Facebook, Google, Twitter To Face US Lawmakers About Tech 'Censorship' (cnet.com)

Facebook, Google and Twitter are headed back to Washington next week to testify at a congressional hearing about alleged tech censorship. From a report: Tech companies have faced accusations that they're censoring conservative speech on their platforms. The companies have denied the allegations in the past. The hearing before the Senate Judiciary's subcommittee on the Constitution is scheduled for April 10 and is titled "Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse." A Facebook spokesperson said Neil Potts, its public policy director, will be testifying. Twitter and Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. A source familiar with the Senate hearing said Twitter and Google officials will also be attending. The hearing will likely mark Potts' second congressional appearance next week. Facebook and Google officials are expected to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on April 9 to answer questions about the spread of white nationalism on their platforms.

Comments

Hate speech is not randomly distributed

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate speech is not randomly distributed. It is almost exclusively Republican. Not conservative, Republican. Those two parted ways about fifteen years back.

Re:Censorship isn't a violation of 1st Amendment

[Freischutz]

The problem is, they are either a platform or a publisher.

The difference is in responsibility. If they are a platform, then they have a wide range of latitude on content on that platform. They aren't responsible. The moment they start picking an choosing, they start to become a publisher, and the content protection narrows substantially.

Censorship is a natural tendency, and we all ought to fight against it in all its forms. The idea that some ideas are just "too dangerous" is a slippery slope that we don't want to ride down.

Anybody who operates a platform is entitled to decide that a bunch of lunatics spewing all kinds of stupid conspiracy theories and hate can go elsewhere to express themselves. The lunatic convention that calls itself conservatives these days is perfectly free to set up competing platforms. If they really are the silent majority and enjoy a groundswell of support among the vast majority of the population I'm pretty sure those platforms will quickly outshine Facebook, Google and Twitter in popularity. Meanwhile the group of generally sane and rational people that we used call conservatives really need to think up a new name for their socio-political philosophy because the term 'conservative' has become synonymous with something very different.

Re:Oh, good Lord...

[sexconker]

Correct. I'm Fry levels of shocked that the modern left (you can't call them liberals anymore) has done a full 180. They hate free speech, and cry about fascists while being fascists themselves.

Re:Bake me a cake

[Anonymous Coward]

Bake me a cake for my gay wedding then.

Fuck liberals, and I mean fuck liberals. Every single one of them is a piece of shit. They bash people based on their religion, obviously not protected by 1st amendment despite it being written there, then bash people on their speech, again speech of the right is not protected by the first amendment according to them.

Fuck all liberals. They are all fucking assholes that no longer deserve to have a say in government with how they have acted. Liberalism = oppression of minorities, women, gays, whites, straights, etc if you don't spout their views. They will even kill your live born babies and make it legal to do so as they cheer. They support KKK members because turning against them "might" cause them to lose a little power, and keeping power is more important to a liberal than going against the KKK.

Fuck all liberals.

Oh my, another angry alt-right incel who's pissed as shit because liberals get to fuck and he does not.

This is just grandstanding by the GOP

[rsilvergun]

nothing more. Nothing less.

Let's address the elephant in the room here right now. The overwhelming majority of bans have been right wing. The reason is, to be blunt, the right wing has let the white supremacists into their fold. Those people have always favored violence, and the major platforms are banning them for inciting violence multiple times. You ask your followers to rid you of some meddlesome priest enough times you get banned.

What's scary is that the right is letting these violent folk run rampant because so long as they do they'll organize and vote for them. We saw this in full force when the President of the United States called them "good people" instead of condemning them. We see it in policy too. Trump has cut back on the FBI's enforcement of domestic terrorism, which is overwhelmingly from white nationalists. This is a fact you can confirm with 30 seconds on google.

The GOP has sold their souls for cheap and easy votes from a small block of highly motivated voters. It was worth it, because elections are so close that an extra .5% can swing them. If the media was doing their damn job it wouldn't work. The GOP have ended when Trump called literal Nazis "Good People". But without a functioning media it's hard for the American people to process the scale and gravity of what all this means.

Mark my words, this shit will get out of hand. It will get out of hand and we'll all be lucky to live through it. Hitler didn't campaign on gassing jews. It started out nice and easy with a heavy dose of populist nationalism. Trump isn't Hitler, he's just an opportunist. But he's paved the way for the next Hitler if we don't turn back fast

Oh, and as for censorship, the left gets it more and it gets it where it counts. This is to be expected. The right literally own everything in this country, including Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg is not a liberal, he's a billionaire. Right now too many violent white supremacists is bad for business. But you're being naive if you think he won't change his tune if the money's right. IBM sold computers to the Nazis. Zuck'll do the same if the money shifts.