Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media
cjr.org
cjr.org
I'd argue in the scheme of things, it's not really that broken, and definitely not deserving of the type of fix we're in for. It's funny to watch the masses effectively manipulated into thinking there is effective mass manipulation occurring. I wish they'd just leave things alone personally, but since they won't and everyone is convinced this is a dire problem, I can only hope for restraint.
This move reinforces the location of the goal posts that define what is “acceptable discourse.” Along with supporting unfettered corporate control of the means of production. The economy must run on big business and nothing else, amirite?
All those other things will undermine them.
The first step to each of the things you mentioned is legislation...
Continuing the status quo means the people in power stay in power. It therefore isn't surprising that the people in power prefer preserving the status quo. It also isn't surprising that the people who believe the system is broken and are most against the status quo are those that belong to historically oppressed groups. If you really think the system isn't broken, I suggest you look through the Twitter mentions of politically active famous women, POC, or LGBTQ members. The harassment they receive on a regular basis wouldn't be allowed in the physical world. Why do we allow it in the digital world?
Shouting words at someone is not illegal.
People protest all the time in similar ways.
Also, you can block people/bots on social media.
Sure, that is why protesters are routinely arrested even though the first amendment exists.
>Also, you can block people/bots on social media.
The sole responsibility of policing and punishing this behavior should not fall on the victims of this behavior.
Blocking someone is neither policing nor punishing, it's simply ignoring; actual censorship still falls to the platform itself.
The idea of a nebulous "illegality" is simplistic and wrong, in the US. They might open an individual to civil liability, but they aren't in violation of a criminal code, nor tort law.
> That doesn't mean the action of speaking those words are legal
Speech is always legal, in the US. What you think "legal" means is up for debate.
Around the clock shouting in residential neighborhoods is likely to get you fined for disturbing the peace.
But, you can send hate mail, or shout in some public spaces and be just fine.
Sending angry emails or tweets sounds most like the former.
People arguing for more moderation and more censorship generally lack perspective when they refer to fascism in the same breath. Free speech is a most effective disinfectant against fascism.
False.
https://www.unodc.org/cld/en/legislation/deu/german_criminal...
https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/...
http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/prop/resn/ns_re...
And yes, he was banned from speaking due to hate speech laws.
I really know that. I live in Germany and have been briefed extensively. Our last emperor was the first to introduce legislation against hate-speech. But that was in the 19th century. Of course you do not find references to laws from the Weimar Republic and before in modern legislation.
I have provided you with actual legally traceable citations to law and their implementations. You cited a propaganda poster.
You are conflating a regime of arbitrary censorship with specific and nuanced legislation that was implemented as a direct result of Nazism. To argue that the basis of Germany's contemporary hate speech laws, including the most recent legislation regarding social media, is not a direct result of Germany's experience with Nazism is delusional.
http://www.ecaj.org.au/2014/critics-of-section-18c-get-histo...
> there was no equivalent of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in the Weimar Germany. The only laws against hate speech were criminal offences, not civil remedies. Weimar Germany had nothing equivalent to the framework which currently exists under the Racial Discrimination Act within which complaints of racial vilification have, in the vast majority of cases, been successfully conciliated through the Australian Human Rights Commission or resolved by direct negotiations between the parties.
> In Weimar Germany, the absence of civil remedies was made worse by the fact that the relevant criminal offences were honeycombed with immunities for members of the Reichstag, the German Parliament. Nazi members of Parliament became the nominal publishers of single or multiple antisemitic publications. This facade meant that no one could be prosecuted for the hate crimes perpetrated by the publications. The Reichstag could waive immunity for its members, but did so rarely.
§ 130 StGB lautete in der Urfassung des Strafgesetzbuchs von 1871:
„Wer in einer den öffentlichen Frieden gefährdenden Weise verschiedene Klassen der Bevölkerung zu Gewalttätigkeiten gegen einander öffentlich anreizt, wird mit Geldstrafe bis zu zweihundert Thalern oder mit Gefängniß bis zu zwei Jahren bestraft.“
The article you linked even explained that Nazis were prosecuted. That some of them had parliamentary immunity is another topic. Distinction of criminal and civil law is also secondary.
1960 a second paragraph was added the said that human dignity is indisputable. It was a reaction to anti-semitic attacks.
But it is pretty factual that Germany had hate-speech laws before the Nazis came to power.
> including the most recent legislation regarding social media
most legal experts think this law is not constitutional and it was responsible for banning satire on the first day of its inception. Future rulings will decide its fate. Not giving you a quote on that, let's just wait.
> most legal experts think this law is not constitutional and it was responsible for banning satire on the first day of its inception. Future rulings will decide its fate. Not giving you a quote on that, let's just wait.
Let's skip your "most" and at least agree that the issue is finding the fuzzy line between proper discourse and hate?
Whether you agree or not, the existing edicts in Weimar Germany were ineffective and neutered, in addition to being undermined / ignored by the ruling party, which essentially calls into question of the status of the rules being "laws" at all. The laws changed quite drastically after the war, so much so that the new legal construct was entirely different, including civil remedies.
"Einer allein von 2000 Million Menschen der Erde darf in Deutschland nicht reden" => "He alone from 2000 million humans on earth isn't allowed to speak in Germany." - propaganda of the NS.
We had hate speech laws since we had an emperor. Freedom of opinion is one of the most fundamental rights in modern Germany.
History of hate laws in Germany here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=12273096193760058...
> On May 23, 1949, the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany was promulgated to serve as the cornerstone of a democratic state designed to protect individual liberty. Accordingly, the Grundgesetz, or Basic Law, is patterned upon the tradition of Western constitutionalism and is a direct historical reaction to the disastrous Weimar Republic and Third Reich." The Basic Law regulates two types of rights and relations. The first type, the Basic Laws, pertain to the rights of individuals and the state. The Basic Laws are characterized by many of the classic human rights found in the U.S. Bill of Rights. The second type, the Rights to a Free Democratic Order, concern the rights of governmental organs, the organization of the state, and the relationships between the various state organs.
People have been politically mobilized by the idea of "change" since the beginning of democracy. But that's just because the idea of "change" has a certain energy to it that is important for campaigning. Most people don't like the idea of supporting the existing status quo because it seems ... low energy.
So anyway. You'll find a lot of professional activists working at big tech companies (a lot of companies now have 'racial equity' orgs which essentially exist to do political activism), having their concerns heard by people in power, and all the while talking about smashing the status quo. But they aren't really trying to smash the status quo. They are just taking the existing status quo step by step to its logical conclusion.
The people trying to smash the status quo are usually the ones having laws passed against them. Who don't have corporate leaders pandering to them. Who don't get celebrated by the media.
It's the anime avatar having people on Twitter, who constantly break taboos with their speech, who are against the status quo and that's why the current power structure wants to shut them down.
(I'm not saying you are wrong for supporting the existing power structure, but it _is_ wrong to pretend that the current power structure isn't pro-LGBTQ and PoC because it is emphatically so.)
(By the way, even as a supporter of the Second Amendment it is remarkable that in America one needs a license to operate a radio but not a rifle.)
Social media and mainstream media will get three sets of regulation wrt Privacy, Individual Manipulation, Group Manipulation. It doesn't matter which country you pick, the free for all that currently exists is not being tolerated.
These proposals seem to be aimed at intimidation and breaching the privacy of each and everyone, rather than at the surveillance-like operations and propaganda-enabling structures of the Big Ad/Social Media companies.
"Fascinated" isn't the word I would choose to describe it..
They changed to a "real name" policy and now the comments, while much reduced, are also much more thoughtful and tend to stay on-topic.
Real name policies eliminate specific categories of speech.
One of those categories is trolling, which naturally makes everybody very happy. The problem is that some of the other categories are really important.
If you require real names then people with minority views are afraid to present them, even when they can make a major contribution. People won't disclose relevant inside information, including malfeasance, because they face being fired or abused until they quit. People won't say anything against the interests of anyone in a position of power over them.
It's basically a mechanism that gets rid of the Nazis and SJWs by getting rid of anyone critical of the government or existing power structures. The resulting debate is unquestionably a lot more polite, but politeness is not the only consideration.
What anonymity does do to social media is muddy the waters to a great degree. Online discourse is now built on bad faith, because of the lack of consequence and reputation.
I've enjoyed anonymity as much as the next person, but I believe it is a net detriment to communication.
It's not just about The Pentagon Papers and Wikileaks. It's about people being able to point out banal incompetence and small scale corruption so it can be corrected without being retaliated against by petty members of the city government with egg on their face, even when there are no journalists willing to take the small story.
It's not even just about whistleblowing. When you have to write everything knowing your mother, your boss and every busybody in the PTA will probably read it, people are going to self-censor.
And then there's this: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/twitter-t...
> Anonymous leaks are still best presented by a journalist that's willing to vet the info and put their name on it.
Journalist is not a title of nobility, it's anyone engaged in that specific activity.
To do what you're asking, a source would need to anonymously send the information to different prospective journalists until one has the resources and willingness to vet and publish it, in parallel if it's at all time sensitive. In other words, the source needs the ability to send information anonymously to an arbitrarily large number of people with no formal credentials. Who then themselves need the ability to anonymously pass it on to arbitrarily many others who they think might have more resources or be more willing to formally attach themselves to something with risk of retaliation by powerful forces.
Which is basically a description of anonymous social media.
> What anonymity does do to social media is muddy the waters to a great degree. Online discourse is now built on bad faith, because of the lack of consequence and reputation.
We already have the ability to verify identities. We know that @ggreenwald on Twitter is Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept because it says so on the official web page of The Intercept.
Nothing stops anyone from only reading things written by people with verified identities. If you don't like anonymous or pseudonymous speech then why are you listening to it? Instead what you're proposing is to prohibit everyone else from hearing it. Which is never something anyone should get to decide for everyone else.
I don't have a clear cut answer myself, because on the other hand, anonymity opens the floodgates to so much manipulation that also ends up hurting real people, and that will only get worse as technology gets refined in those directions. Those that want to control and manipulate won't give up easily either way, there's totalitarian "victory" possible in either direction:
Tie everything anywhere to a real name, and people will ultimately police their own thoughts, because wanting to say things you can't say sucks, so they'll stop wanting that, the one thing they have control over. Keeping foggy and dynamic what is and what isn't allowed to say will make people shrink to the smallest possible attack surface that still allows basic physical survival.
Go the other route and make everything accessible to (super advanced) bots, make it impossible to confirm anyone's identity or follow any money trails, and with enough of that people can be be manipulated by an overwhelming, yet fabricated social consensus, and herded into bubbles.
Of course, the worst of both worlds is also possible.
Anyway, anonymity online gets a very onesided rap. Some of my fondest "internet memories" were exchanges were with total strangers. Maybe I just remember those differently (I don't really think of online interactions with real life frieds as online interactions), because they always came out of the blue, or because they seemed to mean more, since we both know we'd never meet again and were being open or helpful just for the sake of it, with the reward being purely personal gain (even joy is gain), not social capital.
> Why do we travel? Among other things, to meet people who don't think they know us once and for all; so we may experience once more what is possible for us in this life.
-- Max Frisch
If people are afraid to express ideas simply because those ideas aren't popular (even if they aren't very controversial) I think the quality of discourse is lowered.
When a not-out member of the LGBTQ community can't enter a discussion or express something because doing so would tie that to their real name, having to self-censor because of a lack of anonymity becomes a problem.
I don't know that there is a perfect solution, either. Having full anonymity introduces other problems.
It shouldn't mean companies aren't liable for failing to remove content deemed illegal, but having it be illegal for any single thing to slip between the cracks seems harsh.
"you really dont have a facebook?"
Hopefully, this never becomes law
Well, that is private property as well. But I see your point, centralization is the enemy here.
If people failed to see past the trolls this past election cycle, hopefully it will be a lesson learned. Most people here probably learned to spot/ignore trolls when they were 14 but a lot of voters are still new arrivals to the digital landscape.
If we need our government to confirm the information we use to make a decision, is it still a democracy? I still think that if you want a population that is responsible, you have to allow them the responsibility of figuring out what is true and what is not on their own.
TBQH if small companies cannot host user data that is good too. It should be very difficult for companies of any size to house data they are not willing to defend legally.
We just disagree here. We know who can and who can't defend things legally. On a personal level, I don't like my options further reduced for who I can willingly give my data to. Legislate and determine what constitutes private data, data misuse, and/or surreptitious gathering if you want, but non-private information freely and consentually given should want to be freely proliferated.
In the short term it might result in less variety, but only until the tech proliferated and reached maturity. Then services could simply spin up on top of the data that you already host yourself. So you would have to take on the responsibility of finding a good way to host the data you want available (probably from your phone), but after that you would be able to use any service willing to operate on your data, but your data would be in public standards, not proprietary storage inside a facebook/google/amazon data center.
Since it’s a dht, there’s nothing to take down. And since it operates on sha256s of data, it’s implicitly secure. And it uses tor for the rendezvous, so it’s not possible to track who is requesting what, except by unique ID (which can just be a bitcoin wallet address you control).
The hard part is, what do you do about abuse? What if someone spams the network with bots that try to fulfill every request with bad data?
If anyone has research refs in this direction, I’d be grateful to read them. I’d also like to avoid a blockchain if possible, since it seems unnecessary for simple federated distributed data.
It seemed too simple of an idea not to already be done. Hopefully it conceals your IP.
Arg. Nope. It does not. It leaves it up to the client to decide how best to request the content, and by default that almost certainly guarantees no privacy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL37ZVnwpeshG2YXJkun_lyNT...
- Friend another user by adding their key and IP to a trust group.
- When your client boots up, it connects to friend nodes and downloads their recent DHT.
- DHTs from all friends are summed to sort the hashes by descending frequency, perhaps with a time decay factor.
- Display reddit-like UI of content to User: see which files are recently most popular among the set of all your friends.
Possible improvements:
- User could customize time vs vote weighting, script custom sort rules
- Give certain peers greater vote weighting ('best friend' vs 'acquaintance')
- Allow peers to 'tag' hashes to create subreddit like collections of things.
- Allow attachment of metadata to hashes - title, description, etc - figuring out how to handle discrepancies between sources here could be tricky.
- Make client automatically re-host content in your DHT: hosting IS the upvote
https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://github.com/beakerbrowser/fritter
Built on top of dat, it is basically this kind of architecture.
0 - https://github.com/cretz/tor-dht-poc 1 - https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/6 2 - https://github.com/cretz/bine 3 - https://github.com/cretz/yukup/tree/master/yukup/pb/proto
[1] https://swarm-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.ht...
Here's the problem with the US legal system. This regulation (if passed) will likely fail to solve the problem but it will stay on the book and it won't be removed until idk...ever?
I think the real issue here is that social media has moved us to a place where people's real thoughts are visible to all, and the problem we need to solve is how society will work now that the genie is out of the bottle. Social media isn't the cause, it's helped us see the world more clearly.
Solving that problem is going to mean empowering people with the knowledge and tools to assess the quality of information they read and make decisions backed by critical thinking. This is a problem that needs to be solved by society, and expecting a governing body to prescribe to us how our society is meant to think is no solution.
as far as the big tech giants, well twitter's system was proven discriminatory as substituting white/Caucasian with any other race or religion will flag the comments; this was done based on the NYT hiring a tech writer whose twitter comments would be considered hateful but are excused because of the target and the person making them
it is not hard to prey on people's prejudices to take their rights from them. they will gladly accept restrictions if they think it only hurts people they don't like but may find one day they get in some other persons or algorithm's cross hairs
> Democratic Senator
Anything coming from the party without power is dead in the water for now. Maybe it will inspire someone but this is just a waste of a cycle until then.
It's gotten quite bad in the U.S. Common political discourse has devolved into a back and forth of insults, hyperbolic accusations, and sometimes just plain insanity. I agree with you that this will probably be something that will last a while.
If only we could get people to realize that believing something to be true merely because it reinforces a pre-conceived idea or because it's plausibly true is not a path toward finding the truth. How do you have a discussion with someone who believes the political equivalent of a flat Earth?
We also have to remember that discourse waxes and wanes in tone. Throughout the 1800s for example it wasn't uncommon for massive brawls to take place between what were essentially political gangs. Think of the brawls we see today between antifa and right wing groups. Also the 70s saw literally thousands of bombings in NYC by far left groups. Its probable that due to political realignment and inevitable shifts in technology we're going to see this going forward. The most important thing we can all do is keep faith in our fundamental freedoms, like freedom of speech.
With demographic and economic changes and the power/scale of social media the U.S. is facing, I think the intermediate future does not look good for political discourse.
if i may: this example, and my own experience, is consistent with the newspapers from the american civil war, which i read lots of many years ago while my parents dragged me through the american South Eastern states and the myriad covil war national parks an monuments.
further:
> flat earth
just dont. let them vote. and relax. and remember you arent in charge. if you want Texans (for instance) to vote differently, well then... move to Tecas, y'all!
Having lived in both deeply red and deeply blue states in the US, I think most people aren't as crazy or as far apart as they think they are. But many of the people who have lived their whole life in one camp have been trained to think that the other side is literally crazy, and that's a convenient excuse to be afraid of them and not bother seeking to understand them.
A good article along those lines:
https://thewholestory.solutionsjournalism.org/complicating-t...
" Intractable conflicts feed upon themselves. The more we try to stop the conflict, the worse it gets. These feuds “seem to have a power of their own that is inexplicable and total, driving people and groups to act in ways that go against their best interests and sow the seeds of their ruin,” Coleman writes. “We often think we understand these conflicts and can choose how to react to them, that we have options. We are usually mistaken, however.” "
" Once we get drawn in, the conflict takes control. Complexity collapses, and the us-versus-them narrative sucks the oxygen from the room. “Over time, people grow increasingly certain of the obvious rightness of their views and increasingly baffled by what seems like unreasonable, malicious, extreme or crazy beliefs and actions of others,” according to training literature from Resetting the Table, an organization that helps people talk across profound differences in the Middle East and the U.S. "
If you're looking for it, you'll see this behavior everywhere online, including HN, and it's getting worse.
How can you decide if someone is the political equivalent of a flat Earther unless you actually attempt to have a discussion with them? All I really see online is people trying to collect the most virtual points (retweets and likes) within their own echo chamber rather than actually discuss things with people.
The public airwaves are regulated by the FCC. There is no reason to pay broadcasters to prevent some candidate from becoming elected.
Actively and without consequence? No. Simply maintain self control and realize that the more dialog is open, instant, and global, the more it is subject to the loudest and most manipulative. Not necessarily ideal, but better than alternatives.
Is there something Congress should be doing? Perhaps it's not the thing for them to be involved in.
Paul Frazee's 2018 JSConf EU talk on "Formalizing User Rights on the Web" makes an important observation: technology doesn't just interact with civics, it actually drives civics; it defines what the civic structure of a community is going to be (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-ffpAkviM0&t=920).
That there's a serious problem has been obvious for quite some time now, and Silicon Valley has hardly even tried to do anything about it. More likely, they've tended to tune their algorithms to best profit from it.
I'm a small government guy, but if they continue with this disingenuous "we had no idea!" song and dance for much longer, I'd fully support bringing a very big hammer down on the bigger players.
It's a can of worms, especially in a country that is as suspicious of it's government as America, but in my view, one of the biggest changes in people's views of the media (and "truth" in general) is the steady erosion of Journalistic standards - putting infotainment shows and opinion pieces on the same level of journalistic rigour as actually well written, high standard news stories.
News corps will continue to chase money, and money is tied to viewership - which gains from people being engaged through polarising, emotion driven content.
If there are no standards for this kind of thing, people will gravitate towards the stuff that gives you that hit of emotion, and they'll forgo and bend facts to present a story in a way that keeps their viewers at the expense of fair representation of facts, and bias.
In the context of social media, it's tricky, because robo websites and opinion pieces run rife through them, with pieces debunking them and/or apologising for incorrect facts not propogating as hard - so in my view there needs to be some level of targeted/intelligent regulation of social media as a news source. (Content aggregators perhaps taking some level of responsibility of curating what is being shared? Admittedly difficult to do this without getting Orwellian...)
But that's just my opinion, interested to hear if people think it's a load of BS or not.
I definitely think we will look back on my generation (Generation Y) as the guinea pigs for this whole "connected social world" thing. So far it's been too much, too fast, and we have done an abysmal job handling it.
I guess the convenient exception made by the FCC for regulating content shown on TV (OMG nudity!! censor this!!) will prove useful as a precedent. Sad.
Obviously there is disagreement over what is and isn’t obscene.
Right, I must've missed the "except for obscenity" clause. Oh wait, there isn't one... that's just something the courts made up out of thin air.
The freedom of speech includes all speech, even obscene speech. It is never appropriate to respond to speech with force.
What's relevant is the Supreme Court reconsidering a previous decision without any change to the Constitution, but that too has happened before, e.g. Brown v. Board of Education.
I’m not taking a position here, just pointing out the implications of the slavery thing.
The Supreme Court's authority comes from the Constitution. As such, while the Court can rule that a law is unconstitutional, they have no power to permit something which the Constitution specifically prohibits the government from doing (such as infringing on the freedom of speech). All their consistency on this issue implies is they have been failing to do their job and uphold the freedom of speech as plainly written in the First Amendment for a very long time.
Tech gaints have been fusing their role into in form identical to publicly elected govt. Ultimately becoming indistinguishable from elected govt, except they aren't answerable to general public and can make up rules as they go.