A Framework for Moderation
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
The notion behind this seems to be:
"We must protect the idiots of the world from terrible ideas."
Why does this rub me the wrong way so much? I guess it's such a depressing view of our fellow humans?
I’m old enough to remember when Judas Priest (the 80’s rock band) was accused of hiding subliminal messages in their songs convincing their listeners to commit suicide, after a kid did so while happening to be listening to Judas Priest. It seems absolutely ridiculous in hindsight, but people believed it, and it was taken completely seriously at the time: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/judas-prie.... The logic here is essentially the same: some internet message boards are “egging somebody on” to do something that they would not otherwise have done, which results in death, so the internet message boards themselves are to blame, and must be censored.
There is a reason we dedicate academic branches to these phenomena — they are not nearly as straight forward as argued in this thread.
There is something unique, I think, about these message boards, though. I think most people would agree, the overwhelming majority of humans are reasonably decent—they're not going to murder others, are not overtly racist, etc. And throughout human history, these truly 1-in-a-million horrible people have been isolated, unable to find fellow horribles to befriend and egg each other on. The internet has changed that. No matter how unusual or awful your interests may be, it's trivial to find another group of people who share in these thoughts and interests. I don't know what the solution is, or if there even is one, but this does feel like something truly new.
The novelty is that violence is now being mobilized against subcultures within larger society, rather than comfortably against foreign cultures in far off lands. What we're witnessing is the democratization of media-incited violence, from the general democratizing aspect of social media.
Previously, the privilege was reserved for large corporations that paid the traditional media big bucks to support their massive wars. Now individuals can invest sweat equity in a microcult to accomplish the same on a small scale. And the reason we keep hearing so much about it is that the incumbent gatekeepers are not happy about the competition!
Before the internet, they’d mostly be unable to find each other. With the internet, they can build self-reinforcing “communities” on the basis of hate, intolerance, or really anything. If they just stayed in that bubble it’d be fine, but unfortunately sometimes they bring machine guns to department stores.
As you say, such "communities" existed before the Internet. It's just that now, they can better organize to affect the real world. I think Forrest Gump's observation applies here. Even 8chan had some sort of ideology justifying what they said and did. Even the worst scoundrels of history used words like "love" and justice." (And yes, Godwin's Law comes into play if we go down that rabbit hole! So let's not.) If we are to gauge how toxic a group is, I think we need to go to first principles and measure how driven by viral outrage an online group is.
It's natural for people to come together because they are outraged. However, when continuing the cycle of outrage, driving more attention, driving group membership, driving more outrage continues for its own sake, there is a problem. It shouldn't be outrage and attention driving a group. It should be higher principles.
Unfortunately, outrage is a fundamental fuel of virality in 2019. Today, we need to be skeptical of actors who lean too heavily on the cycle of outrage, whether they're openly reprehensible, or if they merely dress their movement in high language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
In 2019, the world has long known to be skeptical of religions gone wrong, which we call cults. We need to develop the same kind of skepticism to groups actually ruled by outrage, not principle.
Edit: removed comments on US “ag gag” laws cited in the linked article, after I read a little more and learned that they may not be so similar as was implied in this piece.
Neither viewpoint absolutely is true, but "As ever, if it can be abused, it will be abused" is the better heuristic. The people pushing the abusive laws are doing so as their day jobs, while their victims necessarily have other livelihoods that constrain their efforts. They don't simply propose the topic once, see that it has no support, and go home. Whomever they're working for has longstanding goals, and each win they get is a step normalizing a bit more of their desired regime.
This is why even when the Internet community strongly rebukes new Internet censorship laws (SOPA being a recent example), the same bullshit just comes back again - maybe tweaked to be a little less aggressive, maybe just using a better outrage-event as justifications. And every time it passes, it's a tooth in the ratchet - heads they win, tails we play again. Capitulating a round just accelerates the process.
'If this were a normal circumstance we would say "Yes, it’s really horrendous content, but we’re not in a position to decide what content is bad or not." But in this case, we saw repeated consistent harm where you had three mass shootings that were directly inspired by and gave credit to this platform. You saw the platform not act on any of that and in fact promote it internally.'
Okay, so you ban 8chan. Now they move to another chan... there's about 5 different "bunkers" running the same or similar software to what powered 8chan and with many of the same users that various boards have moved to right now. Some of the larger of those bunker chans are actually on distributed networks.
So now what? You have to ban distributed networks? You shrug your shoulders and say "oh well, we tried"? This is where the slope comes in. There's no good ending to it. Worse, as we've seen with 8chan, the farther you push people from the mainstream, the more extreme they seem to become.
This simply isn't true, it's trivial to set up clearnet proxies into such services and they can be easily treated as disposable.
The message you send them seems more to be that they need to hunt and hide more for "the truth". The need for that further contributes to extremeified views. It turns out pushing people into deeper and darker recesses doesn't improve their sociability. You can see this difference from communities that used to exist for the content that spawned these on reddit, Twitter to 4chan leading to the spawning of Voat, Gab, 8chan and others. The farther down the line you go the more extreme you get.
It's entirely analogous to the religion <--> cult spectrum. The former is found beneficial by many and has much to do with community. The latter is really about exploitation and control. In 2019, we need to be skeptical of groups that use outrage to spread, much as we're skeptical of cults. (And this, despite how flowery or "good" their language sounds.)
Regardless of how much I hate 8chan, I'm still pretty worried about the precendent these kinds of actions set.
I don't think the internet is fundamentally different here. You could have made the same argument when the printing press came out.
Can I steal other's content and sell it, no, but I would call existing regulations almost non-existent for original content.
Publishers. There are documented cases of writers and genres being blacklisted and suppressed. (Though in fairness, you might find more than a few of them unsavory.)
I can buy a high end typesetting laser printer and print anything I want on it- if it isn't child porn/top secret/libelous I can print anything I want that I've originated.
Sure, but good luck with the promotion and distribution.
It may be 'moderated' in the sense of an optical cable vs a copper one- by its nature there is impedance in the copper one limiting its potential carrying capacity. In that sense the internet vs traditional publishing have a different ability to scale. But Hitler's rise didn't need the internet- Mein Kampf found fertile soil due to economic depression and already extant racist attitudes latent in the populace.
China finds ideas contained in books by Locke/Milton/Paine or the Magna Carta to be extremely dangerous- and that they are and I'm sure they're be ingested wholesale in Hong Kong right now, where the Great Firewall isn't in full effect.
We need to counter evil thought with the only available agent that will actually work- better argued thought that seizes on vigorous ideas that instill a deep abiding respect for their fellow men/women and the potential of civil society to overcome the divisions we've placed among ourselves.
You could spread your message further by printing lots of posters and putting them up in your city, but it would obviously not be comparable in reach to the Internet. Newspapers that do have reach comparable to the Internet all choose to exercise their legal right to decide for themselves what is too hateful to spread. Cloudflare has now chosen to exercise that same right, to a tiny extent.
I think attacking this from the access to guns angle seems far preferable than access to information.
But the person you're responding to does. They may not admit it to themselves but that's what they want.
When I see this kind of discussion and how "Internet helps terrorists" I imagine them in a military uniform doing the same speech about the Résistance.
There is no law that says you have to use Cloudflare and if they ban you, you're not allowed to be on the Internet. It just costs you time and effort, possibly money, hopefully reach.
What leads you to believe that the person they're responding to doesn't simply wish more private entities would exercise their legal right to listen to their conscience on who is too hateful to do business with? That's not censorship of important information, that's the free market of ideas at work.
The Stratechery article explicitly discusses this phenomenon and endorses it. What leads you to believe that the person they're responding to disagrees with the article on this point?
We on HN should know more than anybody that certain design decisions will nudge communications in certain directions (compare facebook to twitter to hacker news).
They have different goals one could argue and that their design reflects these goals and one wouldn’t be wrong. Only: the goals on the bigger plattforms are more shaped by advertisement and data collection needs than by the valid interests of the users. Similar to the difference between slotmachines and a board game — both let people play, but the former doesn’t has the best for its player in mind.
So when you say this is about the nature about our fellow humans, I’d argue that it is about the nature of the digital Zoos we developed for them.
Easy resharing is, by itself, enough to make rumors go viral. Chain letters and all the other crap you see on Snopes depend on nothing more sophisticated than email forwarding.
Active content filtering (spam filters that work) is necessary, but the platforms that largely replace email don't have them.
Because you at least subconsciously understand the real intent behind the message. "We must stamp out wrongthink by eroding your rights"
I worry that fear will result in rash decisions, creating widespread censorship abilities and banning anonymizing services that can be used to bypass them.
It's just not like other kinds of human communication that we've had for our entire history as a species.
Human psychological evolution is thousands of years behind the technical capabilities we've developed in the last few decades. A bit of thoughtfulness in the governance of those capabilities isn't too much to ask.
The alternative to trusting humans is not to just leave ourselves open to the vagaries of the winds, or whatever, but to allow malicious actors to take advantage of an unregulated medium to pursue their own interests. Not sure why anyone should think that's a better outcome.
I don't have to host Nazi speech and you are free to do so if you choose.
It's actually a summary of the legal regimes involved, and some thoughts on the ethics of moderation, as it applies to entities at different places in the stack.
I have yet to see an article placing the blame on the guy that pulled the trigger. Why is everyone else but him responsible for his actions?
The virtue of individual responsibility is awesome until you deal with things done by more than one individual because of a common cause.
Free speech is being stiffled by corporations that offers shared spaces, that even a government is unable to provide.
The government is bound to the Constitution, while some companies bigger than some countries in terms of capital, are not bound to these checks and balance.
Really?
You'd allow a Nazi to spout propaganda at your family and guests?
Why should anyone else have to host them on their private platforms?
Because it's hard to draw the line between acceptable speech and unacceptable speech, and once it becomes acceptable to silence people that power will be abused, especially if it is in the hands of large corporations. The logic is exactly the same as why the government shouldn't ban speech.
> Are you a free speech absolutist at your own house party?
My house is not a public platform so that's a silly analogy.
Because private platforms are the public now.
It's like saying: "You are a Nazi I don't like your beliefs, you are not allowed to express them on my house"
So the Nazi leaves and starts preaching on the sidewalk, but the HOA comes by and says "You are a Nazi, and we don't like your beliefs. We own and maintain these sidewalks, and we are kicking you off"
So the Nazi stands in the middle of the road to preach, but the government had long since let private corporations build and maintain the roads in this neighborhood and Streets LLC comes by and says "Sorry, we own these roads and we don't like your beliefs, get out"
Thus, there is no public space for the Nazi to express his beliefs in, because all public space is now owned by private corporations.
Tying the analogy back to computers:
Even if the Nazi tries to host their own blog on their own computer in their own house, Comcast can say: "Sorry, we don't like transmitting your ideas from your house over our wires to the internet, get out"
Why do you insist on treating internet companies as if they were nation states?
The question is when a website/service should be classed a public utility.
> However, encouraging violence
hmmm
Whatever the controller of some botnet's likely course of action is in response to the distribution of content they don't like, it doesn't change the fact that Cloudflare is merely providing a content distribution service, a service that publishers could go elsewhere to obtain or even build for themselves.
> Radicalized is a story of a darkweb-enforced violent uprising against insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife's terminal cancer.
Also, that claim was by the owner, not founder, of 8chan. The founder of 8chan now disavows it and celebrated on Twitter when Cloudflare took it down.