Hacker News Reader

Comment by choko | Hacker News Reader

"But social media, Berners-Lee said, was still being used to propagate hate."

This is one of the side effects of an open web, and one I feel we should live with in the interests of freedom. The only alternative of which I am aware is to police speech through some kind of authority. I'm not sure that there is an authority in existence that I would trust with that level of power.

In a perfect world, we would be able to de-platform those that incite violence against others (for any reason), but we can't even come to an agreement on what that means. Some people argue that criticizing a marginalized group is hate speech and further argue that hate speech is violence. Should some people be shielded from valid criticism because they identify as a certain group?

It sounds like a simple concept, but the more you explore it, the less simple it becomes.

View on HN

>This is one of the side effects of an open web, and one I feel we should live with in the interests of freedom. The only alternative of which I am aware is to police speech through some kind of authority.

I strongly believe this is nor correct. You can mitigate a lot of this stuff through better design, without censorship. Most important point: Open Web is the idea that people can find info they're looking for, not that anyone on the web can bombard everyone else with information. Modern social media is optimized for the latter. Algorithms chose for you, and they chose badly, and you have no control over it.

Jaron Lanier has a lot of talks about incentives and why current social media is bad for you. His hypotheses seem plausible.

That just means the person writing the algorithm becomes the authority. As we recently saw with Amazon's hiring practices, algorithms have bias as well. Granted, a better designed system might not have made this mistake, but since humans designed it, can it ever be perfectly unbiased?

Without actual censorship (which I'm against) the offending material still exists, but would only be found by those who seek it. I do like that approach personally, but I don't think it would be enough to satisfy many people who prefer to eradicate offensive speech through authoritarian measures.

>Algorithms chose for you, and they chose badly.

The algorithms don't choose badly. They actually choose very well. It's just their optimization function is different -- their optimization goal is more clicks and more ad revenue, not the society's good.

Click-based revenue model encourages pretty dark sides of humanity.

>In a perfect world, we would be able to de-platform those that incite violence against others (for any reason)

Should we really do it for any reason? Are there not some groups of which a certain level of violence (enforced by the state) is good? I can think of many groups of people who engage in actions which we agree it is good to respond with some violence to enslave them in cages. Well, that is one interpretation of what we do when we put someone in prison, but I think we cannot divorce imprisoning someone or putting other punishments on them that are backed by imprisonment from the threat of violence that is put on prisoners to comply with the rules of imprisonment.

At the core, laws are enforced by violence or threat thereof and are largely based upon subjective morals. Talk about adding laws is thus talk about bringing violence to some group of people. And sometimes (say laws against murderer or theft), it is required for us to have a civilized society.

I believe that inciting violence against others is wrong, but at no point did I argue that we shouldn't have laws against aggressive behavior. Those are two different concepts.

I think laws are a subset of inciting violence against others. It is more controlled than random mob violence, but it is still violence. For example, some extreme groups support adding laws that will require minorities to leave the country or be imprisoned. That they argue for doing this through the legal framework instead of random mob violence doesn't excuse it in any fashion.

I respectfully disagree that advocating for changes in the legal framework constitutes inciting violence, unless you use the most broad and generic definition of advocating violence. Thanks for the civil discourse though.

There's nothing wrong with inciting or carrying out justified violence—which is to say, a violent response to similar violence practiced by others. Your examples of murder and theft, for example. A murderer cannot rationally object to being put to death; a thief cannot argue against being fined without self-contradiction.

The problem is unjustified violence. And I agree with you that most proposals for new laws (including the subject of this article) are advocating for unjustified violence.

The problems arises not in the easy to agree laws (murder, theft) or the easy to condemn laws (ban on homosexuality), but with the ones which are debatable on if responding with violence is justified. Many would say that violence against pot dealers isn't justified, but what about heroin dealers? What about opiate dealers? Pot dealers who sell to teens?

If it's "debatable" then it isn't justified. The only universal, objective justification for a violent response is that the other person already did the same thing, and thus cannot claim that responding in kind is wrong without simultaneously condemning their own actions. If you claim that your response is justified on subjective grounds then they can just as easily claim that their actions were justified from their subjective point of view, at which point the whole situation devolves into a case of might-makes-right and justification becomes irrelevant.

None of your "debatable" examples would be justified because the actions you are proposing a violent response to are not themselves violent. Even when the original action is violent, the response must be proportional: applying the death penalty for theft would not be justified because it isn't a response in kind.

Complaining about an open web is just a proxy for complaining about establishment ideas being challenged. You see in Britain with the complaints against the Leave Campaign; you see it in the United States with the rise of Trump; you see it in the European Union with the complaints against far-right candidates. The governing elites don't like it when you challenge their assumptions, and instead of making an argument about their positions or governing better, they complain about Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

I'm American and racists have always been here, Trump isn't new. And in Europe, it isn't insane to want to control your borders and not have rules made in Brussels that you must follow made by bureaucrats that aren't accountable to your nation. It's a crazy idea I know, but politicians have problems with these notions and blame the tools the opposition used to organize instead of being better.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter have problems and they need some reforms, but the rise of companies is not nearly the sinister event people make it out to be.

People seem to be downvoting you without replying, which doesn't seem very helpful.

I'm sure there are some people who fit your first paragraph, but I don't think that's the major issue.

The ideal of free speech is that people can honestly disagree, and state their positions, a discuss the issues. Then the best ideas will win out. But our current social media environment does the exact opposite.

It appears that the way social media now works is that it drives people farther apart. The Red team is moving farther to the right, the Blue team is moving farther to the left, and very little real discussion of issues is happening between them. Much of the cause of that seems to be built into the way our social media is designed.

The "red vs blue team" thing is a US thing, and it is created by the structure of our political (and, especially, our electoral) system. First-past-the-post voting, combined with widely open primaries, result in both parties gradually drifting apart over time, and dragging their constituencies with them. That this erupts into verbal (and, occasionally, non-verbal) violence is not surprising, but what you see on social media is the symptom, not the cause.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com