.con asking Google to do the same on their behalf is the same to me. In both cases I have an entity who is a stranger looking through my search history to serve me ads.
Maybe I am too cynical, but I think in Google's case, the difference between targeting based on data and having the data will be several extra zeros in their price point.
The only real way google makes money is by selling ADs. The only reason they are sooo good at it, is because of the amount of infomation they have about you and me. If they willy nilly sell that information to entities that directly devalues that data. Now ask your self why would google devalue their core competitive advantage.
Well, for one, Google says that they don’t sell user data. And they work with thousands of advertising agencies all over the world, so if it was a lie I’m sure it would have been been revealed in a front page NYT article by now. There are a ton of people who would be in a position to leak that the claim is a lie, and a lot of people very financially interested in learning it’s a lie.
For two, you can look up Google’s history of fighting back against court orders to access customer data. There wouldn’t be much point in that if this data was just “available to advertisers and government agencies”. Except maybe PR, which going back to point one.
For three, Snowden’s leaks revealed that the NSA installed fiber taps in Google datacenters to steal this data, precisely because Google wouldn’t give it to the NSA without a valid warrant. Google has since publicly claimed that they have encrypted all traffic on their internal network.
“Google sells your data!” is an old meme, but a tired one, and not one that stands up to inspection.
We may take as given that advertising agents cannot simply buy the history of your usage, outright.
Does that mean much? Google would not be so foolish as to hand over everything at once, when they could do something else that allows them to sell it, or the use of it, again and again. They doubtless have a hundred ways, each more clever than the last, to sell it again and again. Since they control the whole apparatus, they can make full use of all your history at all times without revealing to advertisers anything that would allow Google to be bypassed next time.
So, Google's pledge is simply that every use of your data will necessarily involve paying Google again. And, anything at all that can help Google uniquely identify you with activity anywhere online certainly is collected into your file, the use of to be dold for what the traffic will bear.
I don’t think this addresses any of the three points, unless you’re interpreting the OP’s “advertisers, gov agencies and corporations can freely purchase your search history from Google” in an entirely non-literal sense that has nothing to do with the literal meaning of the words.
> Your ISP has a different set of incentives.
Indeed, ISPs are known to wholesale sell their user’s traffic history.
I'm unclear how you have a threat model that isn't based on speculation. Unless they are having third party audits that I'm unaware of, I basically have Google's word right now that they are deleting my data. I agree that the evidence suggests that right now, Google does not sell your data, and that they have adequate security. That doesn't mean I trust them when they say they delete my data, or that my data will be safe forever.
I'm not even saying that Google is selling it, I'm just arguing that it makes practical sense to me to have that assumption from a privacy standpoint.
I do not think that the current crime situation in San Francisco appeared by some fluke or an accident. Specific policies were put in place by the progressive government officials and progressive people in San Francisco voted for these policies. I think is a cautionary tale for the rest of the country on what happens when progressive utopia gets voted in.
"Progressive Bad" isn't really the takeaway here. It turns out nuance is important. Questionable policies combined with a complex socioeconomic situation due to decades of perverse incentives isn't, in fact, an optimal strategy of governance.
Also, San Francisco is pretty much the quintessential example of such policies getting voted in place without challenge. So maybe you could argue that certain progressive policies were enacted that hurt so bad they significantly outweighed those that would have actually made things better. If that's the case, which progressive policies do you feel led to this situation?
Nah I think it's more "progressive needs the counterweight of some moderation and pragmatism" . Just completely ignoring "theft" as a whole category of crime because "you're likely locking up poor people who don't have a choice" is their game. They don't care about whether or not your get robbed, they only care about "poor people put in a harsh place and they didn't have a choice because they had a bad childhood and don't know any better" . How about we still arrest them and rehabilitate them. Instead of killing the police budget, why not rehabilitate and have some outreach to petty criminals. Just letting them run rampant helps no one other than the thief who will most likely end up dead at some point when he/she crosses the wrong person.
I think it's hard to argue that the SF government is not comprised of people on the forefront of the progressive agenda. Am I wrong about this? Take a look at Chesa Boudin, for example [1]. All their policies are progressive (their voters would certainly hope so). Are you saying that San Francisco's progressive policies are not the right progressive policies? Which place has the right policies then? Chicago? Their crime rate does not seem much better. Or Chicago also implements wrong progressive ideas?
To be honest, I think American progressivism as a whole is a bit compromised as it generally tries to accomplish its goals while first keeping the corporations pleased and second never truly taxing the rich. Further they need to consider the externalities they create. If a city or state is going to implement supportive policies, people from surrounding areas (areas not contributing to the tax base) may choose or be pressured to travel there.
This isn't to say progressivism is doomed in America or we must force socialist policies onto all outlying areas, just that the process of learning how to properly roll out socially responsible policies is still ongoing and one of the major issues is rapidly growing polarization with no interest in nuance.
> it generally tries to accomplish its goals while first keeping the corporations pleased
What goals are compromised to "keep the corporations pleased"? How would these goals be defined if the corporations were not be taken into account?
> and second never truly taxing the rich
You hold "taxing the rich" as some sort of high level independent goal to be done in and of itself. Can you quantify what the lack of funds are that available to SF from not "taxing the rich"? How much is the budget shortfall, and what would this extra budget go to if San Francisco were to "tax the rich"?
- Being lenient towards criminals because we need to have empathy towards all humans (real victims being forgotten here);
- Encouraging “deconstruction”, deconstruction of family values, of masculinity, of marriage, of traditional rules, replacement by state-sponsored benefits, which break the social fabric (a human as a free-spinning electron without roots may be healthy and wealthy, but at extremely high risk in case of unexpected event);
- Cult of female employment as their main role in society, which, in positions of power, happens to soften the stance towards criminals and deconstruct structures (hierarchies, things that worked to develop our nations, justice system). I don’t know the ratio for Cali but in France, 76 to 81% graduates of ENM (main school for judges) are female since 1977, and we basically free the criminals because they have compassion for them.
- Immigration and being ostracized when pointing out illegal immigration or rules about it, which leads to unreasoned immigration. Which turns into people with broken social fabric, which means they weigh on state sponsored rescue instead of family.
But the biggest danger about a California is that it impacts the whole rest of the world: they apply their cultural pressure using the soft power that is social media, which puts the sane parts of the world at risk of having the same ideas.
> Cult of female employment as their main role in society, which, in positions of power, happens to soften the stance towards criminals and deconstruct structures (hierarchies, things that worked to develop our nations, justice system). I don’t know the ratio for Cali but in France, 76 to 81% graduates of ENM (main school for judges) are female since 1977, and we basically free the criminals because they have compassion for them.
Hmm, my first reaction to this is that it's just poorly considered sexism. Do you have any evidence that the gender of the judges is contributing greatly to the leniency crisis you seem to be proposing? And plus, it's even possible that there are some problems showing the direction of causation; for example, it could be that electorates/leaders wanting lenient judges tend to perceive female judges as more lenient. I'm naturally very skeptical that the gender of judges could have such a large causal effect.
I looked into this briefly and the two articles that I found quickly were [1] and [2], one of which finds an effect obscenity and death penalty cases in State Supreme Courts and the other which finds an effect only in sex discrimination cases. Neither seems to imply such a sweeping and consequential effect as you do.
And the apparent suggestion that women in position of power in general is causing problems for society seems to be an argument out of the last century. Am I correct that that's what your suggesting, and if so what would be the cause of it? That whole line of reasoning strains credibility in my mind.
You must not be American, definitely not Californian because the points you make are extremely taboo.
In the US there are probably a handful of feminist-critics who dare to say these things in the mainstream, e.g. Camille Paglia, Christina Hoff Sommers.
What is the intellectual climate like in France? Can someone write what you wrote above in a mainstream newspaper column?
French people consider themselves an exception compared to USA, but stats depict a stunning similarity: Our stats about male/female suicide, court judgements about family, female position in companies, are closeby the US ones, generally within 4%. The whole Western world, despite local specificities, are going through the surprisingly same questions as I’ve raised about California in the main trends, and local trends don’t offset the main direction.
Culturally, France systematically follows US trends with 10 years delay. My theory is that ideas are tested/tuned in US and reproduced with more intensity in Europe, with the additional help that France already has a strong socialist culture (a quarter of its workforce as public servants, tradition of organizing and demonstrating) so there is no counterpoint to the liberal arguments.
So we basically have similar laws to California. We even have a Ministry of Equality, which sound terribly dystopian.
> - Encouraging “deconstruction”, deconstruction of family values, of masculinity, of marriage, of traditional rules, replacement by state-sponsored benefits, which break the social fabric (a human as a free-spinning electron without roots may be healthy and wealthy, but at extremely high risk in case of unexpected event);
This conflates social reform with economic reforms. Many of the postwar welfare states in Europe were instituted by moralistic Christian democratic governments looking to undercut the support that otherwise would've gone towards the communist parties. Certainly benefits rooted in Catholic social teaching such as the family wage have nothing to do with the cultural bogeymen mentioned in the post.
Debit cards given to homeless people with auto deposits every month courtesy of the city, I guess would be one. I think it sounds like a kind, humane policy btw, even though I answered the question. But one that as you can imagine comes with some built in problems.
Edit: I do get that homeless does not equal criminal. But, see broken windows effect.
> California already incarcerates 5x more people than any European country, and 10x more than the Nordics
Well, most European and Nordic countries don't have 13% of the population committing 52% of the violent crime. So this is kind of an unfair comparison.
Why? Immigrants, various ethnic and social minorities, and repeat offenders are overrepresented in Europe's crime stats as well. If anything, Europe tends to have much shorter sentences, so reoffenders can commit more crimes.
I think the biggest disparity is the lack of any meaningful mental health or addiction treatment, and the law allows people who are out of their mind to refuse treatment and die on the street.
Yeah. That's the problem. Might not be related at all to the SF housing situation, insane rents and the fact that the US still has no universal health care insurance. You know. Stuff people need to survive and not be homeless.
I actually don't know if the crime rate in SF is higher than elsewhere, but if it is I think cause is the opposite. It's what happens when capitalism goes unchecked. Cost of living is on the rise while wages are stagnant. Crimes are often committed by people who are desperate. Also there are no facilities for people who are mentally ill, who will go on to commit crimes.
All of those may be true, but the bad effects of uncontrolled capitalism most likely also have something to do with the situation.
If you expect people to live by the rules, they should have a honest opportunity to do so. But if all they can get is a job that doesn't even pay for a small room, what are your possibilities to live a honest live?
If you remove punishment, but the only option people have is to break the law to survive, the only outcome to be expected is increased number of crimes.
From all the videos I've seen of people robbing stores in San Francisco (and there are a few), none of them looked like people on the brink of starvation stealing food or medicine to avert certain death. They looked like a criminal gang taking expensive items with high resale value in order to make a quick profit. Because that's exactly what they were. They didn't do it because they couldn't survive otherwise. They did it because it's profitable and nobody was going to prosecute them for it.
Those are the opposites of unconstrained capitalism. In unconstrained capitalism you'd have lots of building, building bigger multifamily residences and towers, no zoning getting in the way, little to no taxes, etc.
I doubt that very much: building space is scarce in SF, as a property developer if you have a choice to build an expensive high revenue buidling versus a more affordable building for low income people, what would you choose?
In capitalism there is no driving force to ensure customer desires will or can be met, making profit is what drives it. You need constraints or laws to ensure commercially unattractive needs ar served.
Can you expand on what do you mean as being blind to race? Do you want them to see your race, treat different races differently? Aren't we supposed to be a color-blind society? Maybe I am just not understanding what you mean.
I think on an individual level we should be “blind” to race but when it comes to solving some of the big problems of society we have to recognize the role that racism plays in those problems and
There's a context implied, but not explicitly stated here.
Being "blind to race" means that the context in which the other person exists is being ignored. Seeing things like race and gender mean that you are keeping context in mind when interacting with people.
Systemic racism isn't necessarily about your personal intent, but it is about the results of your actions. Being blind to race effectively results in supporting the racist status quo. Being blind to sexism effectively results in supporting the sexist status quo.
The current default for American society is white. PoC have a different lived experience, and white people don't often know what it is like to have that lived experience. Similarly, richer people lack an understanding of what poverty implies about the lack of choices.
> Being "blind to race" means that the context in which the other person exists is being ignored.
No, it does not. It means that the colour of their skin is ignored. If a white family has the same socio-economic status as a family of colour, should we treat them differently simply based on colour?
I think you mean we should assume the family of colour is actively discriminated against so they can't be in the same socio-economic group, but at the same time you claim that "systemic racism isn't necessarily about personal intent"...?
> Similarly, richer people lack an understanding of what poverty implies about the lack of choices.
This is probs what you actually want to control for, but it's easier to go for the low-hanging fruit that's also culturally fashionable right now, I get it.
My view is certainly coloured by being a white Eastern European living in Western Europe. Not all white people have the same background, certainly not in Europe. I'm sure there are shades of white in America as well. Point being: colour is only an easy proxy for the real issues that need solving.
Here's my "race-blind" take: give help to the people who need it, in the way that they need it. The implementation can then have a race-driven approach, but the policy is race-free. Or is that not good enough?
"Blind to race" claims often go along with smugly ignoring systemic racism in society and acting like it's a solved problem because a black man was elected President.
"racializing all facets of everyday life, including emojis"
Every representation of humans is racialized, they exist in a social context where race exists.
Pretending that it is not and then complaining when someone says, "hey, we maybe should make it so not everything looks like white folks" is just silly stuff. Emoji diversity is good and 100% harmless!!
> Every representation of humans is racialized, they exist in a social context where race exists
This is only true as long as we go out of our way to make it true. The concept of “googly eyes” for example, is totally race agnostic. Likewise, emojis represent emotions that don’t inherently need to be coupled to race. Emojis aren’t even a new concept, we had emoticons in the ‘00s in AIM, where 99% of the emotions had nothing to do with race.
I say this as a brown man; it really doesn’t matter to me if the “thumbs up” I use in a coworker’s merge request is brown or the default yellow. On the flip side, emoji diversity is yet another reminder that I’m different from others, especially in a context where I would rather focus on what makes us the same.
It relates to your explaining the subtext because that subtext is a straw man.
I can’t speak for the GP commenter to whom you responded, but I can speak for myself when I say that I strive to to treat everyone the same regardless of their race (and not make a big deal out of race), while also being well aware of the prejudices and injustices that might affect someone on the basis of race out in the world. If that doesn’t describe “race blindness”, then we probably need to come up with a phrase to represent that person.
You're being snarky, but this is essentially true (as I understand it).
In the US, outside of a few legally protected characteristics, a company is free to exercise its speech to choose not to provide service to customers it does not wish to.
The government forcing companies to provide service would be a violation of their speech rights.
Some companies go out of their way to try to be better than that because they recognize the influence they have on public access to platforms. (Zuckerberg cares a lot about this: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/16/mark-zuckerberg-and-f...), but ultimately all of that is above and beyond what the legal expectations are.
In FB's case it wasn't so much a policy change that lead to them shutting down Trump's account, but that USG's position as a rule of law nation was in question after 1/6 and it no longer met their own policy requirements that give elected politicians in rule of law democracies a special pass to violate their moderation rules.
The irony is this is a variant of the same argument made in the gay cake case, but with the political partisanship reversed. The notable difference in that case is that sexual orientation is a protected characteristic.
"The government forcing companies to provide service would be a violation of their speech rights."
-- True, but the government can institute a bill of rights for digital platforms, and make it mandatory for companies that want to have section 230 protection.
Youtube will be free to choose between following the bill of rights, or becoming a regulated media like the TV, or being prone to defamation lawsuits and be responsible for its content.
What that bill of rights would look like? That's a different story... but google, or any tech company, having the power to just delete your gmail/email account, and erase all your stored data at will it is kinda scary.
There should be a happy medium. We do this for evictions already (i.e. there is a process for the eviction, we should do something lightweight for the digital space as well). Eg, if google has determined you have abused on your email, you will have 30 days to retrieve your data, and contacts and transfer them somewhere else. Losing access altogether is very disruptive.
> the government can institute a bill of rights for digital platforms, and make it mandatory for companies that want to have section 230 protection.
Social Media companies actually want this as well because then they can just deflect all unpopular decisions to this bill of rights. That's why Facebook spent $700 million to create their own content moderation "supreme court."
Congress had every opportunity to explore this issue further during the Congressional hearings about section 230. Unfortunately, they were more interested in whining about why this specific issue should be censored or why this specific issue should not be censored.
The irony is this is a variant of the same argument made in the gay cake case, but with the political partisanship reversed. The notable difference in that case is that sexual orientation is a protected characteristic.
The other far more notable difference is the baker didn't own all the cake shops.
And the "gay cake case" would also be closer to not just providing cork board space for people to stick pins and messages in; but also to require the engineers or CEO herself to write down the words that they put on the bulletin board, after they're orated to her.
The debate is not whether there is a legal requirement for YouTube to provide freedom of speech (categorically, there is not) but whether that is harmful to society. The concept of freedom of expression extends beyond the bound of US law.
Exactly. It makes me uneasy to see all these people who seem to have no idea that freedom of speech is or could be anything other than a particular law. (That there are benefits to having an unrestricted exchange of ideas in public, and that censoring some ideas is a slippery slope to censoring others.) If that law didn't exist, would it occur to them to create it?
The government compelling speech from private companies is a speech violation.
Arguably private companies and individuals should adapt to choose better services that suit their interests. I'm not sure that compelling company speech is a good idea and gets messy quickly (particularly around moderation).
I'm a fan of Urbit which I think is a clever model that makes all of this largely unnecessary.
I see. Then I think you're misunderstanding the position of those you're arguing against. Well, I don't know exactly what throwaway1959 believes, but he criticized Youtube's CEO for "censoring opinions of other people that she does not agree with". He did not say that the government should do anything about it; that was something you mentioned.
I don't know if this is a common misconception or if something else is going on, but it's fairly common for one person to say it's bad for a company to suppress free speech, and someone else to reply that it's not illegal for the company to do that, as if that were a counterargument. Is it believed that saying something is bad = saying it should be illegal? Not only is that a bad policy, it contradicts the ideal of freedom of speech itself: that bad speech should be allowed. I don't understand how someone could believe a free speech advocate would think that (other than by understanding them poorly or having a low opinion of their logical consistency).
For illustration, here's an entire article titled "The YouTube Ban Is Un-American, Wrong, and Will Backfire", 2300 words—none of which says that Youtube's actions are illegal, or should be, or even mentions the First Amendment. I think this is the position of free speech advocates generally: that suppressing free speech is bad and that those who do it should be criticized and shamed but not punished (unless it's the government, in which case it may be illegal). https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-youtube-ban-is-un-american...
I think I understand the position, but the implication is often that it should not be allowed or that it is bad.
The core idea is I think YouTube should have the power to moderate their platform and that that is a form of legally protected speech (a private company deciding how to run itself).
People can disagree with YouTube's policies or moderation, but that's a personal opinion about their policies with regard to what they allow on their platform. I don't think it's that big of a deal for them to block stuff that makes the platform a worse place to be and they have the power to determine what that is.
If they block stuff I find interesting, for example if they blocked videos about cryptocurrencies, I would think that's a dumb rule and I wouldn't want to support them on that, but they should have the ability to make that decision. If they blocked critical videos about China I would think that's unethical and wrong. Their ability to Block/moderate in general though? That's a tool they should have and should use.
Private companies setting policy on what's allowed on their platforms is exercising a form of speech. I don't think private companies should be forced to allow any speech from any users or that that is even desirable. Communities without moderation suck.
The government should not compel speech - compelling companies to provide services is a form of violating free speech. I find this more objectionable than YouTube blocking stuff that violates their ToS.
I also think "censoring opinions of people that she does not agree with" is misleading enough to be false. Banning people like Steve Bannon or Alex Jones is not some sort of ban of good faith intellectual disagreement - it's just banning trolls.
This presumed that private corporations have rights. I’d posit that they do not. They are legal, government created entities, which is different than the individual persons the Bill of Rights was written for. Furthermore, why would we want to grant the power to limit speech to private corporations when we don’t allow governments to do so? The latter is a democratically elected group while the former is almost the complete opposite.
These corporations are as big as governments, but y’all want to give them the rights of individuals. Only they’re run like top-down oligarchies with little to no accountability for their actions.
Well, we agree that the company should be allowed to set whatever policies they want, ban whoever they want, etc., and that it would violate their rights—arguably speech rights—for the government to compel them to unban anyone in particular (unless they signed a contract and the banning violated that contract, but I'm sure they have all the necessary CYA clauses in anything they sign).
That said...
> I think I understand the position, but the implication is often that it should not be allowed or that it is bad.
I just said that "it should not be allowed" and "it is bad" are very different things, and I think it's important to maintain that distinction. It's not entirely clear to me whether you do. (If you do, then I think you'd agree that it's a rather uncharitable assumption to make of one's interlocutor that his criticism was meant to imply "and the law should stop them" when it could just as easily have meant "they suck and I want everyone to know that".)
Here's an incomplete list of things that are bad but that the law should never disallow: mediocre parenting, getting unhealthily fat, insulting strangers for no reason, getting into a romantic relationship with someone you know wants something long-term and planning to dump them soon, cutting corners in products, making bloated websites, supporting political causes I don't like, encouraging people to invest in programming languages I don't like, etc.
There are pragmatic reasons to not disallow those things. In many cases, enforcement would necessarily be (a) very subjective, and therefore open to abuse, (b) require a very powerful police state, and/or (c) create a slippery slope of "Well, if we already disallow that, then surely also ..." that tends toward totalitarianism. (I suspect those who think "bad" = "should be disallowed" will end up convincing themselves either that a lot of these things should be outlawed, and become totalitarian morality police, or that a lot of these things aren't really bad, and become amoral. I suspect that this actually happens to some degree, but that the damage is limited because many people don't think very much about their beliefs.)
However, if that's your only defense against such policies, then you're vulnerable to special pleading. "This particular description of 'bad behavior' sounds objective, and at least the first step towards policing it doesn't require any significant police state growth, and of course we have no intention of extending the policy further [or of getting replaced in the next election by those who would]." If you're not as sophisticated as your opponent, or less prepared on a particular issue, or if your audience finds the concept of police state growth laughable rather than scary, then you may be caught flat-footed in a debate.
Instead, we have a conception of legal property rights and what counts as "violence" that more or less decides all these issues. Legal encroachments on these rights are bad, and at the very least they require extremely rigorous justification, which should be rarely achieved in practice. I think this is the only stance that is likely to hold up long-term against special pleading; though I think the majority of people aren't properly educated about the merits of this stance, and they tend to elect politicians that cheerfully grab power to fight the villains of the quarter (Terrorists! Copyright pirates! Child abusers! Insurrectionists! Rioters!).
> If they blocked critical videos about China I would think that's unethical and wrong.
I agree, but do you think that should be illegal? (I don't.) And if not, then what recourse do people have? Publicly complaining about it to try to change Youtube's mind seems like an obvious thing to try; beyond that, make or join an alternative to Youtube and try to convince others to do so. This is difficult to make work, partly due to network effects.
I do suspect that there are legal barriers to entry (that strengthen the network effects) that should not exist. For example, what if I made a Mytube, which did its best to interoperate with Youtube? E.g. it would show the like counts and comments of Youtube users, and if you commented on Mytube then it would show up on Youtube. Users could have a unified client that would see everything on Youtube as well as Mytube, and for the most part not notice or care which website stuff was actually stored on. I suspect Youtube would claim that using the unified client violated their terms of service; I think this is where we might say that the website cannot make a legally enforceable distinction between a user clicking buttons on a browser to send HTTP requests to their website, and a user clicking buttons on a unified client to send HTTP requests to their website, and that while they can try to detect when the unified client renders their webpage in an embedded browser and scrapes the DOM for the like counts and such, it's a cat-and-mouse game they might not win.
But if that's impossible, then making very strong public criticism seems like the main tool that disgruntled users have against a monopolistic platform. Do you have other suggestions?
It's basically an application of freedom vs liberty. You are less free as a result of having to follow the rules of the road but have greater liberty by being able to travel safely and efficiently.
This balance is governance's equivalent of "three hard problems."
When it comes to platform moderation it seems like HN at large overwhelmingly holds the opinion that for speech liberty is maximized with freedom. Which might be right but for me personally I've experienced the reality not being able myself on the internet because of all the hate I've received. The solution has been for my whole life has boiled down to "just pretend to be a straight white cis American man" to the point of having to use a voice-changer to play videogames online. Like it does work and solves the immediate problem. But the truth is also that it has gotten a lot better in recent years. We're finally out of the "there are no girls on the internet" dark ages and I don't know if the ends justify the means but something is working.
Your platform may be legally allowed to censor everything, but it's clear it doesn't take freedom of expression seriously.
If we add some more mental gymnastics, we can say the Chinese government supports all legal freedom of speech as well. If this sounds ridiculous
but the former does not, we should evaluate why one type of censorship means freedom but another means oppression.
That element has already been evaluated, and is re-evaluated every time this argument is made.
A private platform is free to censor users as they see fit, as the users are free to A) not use their platform at all, B) use a competing platform, or C) create a competing platform. You are not compelled to post your thoughts on FB, or Hackernews, or anywhere else, nor are you entitled to a platform to do so there.
The flip-side, censorship by gov't, is platform independent. This is where the 1st amendment protects come into play, defending you (and the hosting platform) from gov't suppression regarding political or religious speech. If the USA hosted an official message board, then we could argue comparisons to China.
It wasn't always like that. We used to have rules like common carrier restricting the phone company, the fairness doctrine restricting television networks, and campaign finance rules restricting other media.
We truly live in the golden age of corporate power.
> Some companies go out of their way to try to be better than that because they recognize the influence they have on public access to platforms.
If they have that amount of public influence they should be broken up, or heavily regulated as public utilities, so that they uphold freedom of speech online in the new digital public town square.
I always wonder what makes YouTube/Twitter, in particular its so-called reviewers or fact-checkers, think that they are on the right side of the history? They are not necessarily better informed, they are not necessarily better educated, and they are not necessarily better at research, they are not necessarily better at interpreting stats. In fact, I question if many of them understand scientific research at all. Yet they had no problem banning a person for citing a research from Stanford that questions the effectiveness of masks. Yet they had no problem declaring Florida's governor was spreading misinformation in a round-table discussion. Yet they had no problem shutting down anyone a year ago who supported wearing mask or staying at home, and shutting down anyone now who claims the opposite now.
In fact, YouTube, according to BBC, bans any coronavirus-related content that directly contradicts World Health Organization (WHO) advice. Yet isn't it true that WHO gave really bad advice in the early days of Covid-19? Isn't true that Taiwan ignored WHO's advice and implemented strict containment policy to a great success? Isn't Thailand representative harshly criticized WHO for their dubious corroboration with Chinese government? What makes YouTube think that they possess moral superiority over other people?
I think the reviewers are mostly low on the tech totem pole young people, as ignorant of history or anything outside of their neighborhoods as they are certain about their virtue. You know, as young people have always been. That they get to police what everybody else can say is a serious problem.
They know they're frauds pushing a political agenda, and they know if they and their conspirators repeat the same lies over and over, the masses will believe them.
I think there is more nuance to this. The problem is that YouTube literally claim "Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world." not the selectively suppress the views of certain groups. So I think it's closer to false advertising.
