We keep seeing these dystopian stories again and again and again. Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? Or will we all live in fear of losing a lot of work and valuable connections by being banned from one of our social accounts?
I already lost one Instagram account that I put a lot of work into. One day, Insta suddenly asked for my birthday. After me putting it in, all I saw is "Sorry, this page isn't available." and thats it. Whenever I try to log in, all I get is "Sorry, this page isn't available.". Some kind of ban or bug. I dunno. I never managed to get it back. Feels very 1984.
But when say "Ok, let's build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof" then there is nothing but (blind?) hate.
Sometimes there are real discussions. Then the main argument is always "But what if you lose your private key?"
Well, we could build something like Discord (FB, Twitter, Insta, HN, you name it) where losing our private key throws us back to the current system. So if the platform owner (say a DAO) "decides" to deplatform you (say via a DAO vote) you can use your private key to prohibit it.
This way, you can only become deplatformed if the platform decides to deplatform you AND you lose your private key.
If you only lose your private key, then you can ask the platform to please transfer your account to a new private key. Then the usual authentification mechanisms (email, phone, id etc) kick in.
I could sleep way better if I knew that two have to mess up for me to lose my digital life. Me and the platform.
Another idea would be legislature. Have these online public spaces serve under the same laws as real-life public spaces (museums, parks et cetera).
If a town banned you from the train station because you refuse to give them your phone number, that would open them up to being sued. That should absolutely apply to Discord, Google Mail and Amazon AWS.
>> If a town banned you from the train station because you refuse to give them your phone number, that would open them up to being sued.
Nice example you gave, because this literally happened between 2002 and 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List
The No Fly List eventually swelled to close to a million people. There was no one entity you could sue, because airlines had their own algorithms for matching, so even if you werent on the list, but the algo fuzzy-matched you, you were effectively on the list. Matching names is notoriously bad. There was an ACLU lawsuit, but it was a much bigger effort than anything being described on this thread.
In summary: lawsuits against Government systems are slow and not necessarily something to aspire to as a better system.
yeah, the fundamental problem doesn’t seem to be a result of government or companies as we’re seeing this happening with both. governments and as we’re seeing, across the board with companies.
That should absolutely not apply to Discord, Google Mail, or Amazon AWS, because those are all private companies restricting the use of their private property. You may call them "public spaces" or "public services" but that is an abuse of the word "public".
Private vs public all comes down to the interests of society, it's not religious dogma. Prior to the 60s it was perfectly legal to refuse to serve somebody because of their race or religion. The courts decided this was not in the public interest, and so that changed. Some time before that it was private companies used to also be able to fire anybody seeking to unionize. Then that changed. There is even precedent where private land used in a public way subjects the owner to the same standards as those of the government. [1]
The current situation is pretty goofy. We've hyper centralized speech into a tiny handful of outlets, with those outlets increasingly recklessly operating with exactly 0 accountability to anybody, in spite of the dramatic and undeniable consequences of their actions are having on both individuals and society at large. IMO the one and only reason this hasn't been dealt with is because we're going through a brief phase of dystopia. Governments seems more interested in trying to myopically exploit the centralization speech to their own benefit, instead of actually thinking of the longterm, to say nothing of making society a better place.
Small point: the courts didn’t decide this in the 1960s, the legislature did with the Civil Rights Act. The courts enforced it. The courts don’t (shouldn’t) determine what is in the public’s interest, the legislature (aka the people) does.
It all depends on politics. Some people have opinions on how much court "activism" should be allowed, but they reliably flip the script when one of their pet topics shows up.
People used to insist Antonin Scalia was a sort of "strict constructionist", himself among them. But the moment he got a case where he had a personal opinion that contradicted his "strict" claims, his true colors came out. Then it turned out his strictness really did just mean corporations always win and individuals always lose, as his record had always suggested and his critics had long asserted.
(Never guessed I would have cause to miss him... He was not, anyway, Bork.)
They are but that’s precisely the problem. More and more of our vital communication channels are owned by single private entities. IOW public discourse is being replaced by “public” discourse. The promise of blockchain solutions is that they can return us to the status quo ante of the internet where there were open protocols that operated in a decentralized way. Whether it can fulfill that promise, I don’t know. But there’s also plenty of precedent for regulating how the private owners of public goods (such as rail and telephone networks, or even sidewalks) must behave.
The internet is not real life. It seems a lot of people who hold your opinion are in the 18-24 age range. Those people who grew up thinking the internet is the only way to communicate or “make things happen”. But I assure you these private companies do NOT have to let you use their services, and common excuses such as “Online communication is like a public square!” is not rooted in the desire for free speech, but is rooted in the desire for instant gratification.
Yes it’s easier to gain a following online, but throughout MOST of history, people started these movements/conversation offline. Don’t let these companies trick you into thinking you don’t have a voice, or power, without voicing your thoughts on their “platforms”. You have a voice, and you can use it. You’ll just have to get out the house and start talking to people face to face.
Edit: I didn't mean to establish a condescending tone with the second sentence - I was simply making an observation.
I suspect you're older - imagine the US without a public highway system. Imagine every highway is private. Imagine what arbitrary bans from those highways would do to impact how you live. Talk to me about how well we should communicate face to face in that situation?
Idea not that appealing? That's what you're advocating for today.
A complete loss of a highway system that has no public replacement. By the way - those "18-24 age range" are all being forced to help pay for those "private highways" with their tax dollars anyways, in the form of govt subsidies to private cable companies.
Should we discount the ability to still communicate face to face? Nope. Damn well shouldn't.
> Imagine every highway is private. Imagine what arbitrary bans from those highways would do to impact how you live. Talk to me about how well we should communicate face to face in that situation
First off, this is a flawed argument because my taxes don't pay for the servers running Discord or other similar services.
Also, your response is proving my point. I said in my original comment that your entire argument is based on the desire for instant gratification through through the use of private services that can boost your voice/reach online - These are private services, and you are not entitled to them at all.
I understand you want faster results (in a time where you can go online), but it's still very possible to get results face to face - That was my response. This is a fact that doesn't lean on any quasi-moral bulwarks to manipulate the conversation.
Your example ignores the fact that you can get anywhere using public roads instead of highways - Which would take more time, but are still very functional. This reinforces my original point. Additionally, beginning your response with made up scenarios is generally a low quality way to frame an argument to your liking, but I'll give you a pass on that.
> Does that make this ok? Nope, Damn well doesn't
Says who? You aren't entitled to any private service. Mind you, you're the one using words like "shouldn't" that don't fall under any moral authority other than the owner of the platform itself.
You keep assuming that "private" means they are not accountable to the general public, and that they are (fantastically) standing alone without leaning on the resources that all of us are providing.
And that's simply a complete mistruth (I'd call it delusional - in the case of tech companies). They might be private companies, but they cannot (literally - full stop, without room for debate) exist without the infrastructure that we are providing them.
From the roads that they use to provision their datacenters with equipment, to the power we generate with power plants under government supervision, to the police/lawyers/judges that ensure their property rights, to the firefighters who deal with their emergencies. To the cable companies that we subsidize to provide them internet, and connect them to their customers. To the trash we collect from them, the water we provide, the clean air their employees breath.
I don't understand how you keep missing this point. "Private" does not mean self-sufficient, and it is an insufficient standard to claim that being "private" means you have carte-blanch control of how you operate.
This is why we have regulations over all sorts of industries. Do you think private companies are free to ignore accessibility laws? Or that they can violate discrimination laws? Or that they enter into any contract, regardless of the clauses?
Basically - "Ownership" is only a concept that exists BECAUSE we enforce it. There is no such thing as "ownership" without the participation of all of us in this make believe game.
---
So in this case - it's complicated. I think in general I don't mind private companies being allowed to remove users from their platforms, but I think it matters quite a bit what sort of impact that has on the user, and what sort of actions provoked that removal.
Should a store be allowed to remove a jewish person because they are jewish? Nope - damn well shouldn't.
Should a store be allowed to remove a jewish person who is breaking shit and making a mess? Sure.
Should discord be able to ban malicious users spamming other customers? Sure
Should discord be able to ban a user because they changed email addresses? Probably not.
Intent and actions of both parties MATTER.
And simply claiming that it's "Cost efficient" to not deal with problems that are trivial to a company, but utterly life changing to an individual (such as loss to a primary communication channel) is not acceptable. It's cost efficient for the company, and debilitating to the individual - they are harmed immensely so the company can save pennies.
We've long had established law around unequal bargaining power (it's where roughly all of our labor laws come from...) and it's been a concept for literal centuries.
So I'm inclined to say this on the matter:
Just because they currently "can" remove a user for this, doesn't mean that - ethically - we should allow that practice to continue.
It just means our laws are woefully out of date for this application, and technological progress is outpacing political progress.
Edit: Basically - I'm claiming complete and utter rubbish on this
> First off, this is a flawed argument because my taxes don't pay for the servers running Discord or other similar services.
Our taxes DAMN WELL DO pay for discord to be able to run their servers. We pay with our taxes, our time, sometimes our lives - so that the environment in which discord runs their servers can exist at all. Just because discord happen to be paying the costs for the servers themselves is almost immaterial. Society is an organism. We are all part of a whole.
In your example of the highways though, Facebook and Discord aren't the highways. They're the private clubs you take the highways to. The highways are the telecom companies, the ones where you're incredibly limited on which ones will service your area, where you realistically don't have multiple choices.
Discord isn't the only group chat platform on the internet. WhatsApp isn't the only text message service out there. As long as you can get on the internet, the highway, you can drive to another club. You can use Matrix. You can use Mastodon. You can use tons of other services out there.
Private clubs still exist, though, and they can still ban you even if all your friends are there. I'm also reasonably sure Discord can't ban you for being black or Jewish. They can, of course, ban you without giving a reason at all, but so can physical private clubs.
But you're essentially arguing that Willowdale Odd Fellows shouldn't be able to choose their membership, that everyone has a right to join the meetings.
The impact of Willowdale discovering you are gay and ejecting you is limited specifically because they (I assume) don't maintain a blacklist in coordination with Springfield.
I mean, they might ban someone, and as long as their reasons don't pertain to protected classes does it still matter? Do you have a right to go to any Odd Fellow meeting, anywhere? Or do they have a right to choose who they consider to be members? I don't really know much about Odd Fellows, if they did have national/global membership rosters, would that then change this scenario to you?
Seriously, do you feel the private organization should be able to choose who can be a member or not? Generally speaking, not trying to bring any particular protected class.
Say the Odd Fellows club did ban me, globally. Maybe I had friends I knew through the club. Does the fact I have friends who meet in the club let met petition the government to do violence against the group to enforce my ability to go to the meetings despite the leadership of the group not wanting me there?
Should a church be required to accept everyone in their services, even if that person is running around the room screaming "God is a lie! God is a lie!" Should a restaurant be required to seat every potential customer, even if that customer orders an ice water and starts screaming profanities and making other customers uncomfortable?
Why can't Discord decide to exclude those which abuse their platform?
This original post is someone using their phone number for two accounts. Having multiple accounts is against their rules, so it's abuse of their platform.
Another user talking about being banned from Discord was supposedly involved with a server trading child pornography and then continuing to get banned by creating additional accounts which is once again against Discord's terms.
I'm not seeing a lot of examples of people truly getting banned for no reason. It's not my place to tell Discord what is and isn't abuse of their platform. They're allowed to make their own membership rules.
But please, answer my question. Is discord allowed to exclude those who they feel abuse their platform? That's kind of the key point here.
A private organization should be able to do what they like, provided they have not acquired enough market power to be acting in the role of a public utility. As a public utility, they should be obliged to follow procedures that offer due process.
Does that mean they cannot "exclude those who they feel abuse their platform"? That is a tendentious, disingenuous question.
Does that mean they should be obliged to have a legitimate justification for such action, and offer an avenue to challenge it? Yes.
Does it mean the list of justifications should be subject to public review? Yes.
Does it mean that permanent bans for trivial, correctable reasons should not meet the standards of such public review? Yes.
Most couples now meet online. Good luck convincing them all the internet is not real life. And those stats are from 2017. Given a few years of lockdown the trend has surely accelerated.
Discord is how a lot of young people talk these days. If you're banned from Discord, it's not very comforting to hear "you don't need Discord son, in my day we didn't have Discord and we wrote to our pen pals. I'm sure you'll make some new friends."
> it's not very comforting to hear "you don't need Discord son, in my day we didn't have Discord and we wrote to our pen pals. I'm sure you'll make some new friends."
>it's not very comforting
That's the problem. Your comfort doesn't matter. If you want comfort, go buy a hammock. If you want to boss companies around with overreaching regulations, then get into politics.
The fact is, companies can do what they want (within existing regulations). "They should" or "They shouldn't" arguments are outside of both of our control.
Lets use your example of a dating app. Lets say someone makes a Catholic-focused dating app. People make their bio state "Mary was a prostitute! Jesus is a lie!" What should the platform do?
The platform should ban the user, with an explanation written by a human being explaining what rule they broke. And no, "our shiny new machine learning algorithm flagged your account" doesn't cut it. Arbitration should be an option. I could write a lot more, but hopefully you get the idea.
Ban the user? But how would that person ever find a match with a dating site banning them? It's completely socially ostracizing for that user to not be able to use the app. How would they ever be able to function in society without access to the Catholic dating app?
I advocate group #1 suffering the consequences for their actions. I do not advocate group #2 losing access due to factors outside their control. Not sure why you're getting the two confused.
The person in this original post broke Discord's posted rules. So this whole debate entirely falls under the category of #1. That's why I'm confused here.
So I'm glad to see we agree. When you break the rules, it's OK for the site to ban you. So in this instance, Discord did nothing wrong, they banned someone who broke the site's rules.
> Losing my gmail account would have way more effect on my "real life" than if I had suddenly no letter box
Yes, due to your own lack of contingency planning.
I respect your intentions, but government regulation is not always the answer. At some point, we have to admit that we are far too reliant on these services (that many luddites refuse to use, and live a normal life).
My second sentence is true as of now, but maybe things could change in the future. However, I only base my arguments on present circumstances.
I do agree that some of these companies need to at least offer some sort of human support team or call center available to serve users that were falsely banned or randomly booted. However, forcing the hand of these companies is not only unfair, but pretty entitled.
you absolutely shouldnt rely on a single email provider. Instead own a domain and use that domain to forward to whatever email provider is most convenient.
For the record, I'm 46. I clearly remember what it was like before, during, and after the internet revolution and I've seen how things have changed. I actually partially agree with you that part of the solution may be to simply stop relying on these new media quite so much and rediscover more analog ways of relating to one another, and I actually see signs of a movement to do just that (among young people!) but that doesn't change that they are very useful and here to stay, and for better or worse a vital part of how we relate to people near and far.
Consider the postal service — imagine if you could permanently lose the right to send things in the mail at the whim of an unaccountable customer service rep in the USPS. No trial, no recourse. Unthinkable. I suspect you CAN be banned if, e.g. you commit mail fraud or send something hazardous, but only after you're convicted with due process. That's the part that's missing. You can argue that the USPS is a government-owned entity and thus different rules apply... but again, that's the point. The carrier of last resort, at least, should be run in a way that is accountable, whether technically government or not.
Ok, if the internet is not "real" life, then what is it?
Is it "in" reality? Do we interact with it? Does it interact with us, or within the ineffable, largely unseen soup of causality from which how things are/become in this world emerges? Does anything matter?
No, it isn't always about social media, or free speech, or 18-24 year olds.
An NGO I consult for runs its entire business on Google. All its documents are on Google docs, all digital assets on google drive, using google play store for their mobile app, using firebase on the backend ....
They work on children's education, and have lots of photos of children attending their workshops. My biggest fear is that Google AI will identify some photo as objectionable and shut the entire operation down in a hurry. Without recourse.
> An NGO I consult for runs its entire business on Google. All its documents are on Google docs, all digital assets on google drive, using google play store for their mobile app, using firebase on the backend
Sounds like an egregious lack of contingency planning. This situation is the fault of the engineer who stood up their infra. Your argument wouldn't exist if there were a Plan B and Plan C in place.
Do you believe it's fair that your client's lack of preparation is somehow grounds for overreaching government regulation?
Good luck trying to convince an resource-strapped nonprofit to implement contingency plan for this.
No government regulation means existence of these will for all practical purposes depend on Google's whim. I don't see any other viable option, you do? can you elaborate?
Why lol? I do have some nonprofit experience not as consultant but as voluntary admin and I did consider google dependence a problem. But there was no other easy option, that's why I'm asking.
I acknowledge your feeling that the internet is real life, and I respect your opinion, but I have to disagree. I'll repost part of a comment I made 5 months ago because I think it's very relevant:
"Don't forget that everything you see online is a facade. 15+ years ago, I fell in love with the internet because it's somewhere I could go to be something that I'm not. I could be LOUD, or I could say things I would normally never say away from the keyboard, and I think everyone bonded together online with this fact in mind. The internet was an escape.
Soon, people began to view the internet as a reality due to the rapid homogenization into 3-4 major websites which are controlled mostly by advertisers. But what I've noticed is that most of the opinions you read online aren't very honest.
Commenters on reddit will grift in the comment section for upvotes. Some commenters on HN will purposely avoid certain topics because their account is tied to their reputation in certain very partisan circles in California. Both of these examples are often the loudest and MOST SEEN (or unseen...) replies due to the low effort alignment with the popular opinion at the time.
Although the internet seems more real everyday, I truly believe it's never been further from reality. No one is truly able to say what they want due to the (seemingly) dire consequences of saying "F*ck it" and stating your true opinion (which isn't all the time, but the option no longer exists). And this even applies in the short term. If you aren't banned, you're downvoted (HN, reddit, Lobste.rs, every website with a comment section...) or filtered by an algorithm tuned to keep corporate sponsors and advertisers happy (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube)."
Many government functions (unemployment, DMV appointment scheduling, etc) can not be accessed from any place but the internet. It's one reason that Public Libraries are so important these days.
That our government requires you to use the internet puts lie to the idea that you can live a complete life without the internet.
Discord, no (at least for now - some government contractor adding self-help via Discord or Slack is not hard to imagine). Your gmail account? Yes, it would prevent you from using the DMV's website.
No, I don't use an @gmail.com address for important communications. If Google banned me I would still be able to communicate with the government on the internet.
It turns out there's more email providers than just gmail.
I feel like the goalposts of this thread have moved. We've gone from "no, you don't need the internet in your life" to "just don't use certain private entities on the internet".
Which I am going to interpret as "yes, you do need the internet to live your life, and you also have to be either savvy or unremarkable to keep from getting stomped on by private entities."
> Many government functions (unemployment, DMV appointment scheduling, etc) can not be accessed from any place but the internet.
I agree with this. There are many government functions which need the internet to be able to use. But getting banned from Discord does not prevent me from accessing a government website. Getting banned from Gmail does not prevent me from sending or receiving an email from the government. Getting banned from WhatsApp does not prevent me from calling 911.
You practically do need an ISP to use the internet, often (in the US) your choice of ISP is very limited, and I do support common carrier regulations on ISPs. Maybe this will change with more wireless connectivity options becoming available to the broader public, but as it stands you normally don't have much of a choice which ISP will service your home.
But Gmail isn't an ISP. Facebook is not an ISP. You can still use the internet without having to log into Facebook. You didn't need an Instagram account to write this comment. Tiktok could ban me and I'd still be able to send emails to the government. I'd still be able to schedule a DMV appointment even if Spotify cancels my account.
If McDonald's banned me from their establishments I would not go hungry. You're essentially arguing I'd starve if they did. McDonald's makes up 24% of all fast food establishments, they're the largest player in the space. Clearly I would have a hard time ever eating without it. There's other providers out there! There are other places to get food other than McDonald's! You don't need a Gmail account to receive email!
And yes, you literally did just suggest that I needed a Gmail account to receive emails from the government. I regularly receive emails from the government to an address unrelated to Gmail.
Yes, but those government services are funded using taxes, so yes, you ARE entitled to those services. You are not entitled to the use of any private service.
Effectively, the entire internet is privatized. To put another way, it is impossible to access those government websites without using a private service.
And since the government does not provide an email system, you still need to use a private service to access those public resources.
> most of the opinions you read online aren't very honest
IME it is exactly the opposite. People are more honest and open with their opinions on the internet; in real life, they are more likely to stay quiet or lie where they feel their interlocutors may not be accepting if their true thoughts were to be expressed.
They pretty much are de facto public services. The town square is now digital, and the laws have failed to adapt. Just because some big corporation owns it doesn't make it different in practice.
Do you really want to defend a future where you can be banned from doing anything because some random $BIGCORP's algorithm decides so on a whim?
Yes, I want that future, because their right to restrict service is the same right to restrict service that I personally have, and diminishing their rights diminishes my rights.
If you want government-run services that act as public versions of these services, advocate for that. But I don't support this particular method of socializing private businesses.
You can keep a private/public company as a company while still restricting some of its activities via laws. This is reality for every company in existence.
There's even precedence when a private company is a de-facto public space (and must follow the governments' mandates on public spaces) in the physical world; extending this to the digital world makes sense.
Or you know, you could choose to use decentralized services just like we used IRC back in the days. Dont blame the platform when the users created their own problems in the first place.
>That should absolutely not apply to Discord, Google Mail, or Amazon AWS, because those are all private companies restricting the use of their private property.
That's not some law of physics. Just a man made law that game them those "use of their private proverty" rights (or rather, rich and powerful people lobbied and bought legislation, and got them for themselves).
We can take them back. And we can also stop treating them as legal "persons" while we're at it.
>You may call them "public spaces" or "public services" but that is an abuse of the word "public".
Public in the legal sense is just what we deem public in the legal sense.
As for public in the dictionary sense, that's irrelevant here.
Besides, after offering a service used by millions, that's basically a public service (I mean in the dictionary sense: directed at a mass public) - and even legal scholars have argued that they function as a kind of public utility (and could/should be regulated as such).
If we're to take it even further, then it's also a historical fact that all countries, including the USA, have nationalized companies (made some private companies public the same way public libraries are, either entirely or in part - e.g. having the state be shareholders of large part of them). So it's not like it's some unprecedent thing.
Just because a company is "private" doesn't mean they can do anything (manufacturing illegal goods, selling things that are harmful, not hire a certain category of people, etc.) We could add to the list of illegal behaviors the fact of denying service without justification and recourse.
Secondly, when those companies confiscate our accounts, they deprive us of what we had stored there (emails, messages, etc.), which should be considered stealing, even if they don't directly profit from the steal.
But most importantly, the size of these companies make them akin to utilities; while not impossible, it's incredibly difficult to operate in today's world without a Gmail account, or in certain circles without access to Instagram, Facebook, Discord, etc.
Given the impact to someone's life to be deprived of such access, the decision should not be left to companies, "private" or not, but supervised public authorities.
In France, the fact, for a professional, of refusing to sell something for no reason is punishable by up to three years in prison[0]. (If the victim sues, the reasons for not selling have to be presented to the judge, who then decides if they're valid or not.) I don't think this has ever been used against a FAANG but it would be a very interesting test.
If the US wants "email as a utility" then they can build and fund it themselves. I wouldn't even complain about proposals for the US Government to buy Google- I am a demsoc, after all. But I do think that half-measures like forcing private organizations to operate under the same rules as private ones are a "worst of both worlds" proposition.
The entire premise of limited liability corporations is a creation of government; these are artificial entities, not people, they have privileges not rights. Every single right you might think a corporation has is a privilege, not a right, and can be taken away. They don't even have the right to exist at all.
> I'm not sure that current SCOTUS precedent agrees with you,
I know it doesn't, but that doesn't change anything I said. All of the privileges corporations enjoy are negotiable and can be revoked by that which created them in the first place: governments.
Your argument was lost a hundred years ago or more. There are many regulations on businesses. On their speech, on their pricing, on the products, on hiring practices. The list is quite large.
AT&T can't restrict who can use their network to make phone calls based on the political views or the content of the call. Why should Google, Facebook, or Twitter? Especially when special liability exemptions were made without which they likely wouldn't even be in business.
I mean the simple answer is that I think AT&T should be able to restrict their network based on those criteria. If the people of the US don't like that, they should vote to either build out equal infrastructure to replicate that functionality publicly, or vote to buy out AT&T's infrastructure.
Or we can cancel all their easements, remove their right to run fiber and copper over public lands, and not renew their radio spectrum leases. These networks exist because the public gave them privileges in order to build the networks. Without those privileges they wouldn't exist.
Plus we could make them civilly and criminally liable for every bit of fraud, defamation, child porn, copyright violation, and etc. that involves their network.
We don’t have the same standard in place for physical private companies. If Walmart started issuing lifetime bans to people because they didn’t fill out the customer survey on the receipt, they would be well within their rights by the same argument. It would also probably not be tolerated by society, because it impacts food security for those people where Walmart is the only grocery store around.
I am fine with Walmart issuing those bans, as is within their rights, because the correct mechanism to respond to that would be for it to be "not tolerated by society", aka, the market will respond.
Maybe they roll a D20 if you don't fill out the survey and if you roll a 1, you're banned for life (what can I say, they make up the rules for bans). Would the almighty free market really build another grocery store for that 5% of banned people? No... they would go hungry.
>That should absolutely not apply to Discord, Google Mail, or Amazon AWS, because those are all private companies restricting the use of their private property.
We don't live in a libertarian utopia where private property is not regulated. If you're a store-owner, for example, there are some things you simply cannot do or must allow. In California, for example, a private space, like a mall, has to allow constitutionally protected speech[1].
You can regulate platforms to allow for, say, free speech rights.
"under the California Constitution, individuals may peacefully exercise their right to free speech in parts of private shopping centers regularly held open to the public, subject to reasonable regulations adopted by the shopping centers"
When quoting from the Pruneyard Wikipedia article, I would suggest you include "In refusing to follow Pruneyard, the state supreme courts of New York and Wisconsin both attacked it as an unprincipled and whimsical decision", and not just the parts you like.
I made no judgment on the decision. The decision itself is periphery to my argument, namely that governments are perfectly capable regulating speech on platforms ... because they already are in many many other domains.
This is a horrible way of thinking. It's always good that "the others" are getting banned with no recourse, up until the point that YOU get banned with no recourse.
I know, because it happened to me, and it will happen to you, too. Eventually, you'll have a "hot take" on a topic against the hive mind of whatever media you use, and you're done.
If media companies allow public access to their services, they MUST become public spaces, and/or public services. TOS be damned.
If they want to restrict users when they sign up (just an example) "you must be liberal or conservative," fine. They are preemptively limiting their customers to certain conversations. But if they allow everyone in, you cannot mute one set of people.
The bus is owned by a private company, but they're being contracted by the government. It's still public.
If the USG were to approve a publicly-funded centralized chat program and contracted that work out to Discord, I would support/approve subjecting them to the rules people are suggesting here. But that hasn't happened and most likely will not happen.
When you invite the public in, it's public. Maybe not quite the same way as a city park, but it's not wholly private either. That's both obvious in a common-sense way, and part of the law. It's just not really been applied to the Internet yet.
They can’t have it both ways. Either they should not be able to be selective about who they serve, or they should not be able to hide behind the figleaf of “we are just an indiscriminate carrier and not really responsible when our users use our services for illegal things” to avoid having to build sufficient support and moderation infrastructure to do the job properly and provide recourse when mistakes are made.
What I wrote was a political opinion. How I think things should be, not a description of what they are. I absolutely think private companies should be restricted in their use of their private property.
Sure, as long as you acknowledge you're not using any legal definition of the word "public". You're not really even using any dictionary definition of the word "public".
For many services, I think the right model would be analogous to how landlord-tenant relationships are regulated -- with significant constraints on how and when services can be terminated once they've started.
This should be the case even if the tenant isn't paying cash for services.
Government implements regulations about public discourse then eventually goes on to decide what is considered OK to publish and acts as a censor in the end. Since these become now effectively government driven platforms you lose the possibility of alternatives.
Unfortunately as we've seen from email, if there's no system for silencing posters you get drowned in spam. The history evolved as follows, and this is how I'd expect it to go for any "decentralized" comms system:
- various private blocklists pop up identifying alleged spammers. These have a false positive rate, but they're useful enough to become popular
- deliverability starts to become an issue; some people can't deliver because they're on a blocklist
- people start to notice that a big, popular service has both good antispam and good deliverability
- after a while, everyone's back on big, popular services which occasionally false-positive ban people.
That's why there should be laws requiring large services to provide due process for users who have invested significant time and energy into the platform.
Its just common sense that a spam bot should be nuked on sight but a legitimate user should get a fair hearing before you ban them. Ideally the social media platforms would do something akin to Wikipedia's arbitration committee (basically the Supreme Court of Wikipedia) but scalable by hiring a suitably diverse pool of "unskilled" people for a $15 an hour or so remote job where they decide if a longtime legitimate user should be banned. I think this system would do a much better job of avoiding false positives. A properly functioning spam bot detector shouldn't be detecting any legitimate longtime users whatsoever.
Banning email addresses without sufficient notice to allow accounts tied to that email to be moved to another email should be illegal. You should also have a legal right to access your digital purchases even if your account is banned. There's nothing wrong with not wanting a customer any longer but you shouldn't be able to cause irreparable harm to your customer on their way out the door and there should be safeguards in place to ensure you don't fire any customers by mistake.
Email is a different beast though, as it is set up to replicate snail mail. You need to be able to receive mail from anyone at any time.
For private, personal use at least, you don’t need this for a service that competes with discord. I’m not allowing random strangers into my chats, having an allowlist basically makes spam a non issue.
Now, that doesn’t fix the problem for public channels, but spam/trolling is always an issue on those anyways, and frankly, I don’t understand how people can use discord for that purpose in the first place.
However, email is easily portable, you can download your messages, and even own your domain, so you can switch email providers without changing emails.
For each unreasonably banned user, there are 5 concerned ones and 100 ones who joined the platform blue-eyed. It'll be hard for the few of us to fight the network effect.
I don't. Regulation is the key in my opinion. Not fully sure what policies need to be enacted, but at the very least prohibit automated bans except for very trivial cases that don't really need human review.
OP is arguing about us stop relying on over centralized corporations and to start using the tools (that already exist!) based on free software where such type of arbitrary rulings are impossible.
Your response is "mah regulation".
On Hacker News of all places, I'd expect that people were at least willing to take control of their lives and actions, and not to cry from oppressive authority to another, thinking that we can only choose the lesser of two evils.
Where has that spirit gone, really? Is it a generational thing?
You wrote this like the ideas are mutually exclusive. They're not. I want both regulation of massive internet services and for mastodon and others to become more common choices.
> based on free software where such type of arbitrary rulings are impossible.
Software license has nothing to do with what rulings are possible. If you're found to be doing something illegal, it's on you to figure out how to deal with that. It may involve not using that software.
But we don't live in a Cyberpunk dystopia. Government regulation is useful for many things. The answer to corps running wild does not have to be starting an isolated system from scratch.
I wouldn't consider the abolishment of child labor or enforcement of the 40 hr standard workweek as "completely useless"
If government is supposedly accountable to the people it should serve public ends. If it doesn't it should be replaced. I thought that was the entire "Amwrican experiment"? Huh, guess it's a generational thing
> I wouldn't consider the abolishment of child labor or enforcement of the 40 hr standard workweek as "completely useless"
Regulations haven't abolished any of that, they just pushed to China, where you still happily buy products from because they are so cheap.
> American experiment
First, the American experiment was to have a loosely coupled federation of states and to have spread power on the lower spheres of influence. That experiment has been abandoned for a while.
Second, the world should not not revolve around what American people and its government wants to do.
No I'm likely older than you and definitely older than the median on this site and have always basically believed regulation is a more effective solution than blaming users for their problems.
Saying that people are complacent and expecting the audience of a site called Hacker News to be mindful of their self-sovereignty is far from "blaming users for their problems".
The fact that an older individual shares one idea with the younger generation does not exclude the possibility of it being a generational divide.
Kudos, though, for also sharing the younger trait of treating every argument as something about their own identities.
Something I also share with the younger generation is the understanding that the cowardice of their elders is what got us all in this situation to start with. "Self-sovereignty" and individualism are failed ideologies: we will solve this for all of us or for none of us.
A large contingent of ""hackers"" throws up their hands and say "fine none of us then as long as I can insulate myself from the worse effects of it" and yes that is a shameful abdication of the responsibilities we have towards each other. Sorry if you find your own identity in there but you don't have to be so complacent about it yourself either.
You are putting "individualism" where none was mentioned.
> "fine none of us then as long as I can insulate myself from the worse effects of it".
No. More like "there is no way that any central entity will be able to solve the conflicts of everyone without turning into authoritarianism and tyranny, so let's stop pretending that we can do that and create a plethora of different communities where people are closer to those with decision-making power."
I can (and want) to help my neighbor and those close to me as equals, but I have no interest in being a mere subject serving as an instrument to whoever is in power above.
So... based on the fear of a particular outcome, you want a situation where individuals and small groups must solve the problem for themselves or accept the consequences?
The language may be uncharitable but I remain comfortable calling that cowardice and user-blaming, yes. I stand where I stand on this.
The only cowardice I see is in those thinking they can not fight by themselves and for others, and want to have a soothing voice telling them how to feel.
> The government is not supposed to be oppressive.
All "Big" Governments are oppressive, as all "Big" anything is. The only difference is in how they exert their power, and what type of people are at the top of each pyramid.
Even "totally democratic" powers of the west will quickly attempt to crush anything that takes that power away from them and show potential to liberate people.
Well, it prevents you from communicating with the sort of people who will blithely participate in these sorts of destructive systems.
More seriously, it's like an act of civil disobedience. If everybody acted similarly, we would not have these problems. Most people won't wise up until their kin are personally harmed by one of these massive unaccountable institutions, and until that happens to enough people, you have to recognize that acting in accordance with your principles will not always be the most convenient path through life.
You gotta stop putting all of your eggs in one basket. Also, connect with these important people outside of Discord. You have to assume these sites/services will ban you at any moment. Contingency planning isn’t just for projects at work!
> You gotta stop putting all of your eggs in one basket.
This isn't free or even possible for a lot of people. I think it would be better for society for this cost to be imposed on the Discords/Metas/Googles of the world, than for it to be imposed on their users.
>We keep seeing these dystopian stories again and again and again. Does anybody really believe it will ever stop?
I don't think it can. The problem is that these companies are trying to solve the problem of highly sophisticated attackers, at scale.
>I could sleep way better if I knew that two have to mess up for me to lose my digital life. Me and the platform.
You're trying to solve a cultural, legal, and regulatory problem with a technological solution - that's never going to work. That a user can be banned (sometimes, across all the platforms, all at once) is a feature for the regulators and platforms themselves.
>A nominal payment for the purpose of verification could allow someone to "prove" ownership of a number/email/identity.
1) Not really .. people can steal your private key. And then you have to same problem.
2) Don't payment processor already have inordinate amount of (government-issued) identity data they collect from you? Everything from Driver's license, to Passport, to Social Insurance numbers? How would another piece of information make any difference?
> But when say "Ok, let's build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof" then there is nothing but (blind?) hate.
I really don't get why you absolutely want to bring blockchain into this. You don't need any kind of cryptographic proof, or ledger, or anything to replace Instagram: all you need is a website on your own domain and you can even host it from an old laptop at home: the web is already decentralized.
Except people don't do that. I don't exactly know why, maybe it's laziness, maybe it's herd behavior, maybe that's the power of marketing, the economy of scale or anything but that's it, people just keep using centralized platforms and that's as true in the blockchain world, people just buy NFT on OpenSea or store their tokens in Coinbase's wallet. The natural dynamic drives to centralization.
If you try to address this social problem with “cool” technology, you won't achieve anything, centralization will happen regardless.
Now since we cannot change the humans being living in this society, we can at least change the laws regulating the said society and stop all that bullshit by making these gigacorps accountable for their actions.
Now if you live in the US and you think the regulations cannot change because the politicians are corrupt, then you should fix your political system first, because no blockchain will protect you against your corrupt governments anyway.
Answer: then you have lost access due to circumstances completely within your control. Contrast that with the amount of control you have over losing your account with a social company. IOW, that’s a total bullshit argument.
You cannot self-host identity. You cannot self-host a social graph.
If people would host "abc liked my tweet" and "xyz follows me" on their own server, then everybody would claim that Billie Eilish liked all their tweets and Joe Biden is their best friend.
People go on social media for the social graph.
You can do that via a central authority (and live in fear that everything is taken from you) or you can do it via cryptographic proof. Self hosting is not a solution.
You also cannot host identity.
If your domain gets stolen from you (search for the horror stories on Google or HN search), your identity is gone. Nothing you can do against it, since you are at the mercy of authorities again: The registrars.
>If people would host "xyz liked my tweet" on their own server, then everybody would claim that Billie Eilish liked all their tweets.
This problem is what public key verification is literally made to solve.
If Billie Eilish likes your tweet, her client signs the like with her private key and sends the result to your server. Other clients can verify the like is real by looking at the result you send back with the "like" and verifying it against her public key.
Edit: The person I'm replying to has edited their post at least 3 separate times in the past couple minutes, adding multiple new lines to say different things, so if this disagreement to it ends up making no sense, you know why.
Sure you can self-host identity. Why would it be tied to a domain name? It is tied to a public key already, in e-ID systems, S/MIME, or GPG, Tor, blockchain, etc.
In the case of the user who started this thread, there's no option to 'host it yourself'. They're trying to be part of the community that Discord hosts. Discord is stopping them. You can't just fire up an IRC server and ask everyone on the Discord to move because you can't join in. That's not how life works.
Neither one of those are counterexamples. One guy decided to give up solving his deliverability problems (problems I don’t have after self-hosting my email for 20 years). Nobody banned him. The second example is cloudflare banning a site. I don’t (and wouldn’t) use cloudflare, and even in that case, nobody banned anybody from his own website—just from cloudfare.
Regarding email, it's still possible for practically every other mailserver on the Internet to block messages from you, effectively banning you. That's what happened to OP I believe.
On the second one you might want to look further into that case... people have been frantically going after every possible company that does any business with them trying to get them off the internet, whether that's hosting providers, DDoS protection services, IP allocation providers, upstream ISPs, nameservers, domain registrars, etc.
How would it work? I mean, I can imagine framing me for a felony and getting me banned from internet access as part of my sentence, but are there less extreme procedures?
EDIT: Maybe breaking into my email server and sending out spam to poison my IP. That’s conceivable, and would partially ban me from sending out email.
As long as people willingly subscribe to services whose terms explicitly allow to ban users for no reason whatsoever, no. I don't see how this will ever stop.
I always wonder what I should take in terms of behavioral modification from these kinds of stories. They're certainly spectacular. So are stories of mass school shootings, of police murdering people for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, of children being kidnapped out of their own front yards by strangers and held in basements. None of those stories cause me to avoid school, avoid police, not let children into yards, though, because I'm aware of the actual prevalence of occurrence as a proportion of time spent living in places where these things sometimes happen and the risk level is sufficiently low, in spite of how spectacular the stories are.
Sure, assuming I had an Instagram, Discord, or Google account, which I currently do not, they could ban me at any moment and not give a reason, but what is the actual risk? I'm aware they do these things, more than zero times, but as a proportion of total users, how many people does this actually happen to? Is the risk similar to the risk of getting eaten by a shark I take every time I swim in the ocean? Or is it similar to the risk I take running across a highway at 5 in the morning? One of those things doesn't really worry me and one of them does, enough that I never do it.
Without any knowledge of the actual rates at which these events happen, what are we supposed to do with these stories? Sure, we see stories several times a week. But these services have billions of users. If it's really a few users a week, my chances of hitting the lottery are greater. If it's thousands of users a week, then it's something worth worrying about.
Note that this is entirely separate from the discussion everyone else seems to always be having of whether privately-owned computers that host and serve user-submitted multimedia files should be able to legally ban people at all.
There is no solution, you just have to deal with it. There will always be noise in the signal.
If all of these services implemented the policies and procedures needed to bring the number of stories like this to zero, there would be thousands upon thousands of stories about how "BiG tEcH rEfUsEs To SoLvE sPaM aNd FrAuD pRoBlEm".
C'mon. Be real. You know it, I know it, I know you know it, and you know that I know that you know it.
What you DON'T see, regarding all of these stories, is that they almost always get resolved.
Resolutions aren't sexy. Rage is.
"Oh nevermind, my account is back" Doesn't get clicks. OMG THIS MEGACORP DELETED MY SOUL, MY IDENTITY, MY PASSION does.
You don't like this. I know. But there's nothing you, or I, or anyone, or an infinite number of laws or lawsuits can do.
We all know nobody is going to, or realistically is capable of, staffing with humans to such a degree that it will solve this problem.
I also lost my Instagram to a weird bug/ban thing. If I try to access my account on desktop it says "confirm your information using the Instagram app to try to get back to your account". Opening the app on my phone results in a black screen. This happens on both Android and iOS. Android has some buttons that appear, but they're really buggy (appearing and disappearing) and none of them do anything except give me an error. It kind of seems like there's some sort of verification process I'm supposed to go through, but the app won't let me access it.
I just want to delete my account at this point, but I can't since I can't log in.
I'm working on this right now for two different experiences, topic-oriented chat (Discord, etc) and media blogging (Instagram, YouTube) using a distributed graph database + cryptographic primitives, and user-hosted data.
Happy to connect with you or anyone else reading this and trade ideas / give updates, email in bio.
Just simple JSON messages signed with public-key cryptography (Schnorr) relayed over Websockets.
Send your events to many relays so if one chooses to evict you it's not an issue.
Just don't rely on a third party to keep your private key. Not your key, not your identity.
I would love to have people move to this model, but its an extra layer of complexity that the masses will balk at, so they will stick to Facebook or Discord or even Slack.
I'm surprised Discord bans anybody these days -- they have telemetry that rivals Palantir it would be silly to willingly remove data sources like that.
Oh, I could google myself right now, nonstop cockroach pictures, piece of cake. Just need to tease the algorithms a bit. Like why would I? That's old news. Better for both that I not look right now. Like objectively what happens? 1984 was erased, The Metamorphosis also erased, so in fact Kafka was dredged before 1984, means it's not as harmful probably. Eh. Like oh this was gone, the idea that if something did happen to me I had to report it as soon as possible, first opportunity. Wrote down the date I recollected that. Clearly the opportunity went stale, there's exceptions and this was it. Sacred? Memories? Consistency? Why would anything conform to that? Sue whom where how? Forget it.
Courts of no worth. Not constructive, only letting a very bullshit trial pass barely once after 80 years of lobotomies doubling their bet every time they lose, martingale, yeah, and had to have the planets align too, and never once falsely confess to anything, that's like day...uh...day...uh...well there I'm lost. Lost track of time.
Like that is shit. Supreme Court knows which country it's in, like why do they need to get sucked up to to that extent to be willing to answer a brain surgeon? Can he even code? Richest specialty of the richest career, to be rich be a doctor once you're a doctor be a brain surgeon, best of the best. Not the best, but come on. No malpractice suits from patients, as far as the patients can tell? Perfection every time!
Like if it did happen, how would you find out? Being told by a factual blog? Search engine? Words? Report? Truth? Text? Dude idealist on a crusade! Moth to a flame!
No like you know I can do the better thing and make a search engine, just in order to show off a blog, just in order to parade pictures of cockroaches. I'm remembering one now, [flash 17:21 Sep 19 2022], Giant Cockroach from Urza's Legacy in mtg, 3{B} 4/2 no abilities. Vanilla. I remembered the name, looked it up, that's googling myself, there's the pictures.
Boom, there it is. Flashed on it today at that time, the memory was erased, it came back with the specific flashback sensation, I wrote the time down, that's all there is. What's next? Dude any other literature? Chinese torture, something, hardcore shit. Like why not write an entire novel that only takes place inside a torture chamber, a torture chamber retaliation? Dream of the red chamber, dream of the torture chamber ever touched by sunlight, dude don't bore me with hope. Hope will fuck with me as it will, but don't distract from the pain. Like only in the obliuette, [flash 17:25 Sep 19 2022 obliuette], like why zoom out? What else is worth talking about? At least the torture happens in person, not through a camera. The last form of human contact.
We keep seeing these dystopian stories again and again and again. Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? Or will we all live in fear of losing a lot of work and valuable connections by being banned from one of our social accounts?
I already lost one Instagram account that I put a lot of work into. One day, Insta suddenly asked for my birthday. After me putting it in, all I saw is "Sorry, this page isn't available." and thats it. Whenever I try to log in, all I get is "Sorry, this page isn't available.". Some kind of ban or bug. I dunno. I never managed to get it back. Feels very 1984.
But when say "Ok, let's build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof" then there is nothing but (blind?) hate.
Sometimes there are real discussions. Then the main argument is always "But what if you lose your private key?"
Well, we could build something like Discord (FB, Twitter, Insta, HN, you name it) where losing our private key throws us back to the current system. So if the platform owner (say a DAO) "decides" to deplatform you (say via a DAO vote) you can use your private key to prohibit it.
This way, you can only become deplatformed if the platform decides to deplatform you AND you lose your private key.
If you only lose your private key, then you can ask the platform to please transfer your account to a new private key. Then the usual authentification mechanisms (email, phone, id etc) kick in.
I could sleep way better if I knew that two have to mess up for me to lose my digital life. Me and the platform.