I Thought the Web Would Stop Hate, Not Spread It
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
i think applies to this scenario as well.
personally i think the internet has outgrown it's "flower power" stage so we either should adjust our sentiment or do something about it
You may disagree with the people who are doing this now, but that doesn't mean that censorship is the correct way to solve the problem. It's not going to make any of them change their minds.
> we either should adjust our sentiment or do something about it
What are you implying?
i'm not saying i disagree with anyone or that we should censor everything on the internet, i'm just saying that the internet is no longer that obscure thing where everything is rainbows and unicorns and has become of big corporate and political interest.
so we _should_ excpect it to be like the newspaper, the television, the pamflets in your mailbox, etc. (re: "I cannot tell you how sad that is to write, because when I first saw the internet way back when, I hoped that it would help eliminate the attitudes that had fueled those horrible letters to me. I naïvely thought a lone man sending a reporter a missive of malevolence could not find such refuge on the wide-open internet, where his hate would be seen for what it was and denounced and exorcised"): lies and ways to steer you have become part of the game and it's up to you to see through that.
at this point "do something about it", i think, has boiled down to "delete the internet".
You want the internet to degrade to a centrally-controlled, one-way medium rather than enabling the kind of dialogue you and I are having right now?
> lies and ways to steer you have become part of the game and it's up to you to see through that.
This is arguably how it has always been. Never before have we had such great resources to see through things. Sometimes, what we end up seeing makes us uncomfortable, because the world isn't as nice as we would like for it to be. We can either accept truths and work to change them to be better, or accept pleasant fictions and outright lies to spare ourselves.
Deleting the internet won't solve any of these issues. Well, it might help teen bullying some....
most of us consume content rather than generating it and as the internet has become of such great interest to big companies and governments, parts of the (news) information we consume is biased and sometimes plain false, just like it is in the offline world.
> Never before have we had such great resources to see through things absolutely true, but people have to be willing to see through things / be skeptic. i think (assumption) the largest part of the people using the internet do not question what they read and are not likely to do so in the future, hence my suggestion to "delete the internet"...
There is a lot of evidence that much comes from powerful parties such as governments and political actors, who seek to promote conflict, division, and/or the far right (EDIT: and others too, but the far right seems especially prominent). For example, one report I read said that the Russia government's Facebook activity for the 2016 U.S. election focused "overwhelmingly" on race,[0] and recently I read that Russian government Twitter bots sent thousands of tweets criticizing NFL anthem protestors.[1] I'm going to try to find the links and add them. (None of this is surprising: During the Cold War the Soviets tried to aggravate U.S. racial division; for example, a former officer said that they would send racist hate mail to African-American leaders, then 'leak' to the press that the leaders had received hate mail.)
The real question is how powerful the technology is. How effectively can you manipulate public opinion? I hardly see that issue discussed.
[0] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/05/11/what-we-found-... More coverage: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/30/facebook-...
[1] https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/10/22/russian-twitter-trolls-nfl... which links to https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-russian-trolls-inflamed-nfl...
EDIT: Minor edits to make my comments more consistent with the citations.
The "they're all russian bots!" meme is getting old, and doesn't actually bear scrutiny in reality. If you don't believe me, then go and spend some time in the darker parts of the internet to see what the discourse is like. Engage with the people there if you're feeling brave.
Not what I said at all. That Russian grassroots propaganda campaigns exist certainly does bear up to scrutiny.
No, “corporations and governments” are not “a single centralized power”.
A corporation might be in another context.
Multiple of each, however, attempting through similar media to influence the same narrative are, however, not.
Somehow it's the fault of a Saudi prince's exploratory investments that people in the USA want to use their constitutionally-protected right to free speech on the Internet? How absolute dare they!
There is no such thing as hate speech. There is free speech, and there is censorship. Kara Swisher seems to be mad that there is not yet enough censorship for her tastes, which I think would extend to domain registrar or even ARIN deplatforming of any site or network that dares host the comments of someone who says something she is uncomfortable with.
I find it reprehensible that anyone can even consider curtailing speech as a kneejerk reaction to violence. It's crystal clear to me that further censorship is actually going to add fuel to the fire, as those with evil opinions will have no outlet, no chance of counterargument or of being convinced toward nonviolent action, no support from other people in their emotional struggle. As though censorship will be successful this time at enabling the security of the establishment, even though it didn't work in China or Russia.
We'll painfully rediscover the lessons of the past, probably with more death and mayhem. Just as much of it will be on the hands of the censors as is on the hands of those who facilitate speech; it's up to you to decide if that's a nonzero amount.
Are you actually proposing better mental healthcare for Americans (which would be super awesome), or are you suggesting that gab.com and its likes count as "emotional support"?
I do believe that everyone needs a bit of community and a bit of emotional support. The Internet can indeed provide this for people, but there's a risk when people get into echo-chambers - regardless of whether we're talking about right wing extremists, or tumblr social justice warriors. The ideal state is one in which we're still continually introduced to things we may not completely agree with, and one in which we're all free to debate and discuss even controversial topics.
Deplatforming and censorship hurt that effort, drive it underground, and further the formation of deep discontent.
I find it reprehensible that anyone can even consider curtailing speech as a kneejerk reaction to violence.
False equivocations that you don't even really believe yourself aren't exactly good counter-arguments.
Ugly openly available hate groups attract followers of various sorts and allow them to bounce hateful ideas back and forth among themselves that serve to cement the truth of these poorly thought out world views as part of their deeper view of the world.
Those who are mild are more likely to find themselves subserviently listening to those who are bolder and more extreme. The latter will certainly garner a larger audience and gradually seem "truer" to the rest of the community.
The people who merely wrongly believe that jewish people are somehow hogging all the money garner less attention than those who believe they are conspiring to harm us all and calls for violent action are heard above those who call for reason and sanity.
People self select groups of people to communicate with who reinforce their existing beliefs because this is intellectually comfortable and they rarely change their opinion when they rarely encounter a dissenting view.
You probably can't keep deviants from talking to one another short of implementing 1984 but it seems highly likely that we could in fact probably drive most of the trash underground if we were so inclined and thus keep a lot of people out of the intellectual mud in the process.
The argument that "it wont work" seems to be from a deficit of imagination or wishful thinking.