DOJ Statement of Interest on Suppression of Competition Through Deplatforming

4 comments

> The lawsuit — led by plaintiffs allegedly deplatformed for sharing independent news and opinion related to the COVID-19 pandemic — alleges that the Washington Post, BBC, AP, and Reuters colluded with one another and with the large digital platforms to suppress competition from independent perspectives that rival mainstream media.

It's so sad to see the Justice Department turn into Infowars.

> “the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public...”

Is AI a source? It feels like this possibility was unthinkable when that decision was made. Now, it's not.

> “[R]ight conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection.”

Makes sense in the 40s. Now that big corporations have machines that can type following orders, this quote should also be taken with an extra grain of salt.

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These feel like obvious overlooks. It's almost as if they were selected and planted to generate oposition. That makes me believe there's something I don't know regarding how this is going to go. It's too easy.

In other words, this feels like a bait.

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My gut tells me the thing to look for is evidence of manufactured public discourse just before 2017. Whether that manufactured content was generated from a previously unknown widespread deployment of LLMs or manually produced by humans who had prior knowledge of this technology is also a relevant question.

> “This Antitrust Division will always defend the principle that the antitrust laws protect free markets, including the marketplace of ideas.”

Jesus christ.

So glad we have a government department out here telling us which people and ideas we're required to listen to or else we're Anti-Competitive.

Maybe if people are "deplatforming" you for your view points, it means that these viewpoints have ALREADY LOST.

Is this supposed to be an actual market place, where ideas win and lose based on whether or not people accept them, or are we now going to be forced by the government to listen to all of the dumb ideas they want to force down our throats?

>Maybe if people are "deplatforming" you for your view points, it means that these viewpoints have ALREADY LOST.

yeah, right... except, you know, the current president of the US and his followers.

I assume this is an attempt to set a precedent for the repeal of Section 230 and the rolling nationalization of all large US social media platforms and regulation through a body like the FCC, something the right and many people on HN have been clamoring for.

Any platform with more than some arbitrary number of users which accepts and displays user submitted content will be required to post all legal content and will be prevented from moderating legal content without a court order.

I don't know why they bother, they won after all. Despite all of the "COVID oppression" they complain about, their views are now mainstream and an anti-vaxxer runs American medical policy. I guess they need to keep the narrative of widespread leftist censorship alive.

They're trying to get that through Moody v Netchoice.

What does this mean? Don't down vote conservatives? Don't tell conservatives they're off topic? Don't ban conservatives for spamming? Because this is plainly a result of butthurt when pre-Elon twitter banned a few conservatives for being Qanons and militant anti-vaxxers all over the place.

i think more so, the communists need a prominent article every day on every platform