The censorship of WallStreetBets needs to be a watershed moment for everyone
First Discord bans the group, now Facebook, and in the meantime, Google has helpfully removed more than 100K negative reviews.
Big tech is organized against the little guy and at the end, they are no worse than the Wall Street, whether they wear shorts and t-shirts, turtlenecks or suits.
What's interesting about the WSB/GME story is how it's got bipartisan appeal. AOC and Ted Cruz publicly agree that the little guys are getting short shrift in this.
It's the first mob in 2020/2021 that's not dividing the country down party lines. We should do this more often :)
My cousin who I have been IM'ing with from the days of AIM/ICQ/Yahoo Messenger asked me yesterday if there was a better chat app than Facebook Messenger. We're both using Signal now.
Disclosure: Not affiliated with Signal, but I donated $20 to them to support their mission. And since this is on a post about GME, I am a GameStop customer, but I do not own nor have I ever owned GME stocks. I am a WSB and GME supporter. I purchased $2000 in Bitcoin last night for the first time ever after the GME trading shutdowns on Robinhood and others yesterday.
EDIT: had the wrong link for Signal.
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One of the few things a democracy can not tolerate is intolerance. This type of censorship is intolerance.
Our legal system has processes* to deal with people who abuse their freedom of speech. If those processes need to be improved upon to take into account the global megaphone of social media, then let's do so. Censorship however is not the answer.
* e.g. crying fire in a movie theatre can mean you are guilty of a crime like disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace. More extreme words (see Brandenburg versus Ohio) could mean you are found guilty of advocating “crime, sabotage, or unlawful methods of terrorism” for political purposes. All of that depends on context, intent, etc...variables which should be determined in a court of law.
Discord banned WallStreetBets for violent calls to actions. Thet is hugely different from Google removing bad reviews wholesale, with no apparent effort to distinguish genuine reviews by actual users from spam. Actions by zero-cost trading platforms are the most problematic because they favor data customers over end-users in a way that materially damages end-users.
Not every restraint on speech is censorship or venal commercial interest. And some of what was done is going to cause platforms like RH to deservedly get into considerable regulatory and reputational trouble.
I am not clear what other options we have here. If we ban censorship (the defecto result of repealing section 230) then we accept that fake news will become a way of life. Any attempt to correct or remove intentional lies will disappear. For all my personal commitment, I don't think we can handle the amount of misinformation we're already drenched in...
> This is the moment free speech advocates have been warning about for generations. [...] Yesterday, however, a line was crossed.
As a free speech advocate -- no, it's not. It is censorship, but it's not the moment. It's not crossing a special line that's never been crossed before.
The stuff that free speech advocates warn about is stuff that already happens regularly, and while it's valid to talk about the effects of the crackdown on WSB, and while I'm happy to see more people learning about the issues that we face on the Internet, WSB isn't special. Talk to the people making adult games on Steam, talk to the app devs trying to make experimental content on iOS, talk to businesses affected by our online payment systems, talk to sex workers who get driven out of society and lose their jobs because of doxing, talk to the social justice activists and whistleblowers that get targeted by law enforcement and added to no-fly lists.
WSB is just another example to add to the list. This isn't a watershed moment, it's just a moment, consistent with what many other communities have already experienced online and within the US.
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To be clear, I'm not just being argumentative about this for the sake of being argumentative. Understanding that this situation isn't unprecedented is important.
Whenever these stories get run, there are many people who show up who aren't familiar with the extensive groundwork that has gone into building a consistent ideology about free speech and into building workable solutions around decentralization and regulation. When events like this happen, sometimes those people come into the free speech debate and propose solutions that are unworkable, because they want to skip the hard part of going and looking at the work and research that already exist. They treat the censorship that is affecting them personally as if it's an isolated, special, new category of censorship that requires novel solutions. Usually, it doesn't.
The end result of that process is that we get important discussions about online payment systems, Net Neutrality, and decentralization hijacked by people who don't understand how Section 230 works, and who believe that Conservative censorship online is some kind of watershed moment that justifies bringing back the Fairness Doctrine. We get people arguing that these kinds of changes are somehow reverse ToS violations, and that calling out WSB's more problematic language is somehow some kind of libel, or who think that freedom of association is a 1st Amendment bug instead of a feature.
I'm not saying people shouldn't be incensed at this kind of censorship, but I am saying, this happens all the time to lots of communities who don't have voices, and your community is not the breaking point or last bastion of free speech, your community is just another example. It is good if that wakes you up to understanding the problems we're facing with censorship online, but please if you're in that position go read up on the situation from people and organizations like Doctorow, Popehat, the EFF, the Free Software Foundation, and the ACLU before you start proposing your own solutions.
It's frustrating to be part of a movement that has an extensive history, and then to see a large portion of that history thrown away because Conservatives and amateur stock traders think that their censorship is an unprecedented situation that requires special solutions.
I want the censorship of WSB to open people up to the idea that censorship is real and dangerous. But I want them to be motivated by that to learn more about free speech advocacy, not to just propose reactionary solutions and to act like the current situation is unprecedented. It does a disservice to the many much more marginalized communities, (communities that don't have bipartisan advocates cheering them on and constant coverage from mainstream websites and TV stations) to act like this censorship is somehow more important or insidious than theirs. That kind of attitude is harmful both because it encourages people to think about censorship in lazy ways, and because it understates the problem.
WSB isn't a watershed moment in censorship -- they're lucky. Public outrage got them reinstated in Discord. Censorship on Robinhood is going to lead to Congressional meetings. They're getting wide coverage on cable news. Most communities online don't get that privilege.
It's a big club and you aren't in it. These Banks literally have a license to print money but they need to be protected from regular joes with smart phones. New laws protecting hedge funds are incoming.
HN normies are realizing what the right wing have known for years.
Same with crypto people who doe eyedly tout “uncensorability” in their apps. Will you stand up to speech codes and natsec breathinv down your neck? I doubt it.
The end of the day all of this is ultimately either total fork of sovereignty or remaining in the pig pen of walled garden freedom.
It’s anti American but ultimately thats just what it is
when bigtech unprecedentedly walks away unscathed from censoring EVEN that US President, do you think they had any trouble doing the same to us nobody?
>This is the moment free speech advocates have been warning about for generations.
Yes, and the fact that people have screamed censorship at every moment for the last 20 years makes it much more difficult to take seriously.
"First they came for the terrorists, then they came for the people organizing a violent overthrow of the government" isn't "First they came for the socialists". And it certainly didn't include "Then they stuck little notices below videos of anti-vaxxers with links to medical experts".
Not everything is a matter of degree.
>Yesterday, however, a line was crossed.
Which is why we need to actually address specifically what happened yesterday, and not lump them in with violent terrorists.
I oppose (although am unsurprised) by Facebook's actions in this case, but I think this is a really weak argument against it.
Doesn't WSB also use things like homophobic slurs and similar language casually? I can see where the opportunist allegation comes from but I'm really not that surprised that someone would ban them.
It would be terrible if this was actually censorship, but its not, its restricting access to an exclusive and commercial forum with a policy you agree to if you use it. No one is preventing people from talking about this, and its not like there isnt a great many alternative forums to do so.
Why they did so is completely beyond me however...
When your platform becomes a means to drive violent action against society, either physical or financial, it’s no longer censorship to shut it down.