The Internet Will Be the Death of Us
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95379&page=1
It is possible that the Internet has increased politically motivated killings, but articles making broad judgement on all of society based on a couple of anecdotes without proper data is just sensationalist nonsense.
I don't see where the author makes "broad judgement of all society." I see an opinion piece, which explicitly calls out in the text it's opinionness ("that's how I've come to feel about the Internet") in which the author claims that the Internet "creates terrorists."
This is not an argument that needs statistics or data to back it up - if the Internet creates even one terrorist, then the author's statements hold. The author provides not one, but several examples to support the claim.
It's like you are refuting the headline only, or some adversarial interpretation of the article.
as if there were no other, much older, much more efficient, way to become a killer. Such as : education (think about special forces training), brainwashing (think about suicide attacks), political activism (think about political terrorism in the 60's/70's in europe), etc.
problem with that kind of articles is that it makes it more acceptable to track everything on the web.
All the methods you have mentioned, are, to some extent in the public eye. Imagine the uproar if anti-semitic articles occured in any of the daily news papers. It is a matter of public record, even if some of the methods come out later. Now imagine how many such articles are published and propagandized in online media, away from the gaze of critics, away from serious action by concerned authorities. The power is in the hands of big data companies and they are driven by greed and stock market performance.
Once the papers die, people will start dying too.
Analogy: People being killed in accidents with horses is not an argument for disregarding traffic deaths. Nor can that fact be used to argue against seat belts or airbags. Only if someone were proposing to go back to horse & carriage would it make sense to reference total effects.
If "the internet" wants to avoid the fate of more regulation, it is most sensible to take its critics' worries serious, and to try to find ways to be a positive force in the world without inviting the sort heavy-handed regulations that will otherwise follow.
As but one example, see spam, or child pornography: in those areas, tech companies, users, and governments found ways to effectively work together mostly without resorting to draconian measures.
For an example of such a process failing, look at the EU's recent "link tax": Because the tech community has been so adamantly opposed to taking journalism's existential fears into account, this rather unwieldy regulation will become law. This could have been avoided if, for example, ad blockers had settled for blocking only dangerous and/or the most annoying ads, an approach that could have easily reduced annoyances by 80%+ while costing publishers far less. Or micropayments that actually work, and users to use them. Etc.
Because of its absurdity, that interpretation of the headline can't be correct. So instead of cheap shots (without evidence) about the NYT, you should maybe try to find a valid interpretation, of which there are several. Personally, I'd focus on the "Us". In this reading, it laments the metaphorical death of community, and society's disintegration into autistic strangers.
Like your racist uncle, before people just heard him rant at the thanksgiving table but now the whole world can read his rants on Facebook. The racism was always there, it is just harder to ignore today.
So I'd like to see proof that the Internet actually helps radicalize people. It is true that it makes it easier to find radical groups, but it also makes it easier to find other views which would hinder radicalization. Before if you made a few radical friends they could easily become your whole world! So my naive assumption is that both forces roughly cancels each other out making an open Internet mostly neutral in terms of radicalization.
A hundred years ago, anarchists were shooting people from Milwaukee to St Petersburg. Marxism-Leninism literally took over multiple countries. As long as you have global movement and communications, you have global spread of ideology, you don't need the Internet.
As long as you have cows you will have hamburgers, indeed! But the availability of cheese can nonetheless change the frequency of hamburger, as well as their individual qualities.
By using the internet for radicalisations (a fact almost universal along recent attackers in the US) these people have quite clearly demonstrated their believe in the effectiveness of the net for their cause.
We usually rely on local, individual decision-making to optimise everything, and I don't see a reason why these people (despite their obvious moral failures) should be an exception from this dramatically successful concept. This evidence becomes even stronger considering we're looking at the subset of "successful" attackers.
It also feels intuitively correct to consider the net a tool that helps such movement. That's just because by default, it seems to help almost every endeavour in some way or other. Radicalising a young white nationalist isn't much different from getting them to vote or buy a specific brand of sneakers. If anything, the specific challenges of illegal activities of a small, geographically dispersed set of loners seem to be a unique fit to this particular tool.
Kara Swisher thread
But there are so many things that are wrong about his opinion!
1. There was never a "hell of not being able to turn off" email. Nor is there one for social media. There are push notifications implemented as defaults in contexts where they shouldn't be, by hungry marketers and product managers. There's a war for your attention and as long as unscrupulous marketers live and breathe, there always will be. Censorship doesn't solve this. Better software does!
2. The argument that online forums create murderers/criminals is an old bogeyman in new clothes. Remember when conservative reactionaries tried to convince us that D&D promoted Satanism? And then that video games created murderers? This is the same, repeatedly disproven argument. Sane, mentally healthy people don't read incel forums and become murderers. Censorship doesn't solve this, either. Better health care and hard, frank discussion about the problems in our society do. And censorship works directly against open discussion.
3. These flawed arguments are used to call for "better policing" of ideas on the Internet. We don't need this. Policing inevitably means regulations which entrench the most well-funded incumbents and make it harder for new services to complete with better ideas. Yes, Twitter definitely needs to police itself better. So does Facebook. But in the meantime, you can deactivate your account and leave, and maybe even switch to an upstart competitor like Mastodon, which millions of people have already done. That's what needs to be easier. Censorship laws will make it harder. If we close the door now we consign ourselves to a future with largely the same incumbents as the present, and that's a recipe for failure. That really would be the death of our society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent
"Seduction of the Innocent is a book by American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, published in 1954, that warned that comic books were a negative form of popular literature and a serious cause of juvenile delinquency. The book was taken seriously at the time, and was a minor bestseller that created alarm in parents and galvanized them to campaign for censorship. At the same time, a U.S. Congressional inquiry was launched into the comic book industry."
The challenge is probably getting something as subtle as Satanic Verses printed; there's a market for overt islamophobia, but they're not interested in analytical heretical views of actual muslims.
It's establishing technologies and customs that reduce the usefulness of the net for extremists.
But all I hear in the tech community are appeals to a sort of moral nihilism that nothing can be done, because it's supposedly impossible to distinguish anti-semitic conspiracies from any other opinion. Or that even the idea of technological changes, or licenses, or codes of conducts, could serve any role in making some tools less useful for the bad guys while preserving its usefulness for everyone else. It's slippery-slope fallacies all the way down. And in many cases, I'm left unsure if some righteous defenders of free speech haven't actually at some point started to identify with the vile cesspool they claim to defend only in the name of the larger concept.
0: (Telling people to leave facebook is also not the best advice, in they that "just don't go to that part of town" does not adequately replace policing)
Any such fix will only open the way for additional vectors of attack. Eventually the myriad vectors of attack for which we must defend, will result in being overwhelmed.
> Sane, mentally healthy people don't read incel forums and become murderers
True - on average. Its worth remembering that we figured out how to convert engineers and educated people into suicide bombers.
The internet and our platforms though excel at efficiently polarizing people.
While the great many of us may not feel the tug, it is just a matter of probability that decides who gets pulled by these algorithms into the dark reaches of the propaganda world.
I've effectively lost good friends to the world of 4chan and the invasive viruses that have taken over the discourse there.
If you see a sudden burst of articles regarding a subject, it may not be a conspiracy, but rather:
- Different people having the same reaction to some set of events
- Coincidence
- Our tendency to find more and more examples once we have noticed any sort of trend
What is this?
Personally, I find that lack of moderation sucks for everyone. If you want to join Gab and say whatever you want you are more than welcome.
That is one of the most pathetic and miserable things I've ever read.
One thing I always come back to when considering this, is that it's _really hard_ for me to rationalise why this should be true.
I can use the Internet without going crazy (I hope. This is obviously self-classified). I think most people can, but even if that's not true, there's certainly a large set of individuals who _don't_ form insane political views and try to push them on others.
What's different in the individuals that seem to be really strongly affected by taking part in extreme "communities", or are even drawn to them in the first place?
What makes someone want to assume the worst of their fellow man? Where does all this anger come from?
It turns out it's really hard for some people (maybe all people?) to go against the flow of a crowd. And if you combine that with the rise of clickbait, learning algorithms and social media, it suddenly becomes really easy to find yourself in a filter bubble surrounded by a very annoyed and consipiracy-believing crowd.
But I don't believe that censorship are good solutions. Strong moderation is needed to keep a forum interesting and worthwhile reading, but that's a practical issue. Government censorship goes way too far.
There should rather be laws that prohibit the use of certain online marketing tools in political campaigns. For example, it should be a punishable felony to use viral marketing in political campaigns that involves any kind of fake comments, replication bots, deliberately falsified news, or fake accounts not tied to real persons. Maybe these tools should also be prohibited for ordinary marketing - IANAL but I think in many countries they already are -, but they should definitely be strictly prohibited in political campaigns.
Right now, it seems that e.g. in the US almost anything goes in political campaigns as long as no foreigners are involved, and we know from the Cambridge Analytica case that some companies act like mercenaries for hire without any conscience or care for democracy. That's what needs to be addressed, not the lunatics and crackpots on forums who will always exist.
The issue is around defining what is fake and what is real, and that extremist governments will do their absolute best to twist the meanings of these words to fit their agenda.
In that case there is no need to abuse laws about political campaigns, though, it suffices to put political opponents into prison and/or take away their rights to be elected, as happens in countries like Turkey and Russia.
I suppose I'm uncomfortable with it, because it implies that some people just inherently have far less agency than others (disconnected from external factors like appearance, capital, etc), and that has all sorts of far-reaching implications...
Combine that with the fact that mental health issues seem to be on the rise, the fact that previously isolated lunatics now are able to talk to each other and validate their thoughts through various filter bubbles, and we end up with a pretty bad mess.
Slowly their radical beliefs peter out and that’s the end of it.
pretending people couldn't find places to air antisemitic or white nationalist sentiments before the internet, or that the internet makes it easier, is silly. if anything the internet makes it harder for these fools, because now if they show their faces or use their real names, they're doxed and harangued at every turn by an internet lynchmob.
> I don’t know exactly how we square free speech and free expression — which are paramount — with a better policing of the internet, but I’m certain that we need to approach that challenge with more urgency than we have mustered so far. Democracy is at stake. So are lives.
right, as opposed to the rosy times before the internet, with timothy mcveigh, the DC sniper, and the unabomber. or how about john wayne gacy?
why this guy is paid to spew inane opinions like this is beyond me
If the internet does not make it easier, nor does it make it possible, or cheaper... Then why would anybody do it?
I very much think it is silly instead to pretend that whatever Plan B these people would have had to find community with like-minded low-lifes, would, almost by definition be worse than their "Plan A".
So they will do everything to destroy the internet, or better yet to be the ones who control it, even turning the NYT into yellow journalism.
The Facebook Dilemma
Alternatively, lets add political opinions to the list of things you can't discriminate on, we are halfway there with religious beliefs, and move on.
But would we know if social media are the cause of all problems? All we have is a correlation.
There are numerous studies at the individual level attributing the rise of various mental health problems to social media. That's not really debatable at this point; what is more interesting are the social repercussions, looking at the effects on whole populations. This is one of the topics of the books I mention.
Everyone feels besieged. It's difficult to keep your head in a disagreement when you feel there is some horribly misguided revolution going on, and you're part of a small band of hold-outs.
It's not just that we spend too much time online with people who will nod at us in agreement. It's that we spend too much time in a state of rage, bickering with people who won't, and are unlikely to ever.
I think the same thing was said back when the printing press was invented, and I think they were right (if you were a Catholic back then you could look at a guy like Luther like a prejudiced idealist), as there is a pretty good correlation between the first use of the printing press in Europe and the European wars of religion. I'd say that in the long term we were better off.
Edit: Stated more accurately as a proposition, the Internet spreads enough disinformation to undo the good brought about by the true information that it also spreads.
This is always the response to any hint that technology isn't the greatest thing ever. But it's like a no-op. The questions that it leaves open: 1. Were the people saying it earlier wrong? 3. Assuming they were wrong, is there any reason to suspect that their wrongness has any relationship with the wrongness of people questioning the effects of a different technology hundreds of years later?
And at some point, it becomes more effective than our ability to combat it.
I'm concerned friction between the left and right escalates into another civil war. I'm concerned that the rise of nationalists leads to another world war.
If we continue to move in the coming decade the same direction we have the past decade, both outcomes are likely.
In this framing, the article is analyzing exactly the same question, so it doesn't make sense to try to deflect it - it's already seeking the explanation as the deflection you are mocking.
And for what it's worth, it seems valuable to try to understand what is going on - why are there so many people that become mass shooters? Has this rate increased?
I mean, the internet used to be a place where people shared deep meaningful content that interested them. Sure, your rock collection or biology blog on the different frog species of some random island probably aren’t interesting to most people, but the effort spent on those digital journals and the insights they provided is the internet at its best.
Social media on the other hand is the internet at its worst. What value can you ever have within the limited confines of a twitter chat? And what value does the ability for billions of anonymous people commenting and/or liking really add to anything? I’ve been around since before eternal September, so I know it can be valuable, but that was probably the last time it was.
I think reddit speaks volumes of the status of social media these days. Almost everywhere you go, it feels like strangers waste their time trying to push whatever political agenda they have, and it works on the internet, because in the internet you don’t notice the people who ignore you and simply walk away. You’re only ever confronted by the people who respond.
I’ve noticed that over time, this simple fact destroys anonymous social media. I say anonymous but I probably should say strangers instead, because Facebook is just as bad. I’ve removed friends on Facebook that where alt-right, just like I’ve cut them out of my life because I didn’t want to debate whether holocaust was real every time I saw them, so these people certainly noticed the impact of their opinions, but all the thousands of hateful bastards and trolls who post nonsense on the few history groups I follow might as well be anonymous and will never know that I disprove of them. Because I’m not going to waste my time on them, I’ll just walk away.
It’s been a while since I’ve even been to reddit. I’ve had wonderful conversations on there, but these days you can barely make it three posts into something before it’s about some crackpot political issue. Just look at /r/technology, it used to be a slow version of HN that also featured arstechica articles, now it’s a political hellhole, and it’s getting worse, probably because I’m not the only person leaving.
I’m not sure what can be done though. Censorship isn’t a great option, but I have to agree with the NYT that it’s not working out great right now. More than a 100 people died of the measles in Europe this year because a bunch of fools got together on the internet and decided vaccines were bad, and that’s just the start of it.
I doubt we’ll really succeed though, I fully expect a lot of the less regulated countries to go full cyberpunk dystopia in the next 25 years, and I think it’ll give a huge advantage to the pro-censorship countries who don’t have to deal with the nonsense, but they’ll fit right into the cyberpunk dystopia, won’t they?
The population has a distribution of characters, most are good people, some are angry and heinous. The internet is no better or worse than the population who uses it. These calls to censor and control aren’t about the technology, they are calls to censor and control what people tell each others. I think every time we are considering a new rule for the internet we should consider what is the physical world equivalent of that rule, where we have wealth of experience and history to assess whether it is a good idea.
Tracking your browsing? It’s like having to show your ID everytime you buy a newspaper for the state to monitor what you read.
Scan emails and chats to monitor extreme groups? It’s like bugging everyone’s phone line and having a mic behind every radiator to check what everyone is telling each others in private.
Kicking people off facebook because of non compliant speech? It’s like a venue cancelling an event because they disagree with the content.
Some will agree with those measures, others won’t. But there is nothing there that is inherently specific to the internet.
Ever go to a townhall, join an interest group for hobbies or exercise or done some vulanteer work? You’ll meet all sorts of people at those, and most of them treat each other well.
I’ve seen my share of assholeness on the internet, I’m old enough to have been on it before usenet has its eternal September after all, and I think it’s different today. Much more political than its ever been.
So you've helped what I consider the problem of social media and targeted everything: you decided to reinforce your echo chamber.
The problem with everything giving you suggestion based on your previous behavior (from Netflix and Youtube to Amazon) make people never even see new things and philosophies. The only way they get a view of "the other side" is through the exaggerated prism of their own side. Recommendation engines should start to let a little percentage of their suggestion be really different things or thought appreciated by people you have nothing in common.
Just as a thought experiment: read a description of whatever group you associate with from some opposite media / blog. See how they'll tend to cherry-pick and misinform. Then go back to your usual media and how they inform you.
I don’t think that puts me inside a bubble though. It’s not like I avoided the philosophical origin works on fascism when I was studying history at the university some decades ago. I know what these people stand for, and I know their opinions, hell I probably have a good deal of insight in their plights thanks to my job, I just don’t want to associate myself with them.
I mean, I don’t hang out with a lot of drug dealers either, but I have a general idea of what it is they do in society and I won’t avoid reading their opinions of things.
I think you support my point more than you’d like though, because social media already put me in that bubble thanks to algorithms. I’m left-wing, so I see left-wing things on social media, but that’s exactly why I consider it such a terrible place for information.
I read a print newspaper for news, it’s a fairly conservative newspaper, and because that falls out of my left-wing profile, I’ve not once seen an internet add for it, though I’ve been a happy subscriber to it for a decade.
Unfriending someone you dislike on Facebook does absolutely nothing other than make your life a little better.
The proportion of the internet that hold PHD's goes down every day. That's fine