Example - If anyone shares gun videos on social network from a place where carrying guns is a normal practice it may not get censored that quickly or may not even get reported. This is because people feel it is very normal or part of their location specific culture. While on other end someone who maybe coming from an entirely different place or culture may find this offensive or a safety issue.

The slippery slope fallacy isn't really a fallacy.

History shows that in the context of policy, especially that of a non-democratic authority, it isn't always a fallacy.

It seems absolutely absurd to me that YouTube should ban gun assembly videos. If the idea is to prevent "mass shooting"-type events (e.g. lone gunman, nonspecific victims targeted by social group), why would a website want to drive these videos further into the underground? It strikes me as sort of "selfish" - avoid responsibility, so a news anchor can't say "so-and-so learned how to assemble his AR-15 by watching videos on YouTube", much to the horror of the liberal retirees who still watch the news (/s).

I hope it doesn't become a trend.

When I buy a new stock/trigger/bolt carrier group I sure as hell appreciate a video showing me how to properly install it.

Hiding this information is the gun control equivalent of "abstinence only sex education".

There’s a little problem in the fact that those video promote the ownership of guns, and makes them socially acceptable, which could be stated as one of the reasons shootings happen.

But that's just the DMCA. Most laws don't contain provisions like that.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-congress-censored-...

FOSTA does, however, amend & weaken the safe harbour provisions of the Communications Decency Act. But those protections were never subject to the idea that monitoring users makes you more liable.

So, not really.

During the period that they were banned, they formed a shell party, the National Socialist Freedom Movement, which won a stunning 6%, followed by 3% of the vote (In the two 1924 elections). After the ban was lifted, the next election was in 1928, where they won 2.8% of the vote. Much good that ban did them, eh?

I'm not sure how your point follows from the facts.

I'm going to be just a little pedantic here and point out that the Slippery Slope fallacy is indeed always a fallacy, it's just that not every argument based on a so-called slippery slope is a fallacy.

The fallacy is in the failure to demonstrate that the "first step" leads inexorably to the "final step" which is, of course, portrayed as a step people generally wish to avoid.

If one can demonstrate a plausible line of reasoning connecting the first step to the last step, no Slippery Slope fallacy has been committed.

> In a non-fallacious sense, including use as a legal principle, a middle-ground possibility is acknowledged, and reasoning is provided for the likelihood of the predicted outcome.

Howevery, I think their overall point is that there should be a standard principle regarding content. There should not be "levels" of content where content that advocates a particular view, or comes from a particular group of people is deprioritized, unless that view is heinous or the content itself is dangerous. YouTube wants to be treated a public forum, so should not hold some views over others unless it is actively harmful.

It's a list of limits for the government.

> "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." http://www.ushistory.org/Declaration/document/

Then the Bill of Rights enumerates them

edit: (not all of them, but important ones which are subject to abuse from the government).

>A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed

Given the context of militia and state, I read it more as a right of local governments to keep the means of self defense, not necessarily a "human right."

Compare to the language in the UN Declaration on human rights:

>Everyone is entitled to ...

>All human beings...

>Everyone has the right to...

The difference being the second amendment is only viable within the context as an enumerated US law, whereas the UN Declaration of human rights enumerates rights that are inherent to existing as a human.

http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

>Rep. Tenche Coxe of Pennsylvania: “Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American… The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.” – Tenche Coxe, The Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.

>Thomas Jefferson:“No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”, Proposal for a Virginia Constitution, 1 T. Jefferson Papers, 334 (C.J. Boyd, Ed. 1950)

> George Mason: “I ask you sir, who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people.” (Elliott, Debates, 425-426)

https://www.quora.com/What-do-the-terms-%E2%80%98arms%E2%80%...

I believe it is a human right which comes necessarily from your right to self defense.

If the police have no fear and don't hesitate enough to prioritize what they enforce, they will stretch a tyrannical law to its conclusion.

I see it like this: If your state passes a law allowing ICE agents to come into schools and take kids with little to no justification, and having armed teachers can make them hesitate enough to only invade 3 schools instead of 4, that's a minor success. Just enough of a brake to spare one immigrant family long enough for Trump to be ousted.

The second amendment is predicated both on the concept of a universal militia and (as is obliquely referenced in it's preamble) the concept that large standing armed military and/or internal security forces are institutions of tyranny: it is based on the idea that only by relying on the mass of the citizenry as the instrument of armed force can a state be free.

  Given the context of militia and state, I read it more as
  a right of local governments to keep the means of self
  defense, not necessarily a "human right."

It taught me many fascinating things - like that before the 1960s the second amendment was interpreted differently; the right was was seen as only relating to militias, and the NRA was an organisation of sports enthusiasts, and their limited political activity was mostly pro-gun-control.

And one of the first groups to advance the ignore-the-bit-about-the-militia-its-just-an-example interpretation were the Black Panthers, who sought to reduce police brutality by having police patrols followed by armed groups of their activists.

[1] https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/radiolab-presents-more-per...

Its a two part statement i.e. a well regulated militia is a good thing therefore ...

Before the Bill of Rights was ratified, the most convincing argument against them - to the people of the time - was the worry that the act of writing down the rights and putting them in the Constitution might give us (in the future) the mistaken impression that they were up for debate, that they were the only human rights, or that they weren't inherent to human nature.

From a legal sense, the human rights captured in the Bill of Rights are only enforced in the context of the US government because the constitution only applies to the US government. At the foundation of the country, there were a set of principles that applied across all of society, but the people designing the government were very worried about scope creep.

If, perhaps, owners of guns were concerned about gun assembly videos being taken down, they could help the general public with efforts to reduce incidents of mass gun violence.

Imagine if we continued to say that the only way to stop teen pregnancy or the spread of hiv is a ban on sexual activity for teenagers and homosexuals.

Gun owners want to solve the problem as well, they simply dont agree with the assertion that the only way there is to violate our rights, plunge gun ownership into a dark corner, and paint it as a sin.

Where is this illegal? This most certainly isn't illegal in the United States of America. Showing vs inciting.

> If, perhaps, owners of guns were concerned about gun assembly videos being taken down, they could help the general public with efforts to reduce incidents of mass gun violence.

Abstinence-only sex education and marijuana prohibition have both worked so well! Let's increase accidental death during gun assembly by purposefully hiding information! That will stop em!

In reality: you just do not like guns. That's okay! But hiding perfectly-legal, informative, educational information? You've now violated the First as means to spite the Second.

Those videos are illegal? I use to build them for fun (homemade fireworks). As long as you aren't trying to harm someone or someone's property, you are allowed to do such (well at least in my state). Fireworks are basically very pretty bombs (and anyone who plays with fireworks would do well to remember they are explosives and they can harm you if you aren't careful).

Other rights in the US Bill of Rights are more globally accepted as inalienable human rights in all/most jurisdictions.

And why would banning assembly videos on a private platform considered going against the 2nd amendment?

But you may have a different view of what counts as fundamental human rights. And a representative of the Chinese Government would have an even different view.

One might even ask if fundamental human rights even exist, since they are constructs of societies and are relative between different societies.

It's definitely "against the Second Amendment" but it isn't a _violation_ of it - only the government can do that.

Hopefully we can enact legislation to prevent companies who take these stances from receiving any kind of government monies.

It fits as part of an international website including many countries that don't see things that way. That's the conundrum the post you're replying to is addressing.

Should we, in the United States of America, censor content for our own just because they don't like it?

For example, the majority of people in Saudi Arabia believe that gay people should be stoned to death.

I personally don't give any legitimatecy to majoritarianism. There are things that are right and things that are wrong, and this doesn't change because a majority of people don't think the same way.

E.g. A ban on google cloud from any government tenders.

It's also reasonable to start enforcing our monopoly laws.

oh but they aren't "hurting consumers.

Google learned from Microsoft. They pay their bribes.

and you don't have a right to put up videos on youtube.

Of course they are. And I bet a lot of judges would rule against them under our existing laws.

Even just what we could find in discovery would almost surely provide enough information to get the EU with its stronger monopoly laws to make a case.

> and you don't have a right to put up videos on youtube.

Of course - but we can ensure YouTube is broken off from Google and has to compete in the free market.

I've been thinking this for awhile now. There are certain systems which are somewhat hazy or flubbery by nature. Legal and political systems fit into this category. Systems of logic and mathematics have more sharply delimited values for truth or falsity. Science is more sharply delimited, but even here, you see some of the haziness creep in. Is this particular grain of sand Ediacaran or Cambrian? There may be no way of saying, one way or another. However, that also isn't of particular import, one way or another.

Legal and political systems are particularly bad, since they tend to have very fuzzy distinctions combined with very significant consequences.

If you can prove why x > y means y > z, then it isn't a fallacy.

"If you start blocking one thing that doesn't fit your buisness values, you will likely block this other thing because it doesn't fit your buisness values." might not be fallacious. The issue is proving that link (kind of like induction).

Oh, easy. Even if owning a gun were actually a "human right", it wouldn't mean that everyone must be forced to allow you to speak your mind about this.

The 2nd amendment isn't "right to bear arms and post videos on YT about it", and "talking about weapons" isn't a protected class.

xkcd "showing the door" strip applies:

https://xkcd.com/1357/

Self defense and self determination are human rights.

xkcd "showing the door" strip applies

That strip is one of the stupidest things Randall Monroe has ever done. For a society to work well, the letter of the law should be a minimum safety net. Someone assiduously supporting free speech only to the letter of the law is like someone assiduously being non-racist only to the letter of the law. As someone who grew up in a "hypo-minority" situation, let me tell you that people being non-racist only to the letter of the law can be pretty darned obnoxious.

The future belongs to societies which can support a real marketplace of ideas. It's substantive testing of ideas which brings progress and creates wealth. If a society has to resort to oppression/force/intimidation to enforce its ideas, then it is effectively admitting it has lost to everyone but itself. The history of the 20th century shows this very clearly.

It's repression and intellectual dishonesty which is the problem, and which creates the distrust that fuels the worst toxic extremists. It's this kind of extra-legal social repression that people once tried to use to keep homosexuals closeted and Jewish people out of the halls of power and influence. The future doesn't belong to merely those who can muster more force. It belongs to those who can muster the best principles.

But the right to show people the door is the letter of the law on free speech, free press, and free association; that is, it is part of what you recognize as the minimal guarantee that must be preserved.

Right, and if you are declaring to the world, that this minimum is as far as you're going to go, then thanks very much! That's useful information on what kind of person you really are, and I didn't have to pay anything!

On the other hand, if a person is able and willing to go further, and engage and show that their ideas really are better, then this impresses me much more! WWII and the cold war wasn't won by the side that engaged in totalitarian enforcement. It wasn't won by the side that knew a-priori what all the right answers were and forced their citizens to only do and think the approved things. The 20th century was won by the side that let the truth have legs. This was to the benefit of the long arc of justice. I think that it will be so again with the culture war.

Power corrupts. It doesn't just corrupt the right or just the left. Power corrupts whoever is "on top." This is precisely why Freedom of Speech is fundamental. You know how to find the good leaders? The good leaders let others speak truth to power, and the bad leaders oppress dissent. Power corrupts.

I'm more concerned that you seem to declare the importance of preserving the minimum guarantee but seem to be willing to not provide even that: that is, while protecting the right of those who do not wish to be associated with particular content the right to not be compelled to relay it, and the right not to associate with it's originator is the minimum those people are entitled to under freedom of speech, press, and association, you seem willing to abandon that.

To give one side of this more than the minimum they are entitled to, you need to give the other side less.

> WWII and the cold war wasn't won by the side that engaged in totalitarian enforcement.

WWII certainly was, because both sides did that. The Cold War was largely a production/spending competition, and it was, unsurprisingly, won by the side that had a massive production capacity lead at the outset.

> It wasn't won by the side that knew a-priori what all the right answers were and forced their citizens to only do and think the approved things.

You mean, it wasn't won by a side that actively surpress the ideology embraced by the opposing side and hounded people out of government and industry in their own country by agents of the state on mere suspicion of having some association with it, and murdered people, including democratically elected leadership, abroad for the same association? A side that shot down it's own people for protesting the way that Co dlict was being fought? I think you need to review your history a bit. And, even ignoring all that, had the side you refer to lived up to its own propaganda, it would merely have been providing all sides exactly the minimum guarantee you claim is inadequate.

What would you think if a major hotel chain decided to refuse to allow groups of black people to hold meetings at their facilities?

To give one side of this more than the minimum they are entitled to, you need to give the other side less.

This conceit that giving some people a platform is giving other people less is one of the worst half-lies which goes around nowadays. This would be like saying that a hotel chain that let black people hold meetings there was somehow diminishing the hotel for white people.

WWII certainly was, because both sides did that.

There is a stark difference of degree. German soldiers went out of their way to be captured by the side that valued human rights. Soviet soldiers killed German soldiers.

and murdered people, including democratically elected leadership, abroad for the same association?

It's true that both sides of the cold war, and even WWII had bad actors on both sides. But then to make a false equivalence of both sides is simply the height of intellectual dishonesty. There is no honest comparison between the Soviet and Western sides where the Soviets come out the human rights winners. There is no honest comparison between the Axis and Allies sides where the west doesn't come out the clear human rights winners. There is also no honest way to decouple Postmodernist, Marxist, and far left socialist thinking from totalitarianism and the degradation of individual human rights.

Both sides have bad actors, just as there are Far Left activist bad actors in the US today. Only one side says it's okay to trample on individual human rights. It's only one side where the common people can hope to hold the leadership to account for their rights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKj6lZPrFkc

I don't see "owning a gun" there, which just makes this just your interpretation, nothing more.

Are you defensively viable without a gun, against someone with a gun, and are you likely to run into that situation? That's a question that you should be free to decide. Furthermore, I don't see why that's a decision you can morally impose upon another person. If a society can say that the life-and-death decisions around abortion should be the domain of individual choice, then how can this be different for the the life-and-death decisions around personal defense? Both are fundamentally about the right of self-determination with regards to the integrity of one's own life and one's own body.

No, of course not. Preemptive violence simply makes one a violent criminal. Merely possessing the capability does not. The people who do hold to that interpretation are Antifa and the crowd that incites people to violence. In the US and the industrialized west, that would be the Far Left.

It's consistently misapplied.

In the US we believe certain rights are inalienable and we should protect those rights.

Every time that xkcd strip gets posted people treat it like it's a conversation ender - but all it is saying is people don't have to roll over for assholes.

Here the clear assholes are Google and Facebook.

And the obvious problem for some people is that think they need their services and so there's no door to show them.

Not the way I'm using, and it doesn't even have to do with social media. A TV station doesn't have to show "all content", and a local Alcoholics Anonymous doesn't have to accept someone who keeps telling others to drink alcohol.

A "vegan discussion" community doesn't have to allow speech of someone advocating for meat consumption, and a "holocaust survivors" community doesn't have to accept speech from a denier.

Private communities and forums are free to set their content policies. Saying "no discussions about how to make guns" is a content policy as any other.

> In a free society, we should have the right to be an asshole

Oh, you have the right to be an asshole, and I defend that. But that right doesn't mean that people can't show you the door from their private space.

I could see an argument saying that social networks and YT are equivalent to a public square or any other public space. I don't agree with that, but that would be a reasonable argument.

But even then, public spaces still have rules and ordinances on what you can and can't do.

What if the top TV manufacturer started to use their position to interfere with the viewing of "liberal" content? What if there were other TV manufacturers, but the others only accounted for less than 10% of the supply, and due to network effects and exclusivity deals, it was impossible for anyone to make a living making content for the other 10% of TVs? Monopolies are bad, and what constitutes a monopoly changes with technology.

But that right doesn't mean that people can't show you the door from their private space.

Sure. But how far should "showing you the door" go? It seems to me that the ethos of many of us in Bay Area companies would be to segregate those they would classify as wrong-thinkers to less desirable neighborhoods, kick them out of the choicest avenues for commerce and networking, and to deny them the best that society can provide. That's basically the same kind of behavior that "mainstream" people used to apply towards homosexuals, black people, people of my own ethnic group, the polyamorous, pagans, Jewish people, etc. The left rightfully points out the injustice of marginalizing people from public life based on inherent characteristics. The left also used to call out marginalizing people based on their private life choices that affect no-one. But when it comes to politics, all of a sudden, they are right and empowered to basically do the same thing, regarding politics, "for justice?" No, that stinks to high heaven like the corruption that power brings.

So yes, private parties are allowed to do that with their own property. But the long arc of history shows, that it's the magnanimous people who are the harbingers of the future and a better world. It's the people who get power then decide it's time to wreak revenge who turn out to be the villains. In the end, it's the better way of doing things which wins out over coercion. In the end, truth will come out, and the better way will sell itself.

I could see an argument saying that social networks and YT are equivalent to a public square or any other public space.

Also note that what constitutes "private" has changed, based on technology. It used to be that the sky over your property belonged to you for infinite distance. Then a farmer tried to get a court to make all of the airplane operators pay him a toll, and the law changed to accommodate progress. What if, in the early days of telephone, the operators decided that people of your sexual orientation should be "shown the door," and they started to make it harder for you to call or for people to call you based on how you used their private network? What if they gave a special ring only to those with orientations they approved of, and a different ring to people they didn't approve of? None of that would strike me as at all fair and just, but prior to wiretap laws, your argument would have justified all of that. Wiretaps are now illegal, but wire-based communications existed before the wiretap laws were written. The phone network is now something somewhat public that all parties have legal access to. Technology changes the social landscape, which necessitates changes in the law.

In the end, it's the live and let live society that most quickly finds the truth, makes the most money, and generates the most human happiness and progress.

- TV makers?

- Telephone companies?

- Public squares?

- Private forums?

Where people have reach, and you actively degrade that reach after the fact, the action is immorally censorious. Where an audience seeks a particular message, and where another party seeks to deny their access, particularly through underhanded and non-transparent means, the action is immorally censorious. I suspect you just find those actions desirable because they are (for now) aimed at your ideological opponents.

You're basing your arguments on your own private morals. Your argument is essentially "this is wrong, because I think it is wrong".

Do you think we should pass a law forcing every online community to not have content guidelines?

If no, leave your morals out of it.

> I suspect you just find those actions desirable because they are (for now) aimed at your ideological opponents.

Wrong, but funny that you're trying to discuss my reasons, and not my arguments.

No. Nefarious motivations, such as a desire to exert power by controlling discourse, can be judged by actions, and they should be considered in terms of the kind of future they can bring about. It's well and good to judge someone's credibility with regards to talking about human rights, by observing what they would do with human rights.

Your argument is essentially "this is wrong, because I think it is wrong".

No. Squashing free speech in effect is dangerous, because it's through speech and discourse that a society such as the present one can avoid bloodshed. It is wrong because it is dangerous. It is wrong because it is against a human right, which under-girds all other human rights. Those who are motivated by power, for which rights can be sacrificed, have a very bad historical record.

Sure, but limiting speech in your private forum isn't squashing free speech.

Unless your definition of free speech is being able to say whatever you want whenever and wherever you want with absolutely no consequences from anyone.

Not inviting a friend for lunch because of their annoying Taylor Swift obsession is, by that definition, squashing free speech.

Unless you have effective monopoly control over what constitutes the only viable platform for a particular medium. It's entirely disingenuous to claim that YouTube is now simply a "private forum." What if Amazon declared that black people couldn't sell on their "private" infrastructure. Would that really seem fair?

Not inviting a friend for lunch because of their annoying Taylor Swift obsession is, by that definition, squashing free speech.

No, the proper analogy would be the de-platforming and demonetization of Taylor Swift and her fandom through underhanded and non-transparent means.

Why?

Effective monopolies should not be able to shut down free speech.

You avoided my question, but one of those companies are effective monopolies anyway.

But again: Do you think we should pass a law forcing every online community to not have content guidelines?

Content guidelines are fine. But the way they are currently used -- where they can be so vague as to mean anything, and where things can change so dramatically after the fact -- isn't acceptable for any platform that basically constitutes a broad reach medium. It basically just devolves into a pretext for censorship in a broad reach medium. Get to a certain level of reach, and your content guideline means something very different than some little web forum tucked away somewhere.

So my answer would be this: It's disingenuous for someone to invoke "show you the door" if you're the only shop in town. If you're the only bakery in town, it's pretty crappy if you're not going to bake someone a wedding cake.

It's all contingent on reach. Buy one radio station, and only play fundamentalist Christian content? I think that's fine. But if you've bought 90% of all radio stations in the country? Yeah, I think the government might be doing us a favor if they called shenanigans on that.

Did you not understand that? If you don't see the irony and danger here, it's only because you agree with the censors, but that only lasts as long as it lasts.

Let's say you run a discussion group in your home for recovering alcoholics, but open it to anyone who's passing by. A person enters and starts to try to convince everyone to drink more alcohol.

Do you have the right to invite this person to leave? Are you censoring this person if you did so?

To continue playing the analogy game, let's say you run a bible study group in your home. Somebody comes in and advocates for free (homosexual) love - do you have the right to ask this person to leave? Obviously. But what does that say about YouTube's rights? Or more importantly, half leaving aside the question of rights, about what they really should do in a robust free society?

You can't have it both ways, or pick the definition that you prefer each time. It has to be one or the other.

The notion of semi-public space (shopping malls, sidewalks, right of way) has been around for a long time and is continuing to evolve. The laws and precedent on this are not fixed in place, nor should they be, especially as more of our public participation moves online.

What are you proposing? It seems that everyone comes shy of actually proposing something.

Are you saying that online communities/forums should not be allowed to have and enforce a content/behavior policy?

If someone incorrectly titles their video to mislead people of the opposite view to view their content, I imagine that censoring that video is not problematic to anyone.

Finally, it is probably a good thing that if you search a particular topic on YouTube, you will presumably get videos both in the 'pro' column and the 'con' column so you do not fall into an ideological bubble.

But you didn't answer my question: if you create a private forum which is open to the public, can you keep out people who don't abide by the community guidelines?

What if I'm willing to accept that the government suddenly turn into a dystopian authoritarian nightmare that tortures and murders my family in front of me, if we get rid of the right to own guns. I'm totally willing to accept that.

-Ben Franklin

If you're going to use that quote to make some sort of anti-statist, pro revolutionary argument, fair enough, it's a good quote... that's just not at all what the person you're quoting was actually saying.

[0]https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/how-the-world-butchered-be...

For California where these tech companies are based it looks like there was a ruling in favor of your argument: https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/baker-can-refuse-mak...

Yes, and that's why I talked about the protected categories in my post!

Sure it would, because free speech/press is a human right.

OTOH, it doesn't mean that anyone else (including online services) must expend their resources relaying your speech, or that anyone else must listen to your speech, or that people must associate with you despite disliking your speech, because, again, freedom of speech, press, and association are all human rights.

I think it's understood that Youtube is legally allowed to silence gun videos, but of course other communities are legally allowed to complain about Youtube's decision. Just like said community might legally gray out your post complaining about their complaints.

So I really don't think pointing to that XKCD strip again really brings anything more than a touch of irony to the discussion.

Legally false; CDA Section 230 not only does not require neutrality for its “shall not be considered the publisher” safe harbor, it explicitly protects provider good faith actions to remove content that either the provider or a user finds “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected” as the “Good Samaritan” provision of the safe harbor.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 ; see (c)(1) and (c)(2)

But it absolutely does not protect against viewpoint or political discrimination. Which is what everyone who uses the XKCD comic is referring to.

The whole idea that a company can just censor certain viewpoints is false. They will lose their legal immunity if they do that.

It is only very specific things, like lewd content, that they are explicitly allowed to censor.

Or—and all these are in the view of the provider or a user—“otherwise objectionable”.

> But it absolutely does not protect against viewpoint or political discrimination.

Since political content could quite easily make either the provider or a user view content as objectionable, this claim does not seem to be grounded in the text. If you are prepared to cite case law or some other basis for accepting your claim that the definition of “otherwise objectionable” is limited in the way you suggest, I'd sure like to see that citation.

Furthermore, even if it was outside the scope of the Good Samaritan protection as you claim, the “shall not be considered the publisher” safe harbor is nowhere made contingent on not taking actions that are outside of Good Samaritan protection with regard to removing content.

> The whole idea that a company can just censor certain viewpoints is false. They will lose their legal immunity if they do that.

This is an interesting contention about the law, but while you keep repeating it, you haven't supported it.

Sources, please? Can you show me a court decision ruling that such companies can't have content policy?

So, no, they don't have to be content neutral.

That's why the general internet ideal was no censorship until fairly recently. Pretty much the "hacker/tech/EFF" was the standard "you have the right to be offended".

> Example - If anyone shares gun videos on social network from a place where carrying guns is a normal practice it may not get censored that quickly or may not even get reported.

What we used to say on the internet was that if you don't like it, then don't consume it. If you don't like porn, guns, marijuana, etc, you don't have to visit the sites or click the video. But there is a small vocal contingent who wants to decide what everyone wants to consume.

> While on other end someone who maybe coming from an entirely different place or culture may find this offensive or a safety issue.

It's why one should take a principled stance. As a liberal, it's what we learned in civics/philosophy 101 class.

I'm genuinely surprised that the media, elites and their liberal allies have been pushing so hard for censorship. It feels like a betrayal of the core principles of the US in particular and the hopes we had for the internet in general.

I disagree.

To point out the obvious, the Santa Clara Principles are being published now. Not 20 years ago.

Going all the way back to BBSs, it was common for there to exist many forums with varying levels of moderator involvement. I never, ever saw the EFF complain about BBSs or web forums that moderated user content. Can you provide one example of EFF complaining about censorship on a private discussion website from the pre-Google/Facebook era? They were much more focused on the freedom to host one's own forum/BBS, and preventing the government from compelling a BBS/forum to go offline. They never took explicit issue with a forum owner's choice to censor.

So, actually, I think it's the other way around. Network effects in the eternal September have caused EFF et al. to adopt a new stance on censorship in very large communities. Actually, this is kind of obvious; otherwise, why weren't the Santa Clara Principles published 20 years ago and applied to BBS/forums/newgroups?

> It feels like a betrayal of the core principles of the US in particular and the hopes we had for the internet in general.

Again, I disagree. It was the eternal September that killed many hopes for the internet in general. Many were hopelessly optimistic about what it would mean to have "everyone" online. Everything else is just the natural progression from that initial disappointment.

Alternatively, "offense is in the mind of the beholder."

The other notable quote is "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

It strikes me as incompatible. It seems we ought to either believe companies are legally required to provide their service to all comers or they're not.

This is a false dichotomy. The law doesn't see "all comers" as equal; specifically, there are what's called "protected classes" in United States civil rights law. Businesses (and individuals while conducting certain kinds of business) are not allowed to discriminate on certain bases (e.g. race, religion, veteran status), but they are allowed to discriminate on others.

The issue where the wedding bakers' case was interesting was that it pit two values against each other - in one sense it was discrimination against a protected class (sexual orientation can be a protected class, depending on state law and interpretation of federal law), and in another it was compelling speech (again, depending on your interpretation of "speech") that had religious implications.

Reddit, on the other hand, is not acting against a protected class by banning e.g. /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/whiterights, or /r/incels. If the managements' ethics or customer backlash prompts them to, they can ban away. In some cases, if speech might be illegal in some ways (e.g. incitement to violence, harassment, or copyright infringement (yes, the fact that that is on the list is a bit ridiculous)) they are legally obligated to remove it.

AlexB138 was asking whether are laws are ethical, not whether the laws were legal. Describing the laws in more detail doesn't really resolve the tension.

In other words, why are some classes protected while others aren't? Is there a principle that we should be applying impartially (as in Rawlsian justice)?

Let's be frank, a lot of the times, the idea of "protected classes" arises from the problems incurred by NOT protecting them. If something will cause problems in society, I think governments will tend to consider that thing with a great deal of care and caution. That said, your point is still well taken. We can see the problems that, for instance, having slavery caused in terms of bloodshed. It's more difficult to see the problems caused by, taking the original example, not making wedding cakes for the LGBTQ community?

So those laws are, at times, UNQUESTIONABLY ethical. I think it would be difficult to argue against the ethical foundation of the idea that in some cases, (again, slavery, Jim Crow, etc), protected class status is pretty good policy. (Certainly preferable to slavery, Jim Crow, etc.) The questions arise more when the stakes don't seem quite as high to the average person. (Taking from AlexB138's comment, the example of wedding cakes for instance.)

Maybe "protected class" is simply an idea that developed via "scope creep" over time? It starts out with everyone, quite rightly, saying "we're going to enshrine the rights of enslaved people into the Constitution so they can never again be assailed or threatened." But it develops over time into, "Well, you did it for blacks or women or whatever. So why not for nazis and pedophiles?" What you need to realize though, is that the average person, myself included, is going to think that is an extremely silly argument. Blacks and women, are not the same as nazis and pedophiles. Even if it's simply for the sake of making your argument, people will have a hard time with that equivalence being drawn.

But I prefer to think of it as who is a protected class reflects who has the political power to make protected classes.

It's a model that generalizes well, even back to when Jim Crow laws decided who was protected. And I expect it will continue to reflect the changing conditions of future society.

I don't see why protected classes aren't an impartial standard? Admittedly, the inclusion of a particular class into the set of protected classes is perhaps a bit arbitrary, but it has the advantage of being simple while also addressing the common and egregious cases of injustice fairly well.

I fail to see the connection to Rawls, aside from an interest in "impartiality".

You're begging the question there. Unless there's an impartial standard for what constitutes a protected class, they're no more impartial than saying that people called Dave are allowed to break the law.

Protected classes tend to be things about themselves that people either can't change (race, nationality, gender, age, sexual orientation, family status, disability) or that it would be unconstitutional to force them to change (religion) and that people have been discriminated against on the basis of in the past.

Would James Damore be spared if he claimed not that he thinks that women are whatever, but that he believes so?!

You could make an argument that in the US people of different religions get along better than they used to and as a result religion no longer requires the Constitutional protections it currently enjoys. I would respond that as a society we probably have bigger fish to fry.

Sure, we can force people to at least act like they believe in a god (or not). But is it tyrannical to do so? Plausibly, yes.

It’s not as though there’s a lack of data for outcomes here, and it’s weighed against slippery slope fallacies and “what if’s.”

That's not right. What you said about US law and protected classes is correct, but just because something is made law does not mean people should believe it or not. Gay marriage was illegal: people questioned that law and now it is being changed in many places. The user you replied to is not necessarily wrong nor making false statements; they just disagree with the status quo you described.

   Virtually all reasonable, fair-minded people 
   want a society where everyone is equal

"[W]ith the possible exception of Barbeuf (1796), no prominent author or movement has demanded strict equality. Since egalitarianism has come to be widely associated with the demand for economic equality, and this in turn with communistic or socialistic ideas, it is important to stress that neither communism nor socialism [...] calls for absolute economic equality."

The most famous 20th century defender of equality has been Pol Pot who justified his crimes by his wish to create the "perfectly equal state".

I refer once again to the article [1] for an overview of the problems with making the concept of equality precise, beyond populism. I suggest reading equality of a narrative device, intended for drastic simplification that appeals to the masses. Comparable narrative simplifications are for example concepts like god, last judgement, Karma etc in the religions. They are extreme simplifications of complex social processes.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equality/

It's not long, maybe 15 minutes, and worth pondering deeply, and repeatedly.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equality/

If everyone were given equal opportunity to achieve good outcomes for themselves, the only way we could end up with inequality of outcomes is if people choose to have worse outcomes than others. But why would anyone ever choose bad outcomes?

People try to explain this by saying some people are "lazy" or "impulsive" and thus make suboptimal choices, but does this really make sense? If a significant portion of society is consistently making suboptimal choices, are there societal changes we could make to convince more people to make better choices?

If we think there are societal changes we could make that lead more people to make better choices, then can we really say those people had "equal opportunity" to make those choices before the change?

And if we think there aren't any societal changes we could make that lead people to better choices, then what we are saying is that there is inevitably some portion of people who will not achieve good outcomes within our system. And if that's true, is it really a good system for humanity as it exists?

Because what they want doesn't correlate with what's in demand at that point in time?

I mean, someone might want to study English Literature at degree level, then find a job based on those skills. However, if those skills weren't in demand at that point (because everyone wanted people with STEM degrees or programmers or what not), then their outcome would likely be worse than someone who studied computer science.

Did both of these people have equal opportunities? Sure, they could have both gone into one field or another (assuming a theoretical situation where their intelligence was roughly equal and the degrees cost about the same). But they didn't, and their outcomes weren't equal. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and one choice wasn't necessarily 'suboptimal' either.

And how about a few others?

Someone going to one city over another is a choice, and the consequences could be very different based on that choice. That doesn't mean there necesarily wasn't equality of opportunity.

Same for things like what job you choose (assuming they're 'equal' on a technical level), who your friends are, what hobbies you have, etc. You can probably think of thousands of examples where people are making choices that lead to inequal outcomes, simply because either the market demand is different, attitudes are different or random factors in the world are different between them.

Choices don't necessarily have to be 'suboptimal' to have different outcomes.

It's easy to say their unequal outcomes are "not necessarily a bad thing" when you're a STEM graduate living in San Francisco on a $200k, not quite so reassuring when you're an English Lit graduate struggling to make a living as a barista.

And when you look at that massive difference in outcomes and say "well you chose skills that aren't in demand" then what you are saying is "you made the wrong choice if you wanted a good life".

EDIT: Or alternatively, to finish the analogy, you're saying "some people just inevitably want to study English Lit even though our society doesn't value it, guess it sucks to be them!".

But hey, if you need another few, what if:

You have two jobs to choose from, both make you happy and both pay the same. The outcome won't be identical in both cases, since you'll meet different people, work in a different location and do different work.

Or how about the obvious extreme between a job that pays well and nothing? Let's assume everything ends up on basic income and that works out. Fair enough.

But now assume one of those people wants to become an entrepreneur and sets up a startup that ends up becoming a billion dollar corporation while the other one sits at home and watches Netflix all day.

Their opportunities may be the same, but the outcomes won't be. Is that a bad thing? I doubt many people would say it is, especially given how both have enough to live on and both are enjoying their life doing what they want to do.

Or heck, how about another example? Imagine two people are looking for a romantic partner at the same time. They may have the same opportunities (in terms of access to the other gender, wealth, location, etc) but simply by genetics (aka one potentially being more attractive than the other) or interests (more attractive people from one gender might have one interest and not another) they won't have equal outcomes.

You will never get 'equality of outcome', simply because a system that aims for that would be ridiculously unfair, completely non market based and likely verging on a dystopia.

My argument is not equality of outcome is better, but that the dichotomy is not that coherent. If people truly have equal opportunity to choose good outcomes they will do so.

If they do not, they are either being influenced by society towards bad outcomes, in which case we should consider changing society, or they are influenced by innate aspects of themselves towards bad outcomes, in which case our society is structured in a way that privileges certain innate traits.

>That doesn't feel too meritocratic...

Well honestly, I'm not as sold on the idea of "meritocracy" as most people here. I think the idea that some people "deserve" worse lives than others is pretty distasteful.

When people say different outcomes are necessary to motivate people and produce better outcomes overall, I can at least understand that argument. I don't personally agree: I think in reality most people are far more motivated by a sense of purpose and achievement than material wealth (beyond essentials). But the argument does at least have the goal of producing the best outcomes.

But when people start to elevate this inequality to morality, and say that "inequality is good" and that some people "deserve" worse lives because they have less "merit", I think that framing discards the goal of achieving the best outcomes, and I find that misguided and self-serving at best, and evil at worst.

Isn't this a category error?

The gay couple's cake is a category of _people_ being refused service.[1]

The gun assembly video is a category of _topic_ being censored.

You can can discriminate against topics and simultaneously not discriminate against people. As an example of juxtapositions... a "gun rights owner" can upload a video of "iphone disassembly" and the video will not be deleted. On the other hand, a gun-control advocate who wants to ban gun ownership can show a video about "gun assembly" and the video will be removed. It's the topic not the people. Businesses have exercised editorial control over topics for hundreds of years. Same as The New York Times or website forums where users "upload" words such as HN. If you submit a topic to HN that goes against the moderator's rules, it will be flagged and deleted. It doesn't matter if the HN user is gay or gun-control or any protected group.

[1] https://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally-discriminat...

We aren't denying service to gun users, just restricting certain kinds of content. Gun users can make videos on the evils of gun ownership just like the grabbers can, no discrimination against a category of people here!

Just like gay people can order cakes for heterosexual marriages, exactly the same as straight people can.

Another issue that's not considered in this case is that another [gay owned] bakery, in extremely close vicinity to the 'no gay cakes' bakery, was asked to bake in the shape of a bible with a quote stating that homosexuality was a sin. They refused to do so, and this decision was upheld [locally]. That is extremely inconsistent and evidence of bias and prejudice in the local enforcement of law.

I think most people don't realize that this case is actually pending judgement from the US Supreme Court. And the implications are enormous. If they judge against him, it's going to open the door to all sorts of things, such as for instance, the behavior of online sites. It would also open the door to trolling in real life like the aforementioned 'bible cake' or even, for instance, going into an Islamic owned shop and forcing them to blaspheme. Of course if the court rules in favor of him then it's also going to open the door to discrimination in the same form as a child might tease another of, 'not touching you, not touching you!' as they hover their finger 1 cm away from a person. I'm actually somewhat surprised they chose to hear it because of this. There is no good judgement, but now they're going to have to decide one way or the other - setting national precedent.

"Protected classes" are one of the few government mandated restrictions for the freedom of businesses to refuse service (something which I have some mixed feelings on, but given some of the climate that happened without these protections, I find them completely understandable). It's possible that the judgement will end up reading very narrowly -- for instance, if you use the above reasoning, it would be legal to discriminate on the messaging but illegal to discriminate on the product. (In other words, if the baker in the homosexual couple case didn't sell a homosexual marriage themed case, but would sell a generic cake and let the homosexual couple decorate it in any way they want, that would have been legal under this particular interpretation.) This is just an example, it's not the only way a narrow reading could go down, but there are probably more solutions out there then all one way vs. another.

It might be that the baker is lying, but this isn't even a he-said, she-said. There was not even the slightest effort made at compromise.

It's worth noting that religion per se is not a protected class in Colorado's discrimination laws. Sexual orientation is. (https://law.justia.com/codes/colorado/2016/title-24/principa...)

Even if religion was a protected class, one problem I see here is that it really isn't "Christianity" as a whole in the Bible verse case that the owner found distasteful per se. Rather, it's the opinion expressed by the Biblical verse chosen. Christianity encompasses a wide range of opinions, after all. There are some Christians who downplay the anti-homosexual verses in the Bible (or have different interpretations to them, eg, they believe there is some degree of mis-translation). If the baker had refused to make a cake with a more universal symbol representing Christianity as a generic concept (say a cross), I think there's a stronger case that this is religious discrimination.

But as it is, it's a message. Compare this to if the reference was non-Biblical but similar in intent. Say, the customer wanted to write a message like "ALL FAGGOTS WILL BURN IN HELL" on the cake (weird message for a cake, but so is an anti-homosexual Bible verse IMHO :) ). The owner certainly has the right to refuse here because they find the message distasteful. Is there much of a difference? Whereas, in the other case, it involved a class of people that the owner found distasteful, yet was protected by the law above.

I will say that it is indeed these sort of cases that do make "protection laws" a bit troublesome... such codes force the baker to go against his or her own personal beliefs. If it's just one cake baker losing business over a moral code like this, it's probably better to err on the side of not worrying about it. The trouble is, we're well aware of the results that happened when a minority group isn't protected, and suppression of the minority group is systematic and widespread. In other words, from my vantage point, the alternative appears to be worse.

If you're interested in this there an immense number of really interesting filings, particularly 'friend of the court' filings on this case. You can read them all here: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/masterpiece-cakes... They are loaded with interesting anecdotes of the implications of a ruling either way, along with precedent. For instance in one famous case an individual in New Hampshire did not want the state motto, live free or die, on their license plate which was a part of the state standardized and controlled design. The courts ruled that free speech protects the freedom to say things as much as the right to not be compelled to say things. The reason that's relevant is that no reasonable person could think that it was the individual themselves saying "live free or die" but nonetheless it was still seen as compelled speech as the individual was being forced by the state to promote a message they disagreed with.

So then the natural issue there is that the cake itself is not directly stating anything, again like your rationale on the bible cake verses. But there is court precedent declaring everything from photographs to engravings to stained glass windows to... topless dancing as protected speech under the first amendment. It seems likely that wedding cakes would follow in the same vein. When people spend hundreds of dollars on these cakes, they're implicitly spending most of their money not on the cake, but on the artistic expression of its creator.

That is not inconsistent, as one is denying someone based on what they are, and the other is denying someone based on harassment. The gay couple didn't ask the baker to write on the cake that heterosexuality was immoral. There's an obvious difference between affirming the culture of the customer, and antagonistically denying the culture of the producer.

And I do think think that the baker's refusal was about what they are, since the conditions to bake the cake required that it didn't acknowledge what they are. It's like saying, "I will bake a cake for a black person, but only if it doesn't reference black culture in any way."

The gay baker was being asked to engage in an action that's deeply disparaging of his beliefs and values.

This is the problem with social laws. It's easy to see things from our own perspectives, without considering that what 'we' consider perfectly reasonable can be perfectly offensive to another individual. One of the most crucial issues in forcing people to engage in behavior that they find offensive is that it goes both ways.

Which is understandable as far as it goes, except it is the sole exception to the accepted blank slate belief of sociologists everywhere. We carve out a very visible exception in this domain.

Zeitgeist: Our behaviors are all socialized into us, with the sole exception of sexual orientation. Contrast with the perspective that one's religion is merely a choice, such that after being socialized into a belief system for one's most formative eighteen years, one can simply toss it away thereafter.

So should it be OK for a bakery to refuse to bake wedding cakes for gay couples, as long as it's willing to bake other kinds of products for gay people? In other words, it's refusing only to provide service to the specific topic of gay marriage, not gay people generally; gay people can still use the rest of the bakery's services, just not services involving gay weddings specifically.

E.g., a gay person can order a cake for another straight person's wedding, or can order any other product. As a thought experiment, this should suffice to categorize the bakery's action as a "topic" being refused service (gay marriage) rather than category of people.

I have to agree with the original comment that it does seem spurious that companies in some cases are allowed to choose their customers, and are not in others. I understand that laws have been passed to create these distinctions, but I don't see a solid ethical foundation underlying which distinctions should to be protected or not.

At some point it feels to me like the services offered by these companies will become so integral to the fabric of society that they'll become "public goods" of a sort. Would we tolerate it if the phone company refused service to gun's rights advocates, or if airlines or bus companies refused them transportation? In legal fact, perhaps they could, but in reality they do not - however, Internet firms like Google and Facebook ban large swaths of content off their platforms.

As the Internet becomes vital to our lives and interpersonal communication, it's beginning to feel unfair that private companies have such tremendous and capricious control over these pseudo-public spaces.

That's an interesting question, and it's not hypothetical(assuming you consider financial services as part of your "public goods" argument) - https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-directs-depa...

Yes (at least in states where sexual orientation is a protected class).

> Further are you saying the baker could refuse to sell them the cake they wanted because it had some gay theme ( two girl names I think) so long as they offered to sell them a Superman cake at the same time?

AFAIK this is not a settled issue.

I imagine a reasonable test might boil down to "If you have a policy that you never put names on cakes then you can refuse to write 'Jane and Jill'. But if you will write 'Jack and Jill' when asked, then you also need to write 'Jane and Jill' when asked."

In other words, the store may not have a policy that is functionally indistinguishable from refusing service to a protected class.

Notice that Google banning videos about homosexuality would definitely not be equivalent to banning homosexuals from using its public service.

This gets hairy; e.g., religion is a protected class. Could a Satanist cult compel a cake-making business owner to write down a disavowal of his God (in frosting)? Evaluating hairy edge-cases on a case-by-case basis are why human judges exist.

IANAL.

Both of those positions are completely unworkable.

If businesses may always select which people to serve, you can end up with de facto racial segregation. We know what that looks like. The illegality of this sort of discrimination by businesses is a direct outgrowth of that historical moment.

If businesses may never select which people to serve, you'll end up with protesters clogging everything from the meat aisle at Wal-Mart to the local church's bible group.

So we end up constantly revisiting how to resolve this fundamental tension between the owner's right to free speech and the customer's right to equal protection.

The line today, as I understand it, is that businesses may discriminate against people for what they say or believe, but not for explicitly enumerated aspects of their person (such as race, sex, age, and now(?) sexual orientation).

This is likely a rather reasonable system, though: it imitates the way the biological life adapts to the conditions it cannot predict, mostly without breaking previous adaptations.

It does make the system complicated and, at tines, contradictory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory

In the case of putting a message on a cake, an individual human has to effectively perform a deliberate action which may seem to express an opinion (potentially one which they do not share), whereas in the case of a big tech company, the default state is for their software to allow any customer to express any opinion with their own comment, and it is only the deliberate act of censorship/moderation that involves the conscious decision of an employee.

If a baker had an "automatic cake decorating machine", but they checked what messages you had put on your cake before allowing you to leave their bakery with the result, then that would be a closer comparison.

Anyone can be sued for any reason. What matters is whether the judge found the baker guilty.

We don't allow Google to censor homosexual content, and we allow bakers to ban gun cakes.

The courts are endowed with common sense; e.g., you can find many examples of courts rejecting various attempts at "literally equivalent to <insert protected class> but I never said <insert protected class!>".

This is bad because we're all biased in various ways and knowing about that bias actually tends to make it worse among the people who don't realize that simply knowing your biases doesn't make you immune to them, leading them to overconfidence.

Kinda. Yes, intent is an element of some crimes, but they also look for indicators of it in your actions if you go back to the better common law rules.

Take a common definition of 'shoplifting': it requires concealment & removal. That is, you have to both hide the thing and take it away. It's the concealment of the object that shows you have some bad intent.

The problem with an intent standard here is that almost anything can incidentally affect one race more than another. Say I have a job like 'firefighter' and I set certain physical requirements. I've just accidentally discriminated in favor of black males, despite lacking intent to do that. Or say that I have a test to see how well people can do the job and the test consists of mental tasks. That discriminates in favor of Asians and it gets worse the pickier I get despite there being almost no difference between average people.

There are reasonable people who argue both for and against these standards because of the discriminatory effects they have vs. the fact that they may strongly relate to ability to do the job.

I'd be curious to see a study linking attitudes on these to one's self-interest bias. I have my suspicions about how that works, but I don't trust my intuition not to be biased.

It also works the other way around. Content creators on youtube are feeling the pressure of having their videos delisted. So they have to match their content to what advertisers want to show. It's censorship by robot.

The Santa Clara principles are a great step in the right direction. But things are getting harder, and more complicated.

HBO, ABC and NBC aren't just content creators. They are subsidiaries of large corporations who are also some of the biggest ad spenders.

It's isn't by accident that john oliver, jimmy kimmel, SNL, etc are so heavily promoted by youtube.

It's in youtube's interest to manipulate the notifications system so that when john oliver releases a video, his views do well since he is advertiser friendly with the corporate seal of approval. But in the long run, this could be very bad for youtube as people's interest declines. It isn't corporate content that brought people to youtube, it was local/individual content.

But that's the whole point of the notification bell. If you're subscribed, but haven't rang the bell, the videos will be in your sub feed, and you might get a notification. When you ring the bell and say you want notifications, you'll get notifications for all videos.

They ask you to turn on notifications because that means you're more likely to watch their video earlier than waiting to see it in your sub feed.

Unless it’s thoughts, ideas or facts.

The appeal process is the most likely part to cause have problems with implementation, I suspect (possibly followed by attribution of the source of the take down request in some jurisdictions).

In a weird way it is Google paying for the infrastructure and subsidizing such content.

Would make far more sense to me if no advertisers pull the content and problem solved.