Here's a crazy thought - if you're the president of the united states, or in his cabinet, and don't like news coverage that makes POTUS look bad regardless of the accuracy, how about you find some big boy pants and do better if you don't want to "look bad."
Not that I agree with this move at all but, if the coverage is inaccurate, no amount of putting on your big boy pants and doing better will make you look less bad.
Nothing Obama could have done was going to make Obama look good on Fox News.
I was going of the OP article here, the quote is a concern that it makes Trump look bad, not that it is inaccurate reporting.
I do agree with you though, if reporting is wrong then that's the problem. In those cases, and there are plenty, the concern raised should be inaccuracy rather than optics though.
How do you know the coverage is "wrong"? I mean, no news org, not NYT, not Fox, not WaPo, not even NPR can determine if Trump is lying. Sure, they occasionally note that what he says is "baseless", but never lies. So how are you going to determine wrong?
That's not really accurate. I'd say in dictatorships you have one state run network ... and they grow very "confident". Most of the population doesn't believe the state network, but also doesn't have real other sources of information. Shit happens and nobody knows, like the surprise internet outages in Russia recently spreading to Moscow.
In a democracy, you essentially have 5 propaganda networks, each with their own agenda. Agendas go from pure government standpoint to business standpoint, some rich individual's standpoint, religious/ideology/political parties standpoint, ... Everybody knows the big events, because the networks know they have to have some kind of coverage, as it's everywhere.
This often goes right into ridiculous territory. Do you want to know the Socialist viewpoint on the recent strike in Brussels about pensions, and how in that strike the position of women compares to the position of children? Read all about it! Or don't, because of course it's 90% why all other political parties are so very, very wrong ...
The distinction between state and corporate media is generally a meaningless one. What matters is the power to shape and misshape public opinion. The American quibbling about “private/corporate vs. public/gov’t” consistently misses the point.
Your analysis is useless, irrespective of how correct it is. There are countries with a freer press that fare better. Throwing your hands in the air and saying "it's all pointless, only fools care about improving things" is detrimental to fixing this mess.
"Should the government censor speech it doesn't like? Of course not. The FCC doesn't have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the \"public interest\"." -- Brendan Carr 2019
So much of the last four years was watching fools and dishonest people pretend that the government was coming to take away your free speech and you'd better elect [people who routinely lied about everything and clearly had no principles] to protect you.
I think it's something they're doing consciously, accusing the opposition of doing what they're doing. It puts opposition on the back foot, muddies the water, and provides justification for doing something you shouldn't be since "the other side already did it". This us partly why politics has become like a Choose Your Own Adventure book (more than it was before anyway).
Which is why we need to watch the polls closely this year. They’ve repeatedly accused everyone of massive voter fraud so they will most certainly try it themselves.
Slight tangent but the thought has crossed my mind that (the potential of) retaliation by Iran could be a pretense for taking broad executive action which normally wouldn't be permitted, perhaps under the guise of securing the election. They may even do something which will be ruled illegal after the fact by courts, but it could take months after the election to reach a verdict and there's really no precedent in America for broadly declaring a federal election invalid.
To be clear I don't really expect this to happen but at this point I honestly wouldn't even be surprised.
I think they were hoping to provoke riots with ICE but since they didn’t happen they’re using Iran. If there’s a “terrorist” strike in November followed by a suspension of elections that’s likely what’s happening.
Wait there was active efforts to tailor free speech all over the place? Are you going to make an argument tyere has EVER been a US admin that didn't try to do this?
Yeah like if I’m in quicksand and asking to be helped out of it the appropriate response isn’t to say “the mud pit I’m sinking in is just as bad.” It’s to go get a rope.
I still don’t understand how anyone heard Trump bragging about how he’s going to “open up those libel laws”, in addition to all the other idiotic shit that he said, and still decided to vote for him.
I am sure people had their reasons, and maybe some of them even weren’t racist, but I am still having trouble comprehending how anyone didn’t see all this shit coming.
Maybe if we're going to name the department of defense the department of war we can go all the way and rename the FCC to the 'ministry of propaganda'?
A free press is worth its weight in gold. If you let go of that you're going to lose more than you bargain for. All those free speech advocates are a bit quiet on this, wonder what happened to them.
Yes, because it is a backbone through which people trying to hold things together can communicate. Remember how the USSR supposedly held together and could not be defeated, and how the Nazi's overran Europe and there were many who figured the easy way out was to just give up and accept it? The free press held the line, in Western Europe through underground newspapers, which made a massive difference in keeping people informed and in the East between 45 and ~86 through the various - sometimes hand copied - smuggled literature.
Soldarity would have never gotten off the ground without that network and speaking for my own country I suspect that without de Volkskrant and Het Parool the war would have gotten much closer to completely eradicating the Jewish population here. It was bad enough as it was but the network that coordinated the distribution of the underground newspapers was also instrumental in keeping the underground resistance network going. The one fed off the other and vice versa, both as a training ground and as a messenger service. Lots of those stories will never be told (unfortunately) but there were a ton of very brave people that knew full well they risked a one-way trip to the dunes if discovered.
During a press conference yesterday, Hegseth, the secretary of war, received a question on Iran from CNN that he didn't feel the need to answer, and then went on a rant about how he can't wait for Ellison to buy the network and rid it of any opposition to the regime [1]. He literally spelt it out.
Free press in the US is already dead, all media belongs to conservative pedophile oligarchs who use it to manipulate the masses and push their warmongering narratives.
> All those free speech advocates are a bit quiet on this, wonder what happened to them.
There are no principled free speech advocates on the right, only people who have an issue with the media not being completely controlled by their side. Their silence then makes perfect sense: they are getting exactly what they wanted.
Yes, they are no longer even pretending to hide, I think that's the thing that really changed. Up to a few years ago there would always be the figleaf. Now, they're just stating openly what they're up to and nobody bats an eye. It's an extreme case of the normalization of deviance. And in a way that is the answer to that age old question: "How could they let it happen?" when contemplating Germany ca. 1936.
Funny how many of the people who only a few years ago weregloating about how private companies can do what they want, and there's no issues with censoring people or spreading propaganda (in clandestine cooperation with the government) are now seeing it blow back in their faces. I mean everybody who isn't stupid knew it was coming, not everybody thought it would come so quickly.
> There are no principled free speech advocates on the right, only people who have an issue with the media not being completely controlled by their side.
I tire of the partisan hypocrisy that so many people seem incapable of shedding. Have people already forgotten the whole cancel culture hysteria a few years back, or has that already gone down the memory hole? And that’s just one episode in a broader trajectory.
How “principled” each party is is dependent on how something aligns with their interests. Usually, parties suddenly become principled when they’re in the opposition; it’s easy to put on a big show of being principled when you’ve already assumed the role of the underdog. You don’t have the power to prove it. However, when the opposition does take power, those principles generally fly right out the window. In other words, principles aren’t things to live by, but cudgels to be used to try to cripple your opponent in the court of public opinion.
Neither party is principled. They’re two factions of the same uniparty, both composed of delegates representing the interests of their respective oligarchs. The average citizen does not figure into their squabbles except as canon fodder or minion. When we embrace party loyalty, we willfully become instruments of these oligarchs.
In other words: each party likes to babble about “free speech” when it suits them, whatever they mean by the term.
My preference is to focus on individual actions and policies and give credit where credit is due, and criticism where criticism is called for. (And FWIW, I know plenty of actual conservatives, not Trumpist imposters, who defend freedom of speech, rightly understood.)
I tire of this pathetic bothsideism. "Cancel culture" never made it to law, and had zero implications for the people that were supposedly targeted. Case in point: Trump is still president despite being a child rapist that tried to overthrow the American democracy. The Right is uniquely bad for free speech and free press in this country (and the economy, and corruption, and the environment, and peace...). Stop pretending otherwise.
Do you remember Biden or his ministers openly calling journalists names for their "stupid questions" at every press conference? Because that's what the Trump admin does daily. They revoked entry to the white house to some publications they disagree with, they facilitated mergers to put more media in the hands of their allies, they have the FCC threaten "unpatriotic" reporting with sanctions... Need I continue?
> And FWIW, I know plenty of actual conservatives, not Trumpist imposters, who defend freedom of speech
Fucking where?? I am yet to meet a single Republican who condemned anything Trump ever did.
Well there's a clear 1st Amendment violation. Wonder if he'll get sued, and if so, wonder if the plaintiff will win, and if so, whether Carr will abide by any judgment.
Right here, to name one. Needless to say I feel very bleak and despondent as I watch the America I thought I knew transform into something dark. I do not anticipate the next decade+ of life in America to be free and prosperous.
Broadcast TV (and cable TV too) has been whithering on the vine for a long time. What a network couldn't broadcast on TV could simply be put on YouTube or other social network. TV could become state-owned media at this point and I don't think anyone would really care as long as the Internet is the way it is.
I largely agree, but I think we have another 5-8 years before TV’s candle light is really extinguished. I hope they fight this nonsense to the bitter end.
HN was such an interesting place in 2024, they’ve all disappeared, sadly.
I’ve been genuinely, deeply, curious where those posters went. It was the site at that point.
The most I’ve seen in months and months is a limp-wristed handwave at “but humans have gooned and been racist forever”, in response to someone saying they wouldn’t choose to work for X.ai because it accelerates those things.
My most substantive idea is it was an unsustainable coalition, and that’s why we’re not seeing it much. You need to be for an ugly conjunction of things instead of against “woke” and Columbia students, thus you won’t get coalition-wide social approval (upvotes) anymore.
So they’re almost certainly here, but, downvoted to the point of invisibility unless you scour every comment.
Another case study to ponder is our host’s CEO, Gary Tan. Full-on loud-throated American juche stuff at beginning of tariffs. Now he has his own political website he built with Claude. And it’s LLM-generated articles that are riffs on Free Press articles he liked and they’re really tediously boring niche stuff even if you’re full in on team red, even before the AI writing cringe effect on the reader. Ex. “Mackenzie bezos philanthropy is fake and destructive because one college that got money hired the college presidents son and also enrollment dropped the next year”
Well, we have a bunch of really problematic accounts on HN and I suspect that rather than to go into 'endless curious conversation' with those characters people just give up at some point. It's interesting in a way because one of PGs most famous post is the one about 'no broken windows'.
I'm all for having conversations with those having other viewpoints, but it doesn't seem to be possible when they don't argue in good faith (or even grounded in reality).
I take zero pleasure in saying this, but "the other side" is fucking insane. There's no arguing from first principles, let alone acknowledging that there are issues of concern with one's propositions.
In the case of "free speech", there's a failure to acknowledge the fundamental proposition of it when used in the US -- in that it's about the government not being able to prosecute you for speech that it doesn't like. This is literally the basis of the OP.
I'm a fan of Christopher Hitchens and he embodied that "free speech absolutism" argument convincingly (as otherwise its a pathway to censorship and oppression), but I think it's also important to recognize Karl Popper's Intolerance of Intolerance.
This stuff is no longer idle speculation -- it is an active facet of authoritarianism that is playing out around us right now.
Indeed, and it is interesting how all those countries that have seen this up close have reasonable upper limits and courts that will try to find a balance without falling over one way or the other. Obviously you won't be able to please everybody all the time but we're - as you so eloquently put it - no longer in a speculative domain but in one where you can see the consequences play out in realtime.
It's like toddlers with guns, they may not know exactly how the guns work but they're bloody dangerous all the same.
Popper has it right, far more so than most other philosophers because he's coming at it almost from a security perspective: the system will have holes and you need to be willing to be pragmatic about that, rather than dogmatic.
My solution for HN is simple by the way, I give up, but one account at the time and I simply block them. That doesn't help the site but it does help my blood pressure. The one I use is called 'Comments owl for HN'.
Every time I see news about Brendan Carr's latest threat leveraging FCC licenses to enforce approved administration speech I search for the corresponding HN post and half the time it's a graveyard.
Wasn't that long ago an article about Mark Zuckerberg claiming someone in the Biden admin made some vague request about state-sponsored disinformation brought every so-called 1A defender out of the woodwork, but apparently the actual regulator of news orgs publicly threatening their business is shrug worthy by comparison.
I've been on HN since 2010 (different account) and honestly used to take the libertarian/right-leaning types at their word about being free speech advocates and not simply partisans using it as a rhetorical weapon.
On coarser sites (Elon’s, now) I’d say “1st amendment sez muh tweets MUST be published!!!”, never quite figured out a less coarse way to say it, but you just showed me.
It really does feel like the tech right has disappeared over the last year, at least as a more grass roots thing outside of the actual billionaires themselves.
The early crypto and tax victories were presumably the impetus for many, and that's already been realized. There's not much incentive to stick around and be a bad faith advocate for incompetence and graft when you've already got yours.
In my impression the billionaire worship is just another form of fundamental respect and enforcement of hierarchy that has been part of conservative politics forever. We are back to transparently the "right" leaning being wanting to keep the absolute monarchy.
You can be intelligent and believe the narratives.
You can be intelligent and see you were fooled, seeing the sponsors of the narratives don't share any of your ideals to begin with.
Many are confused, feeling betrayed, open for new perspectives. Some will double down as we know from group dynamics in sects.
Don't feel sad, it is a good sign of healthy progress. Project 2025 and the likes are a very destructive force, not something to gamble your democracy on.
>HN was such an interesting place in 2024, they’ve all disappeared, sadly.
Likely because once you've seen your opponent mask off there is no longer a point trying to maintain a facade of politeness. You are in full adversarial waters. Either those people weren't actually for it and were talking a game until they got into power, or there's no longer a point in talking about it until we can get the current numb nuts out of the picture. One shouldn't tip their hand in an enemy controlled medium on their current plans for activism. That's how you go from unrestrained, to controlled opposition. Savvy? Here on HN, you damn well know you're in the SV types territory, and you know to whom'st they've aligned by their actions. Only conversations left to be had is needling those remaining until either they out themselves as part of the opposition, or as part of the sympathetic group. Turns out there's a lot of HN'ers more than happy with how things are going.
Game theory/low trust environs are a bitch like that.
Airwaves are not protected by the 1st amendment, due to the limited amount of bandwidth that physically exists. As such, the FCC has extraordinary powers, including enforcing watersheds, forcing children’s content hours (“E/I”), censoring the F-bomb, and enforcing a 7-second delay on live content to prevent another Timberlake Super Bowl.
The first amendment also does not apply to highway billboards; which is why you never see a vagina on the roadway. Not all government control of speech is oppressive or inconsistent.
The FCC has a number of extraordinary powers over the broadcast spectrum, but they do not include viewpoint discrimination, which has always been seen as uniquely odious and different than indecency restrictions. As held in Shurtleff v. Boston, even the much more limited medium of a government-owned flagpole in front of a government building cannot be subject to viewpoint discrimination. If the public is allowed to speak freely in a particular medium, the government may not rescind that permission based on whether their message is true or fair or in the public interest.
I think "odious" really undersells it. A free press is an important part of a functioning democracy. What's the use in being able to vote against people doing wrong, if no-one's allowed to tell you about the wrong?
It's important not to concede the premise that First Amendment protections are subordinate to the public interest at all. Carr argues in his statement, after all, that the FCC has to take action because the public is losing faith and confidence in the media altogether. But even if the FCC can produce a detailed, convincing explanation of how American democracy will suffer if they're not allowed to block certain viewpoints from the airwaves, they still can't do it.
I find it amusing that your last comment is preaching to someone about what politics is and isn't.
Your politics are clear. You have no problem with the modern Republican party embracing authoritarianism and fascism. In fact, you see it as an opportunity to erode trust in or otherwise destroy the institution responsible for regulating signals in the US. The very thing that makes it so that planes can safely fly or that things in space must respect terrestrial networks without disruption.
That is your politics, just an embarrassing set of politics. Not even a green account. Shame on you.
It's deplorable that there's such empty silence on Carr and his incessant snowflake whining from the right. For a party that has crowed so much about 1A! It's unfathomable, just depraved, to have a party that will complain and whine so loudly, and then have nothing at all to say when you have a FCC commissioner asserting that broadcast rights means saying only what the government says is good.
Utterly deplorable. This man is a high traitor to the constitution and this nation. And the right: seemingly AWOL, on an issue they claimed was so important! It's so fallen. It's so unfortunate the nation haa to be sundered by people of so low moral and political regard, people who seemingly care so little about values and democracy and the nation.
No, this is deeply disturbing.
The person "whining" is the head of the regulatory body that gets to decide what can be broadcast, a supposedly non-partisan role, and yet he's just straight up threatened to cancel the licenses of everybody who's not vocally supportive of what you term the current regime.
I've read so much trump spam recently that on reading this my first thought was that you misspelled winning hehe
Planet announced last week there will be a 14 day delay on all commercial satellite imagery from the middle east. It shocks me how transparent we are about information war and voluntarily lying to ourselves at particular moments
Feels eerily similar to Rodrigo Duterte's threats to Philippine broadcaster ABS-CBN (and in that case, he really made good on the threat and shut down its transmitters).
Here's a crazy thought - if you're the president of the united states, or in his cabinet, and don't like news coverage that makes POTUS look bad regardless of the accuracy, how about you find some big boy pants and do better if you don't want to "look bad."
Not that I agree with this move at all but, if the coverage is inaccurate, no amount of putting on your big boy pants and doing better will make you look less bad.
Nothing Obama could have done was going to make Obama look good on Fox News.
I was going of the OP article here, the quote is a concern that it makes Trump look bad, not that it is inaccurate reporting.
I do agree with you though, if reporting is wrong then that's the problem. In those cases, and there are plenty, the concern raised should be inaccuracy rather than optics though.
How do you know the coverage is "wrong"? I mean, no news org, not NYT, not Fox, not WaPo, not even NPR can determine if Trump is lying. Sure, they occasionally note that what he says is "baseless", but never lies. So how are you going to determine wrong?
E.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgmlzg0p8k2o
Can you imagine the absolute mayhem at Fox News if Obama had declared himself the greatest president of all time.
Or declared a US company a supply chain risk after trying to weasel out of a contract.
Or, you know, incited a terrorist attack on the US Capitol...
It's almost like the stuff right wing media falsely claimed Obama and Biden were doing.
Like they were preparing for someone to actually do it, because it already happened with the last guy, right?
Propaganda state run networks are for dictatorships, not democracies.
That's not really accurate. I'd say in dictatorships you have one state run network ... and they grow very "confident". Most of the population doesn't believe the state network, but also doesn't have real other sources of information. Shit happens and nobody knows, like the surprise internet outages in Russia recently spreading to Moscow.
In a democracy, you essentially have 5 propaganda networks, each with their own agenda. Agendas go from pure government standpoint to business standpoint, some rich individual's standpoint, religious/ideology/political parties standpoint, ... Everybody knows the big events, because the networks know they have to have some kind of coverage, as it's everywhere.
This often goes right into ridiculous territory. Do you want to know the Socialist viewpoint on the recent strike in Brussels about pensions, and how in that strike the position of women compares to the position of children? Read all about it! Or don't, because of course it's 90% why all other political parties are so very, very wrong ...
The distinction between state and corporate media is generally a meaningless one. What matters is the power to shape and misshape public opinion. The American quibbling about “private/corporate vs. public/gov’t” consistently misses the point.
Your analysis is useless, irrespective of how correct it is. There are countries with a freer press that fare better. Throwing your hands in the air and saying "it's all pointless, only fools care about improving things" is detrimental to fixing this mess.
> Your analysis is useless, irrespective of how correct it is.
Generally, knowing the truth is more useful than the alternative.
> There are countries with a freer press that fare better.
That's a non-sequitur if I ever saw squirrel.
> Throwing your hands in the air and saying "it's all pointless, only fools > care about improving things" is detrimental to fixing this mess.
No one said that.
"Should the government censor speech it doesn't like? Of course not. The FCC doesn't have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the \"public interest\"." -- Brendan Carr 2019
Same party thats says they are against new wars.
So much of the last four years was watching fools and dishonest people pretend that the government was coming to take away your free speech and you'd better elect [people who routinely lied about everything and clearly had no principles] to protect you.
Every accusation is an admission from the people running the united states right now
I think it's something they're doing consciously, accusing the opposition of doing what they're doing. It puts opposition on the back foot, muddies the water, and provides justification for doing something you shouldn't be since "the other side already did it". This us partly why politics has become like a Choose Your Own Adventure book (more than it was before anyway).
Which is why we need to watch the polls closely this year. They’ve repeatedly accused everyone of massive voter fraud so they will most certainly try it themselves.
Slight tangent but the thought has crossed my mind that (the potential of) retaliation by Iran could be a pretense for taking broad executive action which normally wouldn't be permitted, perhaps under the guise of securing the election. They may even do something which will be ruled illegal after the fact by courts, but it could take months after the election to reach a verdict and there's really no precedent in America for broadly declaring a federal election invalid.
To be clear I don't really expect this to happen but at this point I honestly wouldn't even be surprised.
I think they were hoping to provoke riots with ICE but since they didn’t happen they’re using Iran. If there’s a “terrorist” strike in November followed by a suspension of elections that’s likely what’s happening.
Accusation in a mirror, a strategy that is pretty much as you describe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror
Thanks, I had not heard of this.
Wait there was active efforts to tailor free speech all over the place? Are you going to make an argument tyere has EVER been a US admin that didn't try to do this?
This “both sides” argument is so weak.
Yeah like if I’m in quicksand and asking to be helped out of it the appropriate response isn’t to say “the mud pit I’m sinking in is just as bad.” It’s to go get a rope.
I live in the present, and not the past, so I'm not sure what your argument is here.
They can’t take your license away if you don’t have one
YouTube is a problem, people speaking their minds.
Fucking Christ.
I still don’t understand how anyone heard Trump bragging about how he’s going to “open up those libel laws”, in addition to all the other idiotic shit that he said, and still decided to vote for him.
I am sure people had their reasons, and maybe some of them even weren’t racist, but I am still having trouble comprehending how anyone didn’t see all this shit coming.
https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/donald-trump...
The tweet/meme about the face eating leopards seems to be entirely applicable to our current times.
They rightly assumed the laws wouldn’t be used against them by this admin
Maybe if we're going to name the department of defense the department of war we can go all the way and rename the FCC to the 'ministry of propaganda'?
A free press is worth its weight in gold. If you let go of that you're going to lose more than you bargain for. All those free speech advocates are a bit quiet on this, wonder what happened to them.
It would obviously be the Ministry of Truth.
That was already taken by the DHS and then dismantled in 2022.
You're probably right.
I assumed it would the the Ministry of Trump. He likes putting his name on things.
Ministry of Truth & Love.
Is a free press even worth anything of the country is already otherwise lost?
Yes, because it is a backbone through which people trying to hold things together can communicate. Remember how the USSR supposedly held together and could not be defeated, and how the Nazi's overran Europe and there were many who figured the easy way out was to just give up and accept it? The free press held the line, in Western Europe through underground newspapers, which made a massive difference in keeping people informed and in the East between 45 and ~86 through the various - sometimes hand copied - smuggled literature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_media_in_German-oc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_press
Soldarity would have never gotten off the ground without that network and speaking for my own country I suspect that without de Volkskrant and Het Parool the war would have gotten much closer to completely eradicating the Jewish population here. It was bad enough as it was but the network that coordinated the distribution of the underground newspapers was also instrumental in keeping the underground resistance network going. The one fed off the other and vice versa, both as a training ground and as a messenger service. Lots of those stories will never be told (unfortunately) but there were a ton of very brave people that knew full well they risked a one-way trip to the dunes if discovered.
What free press? The mass media is controlled by a handful of billionaires who kowtow to the government in order to earn more billions.
And let us say out loud after all the whining about cancel culture it was Republicans, as expected, who are actually going after the first amendment.
They're Republicans. Every accusation is either a confession in disguise, a plan already in progress, or a fond wish.
During a press conference yesterday, Hegseth, the secretary of war, received a question on Iran from CNN that he didn't feel the need to answer, and then went on a rant about how he can't wait for Ellison to buy the network and rid it of any opposition to the regime [1]. He literally spelt it out.
Free press in the US is already dead, all media belongs to conservative pedophile oligarchs who use it to manipulate the masses and push their warmongering narratives.
> All those free speech advocates are a bit quiet on this, wonder what happened to them.
There are no principled free speech advocates on the right, only people who have an issue with the media not being completely controlled by their side. Their silence then makes perfect sense: they are getting exactly what they wanted.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/pentagon-chie...
Yes, they are no longer even pretending to hide, I think that's the thing that really changed. Up to a few years ago there would always be the figleaf. Now, they're just stating openly what they're up to and nobody bats an eye. It's an extreme case of the normalization of deviance. And in a way that is the answer to that age old question: "How could they let it happen?" when contemplating Germany ca. 1936.
Funny how many of the people who only a few years ago weregloating about how private companies can do what they want, and there's no issues with censoring people or spreading propaganda (in clandestine cooperation with the government) are now seeing it blow back in their faces. I mean everybody who isn't stupid knew it was coming, not everybody thought it would come so quickly.
> There are no principled free speech advocates on the right, only people who have an issue with the media not being completely controlled by their side.
I tire of the partisan hypocrisy that so many people seem incapable of shedding. Have people already forgotten the whole cancel culture hysteria a few years back, or has that already gone down the memory hole? And that’s just one episode in a broader trajectory.
How “principled” each party is is dependent on how something aligns with their interests. Usually, parties suddenly become principled when they’re in the opposition; it’s easy to put on a big show of being principled when you’ve already assumed the role of the underdog. You don’t have the power to prove it. However, when the opposition does take power, those principles generally fly right out the window. In other words, principles aren’t things to live by, but cudgels to be used to try to cripple your opponent in the court of public opinion.
Neither party is principled. They’re two factions of the same uniparty, both composed of delegates representing the interests of their respective oligarchs. The average citizen does not figure into their squabbles except as canon fodder or minion. When we embrace party loyalty, we willfully become instruments of these oligarchs.
In other words: each party likes to babble about “free speech” when it suits them, whatever they mean by the term.
My preference is to focus on individual actions and policies and give credit where credit is due, and criticism where criticism is called for. (And FWIW, I know plenty of actual conservatives, not Trumpist imposters, who defend freedom of speech, rightly understood.)
Was the left's cancel movement really hysterical? Or are you referring to the right's reaction to it
I don't recall Obama or Biden administrations opening threatening private outlets.
I tire of this pathetic bothsideism. "Cancel culture" never made it to law, and had zero implications for the people that were supposedly targeted. Case in point: Trump is still president despite being a child rapist that tried to overthrow the American democracy. The Right is uniquely bad for free speech and free press in this country (and the economy, and corruption, and the environment, and peace...). Stop pretending otherwise.
Do you remember Biden or his ministers openly calling journalists names for their "stupid questions" at every press conference? Because that's what the Trump admin does daily. They revoked entry to the white house to some publications they disagree with, they facilitated mergers to put more media in the hands of their allies, they have the FCC threaten "unpatriotic" reporting with sanctions... Need I continue?
> And FWIW, I know plenty of actual conservatives, not Trumpist imposters, who defend freedom of speech
Fucking where?? I am yet to meet a single Republican who condemned anything Trump ever did.
The Gaslighter in Chief wants to abolish the First Amendment.
Well there's a clear 1st Amendment violation. Wonder if he'll get sued, and if so, wonder if the plaintiff will win, and if so, whether Carr will abide by any judgment.
The irony of this would be quite amusing if it wasn't so dangerous. Where are all the "free speech absolutists" now?
Right here, to name one. Needless to say I feel very bleak and despondent as I watch the America I thought I knew transform into something dark. I do not anticipate the next decade+ of life in America to be free and prosperous.
It's a weird world where one's hopes are in the incompetence of their leaders.
Broadcast TV (and cable TV too) has been whithering on the vine for a long time. What a network couldn't broadcast on TV could simply be put on YouTube or other social network. TV could become state-owned media at this point and I don't think anyone would really care as long as the Internet is the way it is.
I largely agree, but I think we have another 5-8 years before TV’s candle light is really extinguished. I hope they fight this nonsense to the bitter end.
HN was such an interesting place in 2024, they’ve all disappeared, sadly.
I’ve been genuinely, deeply, curious where those posters went. It was the site at that point.
The most I’ve seen in months and months is a limp-wristed handwave at “but humans have gooned and been racist forever”, in response to someone saying they wouldn’t choose to work for X.ai because it accelerates those things.
My most substantive idea is it was an unsustainable coalition, and that’s why we’re not seeing it much. You need to be for an ugly conjunction of things instead of against “woke” and Columbia students, thus you won’t get coalition-wide social approval (upvotes) anymore.
So they’re almost certainly here, but, downvoted to the point of invisibility unless you scour every comment.
Another case study to ponder is our host’s CEO, Gary Tan. Full-on loud-throated American juche stuff at beginning of tariffs. Now he has his own political website he built with Claude. And it’s LLM-generated articles that are riffs on Free Press articles he liked and they’re really tediously boring niche stuff even if you’re full in on team red, even before the AI writing cringe effect on the reader. Ex. “Mackenzie bezos philanthropy is fake and destructive because one college that got money hired the college presidents son and also enrollment dropped the next year”
They've switched to "A Democrat told me to shut up once so free speech is over."
Well, we have a bunch of really problematic accounts on HN and I suspect that rather than to go into 'endless curious conversation' with those characters people just give up at some point. It's interesting in a way because one of PGs most famous post is the one about 'no broken windows'.
I'm all for having conversations with those having other viewpoints, but it doesn't seem to be possible when they don't argue in good faith (or even grounded in reality).
I take zero pleasure in saying this, but "the other side" is fucking insane. There's no arguing from first principles, let alone acknowledging that there are issues of concern with one's propositions.
In the case of "free speech", there's a failure to acknowledge the fundamental proposition of it when used in the US -- in that it's about the government not being able to prosecute you for speech that it doesn't like. This is literally the basis of the OP.
I'm a fan of Christopher Hitchens and he embodied that "free speech absolutism" argument convincingly (as otherwise its a pathway to censorship and oppression), but I think it's also important to recognize Karl Popper's Intolerance of Intolerance.
This stuff is no longer idle speculation -- it is an active facet of authoritarianism that is playing out around us right now.
Indeed, and it is interesting how all those countries that have seen this up close have reasonable upper limits and courts that will try to find a balance without falling over one way or the other. Obviously you won't be able to please everybody all the time but we're - as you so eloquently put it - no longer in a speculative domain but in one where you can see the consequences play out in realtime.
It's like toddlers with guns, they may not know exactly how the guns work but they're bloody dangerous all the same.
Popper has it right, far more so than most other philosophers because he's coming at it almost from a security perspective: the system will have holes and you need to be willing to be pragmatic about that, rather than dogmatic.
My solution for HN is simple by the way, I give up, but one account at the time and I simply block them. That doesn't help the site but it does help my blood pressure. The one I use is called 'Comments owl for HN'.
Every time I see news about Brendan Carr's latest threat leveraging FCC licenses to enforce approved administration speech I search for the corresponding HN post and half the time it's a graveyard.
Wasn't that long ago an article about Mark Zuckerberg claiming someone in the Biden admin made some vague request about state-sponsored disinformation brought every so-called 1A defender out of the woodwork, but apparently the actual regulator of news orgs publicly threatening their business is shrug worthy by comparison.
I've been on HN since 2010 (different account) and honestly used to take the libertarian/right-leaning types at their word about being free speech advocates and not simply partisans using it as a rhetorical weapon.
But, lesson learned...
I applaud your optimism.
On coarser sites (Elon’s, now) I’d say “1st amendment sez muh tweets MUST be published!!!”, never quite figured out a less coarse way to say it, but you just showed me.
It really does feel like the tech right has disappeared over the last year, at least as a more grass roots thing outside of the actual billionaires themselves.
The early crypto and tax victories were presumably the impetus for many, and that's already been realized. There's not much incentive to stick around and be a bad faith advocate for incompetence and graft when you've already got yours.
In my impression the billionaire worship is just another form of fundamental respect and enforcement of hierarchy that has been part of conservative politics forever. We are back to transparently the "right" leaning being wanting to keep the absolute monarchy.
You can be intelligent and believe the narratives.
You can be intelligent and see you were fooled, seeing the sponsors of the narratives don't share any of your ideals to begin with.
Many are confused, feeling betrayed, open for new perspectives. Some will double down as we know from group dynamics in sects.
Don't feel sad, it is a good sign of healthy progress. Project 2025 and the likes are a very destructive force, not something to gamble your democracy on.
>HN was such an interesting place in 2024, they’ve all disappeared, sadly.
Likely because once you've seen your opponent mask off there is no longer a point trying to maintain a facade of politeness. You are in full adversarial waters. Either those people weren't actually for it and were talking a game until they got into power, or there's no longer a point in talking about it until we can get the current numb nuts out of the picture. One shouldn't tip their hand in an enemy controlled medium on their current plans for activism. That's how you go from unrestrained, to controlled opposition. Savvy? Here on HN, you damn well know you're in the SV types territory, and you know to whom'st they've aligned by their actions. Only conversations left to be had is needling those remaining until either they out themselves as part of the opposition, or as part of the sympathetic group. Turns out there's a lot of HN'ers more than happy with how things are going.
Game theory/low trust environs are a bitch like that.
Airwaves are not protected by the 1st amendment, due to the limited amount of bandwidth that physically exists. As such, the FCC has extraordinary powers, including enforcing watersheds, forcing children’s content hours (“E/I”), censoring the F-bomb, and enforcing a 7-second delay on live content to prevent another Timberlake Super Bowl.
The first amendment also does not apply to highway billboards; which is why you never see a vagina on the roadway. Not all government control of speech is oppressive or inconsistent.
Why do airwaves matter? I get cable over the internet. Technology constraints shouldn’t me what allows laws to undermine democracy.
The licenses in question here are only relevant to the airwaves. An FCC license isn't required to send you news over cable or the Internet.
The FCC has a number of extraordinary powers over the broadcast spectrum, but they do not include viewpoint discrimination, which has always been seen as uniquely odious and different than indecency restrictions. As held in Shurtleff v. Boston, even the much more limited medium of a government-owned flagpole in front of a government building cannot be subject to viewpoint discrimination. If the public is allowed to speak freely in a particular medium, the government may not rescind that permission based on whether their message is true or fair or in the public interest.
I think "odious" really undersells it. A free press is an important part of a functioning democracy. What's the use in being able to vote against people doing wrong, if no-one's allowed to tell you about the wrong?
It's important not to concede the premise that First Amendment protections are subordinate to the public interest at all. Carr argues in his statement, after all, that the FCC has to take action because the public is losing faith and confidence in the media altogether. But even if the FCC can produce a detailed, convincing explanation of how American democracy will suffer if they're not allowed to block certain viewpoints from the airwaves, they still can't do it.
Hey if you want to get rid of the FCC entirely so neither party can use it against anyone, I'll all for that!
I’m excited about cell phones, pacemakers, and wifi no longer working.
Honestly the world might be a better place if the vast majority of spectrum were just ISM bands anyways.
I find it amusing that your last comment is preaching to someone about what politics is and isn't.
Your politics are clear. You have no problem with the modern Republican party embracing authoritarianism and fascism. In fact, you see it as an opportunity to erode trust in or otherwise destroy the institution responsible for regulating signals in the US. The very thing that makes it so that planes can safely fly or that things in space must respect terrestrial networks without disruption.
That is your politics, just an embarrassing set of politics. Not even a green account. Shame on you.
It was already done before and now Trump and Israeli lobby are doing the same with Social networks and US media
"The Nazi assault on the press, publishing, and scholarship was more than censorship. It was an attempt to monopolize reality." https://brewminate.com/words-under-siege-hitlers-assault-on-...
This article feels very AI generated to me.
It's deplorable that there's such empty silence on Carr and his incessant snowflake whining from the right. For a party that has crowed so much about 1A! It's unfathomable, just depraved, to have a party that will complain and whine so loudly, and then have nothing at all to say when you have a FCC commissioner asserting that broadcast rights means saying only what the government says is good.
Utterly deplorable. This man is a high traitor to the constitution and this nation. And the right: seemingly AWOL, on an issue they claimed was so important! It's so fallen. It's so unfortunate the nation haa to be sundered by people of so low moral and political regard, people who seemingly care so little about values and democracy and the nation.
> For a party that has crowed so much about 1A!
Just like the anti-war stuff, it was always convenient hypocrisy that they instantly abandon when the time is right.
If it wasn’t for double standards they wouldn’t have any at all.
We’ve seen it every 4-8 years for decades.
A better link:
https://xcancel.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/203285541423304717...
BTW, the link is a waste of your time reading it, it is just the current US regime whining again.
No, this is deeply disturbing. The person "whining" is the head of the regulatory body that gets to decide what can be broadcast, a supposedly non-partisan role, and yet he's just straight up threatened to cancel the licenses of everybody who's not vocally supportive of what you term the current regime.
thanks, I should've used xcancel. @dang I would love if we could update to using this link instead
xcancel is like archive links, they prefer links to the original with bypasses/alternatives in comments.
I've read so much trump spam recently that on reading this my first thought was that you misspelled winning hehe
Planet announced last week there will be a 14 day delay on all commercial satellite imagery from the middle east. It shocks me how transparent we are about information war and voluntarily lying to ourselves at particular moments
Feels eerily similar to Rodrigo Duterte's threats to Philippine broadcaster ABS-CBN (and in that case, he really made good on the threat and shut down its transmitters).