Nepal Moves to Block Facebook, X, Youtube and Others

It's insane that the same community that rails against attempts to police encryption, that believes in the ethos of free software, that "piracy isn't theft" and "you can't make math illegal" and that champions crypto/blockchain to prevent censorship is so sympathetic to banning "content ordering algorithms."

The problem is not the algorithms, the problem is the content, and the way people curate that content. Platforms choosing to push harmful content and not police it is a policy issue.

Is the content also free speech? Yes. But like most people I don't subscribe to an absolutist definition of free speech nor do I believe free speech means speech without consequences (absent government censorship) or that it compels a platform.

So I think it's perfectly legitimate for platforms to ban or moderate content even beyond what's strictly legal, and far less dangerous than having governments use their monopoly on violence to control what sorting algorithms you're allowed to use, or to forcibly nationalize and regulate any platform that has over some arbitrary number of users (which is something else a lot of people seem to want.)

We should be very careful about the degree of regulation we want governments to apply to what is in essence the only free mass communications medium in existence. Yes, the narrative is that the internet is entirely centralized and controlled by Google/Facebook/Twitter now but that isn't really true. It would absolutely become true if the government regulated the internet like the FCC regulates over the air broadcasts. Just look at the chaos that age verification laws are creating. Do we really want more of that?

But admitting FB did publicly say they manipulate their users' emotions for engagement, and a law is passed preventing that. How do you assess that the new FB algorithm is not manipulating emotions for engagement? How do you enforce your law? If you are not allowed to create outrage, are you allowed to promote posts that expose politicians corruption? Where is the limit?

Once again, I hate these algorithms. But we cannot regulate by saying "stop being evil", we need specific metrics, targets, objectives. A law too broad will ban Google as much as Facebook, and a law too narrow can be circumvented in many ways.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/tech/facebook-algorithm-change-zuckerber...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Maybe the problem is the websites that amplify the most controversial and problematic content because they get the most clicks, so these companies can report better DAUs and MAUs.

There in the issue that a news site generally has limited number of contributors where has a social media site has an infinite number of contributors.

In either case, it seems like the same laws apply like defamation laws, fraud laws, etc apply to the authors of the posts which might be easier to target when it’s a news site as the site itself takes responsibility for the content

My point, overall, is that there is all the criticism of social media that excludes HN is based on vibes. And if we're about to ban social media for the EU then hopefully we have more than vibes to go off of.

HN doesn't have a concept of engagement really. It has a controversy downranking algorithm which downranks a story if it has a low vote:comment ratio, but this is what happens on Reddit as well (you can sort by Controversial on old Reddit to surface those threads.) There's no such downweighing to comments which is why the comments that float to the top are inevitably the ones that hit the site's common in-group ("circlejerk") opinion.

The downranking helps the front page to not be overwhelmed by flamebait but that's it really. As HN has gotten more popular, more and more of it gets dominated by its in-group opinion, and most of those opinions are all negative ones. Social networks are bad, crypto is bad, finance is evil, big tech is bad, enshittification, etc. It's almost impossible to have any conversation on those topics as you'll just get downvoted if you disagree and if you agree, even if your agreement is incoherent, you'll get upvotes.

The rest of the site's "algorithm" is usually through hand moderation by the professional mod team (dang, tomhow, et al, who get paid to moderate aka they are professionals) and that's a pretty big distinction from most of the other big social media sites which mostly rely on automated systems or volunteers.

So I mean "it's imperfect" is a stretch. HN is often just as bad as most of the other sites, if not worse. If you're going to advocate for banning social media if you end up using any rigorous definition of an "algorithm" HN will end up banned as well. In my experience though the people that want to ban other social media seem to resonate with HN and so they think that it's "better" along some axis that's not measurable. To me that smells of in-group bias.

If they're meant to be "held accountable" as leverage to ensure the company's compliance ("delete this politically inconvenient content worldwide or your local employees will never see their families again"), then it seems fairly understandable why social media sites would be reluctant to give that leverage - particularly for cases like this where the bill in question seems fairly restrictive (including imprisonment for using an anonymous identity).

> If the companies don't want to have people on the ground that are liable to the law and regulations of said country, then stop offering services there.

If I want to run a Mastodon instance (which is blocked by this), do I need to hire an employee/representative for every country in the world? I'd rather just keep the maximum leverage most countries have as being to block the site if they don't like it.

Moderation decisions are not and should not be determined solely by what's legal.

> Ultimately, whether or not we like it, most countries have some restrictions on speech. Countries want somebody in their jurisdiction to represent the company

The former is an excellent reason to refuse the latter.

apparently matrix is not in the ban list. i wonder how they managed to comply.

Seems to indicate they're not actually trying to prevent their citizens from doing anything in particular, they're just trying to get these international companies to follow their local laws since they operate there.

From experience, this is a symptom of them wanting to censor a specific piece of content which is on all those platforms. Look for it, you may discover something interesting.

I live in Tunisia, which had one of the most censored internet in the world before 2011.

If you reframe the issue from "Nepal wants to punish the users" to "Nepal wants to punish the companies", implementing an easy DNS block makes a lot more sense. As long as most users are unable to access the platforms, the companies will get hurt by it, I think the idea is at least.