I know social media platforms can create mobs, but since when are we all scared that:
> That digital rights and press freedom advocates might now sympathize, if not agree, with Sri Lanka’s action.
This seems questionable to me, and problematic for people trying to find each other.
However, there’s a vast difference between targeted censorship of forbidden topics and a temporary blanket ban on certain forms of communication. This isn’t good, but it’s pretty mild. Temporary limits on fundamental freedoms during an emergency are pretty common, even in the good old USA.
I get why people are making excuses though. Pretty much no political systems in the world can actually exist with truly free speech, because they all rely on controlling free speech to function. And now that actual free speech got out of their control it threatens them and makes them push against it, promoting restrictions to free speech.
What Facebook enables and optimizes for can hardly be called free speech. Articulation is not encouraged, merely the spreading of thoughts (both good and bad). Engagement has been optimized for advertising purposes. It led to banal agreement in the form of likes and reshares. There is hardly any discourse, people get silo-ed in echo chambers, and the extreme ends of the spectrum get magnified. Confirmation bias rules, and bad ideas aren't defeated by good ideas because they hardly come into contact.
So no, Facebook isn't enabling free speech, as much as they'd like to claim they are. At best they are a communication tool, nothing more.
Freedom of information flow isn't the same thing. Democracy works best with an informed electorate. Information flow without discourse is just indoctrination. And that's what Facebook (unintendedly) optimizes for.
Depending on your definition of "thought".
That's a rather strong opening to limiting free speech. Who gets to decide that my speech was without thought? Is there an approval process? Can I repeal the decision? Do I have to document my thoughts before I speak to prove later that I did indeed think before I spoke out against the people that make those distinctions?
Now they can finagle around with it as much as they like, try to machine-learning this, machine-learning that, but it isn't going to get around that it fundamentally operates by hijacking people's limbic system. And people are ultimately more clever and dastardly than whatever machine-learning they are going to throw at it to try to sanitize the discourse.
It's probably easier to teach yoga/tai chi/meditation/whatever to all of Facebook's users than to fix Facebook.
Exactly. If people are rioting, for example because their football team won the Super Bowl (http://fortune.com/2018/02/05/eagles-win-super-bowl-riot-psy...), the city may impose a curfew to give everyone a chance to cool off. This just sounds like the digital equivalent to me, and while it's unfortunate, it seems like the best solution to the problem.
Taking power from a non-democratic leadership is incredibly difficult, risky and almost always violent. And non-democratic leadership very rarely self-democratize. Unfortunately, we don't know if much of the world wants democracy as it's aggressively stamped out in many places and illegal to pursue it.
While I agree with you, that it’s difficult, sometimes bloody, and elites almost never give up power voluntarily (isn’t that true even in democracies though?), one can see that it can be done.
Even in “speech,” there is a matter of quality — quality that has been taken for granted in much of the “free” world. It is this quality that is the responsibility of speech.
Now, on topic, another comment on this thread points out quite well that some of our social media platforms are not designed for quality. They were designed to be viral.
I agree with you on the short-comings of social media though, with their algorithms designed to push up the things that make people out-raged (those that go viral the fastest) and enable people to deepen and solidify their beliefs with very narrow curated feeds. These have led to hate crimes all over the world. There is definitely a dangerous element to them that people who harp on about 'free-speech' seem to want to sneer at.
The fact is, those countries where people "just don't care" happen to be countries that violently suppress opposition. The opposition does not necessary want fairness and freedom, but they want participation on power.
There is always mechanism for fighting out power and ideas - prison or election.
What the heck is this supposed to mean? What, I suppose that if people in China wanted democracy they could just go and get it? Oh wait, not really, they get silenced, arrested, and massacred... Is there even a place on Earth where a democratic transition was achieved not by force against the holders of power?
And if most poor people didn't want to be poor, they would have chosen to be rich. And if most homeless people wanted to live in homes, they would have chosen it.
Germany tempers it with the legal doctrine of "practical concordance", where a global maximum over all Basic Rights is sought, not just a local maximum for Free Speech, and all other rights lose.
It's also in the Human Rights convention.
In Europe a few counties has minor limitations on a few sensitive subjects. Don't confuse that for censorship, or free speech restrictions.
Why do not those "minor" limitations fall under censorship or free speech restriction?
(Copy pasted from web)
Forcing people to slow down in their ability to react to a massive amount of information/emotion, by letting them sit on for a while may not be a bad idea.
All too often a flurry of incomplete information leads only to a large degree of noise that organically sorts itself out inside of a couple of days.
Giving people time to think and force them to slow down is a proven method to prevent all out chaos.
What would happen if a US president were assassinated now? Several cities burned after Martin Luther King was killed. Lots of LA burned after officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted. And now, with social media? It'd be total chaos.
People have become less violent over the years and with social media responsible organizers have a better shot at preventing violence.
One deranged man not liberals in general. There have been numerous right wingers shooting up churches and mosques and planned parenthood buildings.
I'd say it's the people going "But not MY side!" that we really need to be worrying about here.
But it is hard not to see that extreme ideology drives the agenda of one or a few sides, while most sides are willing to compromise with reasonable, evidence-based solutions that the ideologists reject outright. It is irresponsible to say in that case that both sides are being unreasonable - that false equivalence promotes an unhealthy stalemate and gives cover to those who blindly delay progress.
Liberalism in today’s society is stuff like taxing people to pay for health care, or living wages, or supporting the right of workers to unionize.
The Weathermen’s stated political goal was to overthrow U.S. imperialism. That is not something I would lump in the same basket as liberalism.
So I would say that this isn’t an example of liberal thinking at all, whether from the 60s or any other decade. Just because it isn’t “conservative” doesn’t make it liberal, and trying to lump everyone into a false dichotomy is rather Fox News, in my opinion.
But maybe that was AIM, not Weather Underground.
People here are finding each other through traditional point-to-point comms -- SMS and phone calls. The social media blackout probably saved lives today and prevented a lot of retaliatory bloodshed.
Recent amplification of fake news and violence(30+ deaths attributed) on social media in India probably plays a big factor, as does last year’s anti-Muslim riots in Sri Lanka.