> American citizens may have freedom of speech, but they find themselves with vanishingly few public forums in which to exercise it fully.

Well put. As we've also seen from numerous leaks and incidents over the years, big business and government often works hand-in-hand, with revolving door policies and barely legal indirect bribes happening regularly.

That the government is now seeking to curtail the First Amendment by exerting pressure on these companies should be alarming to anyone.

It seems to me like there are more forums for free speech now than ever before. When in our history has it been easier for the average citizen to find a platform to host their views?

Yesterday. After that, last week, easier; then last year, yet easier; 5 years ago, easier still, and so on. I will not speculate as to when the maximum was reached, but it was somewhere between the creation of the internet and the present.

I would argue that the peak was on reddit, very briefly before the culmination of the Democrat primary in 2016. The descent was a panic response to two populists nearly winning the major party nominations in the US.

We can likely reach pre-2016 levels of Internet freedom again. I'm not sure if Gab is a critical piece of that, but they seem to be doing mostly the right things right now (though I would like to see some sort of /r/all mechanism for popular activity, right now feeds appear to be completely self-curated).

On Reddit, it would have been right before Gamergate became the political opinion spam that never went away. 2014 rather than 2016.

I forgot about gamergate. You are probably right.

Doubt. Good luck not getting instantly banned on Gab for left wing opinions.

>When in our history...

Before the masses were corralled into walled gardens. If a free and open Internet was a threat to gatekeepers, walled gardens are the solution. You can say anything you want on their platforms, as long as it adheres to the party's content guidelines.

The gate-kept illusion of freedom is arguably more toxic, because it normalizes the curated garden of propagandized views.

Yes, you have more options than broadcast TV, newspapers and radio. Especially if you espouse mainstream views which one would easily find on those sources.

There was a time before eternal September, let's call it August. Google searches were populated by independently run forums and websites. Tech giants were not bent on imposing their political will. Individuals were getting the word out about Hans Blix on independent sites. One can only wonder how Twitter or Facebook's fact checkers would handle that today.

"Experts confirm Saddam has WMD"

In the august days before fact checkers and Facebook, users could still obtain free hosting. They could even post on forums without learning the basics of HTML. That's when the history of the Internet turned.

Anyone can easily obtain various forms of anonymous free hosting at the present.

What some people don’t seem to understand about the first amendment is that while the government is obligated to not stop you from publishing, no private party is obligated to assist you.

> What some people don’t seem to understand about the first amendment is that while the government is obligated to not stop you from publishing, no private party is obligated to assist you.

What some people don't understand about freespeech is that it's a bigger principle then just the 1st amendment protections. Most of us are not arguing that companies ARE violating the law/first amendment. only that political/religious speech restrictions by large gate keeping institutions can have similar negative effects on society. We are arguing for ether more protections to be put in place or even for social change where instead of demanding companies censor these who disagree with us we demand they allow them to speak, EVENTHOUGH we disagree with them.

What some people don't understand is that the freedom to create a reputation by selecting which speech to amplify and disseminate is, itself, an integral part of free speech, and the reputations of the oldest, best established social institutions for the dissemination of information -- such as schools, universities, and publishers -- have been built on what they don't publish as much as on what they do. We are arguing for more freedom of speech for organisations to allow them to choose what level of scrutiny, or even what bias, to apply, so that we can establish the level of trust we think they deserve based on their record.

> Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant — society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it — its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries.

> Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

> Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

> There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

~ John Stuart Mill, On Library (1859)

Free speech is the concept, the human right. The first amendment is the government’s pinky promise to not violate that right. Swearsies. Unless you say something they’d rather be secret, of course.

> Before the masses were corralled into walled gardens

The total audience for the internet was far less in those days.

It's weird to think back to a decade or 15 years ago where it was shameful to be an "internet addict". Spending a lot of time online was generally frowned upon, and not something you would talk about.

Now the entirety of society is an "internet addict". I'll admit the nerd inside me feels a bit vindicated, even if horrified overall with where the internet has taken us.

Wow, I had forgotten that term!

The other day I was thinking back to when I was younger and people freaked out at the possibility of dating someone you met online. Now with dating apps it's the norm.

>Before the masses were corralled into walled gardens.

I'm not sure how old you are, but when is this time you speak of? AOL had users in a walled garden for decades. Then those users moved to myspace, then facebook. You're going to need to be more specific about this magical time when the average user was somehow "free of walled gardens".

Compuserve and a number of other credible alternatives to AOL existed during that time. Usenet and BBSes also existed. Myspace and Facebook (initially) were only for teenagers, college students, and people who never grew out of those phases. You might as well put Livejournal in this list, because none of those platforms (at those times) were as effective at corralling and suppressing wrongthink as Twitter and Facebook have been today.

CompuServe and bbs's weren't "the masses". CompuServe peaked at 3 million users to AOL's 35 million.

There have always been alternatives to the walled gardens, they have never been larger than their walled alternatives.

Apart from their obligations under the law, AOL did not police content. In one example, AOL banned explicit discussions of homosexual activity but did not ban anti-homosexual hate speech. They policed the first type of speech because the CDA required them to prevent the transmission of explicit material to minors, but they did not police the second type of speech because it was not illegal.

Facebook and Twitter are actively policing speech that is not illegal.

That is why your analogy is inapt.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gays-protest-aol-censorship/

I'm not even sure how to respond other than to point out AOL is literally where the term walled garden in reference to the internet came from. They were WORSE than what is around today by an order of magnitude.

I never used them and don't know of the political parallels. I know they had more biz relationships for search results as an example.

Maybe start by explaining how they were worse?

Early AOL didn't give you access to the broader internet, you got access to the content they allowed you access to. That was far, far worse than today when individual platforms choose not to host certain content whether by force or choice. Your ISP isn't curating a tiny subset of the internet for you.

A historian’s word for this might be inclosure. A wag’s might be the hostile corporate takeover of everyone’s private life.

Twitter, fb, and yt are the platforms for COVID misinformation. Contrary to popular belief this content rarely removed.

If this garbage was actually filtered and censored, then how is it still rammed down my throat at every turn?

Sadly you are incorrect

Dangerous antivax nonsense is not well moderated on many of those platforms, especially Facebook

It's terribly put. The American concept of freedom of speech has nothing to do with access to public forums but rather is a limit on government action against your ability to run your own forum (newspaper, etc), and if you consider that when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were actually written, most Americans had significantly less forums. A few newspapers made up almost the entirety of public forums when the right was written, and none of them were forced to publish political content they disagreed with.

In fact, when you realize that the internet has provided more forums for free speech than any technology in history, it beggars belief to suggest that there are less forums now than before.

We are at the ultimate highpoint of access to freespeech forums in American history, and to suggest otherwise is nakedly ignorant conservative propaganda pushing an emotional angle against technology corporations who enforce common sense rules against violence, terrorism, and hate speech on their private networks.

I maintain that until Fox News or conservative talk radio is mandated by the government to stop suppressing my free speech rights to have access to the network to say whatever I want, that Facebook and Twitter should not be forced to support insurrection and violence masquerading as free speech.

It's hard to understate how outrageous this lie is. It's like suggesting "folks today have less access to electricity than at any point in American history". It's such immensely stupid lie that how could anyone fall for it?

While I don't think the original claim is in any way obvious, and you may well be right overall, you're also making a huge mistake in your look at history - newspapers are not and have never been "public forums" (except to the minor extent that they occasionally published letters to the editor).

Instead, historic public forums were mostly related to in-person meetings - town halls, clubs, pubs etc. These have not been outlawed nor disappeared entirely, but they are almost entirely atrophied. Instead, public discussion has moved almost entirely online. This has created a complex situation, as online forums are almost always private property, unlike the forums of the past.

This situation is creating an unprecedented situation for free speech - as private mega corporations, not bound by the first ammendment, are now in control of a huge percentage of public communication. It seems pretty clear that Facebook or YouTube can't just be handled as publishers, nor as network operators, nor as broadcasters, nor as any other traditional form of communication. We will need to invent a new concept of how such communication should be regulated and moderated.

On the other hand, it's also true there is more public communication, and with higher reach, then probably ever before in history.

Well put. I wonder if conservatives would have better purchase framing this as more of a 14th amendment thing (private bar owners throwing out customers whose "kind they don't want around here") rather than a 1st amendment thing.

You might (might) have a point on an article about somebody complaining about having their Facebook or Twitter account suspended for being too right-leaning, but this article is literally about the U.S. government trying to use judicial pressure to shut down a social media platform.

> I maintain that until Fox News or conservative talk radio is mandated by the government to stop suppressing my free speech rights to have access to the network to say whatever I want, that Facebook and Twitter should not be forced to support insurrection and violence masquerading as free speech.

You don't think there should be a difference between platforms and publishers?

Whatever you may think about this, in the law, the distinction does not exist. The idea that there are special rules for "publishers" is a Twitter meme.

Note I said "should be". I know there's no legal distinction today. I'm saying that that's bad, and I want there to be one.

Sounds mostly like a way for people to limit the speech and association rights of others by threatening to declare them "publishers".

... how do you distinguish between a platform and a publisher?

A notice board in town square is a platform; no endorsement by anyone is presumed by content posted there.

A billboard is a publisher; the content there is clearly governed.

So the criteria seems simple:

* is content freely posted? What is the approval process for content?

* if content is freely posted, are the rules for removing content uniformly applied and viewpoint neutral?

* what mechanisms exist for appeal, protest, modifying the rules, etc?

Platforms are defined by what they don't allow.

Publishers are defined by what they do allow.

So Reddit's a publisher (because most of the subreddits have various on-topic rules for posting) and my newspaper's a platform (because their rules for posting comments are what's prohibited).

One of the problems with trying to use an actor's own policy to distinguish between platforms and publishers is that the goal of creating such a distinction in the first place is to restrict the ability of the actor to undertake certain policies.

I don't know of a perfect formal definition, but this kind of gives a rule of thumb: is the content considered their own voice? For example, The New York Times is a publisher, because if an article on their website says X, then saying "The New York Times says X" would be reasonable, but Facebook is a platform, because saying "Facebook says X" just because a post on their website says X would not be reasonable.

Whether you say "The New York Times says X" or "Astead Herndon said this" is entirely subjective, and has more to do with what culture currents you pay attention to than with anything particular about the NYT. Illuminating counterexample: a pretty good chunk of nerd Twitter routinely refers to "what HN has said".

So no, that won't work. Try again.

Abstracting out the subject becomes a problem, and the hated gatekeepers of knowledge become the necessary filter in front of the firehose.

>that Facebook and Twitter should not be forced to support insurrection and violence masquerading as free speech.

Where is "force" coming into this other than various government demands and threats?

The entire conservative war against Big Tech is about fake "censorship" (which is actually Free Speech by the private network) and they want to change laws and use the courts to force Facebook and Twitter to allow any content they want to post, including insurrectionist content.

This entire debate is about making private networks such as Facebook into "public/government spaces", thus meaning the Bill Of Rights would apply to a private company (an outrageously anti-Constitutional concept) and it would count as government censorship for Twitter to ban an insurrectionist like Trump.

They have not petered out, and if the Republicans take control of the House in 2022, they have already sworn to immediately pass legislation on this subject.

And with this radically anti-Free Speech conservative supreme court majority, you better believe that the rights of private networks to publish content free from government interference is still high risk.

What is your evidence that the Supreme Court majority is "radically anti-Free Speech"?

I think it depends on whether your point of view is pre- or post-Internet. If you take the longer view, it is an incontrovertible fact that there are more forums for discussion than in the pre-Internet age; and nobody back then was complaining that there was a lack of fora for their views.

And even if you take the shorter view, there are still more places for people to discuss them. Facebook and Twitter didn’t even exist until the mid-2000s and the Internet has been readily accessible since the late 1990s.

right. my view is post-internet, since i grew up in a time when the internet already existed and already had long-evolved and widely-understood cultural patterns around its use and misuse as a very slight alteration of a substrate in which to carry out ordinary public speech (every kid and grownup I knew when I was 10 understood the root guidance of "don't believe anything you read on the internet", for instance).

to my generation, this is much more poorly framed by arguing whether Facebook is comparable to a pre-internet private establishment, than it is framed by the internet being simply the air that we breathe, an ether in which sound naturally vibrates and which trying to legislate the dynamics of should seem equally ridiculous.

Interesting. To me, Facebook and other social media sites are most definitely not the Internet and don't really prevent anyone from being able to conduct free speech, since you can always go outside these places. (This very conversation is happening outside them!) Facebook is a for-profit business and we've seen these come and go over the years. Yahoo was ubiquitous once; now it's in some hedge fund's portfolio.

There will always be a place for people to express themselves, but it may not always be as convenient as some would like. But the Constitution does not require convenience or free amplification services.

> but it may not always be as convenient as some would like.

This is the entire rub, though. Exactly how convenient it is should be a matter of primal importance to the root relationships between citizen, state, and countrymen that the founders found and advocated for. Beyond the momentary mire of the current legal/political order, one feels that all citizens should have some instinctual understanding and positive desire for the sort of healthy, dynamic, and free social order that we're all ostensibly (or increasingly just nominally) in support of as Americans. Whether this dynamic comes under repression from this type of entity or another is a flatly ridiculous non-sequitur (I'm positive that the founders had the same level of love for the East India Company as they did for the British crown)

Complicating this, the surrounding legal framework and precedents around computing technology is near-universally acknowledged to be in a state of completely hopeless shambles; every critical chunk of the system was designed and implemented in the 20th century, with the assumptions of 20th century media tech casted squarely into them. Exceedingly few TOS and EULA precedents have progressed an inch since the era of 1980s shrinkware tech. The "Congressional inquiry of big tech leaders" parade we continue to put on is a gigantic joke and a gross historical embarrassment. the DMCA and the CFAA routinely horrifies any sensible person that examines them for a couple of minutes.

So two things; while the current legal system collectively catches up to modern tech basics like "how to use an AOL modem", we should be direly concerned that a large portion of the country seems to have abandoned any personal sense of (first creeping, now a torrent) of the predictable horrors incurred under a tyrannical regimes that expressly suppress YOUR (God-given!) constitutional rights.

The second thing, of course, is that all this stuff eventually needs to get resolved in the tangible court of legal opinion. I have no doubt that Mr Torba's constitution claim will fail under our current legal system, and I generally accept the rebuke that the 'digital native' class haven't done enough of the aforementioned positive work themselves to outline how these new usages of these new technologies should harmonize with the constraints and institutional knowledge of the existing legal/political system, which has accumulated a ton of valid merit over its mostly-contiguous 250-year-long history.

At some point there's going to have to be a big palaver regarding one's fundamental right to own, operate, and make sovereign decisions (as a citizen subject to the constitution) about some part of their computing stack. Probably won't get resolved today, but I think Mr. Torba's response seems like a healthy statement to rally around.

the internet is not a newspaper.

you can't simply switch off of Facebook the way you would drop a publication you dislike. the network effects keep everyone trapped in. i can't believe we're still having this asinine back-and-forth a full decade after we learned how natural monopolies form via the ordinary dynamics of social graph consolidation.

Metcalfe's law is a thing people, you can read about in on Wikipedia [1] and we can maybe start moving beyond a 1993 understanding of what an internet platform is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

I don't believe Gab and other alt-righters really are being honest about the issue. They're only raising alarm because they're a small segment of society that doesn't get along with the rest of us so they don't have many or any lifelines to call on. For the rest of us, it's just a Tuesday, we've been acclimated to the sad reality that the State can and will infringe on rights whenever it sees fit to do so. This doesn't justify what the Congressional committees are doing but that the alt-right in general would be completely fine with having Congress sending out subpoenas to Food not Bombs or the IWW because they're looney leftists or some other spiel. But the moment the mailed fist of the State decides to smash them they squeal as loud as possible. I'm not taking their bait. They're not the good guys. When they universally agree that the rights of life and liberty are to be respected for all parties including leftists like myself then I might consider helping them. Otherwise, I'm not going to waste my time with them nor should you.

>This doesn't justify what the Congressional committees are doing but that the alt-right in general would be completely fine with having Congress sending out subpoenas to Food not Bombs or the IWW because they're looney leftists or some other spiel.

Imagine all of the people who have been arbitrarily labelled as "alt-right" in social and traditional media. Do you actually think this is what they generally want?

>Imagine all of the people who have been arbitrarily labelled as "alt-right" in social and traditional media. Do you actually think this is what they generally want?

Many of them self identify as alt-right. It's largely a self-selected identity. They're often proud of the term too. I have yet to see someone mislabeled alt-right when they're a vanilla conservative. Alt-right really is the far right of old but with Gen Z aesthetics.

I'm alarmed. Mainly by the government coercing industry (lots of them, not just BigTech), getting in cahoots with industry, or directly paying industry (govt is definitely a monopsony in medicine since insurance rates are set off of medicare rates). I used to think govt had little control over our economy, but I was wrong.

Am hoping that our protections will be renewed because of potential loss of market share, and financial interests. BigTech isn't worth much if they go after 45% of their user population, I mean, product. Because of that I still actively use Amazon, Google, Facebook, and others

What pressure? Gab is not in trouble. You just don't have the right to conspire to overthrow the government. It's well-understood that Gab is not in any danger, but its members are if they did.

Conspiring to overthrow the government is a national pastime in these "13 colonies".

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

Just because the causes have not been enumerated lucidly or coherently doesn't mean that there's not two different peoples in the USA who would like to dissolve the political bands connecting them to one another.

There are obvious ways the govt can pressure people who've committed no criminal act.

Being put on a no fly list or terrorist watch list are some examples. Happened all the time during the war on terror.

> big business and government often works hand-in-hand

The bizarre irony is that this condition is a core tenet of Fascism, which is something the "woke" anti-free-speechists claim to be fighting against.

It's pretty common to imagine the worst faults of oneself as being the motivators of one's opponent.

This reminds me of the story of kiwi farms and how expensive and mentally taxing for the founder it's been to keep it online.

https://kiwifarms.net/threads/biting-the-hand-that-feeds.808...

Total disagreement. There has never been a time in history where people have had anywhere near the capacity to express completely free speech, including wild bigotry, than today.

The most recent Congressional Dish episode[1] has a discussion on this exact topic. Now I'm off to a rabbit hole of looking up information on fusion centers.

[1]https://congressionaldish.com/cd-237-hunting-domestic-terror...

> All internal or external reviews, studies, reports, data, analyses, and related communications regarding your platform and (i) misinformation, disinformation and malinformation relating to the 2020 election; (ii) efforts to overturn, challenge, or otherwise interfere with the 2020 election or the certification of electoral college results; (iii) Domestic violent extremists, etc.; and (iv) foreign malign influence in the 2020 election etc.

Gab does not have (and has never had) such records in its care, custody or control.

Does this mean they keep zero user records or server logs?

It's also ironic to claim "sunlight is the best disinfectant, electric light the most efficient policeman" only to protest in response to a lawful demand to preserve records. (Question 7.)

You’re mixing two distinct things. Sunlight is the best disinfectant when it comes to freedom of speech, but that does not imply the government should have full access to the communication of individuals and trounce the fourth amendment.

Put it this way, if the government wanted to get all comms around antifa, or any other anti gov anti police protests, would that be okay?

> Sunlight is the best disinfectant when it comes to freedom of speech, but that does not imply the government should have full access to the communication of individuals and trounce the fourth amendment

Congress isn't claiming full access. It's asking Gab to preserve certain information while it goes through due process. You have a right to free speech, and the government has the right to investigate persons who threaten violent insurrection.

I think they have a right to ask for specific information on specific individuals via court order but not a dragnet.

Remember when Quest was the Only one to buck the Bush admin for access to its logs and everyone else just bent over because mumble terrorism mumble?

The legal discovery process actually is a dragnet. The major operational difference is that discovery is responsive — that is, you turn over the records yourself - vs. a search warrant, where law enforcement comes in and searches everything within its scope.

But this is like there being a rape in town and the police asking all males, no exceptions, to submit a sample of their DNA to clear them. No, thanks!

> this is like there being a rape in town and the police asking all males, no exceptions, to submit a sample of their DNA to clear them

This is not how discovery works. The closest analogy would be a rape occurring and the police announcing an investigation, requesting anyone with information to come forward and warning anyone against deleting incriminating evidence.

The analogy is messy because you're comparing a Congressional inquiry with a criminal investigation.

Discovery isn't used in criminal cases, and no court would grant such a request anyway.

They did at some point.

> Gab suspended the account belonging to Robert Gregory Bowers, the man charged with killing 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue last month, shortly after the attack. The site said it backed up all user data for that account and notified the FBI.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/what-is-gab

The request appears to be for reviews and analysis, not the actual activity logs.

Maybe they are just not interested what their users are writing about unless they don't break the law. Sounds like the shocker these days, but as I understand this is Gab business model.

"Spreading misinformation" about the election, whatever it means, is not a crime, I can claim that a given election was a subject to, say, Russian collusion, which is a good point to discuss, as Mueller report is full of statements like this:

"[a] statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts."

which can be interpreted one way or another, so it is good to have a discussions about that but mainstream social platforms want to silent any discussion that they consider to be "misinformation".

Same with opinions about the most recent election. I don't really care if Biden was chosen properly or not, but I do care if we have right to discuss about this this freely without being persecuted by the Police, chased by Congress commissions, fired from my university, banned from the Internet or payment systems, etc. just because I have an opinion that others don't like.

Agreed that their claim of having literally zero strains credibility. This kind of feels like gab setting themselves up for a PR stunt lawsuit.

Wow, look at the previous post on that site, from the same guy:

"They are rigging elections, they are botching troop withdrawals to flood western countries with refugees, the American border is being invaded by hundreds of thousands of people, they are buying up single family homes and pricing you out of the market, they are printing endless money and inflating your currency."

I mean, he’s using his first amendment rights. That’s the point. What does his prior comments have to do with this?

Tribalism. "Look! This person disagrees with you on this other unrelated topic. He's with the enemy, all his opinions are invalid!"

Kind of a sad state of affairs, but that's where we're at right now with political discourse in the United States. (And probably the whole world, to some extent. It's human nature.)

It's a reminder that Torba didn't create Gab to facilitate 'free speech'.

Gab is a site that censors 'obscenity' and whose CEO refuses to deal with journalists if they don't practise the same religion as him.

Gab exists only to facilitate far-right extremism, and 'hate speech' is the only form of unpopular speech for which Torba shows enthusiasm.

Eh, I also hate it when people have differing opinions to myself. Someone should really do something about this.

Should nobody face criticism? The parent didn't imply the user should be banned.

The "you hate people for having a different opinion than you" accusation seems to be disproportionately levied against left-ish or anti-Trump sentiment, but pro-Trump sentiment is disproportionately in the flavor of "hating you for having a different opinion", in my opinion.

> Should nobody face criticism? The parent didn't imply the user should be banned.

Reading it again, I think you're right -- I should have been more charitable.

That said, I guess I didn't see the point the parent was trying to make. You see this kind of outrage stuff on Twitter and Reddit a lot as a reason to dismiss or ban someone. For example, if you express the wrong opinion on trans issues you're not allowed to express an opinion on anything Twitter.

I also agree it's something disproportionately levied against those with left-ish views, but I'd argue that's because this is a tactic used primarily by the left. I do also agree that the pro-Trump cohort often hates people with different opinions. I don't think either is good, but one side seems to be more likely to take their "hate" further and use it as a reason to censor.

No, not really, they're pretty quick with the ban hammer against heathens and communists.

Torba is the cofounder and CEO of gab, that’s about what you’d expect.

> Gab does not have (and has never had) such records in its care or control

In response to a request for all “related communications” to terrorism/Jan. 6 etc. It strains belief that they haven’t even discussed these topics internally.

I used to work for a former U.S. Marine who had a good quote - "don't write when you can speak, don't speak when you can nod, and don't nod when you can wink".

This quote in the context of a Marine is a dark reminder, regardless of which side is more legitimate in each instance: Either a Marine can't trust his government, or the government can't trust its Marine.

That quote is at least a 100 years old, but it's pretty hard to follow in practice. Especially at a digital communications company!

Modern equivalent: don't text or email when you can call, don't call when you can speak face to face, don't speak face to face if you can wink

you see powerful people following this advice all the time, like with Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch’s tarmac meeting. He flew in a plane to talk face to face just to ensure it wouldn't get recorded.

Don't set a meeting when you can email, don't email when you can slack, don't slack when you can do a :thumbsup: emoji one someone else's comment

If you know the original source I'd be curious to hear it.

Allegedly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Lomasney

Eliot Spitzer (!) infamously added the addendum "And never put anything in email"

That's not what they're saying.

They're saying as a company they don't have ownership of records of such discussions, which could be true.

"In each case, these people – good people, normal people without political power – were persecuted because their viewpoints were, in one way or another, perceived as a threat to the established order"

That's true, but the investigation is specifically about criminal actions, not persecution for beliefs.

And if I am reading the subpoena correctly, they're basically looking for data on moderation activity and policies. That would seem be a purely corporate function and not related to actual user postings or any attempt at user identification. Gab claims they are very responsive to government requests related to criminal activity or foreign influence campaigns and that seems to be all they are investigating with this request. If they want to see what users are talking about, they can go in the front door like everyone else. And if they identify criminal activity, they will issue subpoenas or warrants. Correct me if I'm wrong.

My reading is that they are not asking "give us your disinformation" they are asking for their policies and data regarding the moderation of disinformation. Their response to the request seems to more or less answer the request by saying "we don't have any because we consciously don't try". This request appears to also be just a request. Nor a subpoena. But that being said, Congress isn't law enforcement. They're allowed issue subpoenas for information relevant to informing legislation. Mark Zuckerberg wasn't under indictment, nor was a material witness when he testified to Congress. They just wanted a public forum to understand how social media functions, how it could function and if additional oversight was warranted.

Small nit: this is a request, which Gab can essentially ignore. I imagine their response to a subpoena would be similar, though.

Feels like Gab just made itself a target of direct investigation. While you may not agree with how Congress acts, thumbing your nose at them directly is a great way to have the focus put solely on you.

Why would anyone want to voluntarily hand over data? It can only lead to consequences to their user base, thus not being in their interest. The gov puts out way too many requests for info as it stands.

Not saying they should/shouldn't; just that coming at it from this angel is only going to cause more problems.

I'm personally not a fan of Gab, and their claims on freedom of speech have, in my opinion, been way over blown. Plenty of colloquial evidence of people having been banned/blocked for posting, albeit tasteless, anti-Trump or anti-Christian content.

However, I do agree that Congress does, in general, requests too much from to many. There's a middle ground, somewhere, where Gab could have offered to cooperate, while still maintaining their stance.

I may be out of the loop a bit, but do these "requests" have any real power? It seems like subpoenas would have been the appropriate legal instrument if they needed to carry the full weight of Congress.

Generally the requests are a polite prelude to a subpoena. The subpoena process is a bit of a pain, so they'll skip it if the recipient is okay handing stuff over, but its presence is always felt.

Yes. It can result in a contempt charge, if the recipient does not comply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_Congress

Reading the first couple of sentences, it looks like Contempt of Congress applies only if you ignore a subpoena. It doesn't appear that Congress used subpoena powers (I may be wrong in this assumption) for this request, and Gab's reply to their request for information was optional.

Of course, Gab understands that to ignore the request altogether would have left them open to further harassment by the government, and they provided as little information as possible, but still complied with the request.

This sort of request is the nice way of saying that a subpoena is forthcoming, so don't you dare lose anything. If, in a month or two, the subpoena comes they can't respond with "oops! We had no idea we were supposed to keep those documents."

The response is more saying, “we don’t review or classify misinformation at all so don’t ask us about how we moderate it.” Subpoena or not the response would be the same.

Contempt is in failure to respond to a subpoena.

A subpoena is the risk if you don’t respond to a congressional request. So this is two steps removed from a potential contempt charge.

It’s not uncommon to start by asking nicely in case there can be an easy resolution. A subpoena is a much more brutal process and requirement.

It’s like asking someone to stop pissing on the church wall instead of calling the police immediately.

IANAL, but yes that's right as far as I understand it. But a request can very quickly become a demand

I have no dog in this particular fight, but if I were at the helm of any of these companies, I wouldn't willingly hand over my users' data without being lawfully required to do so. To do so would be an invasion of my users' privacy.

If it's so essential to the government to invade the private conversations of a company's user base, they should stand by their claims by using subpoena powers.

I believe they're hoping to avoid legal recourse by "requesting" rather than requiring.

Lol your comment reminds me of this statement by Chuck Schumer. Weird thing for us to be proud of, as noxious as Gab is.

https://youtu.be/6OYyXv2l4-I

Don’t you think that’s what they want? A political battle making national news where they can drum up support for their platform? They’re playing a different game then established players like Facebook.

The government has a monopoly on force. There are plenty of reasons to be afraid of it.

The government has the monopoly on the legal system allowing you to use the guns. Afghanistan only worked because of complete lack of government.

No it doesn't. The government operates part of the legal system. It's an oppositional system. You can fight the government and get a favorable outcome. It happens every day in all 50 states. People are so spooked of a weak, inefficient government staffed by underpaid and corrupt losers. Sure, you can't win every time, but it's not like it's impossible. People just want to build up the government to be something it isn't... it's not god: it's mostly just a bunch of fat people in Washington who couldn't make it in the private sector.

This should be an interesting comment section, because HN was almost unanimously opposed to Gab and Parler around the time of the capitol riots, but recently I’ve seen more of a pro free speech angle here, especially as it relates to Facebook censoring links in private messages.

We do live in a world where everything is either black or white. The man is evil so everything he says is evil kind of thinking. Here Gabs response is 100% on point and how we all imagine the internet should be where they don’t tell you what to believe. Doesn’t make everything they do right but it does make a lot of sense this time.

I tried gab, briefly; pissed folks there off by explaining (too plainly) that a "foot job" is different from a pedicure.

anyone want to bet Gab's internal operations haven't been penetrated and monitored by several antagonistic parties since shortly after their inception? With all respect to their efforts, I looked at some of the code they posted, and didn't see anything to indicate they'll have much luck protecting their operations against the high grade, ideologically motivated opposition they've drawn.

10/10 on IASIP title card usage, 1/10 on platform moderation

It's amazing that a company did this for such a post. I personally appreciate it, but I doubt people in Congress would find it funny - more likely flippant.

we need that web 3.0 now more than ever

The future is decentralized, how do we make it happen? It makes me sad that my children and their children are heading towards a sanitized internet where only the corporate mainstream is allowed and the rest is crucified.

Start with high speed (1gb/sec+) symmetric consumer network links and IPv6.

Easily implemented, decentralized/self-hosted platforms already exist, but you can't stream/share your vacation videos with your large family because your upload capacity sucks.

Centralized services exist because individuals don't have the capacity to support a Mastodon or Diaspora instance on their own network connections.

And more's the pity.

yeah, it's scary how all of the internet is basically being hosted on amazon and logged on to using google or facebook

I thought the Dark Web already exists?

web 3.0 as in "fediverse" or "blockchain smart contracts"? I've seen that term used to refer to either.

I wonder if a social media site marketed as a "free speech" platform will become something center left and right people actually use rather than a haven for psychotic racists. I do not think Gab should be shut down or anything, but just take a look at the average post there.

why is this flagged?

gab platform is fairly pro far-right, as is the founder. HN crowd is susceptible to tribalism just like any other group.

I thought flags weren't downvotes though...

They are sometimes, unfortunately. I'd wager there are some folks flagging a direct link from HN to a site like Gab, though.

They are.

If by "fairly pro far-right" you mean the founder regularly shared QAnon and far-right propaganda along with far-right conspiracy theories like the election being stolen, anti-vax, etc.

Funny test: this post has 61 votes, 16 comments, is 21 minutes old and is on front page. It will be "dead" and off the front page in the next hour if usual hn moderation is applied. This usually happens to thread where majority of comments go against the grain.

Edit: thread is a bit over 1 hour old, 125 points, 119 comments and on page 4. All the other threads on page 4 are of comparable vote/comment count but at least 20hrs old. If you scroll through page 4 you will not find a single thread as popular and as fresh as this one there. Maybe i'm biased but id like to think that my prediction was at least half correct.

Edit2: thread is ~1hr30min old, page 8 :)

You should email the mods. They're very nice, and will take the time to explain the reason some item fell off the front page.

Sometimes it's because a lot of people (not mods) flagged it; sometimes it's because the flame war detector is tripped and a mod may choose not to reset it. They'll tell you.

I truly believe they are nice people. The problem is the discussion will be dead long ago before that happens.

Can you confirm this thread is around page four or five at the moment?

It's almost certainly the right call, in general. My other top-level comment is the only one trying to come up with novel solutions. Most of the other comments are just rehashing the same old stuff.

I assume most of us are heavily invested in the Internet as a form of earning. The future of censorship and regulation online seems like a relevant topic, even if I don't publish political material.

A bit disappointing to see this one go by the wayside. It is almost as if Internet freedom is only relevant here when it relates to partisan's favored champion in the arena.

"...and there was no one left to speak for me"

Users flagged it, and it set off the flamewar detector. Those are routine HN phenomena.

Yeah, that didn't take long. Polarizing topic, for sure.

Contrary to their claim, I believe they do keep records. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/11/gab-hack-neo-n...

If you don’t classify misinformation, you can’t give information on it. It actually makes total sense.

Vague claim. Show us what you posted. I have read anti-trump comments every day since the beginnings of Gab.

How am I supposed to show you what I posted when my account was banned? If I recall, it had something to do with being open to adopting QAnon and extremist Trump supporters kids once they were taken away from their parents because I thought they'd go full domestic terrorist after he lost the election. I guess I was right afterall.

Sunlight does inactivate infectious agents, like SARS-CoV-2[0]. There are studies suggesting street lighting is a crime deterrent such as[1].

[0]https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/222/2/214/5841129

[1]https://www.nber.org/papers/w25798

That's an obvious metaphor. Why are you interpreting it literally?

The first response to my comment (by lvass) insists, with apparent seriousness, that it is literally true. I think it is not superfluous to mention it isn't.

Also, how does it work as a metaphor? What are the metaphorical "infections" that "sunlight" defeats? Conspiracies? Fake news? There has never been more information available, and there also has never been more conspiracies and stupid theories about everything.

So, also as a metaphor, sunlight is not a disinfectant.

I'm not following what you mean, what is it you say they shouldn't be allowed to do?

The first ammendment does not apply to private companies at all -- well, it applies in that it gives them free speach rights themselves, so if you mean by "shouldn't be allowed to interpret" that they shouldn't be legally able to express this opinion, well, that'd be a first ammendment problem.

But it doesn't restrict private company's behavior at all. Private companies are not required by the first ammendment to give anyone free speech at all. Which is a kind of weird thing in this statement, they are speaking as if the first ammendment somehow requires them to do this, or as if private companies should be prevented from limiting speech (in general, that would in fact be the first ammendment problem, to compel the private company to provide a platform! although there are ways around that). But as legally weird or incorrect as I think their reasoning or interpretation of the constitution, I don't know why we would think they wouldn't be "allowed" to express a wrong opinion.

Under what grounds do you think someone would have a claim to sue them? Why do you think it would make it to the supreme court? I think you may not have an educated legal basis for that opinion, but you're still allowed to have it and express it!

> they are speaking as if the first ammendment somehow requires them to do this

What portion of their statement are you referring to? I didn't notice anything in this post suggesting that they're required to support free speech, only that they agree with the underlying principles which inspired that provision in the constitution.

For instance:

> It is not our place, nor should it be the place of any technology company, to interfere with Americans’ civil rights and sit in judgment over their lawful expression.

To me suggesting a private company "interferes with Americans civil rights" by deciding what content to publish, suggests that private companies have some kind of first ammendment obligation.

But I'm not really interested in arguing about it.

>...suggests that private companies have some kind of first ammendment[sic] obligation.

Yes. private companies have the obligation to protect their first amendment rights, as part of their obligation to their investors/owners to maximize profit.

Claiming that private companies has some sort of obligation to you by allowing you a platform for your speech without interference or moderation assumes that such private entities have no first amendment rights.

That's obviously false.

If private entities (which you and I and most everyone else) are required to host the speech of others whether they agree with such speech or not, then I can use the same argument for me being able to come over to your house and play gay, furry, midget, scheiser porn on all your screens, project it on the exterior of your house and you have to allow it. If you don't, you're infringing on my first amendment rights.

Which is, of course ridiculous on its face. Whether it's a screen in your home or a server in one of Facebook's data centers, the principle is the same.

The constitution protects all American people and businesses. People should absolutely study it, understand it, and use it as part of their reasoning when it comes to responses to government or other legal requests.

Anyone should be able to interpret.

Eh their interpretation is fine from my perspective, what everyone around them does to make them ignorable is fine too, and it’s up to Gab to figure out how to be resilient and route around that.

Congress trying to figure out what is happening within the country is fine too. It’s a lot of people and businesses and they don’t know.

Honestly, what is the problem?

I think you forgot the sarcasm tag at the end there.

Do you think I was downvoted more by people who disagree with my actual sentiment, or people who couldn’t see I was being sarcastic?

It's probably 50/50.

I was on board until it got to their misunderstandings of the first amendment.

>our refusal to change our First Amendment-based moderation policy

This seems like a typical misunderstanding of the First Amendment, which only restricts government action.

>Gab has been the subject of a years-long smear campaign by activist groups and boycotted by virtually every technology company of consequence – Amazon, Apple, Coinbase, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Stripe, and Visa included – because of our refusal to change our First Amendment-based moderation policy.

This article is the most reasonably phrased 'Big Tech is violating my 1st Amendment rights' but it is still not valid. It's open to interpretation whether this is attributable to the cause they state.

>The reality of social media content moderation practices today is that large swathes of commonly-held viewpoints and belief systems are systematically discriminated against on the Internet’s largest websites

This is a non-sequitur following discussion of the first amendment.

>American citizens may have freedom of speech, but they find themselves with vanishingly few public forums in which to exercise it fully.

I wonder whether Gab agrees that businesses have a right to refuse service to anyone arbitrarily, such as not making a cake for a gay couple.

>Our web properties are among only a handful on the Internet where Madison’s “general intercourse of sentiments” can presently flow unimpeded by corporate interests, opaquely funded NGOs, and activist groups

I am very skeptical of that claim.

Oh, and I am very open to anyone who would like to explain to me how this is incorrect.