Sacha Baron Cohen Uses ADL Speech to Tear Apart Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Sacha Baron Cohen Uses ADL Speech to Tear Apart Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook

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231 pointssmacktoward474 comments

This is a thought-provoking speech.

Do yourself a favor and watch it in its entirety -- before commenting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

Among the many thorny issues and questions raised by Cohen:

* The business model of social media companies is powered by engagement, which is greatest for content that arouses the basest instincts and feelings of human beings, including fear and hatred. Social media companies earn more with the basest content.

* Social media companies are ideal propaganda machines, enabling anyone willing to appeal to the worst in human nature to reach billions of people with a click.

* Do social media companies bear responsibility for the negative impact their products have on society, in the same way that, say, car companies bear responsibility for faulty engines or airplane manufacturers bear responsibility for faulty plane designs?

* Are social media companies publishers, like broadcast TV networks, magazines, and newspapers? Should social media companies be held to decency standards, like all publishers?

I'm barely scratching the surface.

Do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing!

Thank you for providing a summary of this, and suggesting that the whole video should be watched before commenting. I attempted to produce a similar summary when posting the video, but I wasn't able to create one as succinct and eloquent as this one.

These are all valid points but as humans we’ve never encountered anything like this so we shouldn’t think about it using old world examples.

Also think to yourself why this is front and center? Whereas cigarettes literally kill millions a year and they are perfectly legal. Why? Because politicians cant control their agendas with open social media platforms.

Corporates should not be responsible for regulating their content, unless they are publishers. Social media platforms should be open with the onus on society to teach truth and government to prevent threatening behavior.

Publishers should then be directly held accountable for anything that’s posted on their sites. Fake news, racism, slander, etc.

>> Also think to yourself why this is front and center? Whereas cigarettes literally kill millions a year and they are perfectly legal. Why? Because politicians cant control their agendas with open social media platforms.

The current crop of populist politicians are benefiting far more from social media platforms than they are from cigarettes.

> Also think to yourself why this is front and center? Whereas cigarettes literally kill millions a year and they are perfectly legal.

This is a flimsy comparison. The sale and use of cigarettes is tightly regulated, with sale banned to minors and use banned in most public and commercial spaces. If there was anywhere close to this level of restriction on social media usage you might have a point.

P.S. Facebook also contributed to the killing of thousands in Myanmar. So there’s that.

A UI-free YouTube link: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ymaWq5yZIYM

Another alternate link without the usual Youtube junk: https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

I don't know what is that website but it took 35 seconds to have a DOM on a 50Mbps connection.

I might prefer Youtube-nocookie.

Agreed. It’s disappointing to see multiple comments here with ad hominem attacks on Cohen instead of discussing what he said.

> The business model of social media companies is powered by engagement

This is the business model of many companies and industries, including advertising and marketing, legacy media companies, and gaming.

Why is this unique to social media? This is the media establishment as a whole. E.g. news capitalizes on constant doom and gloom b/c that's been getting them the eyeballs for the longest. Notice how all the blockbusters are full of violence, horror and sex.

Oh, this applies to social media too. Super surprised. Thanks Sacha.

In his speech he specifically says it isn't different than other media establishments. He goes on to point out that other media establishments can't get away with what happens on social media. He certainly speaks from experience on that as someone who has routinely fought against the standards and practices of the MPAA and various television networks. So why does social media get away without those same restrictions?

Well, I'd say the established media gets away with much more than on social media, but established media is more uniform in their output so it is easier to squash dissenting voices. Also, the movie industry regularly outputs much more extreme content than has appeared on any social media.

In my opinion the real complaint is the old guard against the up and coming media, and they feel threatened and are looking for a way to bring the new media into conformity with their worldview monopoly.

In the video, Sacha mentions the New Zealand mass murder streamed on Facebook[1] and the promotion of explicit holocaust denial and antisemitic propaganda via social media.

These are not examples I see occur in established media without reprisal.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/03/19/new-zealand...

These occur in social media without reprisal?

And it is partly a matter of worldview. I consider abortion to be murder, and it is glamorized across both the news media and in the fictional media. That's why I say the problem is more that the old guard has achieved better uniformity with its output.

I grew up in a tightly controlled communist place but I always thought their censorship/propaganda bureaus would have salivated over the power of the social media platforms for that sort of thing.

I watched it entirely. He is arguing for censorship (because terrorism, pedophiles and racism), nothing new here. Attacking Facebook of course helps to gain attention of people who are happy to be separated from freedom.

That’s exactly what I got from it. What he’s proposing is censorship. Have everything posted anywhere be vetted by someone.

I also think that saying “Google shows you all these neonazi sites” (probably not an accurate quote, but he said something of that sort) demonstrates ignorance of what Google is supposed to be.

> what Google is supposed to be

And what Google is supposed to be?

They stopped being a dictionary-like search engine some time ago.

These days they seem to show personalized web page recommendations, loosely based on the search terms.

Maybe I need to rewatch it, but what I got from it was that he's not arguing against the right to free speech, he's arguing against allowing the right to free speech to impinge on other rights - specifically in his words, the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

>he's arguing against allowing the right to free speech to impinge on other rights

This is what so many people miss in this debate. We already outlaw a wide variety of speech that infringes on the rights of others. You can't threaten violence against me because that infringes on my rights. You can't slander me because it infringes on my rights. You can't reproduce my copyrighted speech because it infringes on my rights. You can't use my image to advertise your product because it infringes on my rights.

The debate isn't free speech versus no free speech. We already decided against universal free speech. The debate is now where do we draw the line between one person's rights and another person's rights.

Of course the problem, though, is that certain folks have imagined a right “not to be offended” into existence out of thin air. Or imagined that certain speech is “literally violence”.

In almost any debate there are going to be people that take one side to an necessary extreme. But at least those people who claim to have a right not to be offended are engaging in discussion. The people who demand we adhere to absolute free speech are both by definition unwilling to compromise and are coming to the conversation under false pretenses that we currently have absolute free speech in the first place.

Although I do want push back against your "literally violence" point since we handle that differently on an individual versus group basis currently. For example, if we start with the idea that slander of an individual infringes on the rights of someone, why is slandering an entire protected class of people okay? Cohen could sue me if I called him miserly (to use one of the examples of hate from his speech), but it is fine to say all Jews are miserly including Cohen? That doesn't make much logical sense to me.

Your point is specious. The people who claim a right not to be offended are engaging in “discussion” only to redefine the limits of what’s allowed to be discussed. The limits become arbitrary, and grounded in nothing except whatever the current moral panic is. The free speech “absolutist”, such as they actually exist, are of course bounded by the actual law.

I don’t know what your example about Cohen and Jews is attempting to show. Neither example is “violence”.

>The people who claim a right not to be offended are engaging in “discussion” only to redefine the limits of what’s allowed to be discussed.

I've gotta say, this sounds real similar to the "very fine people on both sides" type logic that tries to equate antifa to white supremacists.

I don’t understand your point. How is antifa or white supremacists at all related to this?

>Your point is specious. The people who claim a right not to be offended are engaging in “discussion” only to redefine the limits of what’s allowed to be discussed. The limits become arbitrary, and grounded in nothing except whatever the current moral panic is. The free speech “absolutist”, such as they actually exist, are of course bounded by the actual law.

Well, yeah, this is a debate about free speech so of course one side wants to redefine what is allowed to be discussed. The difference is one side says "these are the things we don't want to be acceptable anymore" the other says "any change is unacceptable". Which side do you think is more likely to compromise? And free speech absolutists definitely exist, there are plenty in the comment sections here defending Facebook and their practice of allowing nearly anything to be posted.

>I don’t know what your example about Cohen and Jews is attempting to show. Neither example is “violence”.

I was assuming your "literally violence" comment was in relation to hate speech since that is the only time I have seen that type of language used. I was pointing out that banning hate speech can basically be viewed as simply an extension of our existing laws banning speech like defamation.

Banning hate speech may well be a good idea, but it'd be much more complicated than our restrictions on defamation.

An accusation of defamation can be countered by showing the statement is true. And, even still, we significantly weaken our laws against defamation when the person being defamed is a public figure, especially a politician, because the people who wrote US law have been extremely concerned about restrictions on political speech.

Hate speech is not defined in US law, and defining and banning it would not in any way be "simple".

It is pretty sad if we believe it is a good idea, but don't even try because it isn't "simple".

It'd also be pretty sad if we apply a simplistic solution to a complex problem and make everything worse.

I wasn't answering the question of if we should try, I was narrowly responding to a single claim that laws restricting hate speech would be easy to write because it would simply be a matter of applying existing laws slightly differently. That isn't the case. Irregardless of what you think of the merits, nothing analogous to a ban on hate speech is currently on the books in the US

Assuming you refer to US law your right to not be threatened with violence is extremely limited. Furthermore, when deciding if speech is protected US courts generally do not balance one person's rights against another's. They look at whether the speech falls into a set of well defined categories (which the Supreme Court has refused to expand on many occasions recently).

Unfortunately a lot of the debate around free speech online relies on flawed assumptions about current US law. I'm not sure what restrictions should be in place, but I think incorrectly understanding the current legal standards won't help us figure out the answer.

For example, the trite phrase "Shout fire in a crowded theater" was coined in a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Oliver Wendall Holms during WW1 to argue that a communist activist who wrote pamflets urging people to hide if they were drafted violated the law and should be imprisoned. Thankfully the Supreme Court subsequently realized that criticing the government in wartime and urging people not to cooperate with the military should not be illegal. The phrase is completely outdated nowadays.

Two of the excluded categories I find most frequently misapplied in this sort of debate are "true threats" and "fighting words". In general, they don't apply to most things you might expect them to.

> A statement is only a "true threat" if a reasonable person would interpret the words, in their context, as an expression of actual intent to do harm. In addition, the speaker must either intend that the words be taken as a statement of intent to do harm, or at least must be reckless about whether or not they would be interpreted that way (that's still a bit up in the air, legally).

https://www.popehat.com/2016/11/16/true-threats-v-protected-...

Similarly, the doctrine of fighting words almost never applies in real life

> In 1942 the Supreme Court held that the government could prohibit "fighting words" — "those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." The Supreme Court has been retreating from that pronouncement ever since. If the "fighting words" doctrine survives — that's in serious doubt — it's limited to face-to-face insults likely to provoke a reasonable person to violent retaliation. The Supreme Court has rejected every opportunity to use the doctrine to support restrictions on speech. The "which by their very utterance inflict injury" language the Supreme Court dropped in passing finds no support whatsoever in modern law — the only remaining focus is on whether the speech will provoke immediate face-to-face violence.

https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...

(I'm citing Ken White because I find his writing amusing and easy to read. If you don't like his presentation googling keywords will trivially lead you to more academically oriented sources that say essentially the same thing)

In that case any anti propaganda regulation is censorship.

We can't just reduce things down to being either censorship or free speech. Real life is messier than that.

Do you think that anyone should be able to pay network TVs to display any political message (including lies) that they want?

Should accumulated wealth be the equivalent of having the loudest megaphone?

I think there's a line there between free users of social media vs. paid advertisements. Still, I'm not sure social media is public space rather than an establishment, so the idea of how you apply freedom of speech has to be carefully weighed.

"Speech is not reach" - he's clearly not supporting censoring posts. He is advocating for Facebook to restrict the type of messages that can be amplified with their insanely effective programatic advertising tools (have you ever used lookalike audiences!? it's amazing.. and a little scary). Posts are speech ads are not.

I've done a lot of reading on this, from neil postman, to nicholas carr, sherry turkle, jaron lanier, tim wu, to plato's allegory of the cave. We've been worried about these issues for eternity. As a consumer of information, how do you tell what is real and what isnt? As a publisher, what role do you have to tell people what is real and what isnt? As a content provider, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff?

As a software developer myself I'm always looking to discuss this topic with layman and other software developers since we're always looking to develop a new architecture/a new paradigm for conveying better and more concise data to clients. Even without the business model, how would you create a scalable model for all of humanity, regardless of culture or creed, that displays the information people need to do what they need to do? And what does that even mean, "information people need to do what they need to do?" The toughest part of programming is designing scalable architecture. It's so complicated and difficult that we've all but given up on trying to figure this shit out and now we're just building AI hoping something computationally faster and less human can possibly do it better.

> Do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing!

I did. I guess you have to be fan. I agreed there's an issue. I didn't agree with any of his suggested solutions.

> * The business model of social media companies is powered by engagement,

How would you change it? All media is powered by engagement. Look at the covers of most magazines at the checkout counter. They'll are covered in sensational titles.

> * Do social media companies bear responsibility for the negative impact their products have on society, in the same way that, say, car companies bear responsibility for faulty engines or airplane manufacturers bear responsibility for faulty plane designs?

That analogy breaks pretty quick it seems to me. If 15% of Ford drivers started running over children is that Ford's fault? I'd say no. So who's fault is it when my dad posts climate change is a lie posts on Facebook? It's my dad's fault.

I'm as worried as everyone else about how to deal with this but I'm having a hard time finding a cure that's not worse than symptoms. It's hard for me not to imagine too many false positives in targeting fake news. It would be interesting to make a quick site and have people judge what they'd take down. I suspect it would show in issue pretty quick. I'm also not sure how you couldn't get around it just by hedging. "Many scientists say X is false". Who decides what's "many"? It doesn't say "all". It doesn't say "most" or "a majority".

Let's take an example (i'm not taking a side here, only pointing out what I perceive as difficult).

Mr. Cohen mentioned getting some white middle America guy to profess his racism against muslims. Another POV might look at what Muslim's profess to want and think "No, if that's what they want then they are not welcome". Examples

> In South Asia, high percentages in all the countries surveyed support making sharia the official law, including nearly universal support among Muslims in Afghanistan (99%). More than eight-in-ten Muslims in Pakistan (84%) and Bangladesh (82%) also hold this view. The percentage of Muslims who say they favor making Islamic law the official law in their country is nearly as high across the Southeast Asian countries surveyed (86% in Malaysia, 77% in Thailand and 72% in Indonesia)

You can go through sharia law and find that you likely wouldn't agree with it.

I'm not trying to single out Islam or sharia here. Older Christian beliefs are just as bad. The difference is, at least at the moment, few Christians are actually calling for things like stoning your wife for various reason where as

> at least half of Muslims who favor making sharia the law of the land also favor stoning unfaithful spouses

Note, the point above is not to pick a side. I have no idea if those facts are correct. The point is Mr. Cohen seemed to be saying bring up topic like that should be banned because it's racist against Muslims. It's arguable there's more to it. It should be discussable but of someone says "The majority of muslims want to stone adulterous women and force them to hide their faces and bodies therefore I don't want them here" who decides if that's a racist statement or a prudent one given certain data?

https://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-relig...

I have muslim friends and they're great and seem mostly tolerant but I get an ear full from my non-Muslim Malaysian friends about all the ways the law in Malaysia favors Muslims over non-Muslims. The point being there's an arguably valid POV to be worried about the influence of a lot of people coming into your neighborhood with those beliefs.

> How would you change it? All media is powered by engagement. Look at the covers of most magazines at the checkout counter. They'll are covered in sensational titles.

Sure they are, but a magazine is liable for what he does, both from a social stand point, but also a legal one.

We all have a similar power as theses magazines through social media, but Facebook promote the worst kinds because they are the most sensational ones. If something wrong come outs of its, they just push the responsibility to the one that made the post/ads. A magazine can't do that, because they still chose to publish it nonetheless.

> If 15% of Ford drivers started running over children is that Ford's fault?

I'm pretty sure that would certainly trigger some kinds of major investigation which would certainly affect Ford itself. There's no way there wouldn't be any kind of regulation added on Ford cars in that case.

> The difference is, at least at the moment, few Christians are actually calling for things like stoning your wife for various reason where as

Why do you think that happens? Is it because we hated Christians for theses older beliefs or because we hated theses older beliefs? It's pretty hard to make someone change his whole belief at once, I'm pretty sure it's actually impossible. What you can do though, is to change the issues that come from that belief and for that, you need to accept him to be able to interact with him in a civil manners.

> The majority of muslims want to stone adulterous women and force them to hide their faces and bodies therefore I don't want them here

The issue is with the end of that sentence. them is the muslims or the majority? The thing is, most people is saying the former, which is the racist part of it. Condemn the wrong behavior, that's fine, but don't put everyone in the same bucket.

I find it funny that you believe that Ford shouldn't be liable for belief of others, but you certainly believe that if it's a Muslim.

I just watched it, in its entirety. Some quotes that stuck with me:

  Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.
  There is such a thing as objective truth.
  They could fix these problems, if they wanted to.

I've said this before, but we need the government to step in and provide a "free speech" public platform for people to say whatever they'd like, uncensored. The new public space is the internet, but currently it is only managed by private entities. We need to carve out a government-protected space if free speech is going to survive online. It's clear we can't depend on private businesses to do it.

Half of the arguments I see that are pro private-platform censorship revolve around the idea that "private businesses can censor who they want." Fine, that's fair. If you believe that, then also you shouldn't have any problem with a public space online being uncensorable. But pro-censorship people will have a problem, because that's the true issue, isn't it? What they really want to stop is the spreading of ideas that they cannot control. People arguing for pro-censorship under the facade of supporting the rights of private businesses are only doing it because it's a convenient tool. Take that out of the equation and you'll see that it's not about the rights of private businesses at all. But we need that public space online and we need it fast.

Why?

This is a real question. This is not a thing that has existed in the past; why is it necessary that it exist now? If you look back to the founding of the US, political discourse was done frequently through pamphlets. The government didn't provide some "uncensored" pamphlet distribution service, and I find it unlikely that print shops of the time did not occasional reject orders that they didn't like.

Ironically, the one time I know of a government guaranteeing freedom of expression, down to the right to be provided with printing presses if needed was … the Soviet constitution.

(Source: a memory of a comparative politics lecture in college, where the professor used it as an example of what’s written and what’s implemented being sometimes a little different...)

Notice I said "space" and not "website." A pamphlet is to public physical space as a website is to online virtual space.

What's the line? There always is one. Example: Child pornography.

The banning of child pornography is legally sanctioned censorship. The legal argument being that the content is "Child Abuse Material" (CAM), which is audio-video evidence of a crime, which in that legal argument is not protected free-speech.

Obviously child pornography is horrible and should NOT be permitted to be spread due to a variety of negative consequences associated with it, namely for the victims involved. I am highlighting that censorship is a tricky issue.

That said, political speech should always be permitted in the public sphere, even if what is being advocated for is horrific. I believe in allowing people to make complete fools of themselves ("give them a long enough rope"). Sure, Neo-Nazis might gain a few followers by allowing them to stomp around the streets, but I'd wager that 95% of the people who see them immediately classify them as complete assholes and fucking degenerates.

While I'm not a fan of folks being "doxxed" online for holding dumb-ass views, I do have a mental line where if you are actively meeting and assembling physically to advance immoral and un-American causes, I think you should be prepared to stand behind your association with said movement under your real identity. And that will have an impact on your friends, family, employment, social standing, etc.

That is not a bug, that is a feature. It creates self-harmonizing communities where horrible behavior (actions) has social consequences, especially when the viewpoints or behaviors are not actually illegal, but still equally shitty.

What I've realized is most people don't believe in freedom of speech. They believe in freedom of speech that they agree with or enjoy.

It's really a shame, from the perspective of someone who seriously does not care what others speak.

It's like most people lack the ability to simply ignore what they find distasteful. They instead feel compelled to destroy it.

These tendencies are at the core of our current online reality. It's a scary world out there!

I think you are being really kind.

If we're really talking about "most" people? As in, the majority? Then the fact is, they do believe in free speech. It's just that they don't care about free speech. At all. Whether they agree with it or are interested in it or any other thing means absolutely nothing to them because they feel they have more important things to do.

Let me give you a fairly realistic for instance of what the great unwashed masses think about free speech when compared to even something trivial like college football:

Member of great unwashed mass: "What the hell is this f'in free speech debate doing on my tv when LSU is about to play Georgia!?!?!?!"

Young, idealistic, activist: "Well, um, I thought maybe everyone would like to see how their rights are being eroded by increasingly powerful concentrations of industrial and technological weal..."

Member of great unwashed mass: "Shut the F up!!! Put the Ohio State/Wisconsin game back on so I can catch the last little bit of that before LSU/Georgia kicks dick head!"

This is what we're fighting against, and we need to be far more realistic about how powerful apathy is in shaping policy. At least in the US.

> It's like most people lack the ability to simply ignore what they find distasteful.

Because sometimes it really is about the children.

> It's like most people lack the ability to simply ignore what they find distasteful.

I don't think that's really it.

First, I will say that I'm not wholly decided on the issue. I think free speech is important, but I also think there are reasonable limitations on that freedom (as with any freedom).

I actively encourage debate. I truly enjoy hearing other people's perspectives and considering things from opposing views. I often find myself changing positions on things because I realize I hadn't thought about an issue in a particular way before. People like me are not so rare, I think (so long as you approach the discussion politely and with manners).

But I believe Facebook (to pick one example) is problematic. That they don't vet political advertisements prior to running them is problematic. That they experiment on people's psyches by manipulating their news feeds is also problematic. That they encourage the formation of echo chambers (for all people) is — you guessed it — problematic. These factors have contributed to an atmosphere of hostility and a lessened desire to listen to opposing view points. People want to hear from other people who think like them, and that's exactly what they get. It radicalizes people (to use a perhaps slightly dramatic term) by exposing them only to notions with which they already agree.

Now getting back to the part of your comment that I quoted.

I do not lack the ability to ignore things I find "distasteful". I ignore Alex Jones and all his conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook. I ignore Flat Earthers, and 911 conspiracists, and other people like them. Interacting with them is not worth my time, and reading their positions never leaves me feeling more enlightened than before I went in.

But I am privileged to not be subjected to some of the things that others are.

To pick another specific example: semi-recent discourse online has contributed to an atmosphere of hostility towards non-white people (at least here in the US where I am). This has real consequences for such people. They find themselves subjected to everything from mild harassment to actual murder.

Suggesting that they should just "ignore" things online which are "distasteful" in this manner is 100% missing the forest for the trees. There is a problem with the fact that people that are violently racist (and I mean "violent" literally) are able to organize and find a platform in the same space as other people. This creates a culture that is unwelcoming and dangerous in a very real sense.

I do believe there is a need for some form of regulation, not because I am unable to ignore things that I do not agree with, but because there are groups of people who must be deprived of their platforms for the benefit of the physical and emotional well-being of others. I do not want everything to be sugar-coated or covered in bubble-wrap, but I do want public platforms to be devoid of open hostility. I don't think that's so much to ask.

This only works if you believe speech doesn't influence people. If you believe it does, then you have every right to feel compelled to destroy it if the influence in your opinion is disastrous.

> the perspective of someone who seriously does not care what others speak

I'm sorry but I can't help to think that you're only able to speak from this perspective if you were never threatened. Of course I care if someone says all Jews should be killed, because I know the next day someone might actually try to kill me and my children. It's a simple as that. My inner organs shake when I see something like that online because I know some people do actually take it seriously. I'm happy for you that you don't have to worry about this, but history shows that certain words are not only distasteful, they are dangerous.

This changed my perspective on this. I can see where you are coming from. We do have laws against inciting violence, but I'm not sure that covers this type of speech.

The platform provided by the government for the exercise of free speech is the public space. Anybody is free to go outside and tell other people exactly what they believe if they choose to do so. The notion that the government has some obligation to platform bigots and their ilk is farcical.

If you want to win against a view, select a leader from your pocket, make him look plausible and make him take control of the whole view. At any point you desire, let that person discredit himself and take the whole view down.

Here, your view "to provide a free speech public platform" is under attack because such platforms would give people freedom and power. We are about to separate people from freedom. So-called "white" people will go first (they still have some power), the others will follow. Technological evolution is brutal.

Woah.

I'm completely against that.

The last thing we need is the government to step in and say, "This is our brand new Free Speech site! Come on in to post whatever you like and pay no attention to the lady in the blue FBI windbreaker behind the curtain."

Such a site could trap many an unfortunate idealist who actually believed they could put whatever they wanted on that site. To me free speech is, you can put whatever you want up, and the government can't stop you in any way. Including potentially, you putting the information up there completely anonymously.

A government controlled space will not allow that.

I think the idea of a pure free speech space is great in theory, but probably impracticable.

Could I post as much as I want? Do bots that I authored, posting on my behalf, count as my own speech? What if I effectively DDoS the system, will I be censored then? Preventing DDoS is essentially censorship, even though the DDoS is also essentially censorship of others by preventing them from being heard at all. It’s like the paradox of tolerance.

It reminds me of a “free speech wall” in a city I used to live in. At some point all writing on that wall becomes unreadable due to volume. It was also regularly wiped clean.

With FB we’re talking about psychological DDoS of truth, instead of infrastructural DDoS of information.

>I've said this before, but we need the government to step in and provide a "free speech" public platform for people to say whatever they'd like, uncensored

No.

We need people to say whatever they like, and we need the government to prevent anyone from silencing them by force, potentially meaning we need the government to prevent domination of media.

A C-SPAN for social media isn't such a bad idea though.

Why? It'd just be a government sponsored 4chan. Do we then blame the government for having a platform that the next shooter is going to use to murder 50 or 100 people? What's the point of such a platform? Why would we waste government money on it just to have it filled with hate speech? Why would we, as the people who control the government want such a platform? If people want to publish in such a way, there is already a platform: the Internet. Start a website. Nothing prevents people from doing that. If they're too lazy, they can go to 4chan, etc. The rest of us shouldn't have to subsidize a cesspool of shit that has no positive uses.

I'd change

    Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.

      Freedom of speech. Duty of thinking.

freedom of reach is a reference to the platform that the speech is being disseminated on.

Sasha Baron Cohen is a manipulator - that's the basis of his comedy, and for comedy, it's funny. It's not the person who I want to take cues on freedom of speech from.

Yes, you can go to a group of people and get them to sing anti-semitic songs, just as you can bluster them with an unlabeled map or have them fall prey to trivial parlor magic. That's a terrible basis for attacking basic human rights on.

He calls the openness of platforms a defect, and he would like to censor every single word before it is public - that is not freedom, it is authoritarianism.

I suspect he believes that most people are dumb sheep - this is after all how he made his money - and he sees himself as protecting the poor sheep. He believes that because his intent is just, his actions are just - that the end justifies the means. He is the most dangerous kind of strongman: the self-righteous kind.

I suspect he is trying to repair his image.

https://youtu.be/tF_2QZo90lw

Kind of like Eminem and Michael Vick, it'll probably work.

It is funny that Why Isn't Sacha Baron Cohen Working Anymore video was posted just three months before his latest show started airing on Showtime. It is also weird seeing the video feature criticism of him from the ADL considering this speech was at his acceptance of an award from the ADL. It doesn't seem like his image needed much repairing after all.

It's amazing how his past movies, made not that long ago, would be completely verboten today. Using racial and ethnic and homophobic stereotypes to make audiences laugh... and raking in millions for doing so.

And... it makes sense. Can you imagine if his movie portrayed a ridiculous caricature of a Jewish person, the way he portrayed a ridiculous caricature of a gay man ten years ago, today?

Context exists. His movies used stereotypes but never punched down at those groups, instead using such characters to mock bigots.

So yes. I can imagine such a movie today. And it would be funny as hell.

Wait! Actually this already exists as a TV show, it’s called I Am America and Cohen frequently portrays a caricature of a Jewish Mossad agent.

I agree in some cases, but Bruno specifically was not attacking homophobia, but was all about making fun of a ridiculous gay straw man.

> and he would like to censor every single word before it is public - that is not freedom, it is authoritarianism

He never said that. He said that a publishing delay just enough to filter out potential illegal content (snuff, hate speech are illegal under US law) would benefit the society overall.

> hate speech are illegal under US law

False - explained by a 1st Amendment lawyer: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-white-first-amen...

And who decides what's filtered? Unless it's the judicial system, don't want it.

If you have 2 opposing views, and one is delayed long enough, you've effectively censored it, in favor of the other.

Which is exactly what's going to happen. Once the dissenting view "passes filter", the news cycle is over, the unfiltered view remains in everyone's retinas, the filtered one ignored, despite any merits it may have.

This is just preparing the field for stronger, more arbitrary censorship.

Who is deciding which content is promoted now on social media? An unaccountable algorithm. Isn't this just the flip side of the censorship coin? Except now the truth is being censored and lies are being promoted because it's financially better for the publisher.

Wouldn't the most appropriate legal response to this be not allow social media companies to have any sort of recommendation algorithm and force them to have feeds that are linear in time of people who you follow?

The appropriate response would be to take them to justice if law was broken, and for you not to use the platforms if you don't want to, as a free citizen.

The problem with the mixed approach is that these platforms get the official recognition they don't deserve, and the private censors we don't need or want.

Neither "snuff" (unless you're talking about CSE or other specific categories) nor hate speech are illegal in the US. The supreme Court has repeatedly ruled on this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.A.V._v._City_of_St._Paul

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyder_v._Phelps

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_St...

That's because, unlike other countries, the US Supreme Court doesn't define speech that calls for imminent violence upon a person or group as "hate speech".

That specific type of imminent danger speech and it's expression are not protected by first amendment rights. It's right there in your Brandenbug v. Ohio.

The above commenter wrote that hate speech was illegal. This is not correct. I'm not sure what you think I'm missing here. The bar for speech to be inciting imminent lawless action is pretty high:

> Portions of the rally were filmed, showing several men in robes and hoods, some carrying firearms, first burning a cross and then making speeches. One of the speeches made reference to the possibility of "revengeance" [sic] against "Niggers," "Jews," and those who supported them.

This was determined to be protected speech under the First Amendment.

Smashing a speaker that deafens those around it doesn't inhibit free speech. Believing that building such a thing is an act of freedom is authoritarian.

With all due respect, you don't understand his comedy whatsoever. I suspect you believe Bill Hicks is also a misanthrope. These are extremely gauche interpretations, it's like saying Picasso didn't care about painting because he didn't paint realistic flowers and horses and barns like a "proper painter" would.

Edit: misspelling.

Cohen performed his bits without the audience knowing they were part of it - and he only shows the bits that had the outcomes he wanted (or were at least funny). There are more then a few security cam clips of the bits that didn't go so well - and I recommend finding them.

Cohen isn't a surrealist who is using a medium to convey the depth of life, he's just a comedian with an editing team.

It's true he's just a comedian, but his comedy goes deeper than your run of the mill midlife crisis jokes at the comedy cellar or whatever.

Just like Bill Hicks, he's a political comedian that reveals hard to stomach truths. Unlike Bill Hicks who creates an abstract persona (of a particular kind of bigot, etc.) and then critiques it, Cohen astonishingly shows you a concrete instance.

Cheney autographed a milk jug he was convinced was used for waterboarding. Saying a joke about this on stage would be pretty funny, but Cheney himself autographed a waterboarding milk jug on camera and lamented about how much it would be worth as a collectors item.

I would encourage every single person who sees this headline to take the time to watch this speech. Its incredibly well done. Many of the commentators here demonstrate that they only read the headline, which in itself is disturbing.

Here is the video link hosted on the "greatest propaganda machine in history": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

Thank you, that was excellent.

I mean, it's a nice speech but it's not surfacing any new thinking or ideas.

SBC's argument is self-contradictory. On the one hand, he paints tech companies as greedy, untrustworthy, and arguably evil. At the same time, he feels that these companies should be trusted to regulate speech to a degree beyond what they already are doing. (In his example, through regulatory force telling them to do so.)

In general, he wants the end (no "bad" speech) but doesn't provide a clear picture of the means to get there. This is common.

The argument against companies regulating more speech is that people who are not Nazis will be caught in the crossfire, and that will lead to unintended consequences. In his speech, SBC admits as much, citing Twitter's claim that algorithmic regulation of speech would result in de-platforming politicians. SBC claims that this may not be a bad thing. This illustrates the problem: SBC like many others are perfectly fine with people being de-platformed not just for true hate speech, but for speech they disagree with, because it is algorithmically similar to hate speech. This is the crux of the issue, and it's at least good for someone to admit it: typically proponents of centralized speech regulation pretend like the issue of false positives doesn't exist. Such false positives will result in law-abiding citizens being de-platformed, and that is unacceptable to many.

To whatever degree that strategy is taken, you can bet your money on these companies losing their power to decentralized platforms. If it's no longer possible to post on social media without a reasonable risk that your words will get nuked because of being mis-flagged (and your reputation unjustly soiled) -- people will move elsewhere. The irony will be that the net effect will be way worse than today: completely unmoderated, unregulated speech with global reach. (this is probably inevitable for a variety of reasons, but this current dynamic probably accelerates it.)

edit: appreciate the downvotes, feel free to check back here in 10 years when facebook + twitter are no longer serious platforms because they're policed by over-zealous, government-mandated moderators, and anyone posting anything interesting is on a decentralized platform or some new centralized platform which has yet to be put under public scrutiny.

And not just law abiding speech being deplatformed, but what will AI do with new speech it has never seen before? Will it understand its context, its references, its sarcasm, its wink, its intention? It's another way to trap us into only having conversations that have already been pre-approved by the past.

> In general, he wants the end (no "bad" speech) but doesn't provide a clear picture of the means to get there. This is common.

The MPAA example is a perfect and very clear example. Lots of publishers have gone through the same thing: regulate yourself or be regulated by the people.

As long the Internet is not subject to government packet filtering based upon content (ie, the US doesn't become China), there's no way to prevent the eventual outcome that someone can say bad things and it reach millions of people. If that person breaks the law, the legal system can hold them accountable. But if they are not breaking the law, it seems to me that in the limit such speech cannot somehow be stopped from being spread. It's not a new lesson. It's hundreds of years old, all that is different now is the speed of dissemination and scale of reach. The current centralized platforms are transitional technology. There's some kind of Nash equilibrium where they can exist in a regime where a certain level of legal speech is stifled, but as soon as that threshold is breached and a sufficient sub-network of people conclude their speech needs to go around any centralized provider, the incentives are there to do the work to make it possible -- and internet infrastructure which already exists would arguably be the hardest problem they'd need to solve.

> But if they are not breaking the law, it seems to me that in the limit such speech cannot somehow be stopped from being spread.

It can't be stopped, but it can be severely limited. See: 8chan and Stormfront.

I agree that the centralization of internet infrastructure (like Cloudflare, who was involved to the sites you mention) is a corollary to my claim that government packet filtering as a potential regime which could result in limiting global speech.

> As long the Internet is not subject to government packet filtering based upon content (ie, the US doesn't become China), there's no way to prevent the eventual outcome that someone can say bad things and it reach millions of people.

Here's the cool thing about trade group regulation like MPAA: we have much less to worry about with respect to slippery slopes. If there's someone who's too small to be a member, then yes: they do get to distribute their content. This means that people can still host individually horrible pages and blogs that few care about. But managing legal liability / responsibility for all those horrible blogs would be a real challenge for wordpress or github, e.g. Writing legislation to thread those kinds of holes but still be upheld in courts might also be difficult. But that's the threat.

If the lion's share of deceptive "news" and bogus claims are spread via Youtube/Twitter/FB, just think of how valuable it would be for those three to come together and have a trade group like the MPAA that would set standards for them to audit content.

> he feels that these companies should be trusted to regulate speech to a degree beyond what they already are doing

My extended interpretation: he feels that, if we are going to tolerate them, we should at least require them to dampen the worst of the ill effects they have on society. If, in doing so, they lose presence and that leads them to wither and die, too bad^W^Wthat's ok.

Characterizing the state limiting the actions a corporation may take, by regulation, as the state “trusting” the corporation is absurd.

Acting like we are talking about nebulously “bad” speech when the primary subject is 1) denial of the factual event of the Holocaust and 2) incitement towards a future Holocaust is deeply insensitive to the present and growing fear of that exact thing.

Pretending that any white supremacist or anti-semitic propaganda which comes from a politician must simply be “algorithmically similar to hate speech”, and could not conceivably be hate speech per se, is the pinnacle of politically motivated reasoning.

And somehow we put all of that together to arrive at the dramatic conclusion that... the status quo is fine with me, and nothing should change. It’s a nice speech, mind you.

I can’t possibly replace HN with another platform— where else am I going to find such passionately incoherent arguments from the radical middlebrow?

Algorithmic regulation of speech necessarily requires arguments around global effects, counterfactuals, and long term consequences. Focusing on a specific, extreme example to inductively derive a plan around making platform-wide, global scale, centralized enforcement of speech is something I expect of a child, not an adult. Anyone who has worked on machine learning understands this: if you are going to ignore false positives, it's trivial to make an algorithm with 100% accuracy. The challenge becomes what confusion matrix is acceptable. It's fundamentally impossible to avoid all Type I and Type II errors for anything but the most basic underlying function: I don't think anyone here suspects a system for labelling unacceptable speech is even close to such a problem.

In our justice system, we highly prefer to not send the innocent to jail. A similar level of tolerance should be articulated here. It is not being done, and the issue of false positives is largely glossed over by stirring up emotions around extreme examples.

This is similar to seeing people getting angry over when a suspected guilty person walks free in an individual case, winning due to proper legal reasons like insufficient evidence to prove guilt. We accept that outcome, not because we want the guilty to be free, but because the system we have designed has made tradeoffs where that outcome can happen in favor of minimizing the liklihood of the innocent from being imprisoned.

People should be forced to articulate what degree of non-hate speech they are willing to see silenced in favor of increasing the silencing of hate speech, and those who are happy with the status quo or who are interested in reduced regulation of speech should articulate the degree of acceptable hate speech that is let to continue so non-hate speech will not be inadvertently silenced.

> and could not conceivably be hate speech per se, is the pinnacle of politically motivated reasoning.

Nowhere did I state that political speech could not conceivably be hate speech. The inverse proposition, that political speech by politicians that isn't hate speech could be mis-labeled, was my claim. This isn't even a claim, it's self evident if we're talking about having a system that is labeling all instances of online speech as being either hate speech or not. Type I and Type II errors are unavoidable. Arguing the inverse shows you did not understand my logic.

My claim is that people who shrug their shoulders at the impact of false positives (like SBC) either underestimate the magnitude of them or are revealing fundamental beliefs about what world they think is acceptable to live in. (Namely, that these platforms should be willing to silence more people today than they are doing already, even if they are innocent, in the name of preventing others who are bad actors.) I'm sure there have been millions of people who have strongly argued in favor of a justice system where you must prove your innocence. A similar tack is being taken when you have people who wouldn't mind seeing people de-platformed who actually were not spreading hate, if it meant less dissemination of actual hate speech.

I don't blame celebrities for not understanding the nature of Type I and Type II errors, and the nature of unintended consequences, but I sure as heck expect more from commenters here.

And anyway, my point wasn't about what I think ought to be, what but I think will happen inevitably. Due to the Internet, all of these arguments are moot. Unless the government starts packet filtering, there will ultimately be no way to prevent non-illegal speech from spreading rapidly across the globe. I'd rather people focus on what we want the world to look like under a system where any voice can be heard by anyone, and how we can optimize that scenario, instead of focusing on the present-day system where a few centralized actors happen to have these artificial hammers they can use to clamp down the spread of speech. Leveraging those hammers for good or evil will not result in a good, long-term, sustainable outcome, since they are going to eventually evaporate and we will be back exactly where we started, if not in a worse scenario due to solving for the wrong problem.

I've had an account on HN for more than 10 years. I'm sure we used to have the convention that you should not down vote comments just because you disagree with them. I don't see it in the FAQs anymore but I sorely wish we could go back to those days.

This is not the case. See dang's note https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

The first link was posted by PG in 2008.

I agree with pretty much all of your comment. The only thing I don't agree with is this:

> The irony will be that the net effect will be way worse than today: completely unmoderated, unregulated speech with global reach.

I certainly don't see unregulated speech on decentralised platforms with global reach as a bad thing. Indeed, I see it as the goal. And as to moderation (which can be a good thing), that can be applied by a third party of the user's choosing, without requiring regulation or policing i.e. everyone gets to say whatever they like and you can look at it raw or you can choose what subset you see determined by a moderator of your (not the government's, nor the hosting platform's) choice.

I actually agree with you -- my point was more about things being worse than today because, much like today, the future we are headed into will be fallen into unintentionally if we don't recognize now that we should be designing for what we want it to look like and come to a common understanding of what ethics that system should enforce.

For example, it seems likely these decentralized networks will have their designs (such as moderation) iterated upon in response to points of crisis, as opposed to being methodically designed around a collective set of ethics that serve as a foundational bedrock for decision-making. To do so will require "adult decisions" which will have distinct tradeoffs. Without that, the loudest or most powerful voices will end up driving the ultimate long term structure, and we will be left almost certainly with a suboptimal outcome.

You can see this happening today with Mastodon: there's a huge amount of contention around what is the proper ethics with regards to developing software that would allow connectivity agnostic to content, vs stipulating that clients could not be used by certain groups (despite the network itself being inherently decentralized.)

The fact that this kind of question wasn't answered from the beginning before the first line of code was written, but is being answered in response to a blatantly predictable 'crisis' in the form of the arrival of a node like Gab full of Nazis, shows that many participants building these networks have actually failed to come to a meaningful consensus about how they think things ought to work and what the optimum social system is to balance these competing concerns of decentralization and harm minimization. It's trivial to design a decentralized system that works as long as nobody comes along who has counter incentives to the system designers.

It seems like we need to have a wider conversation, along with education, about what the various end states of this can be, recognize that the future will not necessarily represent the present, and then design incentives and legal structures to guide towards the ones we want to actually see happen.

Currently, we are being almost entirely reactionary and have an incredible lack of imagination (and in turn, optimism.)

Wow this touches really deeply and closely - given I use social media all. the. time.

My love for the Web and freedom of discussion and how it would free us from the powers of authority. This was me imagining the future of information in the early 2000s.

I'm thinking this may very well be a lie: as Sasha so eloquently and comedically touches several points about how these social media giants (Facebook, Twitter etc) have developed algorithms to satisfy our most basic "monkey brain" instincts: we want information that is agreeable.

The comparison he made with "fake scientists" on the internet getting more attention than nobel prize winners really hit me hard.

The issue seems to be that with the internet we got rid of authority, but another type of hierarchy grew out of this: algorithm hierarchy. Where we don't have authorities in charge of giving us information, rather we have algorithms.

An obvious solution to this (from a programmer's point of view) would be to allow users to freely and openly (through an open source kind of movement) change these algorithms to fit their needs. For instance I want information that is "not biased" and I can quickly get the "non biased algorithm" from github (as an example) and plug it into my social media. If I want information from academica I would get the "academia algorithm" and plug in. And so on.

I don't know how something like this can help, but it seems we may need to stop thinking in terms of social media companies being the problem; it's the fact that we can't change these algorithms that is the problem.

I struggle as to how we could regulate massive companies like Facebook and Google from opening up their algorithms in a verifiable way.

Perhaps a better way to attack this is to allow them to continue, but break them up - ie, mandate competition, and admit that monopolies in markets like search and social media (not to mention specific segments of advertising) are as dangerous as monopolies in operating systems or telephone services.

I over post this, and am turning into a broken record, but this is my favorite of all time article about predictive ai dystopia.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...

my fear of everything being decided by algorithms that exist to please us, is us being trapped in the past and creativity being extinguished. if netflix makes shows based on what it knows will be popular, what happens to visionaries that have an idea nobody else can comprehend. risk, exploration, adventure, new, is replaced by nostalgia, familiarity, comfort.

we can debate fighting google and facebook, or we can come up with a "Human Best Practices" behavior guide for how to best consume content, and spread it. There will always be temptation, moderation is either taught or learned. If not facebook, there will be another mind drug to over indulge. Spend effort countering the concept of unlimited "picked-just-for-me feed" or "whats popular with everyone today" intake, not attacking this specific villain. We need new ways to surface and propagate novel, intelligent, thought provoking content, AND we need to teach people to resist human hedonistic urges and impulses, and offer social support and encouragement to deviate from consuming new and fresh news. Watching the news (on tv anyway) is, and shouldnt be, looked up to.

If I were making a tldr of guide v.01, it would start: "Supplant your facebook, google, and reddit intake with https://aldaily.com/ https://redef.com/ https://longform.org/ https://longreads.com/ "

and here i am now moving on to the next n.yc post.

It is not possible to over-post Adam Curtis. The range of ideas in his videos is fantastic.

I believe it's an economic problem. There is no reason all of these comfort services cant exist to help keep the peace among people uninterested in anything else. If they make up the majority of the economy, then we have other problems to solve though.

After all, we do need comfort for sleep - so it could be .. maybe the role of BIG companies should be comfort focused.

Visionaries can still exist - we would only need to improve their discoverability and ensure they are not at risk of financial crisis as a result of going outside the line

discoverability is the end issue.

facebook, reddit, google amplify what is popular, not necessarily ideas with depth. they in particular incentive things that can be consumed quickly and moved on from. a person consuming 100 links per hour upvotes at 10x the rate of someone consuming 10 links per hour. those shorter posts, bits, soundbytes, images, memes then gain 10x the amplification of longform content.

what is popular is not necessarily without depth either.

Also consider propagation of danger alerts. the longer time it takes to consume the average piece of media, the longer it takes for people to become aware of dangers. There are, of course, shortcuts for authorities to spread information about dangers already identified, but danger is a gradient.

Maybe there is an inherent trade-off between quick, scanning behavior being good for safety and deep, thoughtful consumption being good for progress

For a while, I thought decentralization could help with this problem. If people just published websites and there were no central social media, you can better control what content is seen and not seen. But then Google came around and aggregated these websites and made them searchable and now has it's own algorithm for maximum engagement.

Sasha's idea of delaying the spread of information via a timer is very interesting. It can get people a chance to second guess their posts and also give a chance for something in-between to publish or not. If every retweet was delayed then the network spread slows down a lot which might have really interesting consequences.

But ultimately I believe the problem we have is we have chosen the mall over the public park.

An important question is how would it even be possible to have a public park without government intervention?

You have to buy and maintain your own server and pay for uptime. That all costs a continued stream of knowledge and money and it’s very hard. Maybe not for you and I, but for many other people.

Interesting idea, a publicly funded social media site. That would allow the public to have input in how the software works.

We most definitely did not get rid of authority, we got rid of central authority. Every nation used to closely control media so all of their citizens were on the same page. What they believed was biased propaganda with a strong illusion of truth due to dominance in commonly consumed media channels and the echo chamber of talking to others who drank from the same trough. It was far from being high quality information but at least your neighbors had the same beliefs as you so it was less contentious. There never was an authority of truth - only a facade of one. Critical thinking by individuals was discouraged to avoid conflict. Now that people can get their information from anywhere they are completely unprepared to use their minds to separate the good from the bad so they try to find "authoritative sources" instead of using their own judgement. Except their are no authoritative sources, and there never were.

Do we have actual reason to believe that really high adoption rates of people using their own judgement actually is a good thing?

I think there is inherent need for specialization to occur on digesting information and drawing conclusions from it. And when someone is good at it, we should want them to leverage other people parroting what they say to help signal boost

I just don't buy it. Are there any of your beliefs which you'd want to abandon just because someone got on TV and told you they're wrong?

the focus is more that I dont have the time or energy to form personal beliefs on everything talked about on TV (or by news authorities in general). It's easier to adopt someone else's beliefs and entertain that position than talk out of my ass or not be able to talk at all. If that belief is successfully challenged, I change it. It is also easier to change my belief on something if I did not form it myself.

Most people lack strong beliefs on most things. news authorities exist because people are looking for them to help fill that gap and relieve the responsibility of forming beliefs on all the things relevant to the community each person is a part of

That’s fair. I didn’t interpret the original comment that way, but I wouldn’t agree with the strong position that there literally shouldn’t be such a thing as an authoritative source of news.

Ah yeah, I did not want to rule out the possibility that people in general may be shit at forming their own opinions even when they do spend the time and energy. But that also opens the rabbit hole into why that would be the case (low vs high intelligence - but intelligence is hard to generalize), and variance of judgement based on context (e.g. quality soccer judgement vs shit hockey judgement for same person).

All of which kind of comes back to quantitative changes to either time or energy needed for each person to get to an acceptable judgement (even if it's infinite of both for some people-topic pairs), and both of those resources are incredibly finite compared to the volume of topics that are beneficial to the community to have beliefs on.

The big point I want to drive home here, which I have a feeling we agree on, is that we should prioritize the topics people are forming their beliefs on more than what those beliefs are. This is something authoritative figures actually can help with (for better or worse) due to the centralization. So imo, maybe you disagree here, it is not enough to simply allow authoritative sources to exist but we should be more actively promoting sources as authorities for topics.

But you would still require the skill to judge who is and is not a legitimate authority. This sounds more difficult and easily gamed than not bothering with a middle man and judging the facts yourself. Even if there is some perfect way of distinguishing true authorities from frauds, nobody is so authoritative as to never make a mistake, or so clueless as to not occasionally stumble into a correct answer.

You are only thinking about a single belief on a single topic, but we are tasked with a near endless amount of potentially important things to form beliefs on and an incredible sum of time and energy needed to actually do that yourself.

Authorities would be open to judgement by communities. You can better leverage your trust in people to cut down on the amount of energy and time you need to spend to get to a reasonable opinion. There becomes less instances for common miscommunication to go unnoticed. Yes, this comes with a risk of being gamed, which is another interesting conversation, but that's more a human vs human topic than a humans vs reality topic. which is important (economic incentives destroying the world and all) but a bit off-topic from the more general point I am making

basically, looking at all the details yourself is only good if you know what you are looking at and have the time to do so for everything you need beliefs on. The value that authorities provide is in consolidating multiple beliefs into a feed. Secondary to that is getting those beliefs to be high quality. Even if you go do the research yourself for a more quality belief to "fact-check" what you just heard - you have still accepted the value of the authority to tell you the TOPIC on which you should be forming a belief. All you did was locally iterate their work on a single topic to improve the deliverable.

Context matters as well. I dont need to judge the facts myself to figure out how many people died in the california fires if that detail is included in the report from authority. I'm okay with an authority figure telling me that number. Maybe I could arrive at a more accurate number myself, sure - but to what extent does the accuracy matter? It certainly matters if I believe no one died, or if I believe the death toll was orders of magnitude higher than it was.

The only real issue with trusting authority figures is the recursion. Authority figures using their own authority figures.. resulting in an appearance of multiple independent sources arriving at the same conclusion when in reality it is all signal boosting of a single source.

To protect yourself, the simple thing to do is assume any people who say the same thing heard it from the same place until you're given reason to believe otherwise

My solution would be similar, but the user can use a drop down/settings menu to change algorithms rather than install a different algorithm from github.

I frequently ask myself, if Hitler took power today - how many of our government officials, engineers, and soldiers, would get in line behind him. He would have no problem getting the census data and locations of subversives.

I run an email newsletter[1] that aims to combat exactly this issue. It's a single link every day to something interesting, the kind of blog posts that you come across every once in a while that really make you think. The overwhelming feedback is that being able to read the kind of non-viscerally-targeted news and analyses that aren't easily found online is incredibly valuable.

[1] https://thinking-about-things.com

If I understand this correctly, he's pulling back from offline comments he's made about Hollywood (vis Jewish people) and of course years of negative Jewish stereotypes in his work.

Before this, he "bent the knee" with his portrayal of Eli Cohen. Wasn't a terrible film but his reverence for the character was a bit much.

FB is a dumpster fire, I don't think anyone argues otherwise these days. But differentiating between freedom of speech and "reach" is just as dangerous as saying we need to treat freedom of speech on a case by case basis.

We either have freedom of speech or we don't. If we don't, sooner or later we're all fucked.

There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous. If people are easily convinced to hate other people, the problem is not dangerous speech or ideas. The problem is a breakdown in fundamental education, i.e., those people are dangerously ignorant.

We need to work on the fundamental issues, not grant more power to groups with specific political / authoritarian agendas.

> There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous.

Shouting fire in a crowded theatre that could lead to a stampede that puts people in danger. Deliberately misinforming people about the risk of an action they are about to take could be too.

This reply already gives too much credit to the original claim. The acoustic vibrations generated by mouth sounds could physically cause damage, like an opera singer breaking glass, or shouting next to a microphone.

This is an unrelated and poor interpretation of the claim.

After re-reading and self-reflecting, I do not agree. The original claim is about defining certain actions as intrinsically not side-effectful (no sounds can themselves be dangerous), but actions having side-effects cannot be considered in isolation of the physical and social circumstances they are embedded in, which can require restricting an action.

I think my reply really adequately responds to the core intent of the original comment.

I’d also like to point out that your reply is not helpful. Merely gainsaying something is not useful or informative.

Bringing up opera singers breaking glass as an example of sound vibrations physically hurting people is just not useful in a conversation about freedom of speech because it’s a nitpicky convoluted example that is not a great thing to bring up when you’re trying to redefine the claim so that you could rebut it. (Note that I am specifically talking about the example you brought to to support your interpretation of the claim. I’m fine with your speculation that the claim literally meant something along the lines of “sticks and stones can break my bones” rather than “free speech has never had adverse consequences”. It just didn’t need your qualification. I do appreciate the self-reflection, though.)

I'd argue that the orignal sentence was using 'sounds' a bit symbolically, so the clearer interpretations would be closer to "there are no communications I can utter that are dangerous".

His point being about the critical thinking on the part of the listener, not about the physics of making actual sounds.

A communication costs energy to transmit. It cannot be decoupled from physical circumstance. But it’s beside the point. The communication is still embedded in a context of the situation it’s in.

If you utter a communication to an insane person, the side effect might be that you are stabbed. You as the person uttering it must take responsibility for what neurophysical response in the mind of the listener might result.

If you emit communications, there can be consequences which are causal. Not strictly the volitional responsibility of the listener.

I hate when people use this metaphor. Not because it's inaccurate to say that speech can cause imminent harm in some circumstances. But because its origin was a Supreme Court opinion that argued against the right to speak out against the draft in WW1, which I don't think too many people using this analogy today would agree with. Also, this legal argument has been rejected since then.

Point is, this exact argument could be (and has been) used to justify some pretty bad ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

For freedom of speech to be important for any reason, it must have the power to effect change.

If speech can effect change, how can you be sure it is incapable of being dangerous?

You accept the danger or stifle it with more speech.

Reflexively, the only way to neuter the danger of speech is to suppress everything that isn't already accepted. Then nobody can effect change on the grounds that change might be harmful.

The fact that you think Cohen "bent to knee" sounds creepy to me, like you're implying some secret Jewish cabal that made him do it. It reminds me of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

What exactly has Cohen ever said that's anti-Semitic? The racism in his work, like Borat, is satire. If anything, he should've offended Kazakhs by implying they ignorantly hate Jews.

> There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous. If people are easily convinced to hate other people, the problem is not dangerous speech or ideas. The problem is a breakdown in fundamental education, i.e., those people are dangerously ignorant.

OK, so let's say we agree that the fundamental problem is lack of education. That's great in theory, but that doesn't solve a problem today.

There are societies where unfettered lies about groups caused genocides. You can lament the poor education that contributed, but that doesn't change the fact that it can happen again.

The real issues are that lies are much harder to undo than they are to create; that many people are resource-poor, under-educated, and susceptible to lies; and that we have a biological tendency toward out-group violence that requires a thick layer of socialization to counteract.

Nothing FB is doing is threatening speech in the US. If you want them to have less power over the broadcast of speech, I'm on your side, and I'll be voting for people who want to break them up and decrease Zuckerberg's power.

As much as I admire Sacha Baron Cohen's efforts to uncover hypocrisy of our society, I agree with your comment and disagree with him - that social platforms have to filter content; just on the basis that this filtering, even if done with good intentions initially, may later be seized by individuals with their own agendas, which may not at all be virtuous.

If we mute people talking about races and skin color, prohibit to single out minorities, do we actually relieve the pressure in the society, or help build it up to a radical level and fuel even more hatred that way?

I don't trust people with the kind of power filtering provides. I'd rather error on being open and free.

But Facebook already filters content in various ways. They boost content according to its engagement which downgrades/hides the other content from your feed. They sell targeted ads to the highest bidder which implies that you do no see the ads of the other bidders.

If Facebook would just stop manipulating and selling your attention it would have a better defense against calls to filter the content on it.

> do we actually relieve the pressure in the society, or help build it up to a radical level and fuel even more hatred that way?

Bad ideas spread through exposure.

> If people are easily convinced to hate other people, the problem is not dangerous speech or ideas. The problem is a breakdown in fundamental education, i.e., those people are dangerously ignorant.

With reeducation camps reappearing in parts of the world and sensitivity, bias and other types of training in other parts ... that makes me somewhat uncomfortable as idea. The ones in power always want to educate the wrongthinkers.

And judging how easily Democrats learned to hate everything Trump related and before them Republicans - everything Obama, and hating each other - I would say that it is not a problem with education. People hate because it is fun and pleasurable.

I think a direct comparison between Obama and Trump is a bit dishonest. Obama did some bad things, sure, but Trump's behaviour is unprecedented.

I am not comparing Trump to Obama, I am comparing the Dem/Rep reaction. There were two minutes of hate before the inauguration.

> the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron" - dril (https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312)

That's why Cohen's speech is all the more important. To be clear, I don't agree with everything he said but he is absolutely right that there are some facts that are objectively true. Filtering out misinformation from fact and opinion means those political parties can still have their debates where they slam their opponents but they cannot make lies nor baseless allegations.

The problem we have these days is it's become impossible for the casual observer to separate fact from fiction. Which then just encourages people to take information spread within their own echo chamber at face value (since, rightly or wrongly, that's the network they trust). If we can at least remove the falsehoods from the conversation that is a step forward in having open debates.

Someone will no doubt point out that there's a fuzzy line between a lie and something that is true but intentionally misleading, so where do you draw the line. Unfortunately there's no easy answer to that. However I personally believe things have gotten bad enough where it's now worth the trying.

>To be clear, I don't agree with everything he said but he is absolutely right that there are some facts that are objectively true

Like the fact that "Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia" ? Who decides what is fact and what misinformation. Caitlyn Jenner is a woman - this is objectively true for half the society, bullshit for the other half. Who decides?

Caitlyn Jenner?

"Objectively true" doesn't mean "people believe it to be true" (that's "subjective" not "objective"). "Objectively true" means there's a body of evidence that supports it being true. So the question shouldn't be "who decides what's true?" but rather "what evidence is there to support a claim?"

I've got no issue with subjective content so long as it isn't intentionally harmful but when content is objectively false (the example Cohen used was Holocaust deniers -- there's a body of evidence which proves the Holocaust did happen) it's probably better it was removed. Newspapers, for example, are often forced to write retractions when courts find them to be dishonest.

Where the blurred line lies isn't the "who" behind the moderation but the "where". Where do you draw a line between content that is untrue and content that is technically true but written in an extremely dishonest way? Do we define things as a strictly boolean state (ie only objectively false content gets removed) or is there a state in the middle where content that is not objectively false but still hugely dishonest can also be removed.

For example the UK Brexit slogan "We send £350 million to the NHS, lets fund the NHS instead" was not objectively false (well, the figure they published was untrue but lets ignore that for the purpose of this example) but it was also dishonest because it suggest the EU membership fee would fund the NHS if we left the EU and the actual truth is that almost certainly wouldn't happen. So should dishonest content be removed also when it is as damaging as something objectively false?

That's such a dangerous precedence to take however I'm also not convinced the status quo is working either because people currently game the system and it does have massive repercussions.

Work on "fundamental" issues takes time and no one has stopped working on education.

But in the current environment noise and distraction is incentivized and amplified and that makes things like education even more complicated and time consuming.

Now open your mouth and make the sounds "education is bad, our young people are being corrupted by an educational elite that is destroying America".

Thank god those sounds aren't dangerous.

It's about differentiating (i.e. creating a distance) between speech and our reaction to it, or, in other words, it's about taking responsibility for our reactions.

In my opinion, prohibition of symbols, under the premise that they're subversive, like the Nazi ones, is one of the biggest cultural blunders of our time. It castrates entire generations of the possibility to experience the difference between ideas and their effect on us. It is ceding to the symbols, saying "you have power over us, with which we cannot come to terms with, the only thing we can do is prohibit your use".

The seeming culture-wide inability to discuss politics, religion or other dividing topics in a constructive way is part of the same phenomenon, in my view.

Just to be clear - are you asserting that any abuse and threats to anyone should be tolerated? Or are you drawing the line somewhere?

In that sense everything is dangerous and the word 'dangerous' is nearly meaningless. Just because the idea is stupid and it would be dangerous if people take it seriously doesn't mean saying it should be treated as dangerous.

We can cope with people saying stupid things. It happens regularly.

> In that sense everything is dangerous

No. Open your mouth and utter the sounds ‘water is wet’ demonstrate how these words are dangerous. It is ludicrous to assert that all sentences are equally liable to be dangerous

The issue is that 'danger' is in the eye of the beholder. There are plenty of people who would love to ban advocacy of Socialism or Communism. There are people who want to ban 'hurtful' speech. And people who want to ban 'blasphemous' speech. In the end, they are all self-interested parties who want to ban speech that they disagree with. There is no magic wand that can ban harmful speech without creating a framework for authoritarian meddling, with very few exceptions, which are already on the books.

You are free to walk into a police station and tell them you are about to open fire.

If you don't have a gun, your hands are clearly visible, and you make no threatening actions, the worst they had better do is get you gently into a quiet room and arrange a psych eval.

Which dovetails perfectly with the intent of the OP... police just as much, or arguably even more, than every other person, need to think about what they here and not just knee jerk respond.

> There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous.

So you're arguing that Osama Bin Laden, who did not himself commit violent acts but merely persuaded others to do so, was in fact not dangerous?

> There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous.

This might just be revealing a lack of imagination on your part. I'd argue the opposite: there are sounds you can make with your mouth that can change the course of history.

Just break the advertising business model. Literally that's it. Don't allow data sharing with advertisers, and don't allow political advertising, solved. Overnight the internet's better.

Now you just have to define data, data sharing, advertiser, political, advertising, and political advertising in a way that can be affected by such a policy without all the obvious and non-obvious harms.

I argue that Facebook isn't a dumpster fire. I use it mostly to share photos with my friends and family, and I see little or no propaganda on my feed.

(Agree with your other points.)

Ill jump on this one too and say I am consistently impressed with the engineering quality of their teams, and appreciate their contributions to open source communities. The scale and up-time of their product over its lifetime is impressive, as is their ability to make so many underlying changes and survive with the same user interface for a decade each iteration.

> I argue that Facebook isn't a dumpster fire. I use it mostly to share photos with my friends and family, and I see little or no propaganda on my feed.

So Facebook, a site used by hundreds of millions of people, is fine because... you don't see any propaganda?

> But differentiating between freedom of speech and "reach" is just as dangerous as...

I don't think so.

> those people are dangerously ignorant.

I think that is a gross oversimplification.

Much of the repulsive vile speech, such as hate speech, is generally festered among a group bouncing their ideas off each other. You may or may not label such groups as echo chambers. Part of the reason for this is that many people find comfort organizing into groups and generally fear/distrust originality. In other words many people value conformance more than the message to which they are conforming because an idea or message gains credibility the less original it appears and because there is security in numbers.

Mild changes of technology will not instantaneously cure original hateful speech any more than it will instantaneously modify behavior in advance or increased originality or critical thinking. It can, however, vastly alter the reach of that speech allowing vile ideas to proliferate or be constrained to faithful believers.

The balance there is if you modify technology to open wider reach then all speech, including vile hate speech and conspiracy theories, are widely available. If you modify technology to restrict reach then all speech is restricted including objective research and educational material.

My personal solution is to just avoid the online swamps where people congregate merely for the point of gathering and try not to worry about the loud volume of amplified stupidity that leaks out. When the stupidity confronts me in the real world I respond as directly as I can without regard for making people feel stupid or embarrassed, because I generally presume when people bring the full force of unoriginal ideas to me conversationally they do so in a quest to solve their personal insecurities. Don't waste time with stupid.

Freedom of speech is important primarily and especially because it is a powerful force - not because it's not.

There are indeed sounds you can make that are dangerous, here are some examples: 1. Follow this instructions to build a bomb with materials bought at a drug store: ...... 2. There's an American spy in North Korea going by the name Ichi working at ... 3. (As a woman) Michael raped me (when he didn't).

Disgusting and hypocritical. Given that the ADL already has outsized censorship abilities on Google and Twitter amongst other platforms, everyone should read the transcript to see how self-righteous and presumptuous Cohen is and their aligned vision of controlling what information you are allowed to access: https://www.adl.org/news/article/sacha-baron-cohens-keynote-...

This coming from the guy who played Borat and Bruno- it was ok when he did it, because he is on the right side of history you see.

If by "controlling what information you're allowed to access" you mean removing hate speech, then yeah they have the right and the duty to do that. I really wonder why you're against that.

Maybe it's because the definition of hate speech is subjective.

Maybe you shouldn't limit what other people say because of your subjective views. Moreso if you define hate speech as "The incomfortable truth that I don't want to hear" and not "insults or objectively proved deceit"

I'm such a dumbass. I wanted to reply to the comment above this one in the comment hierarchy.

There's no such thing as "hate" speech. The label is a tool to suppress speech the accusers don't agree with and I've never encountered anyone who uses the term to do so objectively.

That's quite the claim and I don't really think it's defensible. Hate speech definitely exists. Your claim is equivalent to saying there exists no speech meant to demean or harm others based on race, gender, religion, etc. Why does this kind of speech need to be protected from removal? Surely we wouldn't tolerate it in this forum, why should it be tolerated in others?

> Hate speech definitely exists.

In the USA, it does not exist, in the sense that freedom of speech is absolute, even when you're demeaning or "harming" others with your words. The only way in which it is limited is when it is directly inciting action as a call to violence.

In Canada, hate speech laws exist, but again are designed around the case where a reasonable person would view the speaker as making credible threats and inciting violence.

Neither country prohibits you from saying mean things about groups you don't like. Certainly neither country prohibits you from saying true-but-uncomfortable, even scientifically backed things that are banned outright on most platforms for being hateful.

> Hate speech definitely exists.

There’s plenty of stuff that you and I would both look at and say, “yep, that’s definitely hate speech”. There’s lots of stuff that I might call hate speech under any definition of it but you might think is perfectly reasonable. Since you’re defending censoring hate speech, I suspect there’s even more stuff that you would call hate speech but I would think is perfectly reasonable. And as we’ve seen over and over again, once you allow for censorship/cancellation based on “hate”, the definition of “hate” grows without bound.

Speech that's meant to demean or harm others? Who judges the intentions and what criteria is used to make that determination?

I find the claim that there are not clear double standards within this context to be indefensible.

Is wearing a MAGA hat in public hate speech?

Is telling someone their opinion doesn't count because of "white privileged" or "the patriarchy" hate speech?

What about calling evangelical's red neck climate change deniers?

You see, I've never encountered anyone that's vocal in this realm to apply their own standards logically and objectively.

I think your claim that hate speech is indefensible. Because in order to show it exists you would have to define what it is and what it isn’t entirely, and not allow that definition to expand. But that’s not really possible, so really what does exist is people who try to call things hate speech things and then make others conform to that.. but what do you do when they start defining legitimate criticism as hate speech? You can’t do anything if they’re enforcing things by law (ie guns).

Do you think Cohen and his movies are hate speech? They are full of attacks, demonization, and mocking people based on their ethnicity, religion etc.

> Surely we wouldn't tolerate it in this forum, why should it be tolerated in others?

Because this is the difference between moderation and freedom of speech. It is fine to say that some things are not acceptable to say within a particular forum; it is not fine to stop people saying those things everywhere.

Yeah, I don't agree with people advocating for violence against me. That's why I don't want it in my social circles. What's wrong with that? Why do you support hate speech? Do you agree with it?

Duty, according to whom?

Couldn’t agree more. I find the defense of Cohen here bewildering, and the fact that you are downvoted sad.

My take:

1)It is a failing of our public education system if hate speech is a problem.

2)There is a significant difference between targeted hate speech and generalized hate speech, also between speech in public and private.(not to say its ever a good quality) 2b) Private speech should never be controlled under any circumstance. It’s simply unethical.

3)Just because you deliver messages between people doesn’t mean you need to preform SIG/INT on it.

In his speech, Cohen said that 2/3 of millennials don't know what Auschwitz is [0]. Our public education system already failed (or so it seems).

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/auschwitz-...

Sorry. I don’t buy that study. I can’t believe that statistic from personal experience, and find the conducting authority partial. And nothing is stoping us from educating adults, ever heard of The Ad Council?

I also don't buy the study. Further, any questioning about knowledge of Auschwitz should also include questioning about knowledge of other 20th century atrocities, such as the British suppression of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, the Nanjing Massacre by the Japanese army in China, the Greek, Assyrian and Armenian Genocides under the Ottoman Empire, the Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, the expulsion and killings of Germans at the end of WWII, the Cambodian Genocide by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, the East Timor and West Papua Genocides in Indonesia, the Anfal Genocide in Iraqi Kurdistan, etc. I would guess that Auschwitz is better known than most other 20th century atrocities.

I agree. But I'm not sure why Cohen's career is not hate speech.

Because he's pointing out hate speech by lampooning it. Very different

> Given that the ADL already has outsized censorship abilities on Google and Twitter amongst other platforms

Can you explain this? I dont know what censorship ability the ADL has on Google and Twitter?

Then you're not paying attention. The ADL and the SPLC, though the latter is suffering some issues presently, are basically the key arbiters of what is classified as "hate speech" today. FAANG will not go to bat for the free speech rights of anyone the ADL has classified as verboten, because going up against anything the ADL does or says is anti-Semitic.

Please no name-calling. I knew about the SBLC but did not know about the ADL. If they’re similar, this is interesting information.

May I refer you to this comic? https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

I'm glad to have made you aware. They wield considerable clout.

Except that he pointed out in this, that tech's arent removing some white supremacy stuff because it would remove politicians when ADL wants them to.

https://www.cnet.com/news/adl-anti-defamation-league-faceboo...

>Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft, among others, are joining with the ADL to form a Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab, the companies and the civil rights group said Tuesday. They'll exchange ideas and develop strategies to try to curb hate speech and abuse on the companies' various platforms and across the internet.

>"These companies have an added responsibility to do everything within their power to stop hate from flourishing on their watch," ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. "We look forward to tackling this pressing challenge together."

That article does not describe any censorship abilities being granted to the ADL. It merely says that they're looking for solutions without stating what those solutions would be.

I agree. I'm deeply suspicious of Cohen. He has used 'comedy' to trick and ridicule people but taken it to another level by taking statements they make and twisting meanings. A religious jew disguised as a visitor to the US from Kazachstan going to a provincial US bar and singing 'throw the jew down the well' and then subsequently openly ridiculing and shaming the audience for singing along is a form of baiting and hate speech, the sort of thing the ADL should be commenting on. I'm surprised Kazachstan hasn't officially protested this misrepresentation, maybe they have....

I'm normally pretty well versed in dry humour, being a near native speaker of such. But I'm failing to comprehend whether you're being satirical or serious... perhaps I need more tea. Can you clarify?

Well, you're either employing tactical nihilism or you truly do need more tea. Cohen has shown himself to enjoy manipulating rubes in social contexts where the pressure to perform is present, not entirely dissimilar from how hypnotists work in crowd situations. Rather than letting it be all in good fun, though, Cohen has made people say offensive things, and then uses it to pretend it's what those people really think rather than admitting it's 99% social pressure.

Is your argument that none of the people Sacha has gotten to say things, actually believe those? Its just pressure to perform, so EVERYONE would say things they dont believe if put in the same position?

That, and he's also arguing that they're all somehow the victims of a hate crime.

Cohen is a great comedian, but I suspect he also has the skills of a con-artist, or a hypnotiser: he manages to get people to "sing along" with him well beyond what is normal and reasonable, and then ridicules them. It's funny, sometimes very interesting, sometimes leaves you a bit suspicious.

Yes. I'm confident that a charismatic person could walk into any bar anywhere in the world, and get some of the people there to sing along with an offensive song. I'm not quite sure how someone who's familiar with bars or alcohol in general could doubt this.

I'm equally confident that most of the people who sang along did not actually want to throw Jews down a well.

One distinction though, the rubes he targets are generally rubes with some level of power or influence. That's kind of the point.

I was being serious. Cohen plays a dangerous game of tricking people into interviews and situations under false pretenses and disguises and then ridicules their responses. This is low blow comedy but can be very funny. When you subsequently reach a point of publicly deliberately mischaracterizing and misrepresenting the tricked people it becomes defamation. You'd think the ADL would not want Cohen as a spokesperson.

I was going to point out that no one made them sing that but you've already got a subthread going where people are saying that he's hypnotizing them. You can't make this stuff up.

What is with all the ad hominem attacks in the comments? What a bizarre thread.

Some people want to use social media as a propaganda engine. Dismissing all criticism is par for the course.

>If you pay them, Facebook will run any ‘political’ ad you want, even if it’s a lie

Most media outlets are propaganda machines, full of white lies. The problem many have with facebook is there's no longer a high barrier to entry to control people's opinions.

Facebook in and of itself is a Skinner Box and Controlling People's minds.

I've been thinking about this as well. it's not only the low barrier to entry, because large scale is still expensive. the problem is public visibility and scrutiny. if I spread false information in a newspaper, everyone can see it and expose the lies. on Facebook, each highly targeted ad will be seen by very few people and is therefore unlikely to be publicly exposed as misinformation.

That said, it's not like people fact-check CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, Fox News etc (though Fox News probably gets fact-checked more than the rest). There have been many times just this year that all of the above have gotten stories wrong, or published disinformation because it fit a narrative.

This doesn't even get into the number of blog-style news orgs out there. And it's coming from all sides, and really hard sometimes to tell what is, and isn't actually truthful. I'm not sure I can expect FB/Twitter to be able to handle it on an even larger scale.

Everyone is in their bubbles and it's pretty toxic in a lot of ways. And I'm not sure I could even begin to suggest a way out...

I've been trying to convince people to take the week of Christmas off social media (5-9 days, depending on weekends) ... and no traction at all. I don't have a large follower base.

Every organization you listed has fact-checkers, even Fox News, if you can believe it. That doesn't mean they're infallible, but they will all publish retractions when they get the facts wrong. The notion that major news outlets do not fact-check is itself a disinformation campaign... I wonder who might benefit from such a narrative? ;) I'd add that facts are easy to come by! They are a super useful tool of disinformation, and presented in the right context will fit any narrative you like.

It also doesn't mean they always use their fact checkers... or that they do their jobs effectively.

I could never put my finger on what makes social advertising more scary than traditional media until I read your comment. Maybe the solution is that every ad needs to be published in a public form that people can review and comment on.

A public database for political ads sounds like a good idea to me

I think it is more about the targeting. Anyone can see what Fox, CNN or MSNBC are saying but Facebook ads can be targeted practically to the individual and few know what messages are being shown to others.

Furthermore, it's not just about targeting but about silent targeting. I'm not the target audience for Fox but I can still, if I choose, see what they're saying and thus know what sort of (mis)information other people are being exposed to, and possibly respond accordingly. But silently-targeted ads mean people can be shown lies all day long without anyone else ever knowing about it.

You should be opposed to this even if you believe strongly in the marketplace of ideas, because one of the bedrock principles of the marketplace of ideas is that people can fight false claims by responding to them. But if they aren't aware those false claims even exist because Facebook is secretly only showing them to targeted subsets, that assumption is broken.

Has he seen the political ads that ran on local television over the last 30-40 years?

I can't believe people WANT Facebook to ascertain the veracity of political ads. How do you do that? How does Facebook look at an ad for something like the recently proposed 'Green New Deal' and apply a truth value to it? And if they do 'allow' it, now it's an implicit statement of support for the position (the way Twitter's blue-check marks are a de facto mark of some kind of recognition by Twitter) and if they disallow it, it's not.

please watch the video.

In it, SBC includes the basic point that Facebook and similar are publishing companies. As such, they should "abide by basic standards and practices just like newspapers, magazines, and tv news do every day".

This issue is not about opinion, omissions, or so called "white lies". It is about outright falsehoods, many of which are detailed in this speech. SBC himself in this speech includes an anecdote where he himself replicated his own version of the Milgram experiment; he convinced someone that antifa were attempting to induce spontaneous sex changes in babies at a protest. He gave this person fake devices which he was told would kill these people, and the person in fact went off and used them as instructed; that is, he willfully murdered three people as far as he was aware. (found a link describing this: https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/403743-sac...)

this is not about dissatisfaction with the various biases of the news media, this is about weaponized propaganda. There is a difference, and these companies have more than enough resources to successfully tell the difference.

From the speech:

> Twitter could deploy an algorithm to remove more white supremacist hate-speech, but they have reportedly haven't because it would eject some very prominent politicians from their platform.

> Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing.

While I appreciate the sentiment behind a lot of Baron Cohen's speech, and generally distrust Facebook, the idea of having what can be said on the platform regulated either by algorithms or by a large number of monitors does sound to me like a step too far. An algorithm that ejects prominent politicians is political censorship—that should not be OK.

It seems to me that misinformation should be fought with information, not censorship. Steps that are already being enacted, like “reduc[ing] the distribution of that content” and adding fact checking annotations to incorrect information, seems to do much of the same good while not also shifting the overton window towards Ministry of Truth roles for our already-too-powerful tech companies.

> ejects prominent politicians is political censorship

And is evidence that the _algorithms aren’t working correctly_. They’re supposed to pinpoint indisputably hateful rhetoric and if they’re producing significant false positives then yes, Mr. Cohen, that _is_ a bad thing. A _very_ bad thing.

Or is it evidence that the politicians aren't working correctly?

... or those "prominent politicians" are using "indisputably hateful rhetoric".

Well, that’s the sound-bite/bumber-sticker/I’m-on-the-right-side-of-history-so-I-don’t-care-what-the-collateral-damage-is-as-long-as-Trump-suffers quip, but, no, no they aren’t. When I was young, the censors were all right-wing Christian conservatives, and we successfully (for the most part) fought back against them. One of the most often-repeated weapons in the fight against right-wing censorship back then was, “if you accept censorship of obscenity, you’re going to end up with censorship of political viewpoints”. Yet here we are, in spite of the relatively victory against right-wing censorship, staring down the barrel of much worse left-wing KGB-style censorship.

It's very generous of you to assume they're false positives.

> It seems to me that misinformation should be fought with information, not censorship.

That's not working. The New York Times, Washington Post, testimony from state department officials, climate scientists, etc etc etc etc etc

etc etc

etc etcetcetctectetc

hasn't gotten through to this country. Believing that "truth wins in a marketplace of ideas" relies on

a) people caring about the truth above all else, including their emotions

b) people having access to the truth

c) people being able to tell truth from fiction

The counter-point to these is the entirety of human history.

We have built technology that has hacked human nature for profit.

Sugary and fatty foods overwhelm our capacity to differentiate food that is good from food that is good for us.

Heroin creates tremendous addiction that is, for most people, entirely unbreakable.

Social media has consumed a generation with performative outrage, diminishing attention spans, and hyper-targeted misinformation.

The mortgage crisis was triggered by people buying homes on financial terms that they did not understand, which would have worked out only in an impossible scenario where home prices never go down, interest rates sit at near-zero, and their income continues to go up.

It might be time to admit that "just give people options and they'll make the right choice" is bullshit. It doesn't work. People aren't rational creatures with infinite will.

This isn't an argument between the Ministry of Truth and infinite freedom. Even the 1st Amendment—which doesn't apply here—has limitations, because we live in a society and some lies can get people killed.

It's not as hard as people make it out to be to take incremental steps towards quelling humanity's worst impulses. We can do this.

My opinion is based off the fact I just saw a room full of people cheer for the censorship of politicians.

I'm not of the opinion that reduced visibility and annotations will solve the problem. I just don't trust people like the above to know where the slope is, and so I don't trust them with tools for censorship.

> cheer for the censorship of politicians

This is almost willfully in bad faith. They didn't "cheer for the censorship of politicians", they want something done about lies that are eroding our democracy.

If politicians are a part of that, well, okay!

Are they "cheering for the censorship" of nation-state actors?

Maybe!

And that's…maybe not bad?

> I just don't trust people like the above to know where the slope is, and so I don't trust them with tools for censorship.

I mean, should they not remove child pornography, rape video, snuff films, or cruelty to animals? That is censorship and those things are on some part of the slope!

Will there be edge cases and mistakes? Absolutely. Guaranteed.

Are the risks of those edge or ambiguous cases sometimes going the "wrong" way worth so much to us that we throw up our hands and say, "Ah, shit, can't do anything about this. Literally any change at all would be treason to freedom."?

I don't know.

It just seems…

“it would eject some very prominent politicians from their platform. Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing. <crowd cheers>”

I don't know how to read that as anything other than approval of political censorship.

Child abuse, rape, snuff, etc. are already banned, and rightly so. The question here is whether we should ban things that are offensively incorrect.

One way of combating misinformation could be increased visibility. For example, suppose that Facebook had a policy like this: if an advertisement is deemed to have misinformation in it, or cover a particularly controversial topic, it is not allowed to be targeted. It can still be published en masse, but it cannot be targeted to a particular population. Also, there is a period of time where fact checkers and other sources have time to publish rebuttals, which will be included with the ad.

I don't think adverts need the same freedom of speech protections that general users do. Banning factually inaccurate adverts is fine IMO.

"fact I just saw a room full of people cheer for the censorship of politicians."

That was his point I think. I think this was just a performance to point out exactly THAT behaviour. How easy the people cheer for censorship.

He even explained his doing in the beginning when he told about his other characters and what he did to the audiences.

If that is true, I think its genious. He is my favorite trickster hero now.

I don't care about algorithm automatic censorship.

Probably a few perfectly fine posts would be deleted. But the amount of hate speech and manipulation in social platforms is way too much and it is an annoyance.

Are you opposed to social media companies removing / hiding / reducing the reach of anti-western and terrorist propaganda?

Do you think ISIS and Al Qaeda should have broader reach?

I think terrorist propaganda is a clear case where censorship is reasonable, and I believe all major platforms already do so.

Does your opinion change when referring to white American terrorists? (nazis, white nationalists, other groups that incite domestic terror)

Or is your support of these limits scoped specifically to anti-western muslim terrorists?

No, not particularly. But bear in mind that I'm making a distinction between Muslim terrorist propaganda (censorship OK) and people arguing on behalf of the Quran (censorship generally not OK).

The algorithms that ban Muslim terrorist propaganda also routinely ban non-terrorist Muslim content. They have essentially the exact same failure modes as anti-Nazi algorithms that also ban some politicians.

Why are you tolerant of these problems in one case, but extremely bothered by them in the other?

He later mentions that newspapers and TV are regulated and held to standards. These could be applied to facebook and twitter too.

Facebook pays a lot of money so their engineers can forget about privacy as a fundamental human right and enter the life of an amoral mercenary. “I’m just trying to do the best for my family (by selling out all of yours).”

This is inflammatory. The truth is some people just don't care about these implications. You can find people in this very thread arguing that it isn't Facebooks responsibility to filter these (whether or not you agree is not the issue, it is a valid position). Calling engineers who do not fit your narrow view "amoral" is disingenuous.

Which is it? That they don't care, or they care but disagree?

The first seems to be pretty much the definition of "amoral".

"Lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something."

Using amoral implies there is at least a consensus on what is moral and they are acting opposite to it. This is an entire conversation on what is even moral to begin with. It is smearing someone by associating your "morality" to a particularly grey area.

This just in folks, we can't actually condemn an action until the entire field of ethics is solved. There is actually zero difference between good and bad things dril tweet etc.

It’s literally the opposite. “Opposed to moral consensus” is immoral. “Grey area” is definitionally amoral.

You’re complaining because “amoral” still sounds like a bad thing to call someone. And it is, exactly because history doesn’t tend to see that “it seemed like a grey area at the time” defense very charitably.

Wait, is that right?

I thought your definition of immoral there is correct. But I thought that "gray area" means a person has morals, but the goodness of the topic is tricky to decide, while "amoral" just means the person doesn't even have a "right and wrong" scale, or doesn't care.

>This is inflammatory.

Sometimes the truth is inflammatory.

I think it's hard to argue at this point that Facebook is not a force for evil in the world. Engineers spending their productive years to further this evil company should feel some shame.

> The truth is some people just don't care

I don’t buy that. They either are ignorant (which is fine, until the point they become aware of it–I really doubt many people at FB are ignorant of the social issues it brings up), or they inevitably are aware and have rationalized why it is or is not an issue.

I’m not saying it is FB’s absolute responsibility. I’m saying it is the responsibility of each individual who works there. There’s a difference. Corporations are not people, the people in them are what make possible the goods or evils the corporations use to make money and thrive.

The pen is mightier than the sword. Social media is mightier than the atom bomb. People need to act accordingly. Morals are the impetus of action so I’d say they are highly relevant.

"If I told you to murder an infant girl say, still at her mother breast’s, would you do it without question?"

Bronn then answers "Without question? No. I'd ask how much."

especially since they could make a very comfortable living doing anything else

The Communications Decency Act of 1996 permitted Internet Companies to not be held responsible for content posted by users. That was an interesting experiment. Looking back we now know that it did some good, but it also did some bad: It meant that everyone on the internet could become a publisher and the result has been fake news, unbridled growth in hate speech, terrorist propaganda, and so on. It meant many users trapped in echo chambers who receive an untrue view of the world.

It is now time to review the Communications Decency Act and perhaps take back some of its provisions based on what we have learned in the last 23 years. Sacha Baron Cohen is right, social media companies should be held to the same decency standards as traditional publishers.

> Looking back we now know that it did some good, but it also did some bad: It meant that everyone on the internet could become a publisher and the result has been fake news, unbridled growth in hate speech, terrorist propaganda, and so on. It meant many users trapped in echo chambers who receive an untrue view of the world.

From my perspective, your last sentence perfectly describes the prior. The most prominent purveyor of “fake news” is, by far, the major networks themselves. Hate speech has never been less unbridled, and terrorist propaganda never had anything to do with the CDA.

Why is that Facebook's responsibility? If someone advertises something illegal or in an illegal way, it's not the publisher who is punished, but the one who posted the ad right? In newpapers, billboards etc.

When a magical cure company makes false claims about the efficacy of their products, you sue the company, not the newpaper who printed the ad.

Why do people want to give the authority to Facebook to decide whether an ad is within the acceptable range? That's what laws and courts are for.

Because they are made of human beings and live on planet Earth. A better question is why do we think companies shouldn't care about that? Why isn't it their responsibility?

Because making money is all that matters and any interference of that is bad? /s

I'm so tired of libertarian fairy tales.

Because a system where companies maximize profits and government punishes unethical behavior according to the rule of law is a cornerstone of liberal society that many highly respected thinkers advocated for since the start of the Age of Enlightenment.

> Because a system where companies maximize profits and government punishes unethical behavior according to the rule of law is a cornerstone of liberal society that many highly respected thinkers advocated for since the start of the Age of Enlightenment.

It's frankly unworkable to outsource morality and ethics to the government, even if you allow extreme surveillance and control. The law is there to catch serious cases where personal ethics and morality have failed. Yeah, that contradicts the DRY principle [1], but life isn't a software system.

Also, IIRC, the idea that the "system" is one were "companies [merely] maximize profits" within legal limits set by the government is a rather recent but false view [2]. The Age of Enlightenment didn't start in the 1970s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself

[2] This seems to give a decent summary: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Stout_C...

Why is this a standard being uniquely applied to Facebook? There are ads for x-ray glasses in magazines. The are commercials for security products with many lies running on all the cable news networks.

I tend the think the source of the lie is the thing that should be attacked. Who has the most responsibility here: the advertiser for lying, the network for showing the lie, the ISP for delivering the content with a lie, the laptop for displaying the lie?

Simple answer.

With magazines, television etc you are targeting everyone. So if you run an ad that said "Vote for me because I will build a border wall" then you will attract 30% of the population and alienate the other 70%.

With Facebook you can just target that 30% whilst guaranteeing the 70% won't be affected since they won't see the ads. That is the feature that is unique to Facebook that is causing all of the problems.

What problems is it causing? How does not affecting other "70%" change things?

Let's say you have two groups of people. One group is pro-skub, the other group is anti-skub.

If you run an ad in the newspaper that says 'pro-skub people want to literally kill all anti-skubs', that is broadcasted to everyone. People outside of the target group can independently fact check it and/or apply pressure to the paper itself to remove an obviously fake and inflammatory ad.

Now let's say you run that same ad on Bookface. You target specifically the anti-skub people, and especially those that are already predisposed against those that are pro-skub. Even if your ad is obviously fake, you're contributing to the radicalization of a group which increases divisiveness. This becomes much harder to independently fact check because when you search that ad on Dooble you find results which seem to reinforce that ads message because all of these algorithms are optimizing for engagement.

Because that 70% still votes:

30% (increase) + 70% (decrease) = No difference

30% (increase) + 70% (no change) = Increase

My right-wing grandma who's a bit nutty reads tabloids. Like that's the only magazines she reads.

Pretty sure a specific 'type' of person reads that crap. It's like Alex Jones' in print. There are probably other similar 'print' publications.

If you hit a specific magazine/publication you can target a specific demographic without hitting 'all of us'....

Edit: I'm playing devil's advocate here. I agree FB needs tempered a bit. I believe though that truth doesn't need to be in ALL ads, but if it's political in nature or could affect society at large then yes it should be controlled.

Nothing is stopping you from creating facebook personalities to receive these ads is there? You have to buy a magazine to read it.

Why Do standards apply more to Trump than my racist grandma?

Power. The tallest weed gets the shears. If Facebook doesn't like being the tallest weed in the garden it's free to split itself up. Until then harbouring a persecution complex just makes it lose reputation. And until Facebook can operate outside off planet it's still going to have to learn to live with the people on it. And there's been a long history to read up on about the different methods humanity resorts to when it's ticked off enough with those in power and lose hope of them changing course on their own initiative.

In my country responsibility lies with the network because it's the last part of the system that isn't a dumb pipe. To tackle the source of the lie will require dropping the first Ammendment as a prerequisite. Facebook employees having nice happy unchecked good days isn't worth that.

No, Facebook should not allow someone to run an ad promoting genocide. They should not wait for the issue to go to court.

Personally I don’t think they would run an ad for genocide. This is pretty easy to decide. But there are plenty of other areas where it’s much harder to determine if an ad is ok without being too political.

Laws are very hard to enforce internationally and against unknown persons. Facebook ads are opaque. If they wanted to disclaim responsibility, they should start with an impressum: a click to show who the person is in your country who can be prosecuted for misleading ads.

If someone advertises something illegal or in an illegal way, it's not the publisher who is punished, but the one who posted the ad right? In newpapers, billboards etc.

No. In newspapers and billboards there are human beings involved who have sense enough to make sure things like this don't happen (thought there are cases where bosses will override common sense).

For Google and Facebook, everything is automated so there is zero accountability by design. And when something goes wrong, SV companies point fingers at algorithms and put out pithy press releases saying, "We can do better" but things only seem to get worse.

> If someone advertises something illegal or in an illegal way, it's not the publisher who is punished, but the one who posted the ad right?

Not true, there are laws that govern what can and cannot be advertised, and how. The reason cigarette companies don't publish TV or print ads is because the government made it illegal to do so. Publishers would face legal action for running illegal ads.

> Why do people want to give the authority to Facebook to decide whether an ad is within the acceptable range?

They already have this authority, and they choose again and again to exercise zero discretion. The fact that we're arguing over whether or not FB should have the right to choose whether or not to run these types of ads is so absurd.

>Why do people want to give the authority to Facebook to decide whether an ad is within the acceptable range?

Do they currently not hold such power?

Publishers are responsible & accountable to the FCC and FTC in the United States.

Facebook’s entire argument, until recently, is that they aren’t a publisher.

For TV “The FCC has primary responsibility for determining whether specific advertising is false or misleading, and for taking action against the sponsors of such material.”

https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/complaints-about-broadc...

And the Federal Trade Commission... “When consumers see or hear an advertisement, whether it’s on the Internet, radio or television, or anywhere else, federal law says that ad must be truthful, not misleading, and, when appropriate, backed by scientific evidence.”

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/truth-advert...

The reason we hear about magical cures in spam email & telemarketing is precisely because publishers are held accountable for what they publish & don’t allow those ads in newspapers, magazines, or on TV.

I really like this quote:

“I think we could all agree that we should not be giving bigots and paedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.”

To me that's a good way of looking at it. Censorship will bring nothing positive, regardless of much we may dislike the words being said. However, we don't need to provide the those with opinions we disagree with a platform to utter those words.

Of cause Facebook is free to provide a platform to who ever they want, assuming wish to be associated with those messages.

I'm also completely fascinated by the speed of which Facebook will take down a picture of naked breasts, but they can't screen the ads being run on their site.

My fear about all of these calls to police speech on social networks is that eventually people will call for the same to be applied everywhere on the Internet.

I realize that the major difference is how easy it is for someone to have an audience on FB/Twitter vs. Running their own blog. But there’s no real barrier to someone we might not agree with to build that audience outside those platforms too.

I suspect social media companies don't like the message because they don't like the costs required for good moderation. They don't really care about free speech, that's just spin.

Or they don't like the costs for moderation and believe in free speech.

Come on, Zuckerberg never designed FB with freedom of speech in mind, it started as a campus thing and transformed into a money printing machine, he may or may not care about freedom of speech but it's irrelevant, it's nowhere near the top of facebook priorities.

"Freedom of speech" is the new mantra you have to repeat if you want Americans to stop thinking about a problem.

Censorship and propaganda are the tools to limit thinking. More speech = more thinking, not less.

But yeah, would agree that "freedom of speech" wasn't a design pillar or anything for FB.

> More speech = more thinking

This is as true as saying "more code = more programming" -- possibly a technically correct statement, but if your goal is to create something valuable (to your business, to society) this won't help.

It's probably simpler than that. Their earnings are proportional to click-baitiness, so they optimize for that. Moderation is probably more akin to a water pump on a ship: its purpose is to keep it afloat. Free speech is probably just passing regulatory nuissance that moderation has to account for.

I'd like to call Occam's Razor, but, then, when has it become that the most selfish interpretation of an organization's motivations is the simplest one? Maybe it's simple simply because it aligns with my beliefs. Something to ponder.

Deeply thought-provoking. Confronts difficult issues and makes logical, compelling and important arguments. May have to think about all this a little differently now.

Oh how mighty are the righteous who now swiftly mount one of the galloping horses in the stampede against Facebook.

How self-serving they are when the criticism comes from all directions and they take no risks in joining the chorus.

How conveniently they point their finger to the to the west when a bit further to the east they’d rather the world’s gaze not firm into a stare and a squint.

Politicians care about taking down Facebook’s or Twitter’s power mainly to leverage it for themselves or because they view it as an existential threat.

As long as children starve, we should not talk about free speech etc. at all! /sarcasm

Whataboutism at its best from you.

What are you on about, he basically said democracy needs to police social networks and hold them to a high standard given their huge amounts of power. I particularly like the line about a restauranteur not having to serve an 8 course meal to a fascist. This is the correct way to look at freedom of speech - you can say what you want - but there is no requirement for me to provide services for you to reach billions of people with your statements.

If normal people want to hear my message, and there's only one platform they can effectively locate it through, then I'd say you are required to provide services to me. At this point, it's like cutting off somebody's internet or phone service for their political views - the argument that Verizon isn't the government and is just "muh showing you the door" wears thin.

There seems to be this underlying assumption that nationalism, paleoconservatism and various commonly-held views that are wrongly called "fascism" are actually things people want to hear, and if we allow them the same access to services as any other views, their popularity will overturn this entire neoliberal scheme that's being artificially propped up by organizations like the ADL rooting out free speech in every area they can legally do so. I sort of agree - this entire project would fail without censorship.

And, if as Baron Cohen implies, we're really just a bunch of stupid hateful beasts always primed to commit another Holocaust as soon as the boot is off our neck, well...then we've got deeper problems in our society than a lack of social media censorship.

Your Karma of -9 leads me to worry about the quality of your opinions, however your arguments are quite well put, so I'll do my best to address them.

Firstly, I mean really hateful fascistic stuff not any of the things you mention - I don't agree with nationalism (or even patriotism, countries are a completely made up idea) but would defend your right to talk about it as you see fit on any platform, paleoconservartism is more than fine too or even talk about advocating gun laws or anti abortion stuff. All fine.

The problem is the current climate is not a fact based discussion about issues on their merits, instead the system is being gamed by these platforms and people using these platforms to wield influence (and craft a society) that will allow much great abuses of power going forward.

I think the Standford prison experiment and the smaller version Cohen ran in his film shows you that people are not good, we all can be riled up and lash out because of strong beliefs we might hold. I think having platforms that don't try to help tone down and instead encourage hateful thinking really is dangerous, especially when a lot of these opinions are based on lies.

The West is not doing too well in the human rights department, yo. You have to actually work pretty hard to understand that, however, as the mass ignorance is by design.

However, as long as we are free to speak to each other about our differences of opinion, we can avert catastrophe and build a diverse, and therefore stronger, civilisation.

Those who would lecture the masses on what is and isn't free speech, don't seem to be getting the point. Words, in and of themselves, never kill.

A world-wide, sudden enlightenment at the hands of celebrity figures in an attempt to create a godhead may .. or may not .. be the kind of solution to collective destruction .. we should be celebrating.

From the video: https://youtu.be/ymaWq5yZIYM?t=723

"This is ideological imperialism. Six unelected individuals in silicon valley imposing their vision on the rest of the world, unaccountable to any government..."

"Now here's an idea, instead of letting the silicon six decide the fate of the world, let our elected representatives voted for by the people of every democracy of the world have at least some say..."

Democracy is a political system, not a system of rational inquiry. It can not establish facts, outside of voting statistics. Dressing up censorship with the pretenses of democracy is nothing more than appealing to the tyranny of the masses. Democracy as we know it requires a free and open forum for discussion.

The trend towards 'fact checking' disappoints me. Individuals must be capable of processing and consuming information without authoritarian hand-holding. To pessimistically dismiss this possibility is to refute the premises of democracy. It baffles me how proponents of censorship feel that they can have it both ways here.

Furthermore, the underlying philosophy of fact-checking dismisses the fallible nature of man. Information is constantly emerging. The horizon is contentious by definition. What would fact checkers have said to Copernicus? That a scientific consensus has already been formed?

The popular view that we have somehow escaped these human limitations is nothing more than special pleading: "This time is different. This is the age of reason and science. Dogma is dead."

This time is not different. Progress will continue to unfold and regressive ideologies will continue to limit us. On the historical scale we are becoming more tolerant. One has to wonder if the pessimistic view which highlights hatred is accurate.

Is it a meaningful assertion to say that you are intolerant of intolerance? Should we applaud this as noble? Perhaps a more rational inquiry would be to ask who would benefit from the proposed censorship and fact-checking regime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading

A person who made his name manipulating unwitting people probably isn't the best spokesman for social responsibility.

He constantly makes comparisons about his comedy and how much more of an experiment it was to showcase the "hidden prejudice" of people. The content of his speech are totally valid and agreeable and don't see why he cannot have an influence for discussing social problems. Actually comedians are of great help for ethical social concerns; for instance take a look at George Carlin.

You're right and I loved Sasha's Made in America show, however George Carlin would be absolutely fucked in today's day and age. His political/cultural angles are not nearly as "safe" as Sasha's.

I suspect Carlin would have adapted, as Dave Chappelle has.

Chappelle was grandfathered in, imo.

His recent comedy takes aim directly at the cancel culture that most other comedians don't dare offend. It seems to me that he doesn't need the acceptance of the system because he largely lives outside it, producing new specials when it suits his fancy.

Carlin would've been fine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8yV8xUorQ8

He makes his living by mocking people. Any claims of experiments or hidden prejudice are hypocrisy.

People mock themselves. He's just giving them the door to walk through. It's entirely within your own power to not show the world you're a fool.

"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." -- Mark Twain

I double-dog dare you to go to a Jewish wedding and ask about circumcision. (Or to a tech conference and ask where the women are and why everyone is single.) With good editing, it will be exactly as funny as Cohen's best.

Everyone has a door and can be convinced to go through it. And at any given time, some people are safe targets.

> I double-dog dare you to go to a Jewish wedding and ask about circumcision.

I've been to Jewish weddings and the community themselves make jokes about circumcision. It's not like it's a subject for which they have to be tricked into showing their true colors on like the latent racism and sexism that Cohen exposes in his comedy. In fact, circumcision is the subject of a lot of of traditional Jewish humor.

> Or to a tech conference and ask where the women are and why everyone is single.

I suspect you'd get a lot of laughs from the attendees, because after all, most normal people can laugh at themselves, and even at caricatures of themselves. If some of them end up shouting mysoginistic stuff in response, that's on them.

> Actually comedians are of great help for ethical social concerns; for instance take a look at George Carlin.

George Carlin is a pretty impressive example of a comedian affecting meaningful change, or at least forcing a legal confrontation, though probably not in the way he wanted [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_v._Pacifica_Foundation

> He constantly makes comparisons about his comedy and how much more of an experiment it was to showcase the "hidden prejudice" of people

Was that his original intent or is that a retcon? Maybe I was too young to "get it" at the time, but I watched the original Da Ali G Show when it came out and don't really remember that being the point. Maybe if Ali G asked legitimate questions despite his low-status dress/speech mannerisms you'd have a point, but the character was actually incredibly stupid.

I wonder how long it will take until it becomes illegal to say that Epstein didn't commit suicide.

Hm, that stuff about Twitter having an algo that is totally effective and not using it sounds...a lot like a conspiracy theory to me...but that couldn't be...

Suggesting that companies - remember Zuckerberg is ethnically Jewish, Pichai is a migrant, Brin is a migrant, Page is ethnically Jewish - want to do nothing is bizarre (and, again, somewhat conspiratorial). These companies pay almost no regard to shareholder value (again, this is a conspiratorial point). The issue is that it is hard to know how to generalise.

To be honest, I don't think anyone has a good grip on this topic. It is certainly true that political parties have always been allowed to make inflammatory adverts (and sorry, but it is both sides here). And if you believe anti-semetic propaganda, is a Facebook post really the thing that puts you over the edge? Or is it just the thing that we can now observe.

A similar point is that celebrities today often complain about the abuse they get on social media...but these people have always been there, and some people won't like you regardless of what you do. That is part of having a public profile. I have heard minor celebrities recommending that social media gets shuts down because someone tweeted at them that they found their voice annoying...everyone hears this kind of stuff in life. It is normal.

I don't know what the solution is but we are still clearly quite a long way from the point where a solution emerges.

Doesn't Facebook already prohibit all content (not just ads) that incites violence against groups?

https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/hate_speech

After the fifth DNC debate, I am convinced the legacy media ("MSM") are exponentially more dangerous and insidious.

In fact, I suspect that this persistent campaign against "new media" is nothing more than a turf war, waged as it were by the losers.

Good riddance to the self-appointed gatekeepers. It's no surprise this speech is sponsored by the ADL. They are probably good allies with racist MSNBC, lying NYTimes etc.

That's a great comment, because I don't doubt at all that this would be the case.

The obvious historical corollary being IBM's role in the Holocaust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

I worked for about half a year on a DHS contract and quit once the family separations started, and spoke to someone last night about why they're still working there: "Well, if we don't do it, someone else will."

Which is, I guess, probably true, but man is that a weak way to justify contributing to an atrocity.

Thank you for standing up for what's right.

The solution is not to censor. The solution is to not allow targeting. If you change your message based on who you're talking to, everyone should see it, and get to call you out as a liar.

In a system that permits free speech, the solution to bad speech is good speech, not controlled speech.

"Select is not broken" in the parlance of Pragmatic Programmer.

Too bad he is making these comments at the ADL.

>Too bad he is making these comments at the ADL

Why is that bad?

The ADL is a Zionist organization. It's hard to take their opinions on ethnonationalism seriously at all when you consider their goals for Israel.

Their goal for Israel: a democratic, two-state solution that provides for the security of everyone living in Israel and Palestine.

https://www.adl.org/news/op-ed/dont-destroy-the-two-state-so...

Sure, they might have a bit of a blind spot that makes them overly favorable toward Israel, but in a sea of bad actors, they're one of the few groups acting in good faith.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-04-13-mn-22383-...

https://psmag.com/news/kings-garbage-76228

The ADL spied extensively on not only pro-Palestinian activists, but also on anti-South African apartheid activists, presumably because they didn't want their critiques being used on Israel.

I was curious, so I read the articles. For something intended to critique the ADL, they spend a lot of time listing malign actions of the government of Israel. Which is annoying, because... I don't care. I oppose Israel having cooperated with South Africa in the 60s and 70s, but that has pretty much nothing to do with the ADL in 2019.

The spying seems like a more damning charge. But the word is doing a lot of work: most prominent political organizations maintain rolodexes of reporters and activists, along with their stances and perspectives. It's part of what makes them effective--you can rest assured that e.g. CAIR does the same. Characterizing it as spying is a bit overwrought.

We're talking about the ADL being a Zionist organization, and the viewpoints that caused individuals to be the subjects of spying (or whatever you want to call it) clearly indicates a pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian bias. I don't think anyone would argue CAIR isn't a pro-Islamic organization with accompanying biases.

They actually got busted in 1992 for stealing records from the SFPD to spy on their enemies: https://psmag.com/news/kings-garbage-76228

It's an organization that has repeatedly been sued for defamation, and paid out tens of millions of dollars for doing do. Among some of the most egregious episodes were when they recruited a family to wiretap their neighbors. To many, they embody the tendency of using allegations of hate and bigotry to justify authoritarian measures.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Defamation_League

err, that's not on the same level to compare

Not only that: it doesn't change the contents of the speech.

"freedom of speech is not freedom of reach"

"free speech" is not curtailed when Facebook disallows hate groups from reaching one third of the planet. These groups may have all the "speech" they want but global media platforms need not facilitate them.

In a way he is blaming the paper (social media) for what people write on it.

Social media merely enable our worst to come out. But it doesn't cause it.

The solution is not censorship. But to somehow make it so that people see through the bullshit. but how!?

Social media isn't the piece of paper.

It's handing out copies of what you wrote to potentially countless people.

The hitler example is easy, but it’s almost the exception :

Should someone in 1938 advocating launching war against Germany after they invaded tchekosloviakia and calling chamberlain a coward be censored as promoting « hate speech » ?

Wow. An excellent, pointed take.

Facebook has put profit & self-interest over ethics. They have taken a step-back, reflected, and fully embraced the damage they have caused, are causing, and will continue to cause.

Some of this is reactionary. Zuckerberg feels that "the left" (as if there is one, unified left) has gone to war against him (via his company). Front-runner 2020 candidates like Warren and Sanders are explicitly stating they will examine regulation & oversight legislation to reel in some companies behaviors. His concern may be legitimate, however his reaction is childlike.

Zuckerberg is now taking private dinners with the current POTUS, probably to curry policy favor even though there will be inevitable strings attached (as is always the case). It also means he now has a stake in a "side" of the US body politic and so his actions will move in the direction of support for that side.

Attempting to curry policy favor isn't new, is has happened, does happen, and will happen. That being said, Zuck's newfound eagerness to spread misinformation via the power of his platform is eyebrow-raising.

I would argue that this lack of ethics will ultimately hurt both "sides" of the US political spectrum, it will just take longer for one "side" to feel it than the other.

Note: I use "sides" in quotes specifically because Americans are quite often divided into two opposing sides, even when there are many actual sides, interests, groups.

Wow. An excellent, pointed take by SBC.

Facebook has put profit & self-interest over ethics. They have taken a step-back, reflected, and fully embraced the damage they have caused, are causing, and will continue to cause.

I would argue that this lack of ethics will ultimately hurt both "sides" of the US political spectrum, it will just take longer for one "side" to feel it than the other.

Note: I use "sides" in quotes specifically because Americans are quite often divided into two opposing sides, even when there are many actual sides, interests, groups.

So somebody who has a voice via his fame, argues about which of regular non famous people that shouldn't have free speech. And he even talks about tolerance in the same text.

Repulsive.

To expect a platform with billions of content posted every day to have algorithms capable of distinguishing the intricacies of what humans subjectively determine is vulgar, untrue, etc. is insane.

Moreover, who determined what is "banworthy"? This is dangerous territory. I agree with the sentiment of SBC's speech, but in reality, that's such a slippery slope into suppressing speech simply because somebody is going to dictate what penetrates the filters.

I'm sorry, I'm not taking advice from Borat.

Actually this is the actor Sasha Baron Cohen. Borat is just a character he portrays in television and movies.

Pretty sure he knows that.

One of Cohen's schticks is not breaking character. (I wonder who will be embarrassed when his new style's punchline hits?)

I was trying out HN-style pedantry; it didn't work.

I thought it was perfect!

I'm sorry, I'm not taking any sort of advice from the ADL, a lobbying group for Israel posing as an anti-racist organisation.

Cohen is funny, but I'm not sure I understand how a guy who made his living stereotyping everyone else gets on his high-horse when honored by the ADL, a group with a mile long controversies section on their Wikpedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Defamation_League

Cohen is advocating for political censorship in front of an ADL audience. The ADL, or Anti-Defamation League, for those who don't know it, is a powerful Jewish organisation claiming to fight agaist anti-Semitism- but mostly lobbying in support of Israel. Just to make clear where this is going and why the ADL is so happy to hear this speech, here is a recent press release by the ADL, praising a resolution of the House Foreign Affairs Committee against the BDS movement (which advocates political and economic pressure on Israel to force it to come to a peace with Palestinians):

https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-commends-house-f...

This means that currently the ADL is already lobbying the American parliament and government to obstacle, possibly even outlaw, a political and human rights movement that goes against Israel's interests.

This talk touches the very fundamental question of attribution of blame. Say I read an anti-Semitic leaflet and then perform a hate crime. How much of the responsibility do I bare and how much does the writer of the leaflet? And how much does the printing press?

First off, there is a very strong axiom here that "the masses" are extremely malleable and incapable of critical thinking. So, just like with children, it's the responsibility of the "influencer" to control the audience "properly". This is a very strong axiom that, while I personally agree with it, I'm guessing most people wouldn't when presented explicitly. This axiom has far reaching consequences for Free Speech as Free Speech only works when personal responsibility is a given. This is a classic "you can't have it both ways" situation.

But assuming this axiom and its implications (that people are not 100% responsible for their actions), the next question is how much of the external responsibility does the metaphorical printing press have? Is it ok for my OS to allow me to type "kill jews"? Is it ok for your browser to render said text? Should Microsoft censor the content of Word documents so they can't be used to spread hate speech? (this is not so far fetched: Photoshop blocks attempts to edit images of money bills for fear of being a tool for counterfeiting) Is it ok for a CDN (like Cloudflare) to decline services to websites based on their content (like 8chan and Daily Stormer)? If yes, must they decline and actively police the content of all "19 million Internet properties that use Cloudflare's service"? Should Google not deliver emails based on their content? etc.

How much do we want Facebook/Twitter to bare responsibility for the content of users and advertisers and thus actively censor based on their own criteria? What should be this criteria be?

"Say I read an anti-Semitic leaflet and then perform a hate crime. How much of the responsibility do I bare and how much does the writer of the leaflet? And how much does the printing press?"

Here is where this line of doesn't work too well with what Baron Cohen is saying: Facebook/Twitter/etc are centralized publishers. He is arguing they are equivalent to Random House, NBC, or TIME. If a hate group owns its own printing press, it's not the press' fault because they are a publisher of the organization. But if Random House prints and publishes works of a fringe group, do you think there would be push back? Why are they giving this group legitimacy? It legitimizes them if they are published by the same entity as works of literature. Sacha is saying that by allowing hate groups and non-hate groups the same publishing capability, Facebook is legitimizing them.

> “If you pay them, Facebook will run any ‘political’ ad you want, even if it’s a lie.”

Well, I guess that almost every ad-based model has it, as a core principle. Contemplate sentence "the best washing powder".

I would bet that most of the marketing is precisely about white lies. Every ad is a piece of propaganda, but business rather than a political option.

Let's imagine implementing Cohen's vision for a minute: each piece of content on YouTube must be reviewed by a moderator and be rated according to MPAA standards. By some estimates there are 2000+ millennia worth of videos on YouTube. Some significant portion of this is algorithmically generated or duplicated, but let's suppose 10% of it is new original content. 200 millennia is equivalent 1.75E9 hours. Suppose a content moderator earns $3/hr and no benefits and watches videos at 2x speed. To rate all the content, it would cost $2.6B. Not actually that infeasible. Society might ease the burden on FB by making a law that videos only need to be rated after 1000 views.

Frankly I'm not sure this would be effective because of the lawlessness of the internet and the ease of moving information, but it doesn't seem impossible either.

If Facebook would have let Hitler buy ads, Google would have worked with state-run German universities to develop AI technology that would be used to advance the authoritarian regime: https://www.theepochtimes.com/google-works-on-ai-with-top-ch...

> The U.S. internet giant has collaborated with Beijing’s Tsinghua University since June 2018, when it launched a new AI research body, the Tsinghua University Institute for Artificial Intelligence (TUIFAI).

> Earlier that month, it was revealed that the university received significant funding from the Chinese military to work on a project aimed to advance the military’s AI capabilities.

> Google and Tsinghua The university announced the opening of the TUIFAI on June 28, 2018, during a joint Google–Tsinghua symposium held in Beijing.

> During the symposium, Tsinghua University also announced the appointment of Jeff Dean, head of Google AI, as a member of the computer science advisory committee at the university.

Remember, Tsinghua is a state university, run by the same government that is currently running concentration camps: https://www.businessinsider.com/muslim-woman-describes-horro...

> Sauytbay describes being forced to witness a gang rape while at the camp. A young woman, she says, was forced to disrobe after being forced to "confess" her sins in front of around 200 prisoners. The young woman was then raped by several police officers, Sauytbay said.

> "While they were raping her they checked to see how we were reacting. People who turned their head or closed their eyes, and those who looked angry or shocked, were taken away and we never saw them again."

Epoch times is a fake news blog, FYI. They spread conspiracies like chemtrails and lizard people:

1. https://www.theepochtimes.com/nervous-system-damage-from-the...

2. https://www.theepochtimes.com/space-aliens-live-quietly-amon...

Venture Beat says the same thing: https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/28/tsinghua-university-plans...

No, Venture Beat simply announces the A.I. center. They say nothing about the jingoist conspiracy.

> It’ll also work closely with Google, which opened an AI center in Beijing in December 2017. The Mountain View-based company is already involved in research at Peking University, the University of Science and Technology of China, and other institutions in the region.

Google is actively working with a government that is currently going full nazi on muslims in China. They’re not just buying and selling products in the stream of commerce, they’re partnering with and arming a hostile foreign dictatorship.

It’s not some wacko conspiracy theory: https://www.thedailybeast.com/google-snubbed-the-pentagonbut...

> General Joseph Dunford, America’s top military officer, has announced he will be meeting with Google representatives this week to talk about the company’s assistance to China’s People’s Liberation Army.

> Similarly, acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan sounded the alarm at that Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on March 14. “The fusion of commercial business with military is significant,” he said. “The technology that is developed in the civil world transfers to the military world. It’s a direct pipeline. Not only is there a transfer, there’s also systematic theft of U.S. technology that facilitates even faster development of emerging technology.”

Freedom of speech is not freedom to microtarget billions of people, aided by technology to change their minds to act according to bigoted principles.

I'm fully on board with Cohen, except that he doesn't go into enough detail about what Facebook is. Facebook is no longer a social network on which you can connect with friends and share your thoughts and aspects of your life. Facebook is an influence-amplification network where with enough money you may change the minds of hundreds of millions of people.

In other words it's ad targeting that when taken to its logical conclusion becomes the ultimate propaganda system.

Let's get Ja's opinion on this matter.

I don't want to dance I'm scared to death

Written version: https://www.adl.org/news/article/sacha-baron-cohens-keynote-...

Counterpoint: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191122/00412943432/sacha...

We should be above this level of incendiary, hyperbolic, un-nuanced discussion.

Here’s a fun theory that he’s just a master comic:

- He admits he’s played a lot of characters, and he’s now playing his least favourite for the first time, Sasha Baron Cohen.

- He admits all the times he’s gotten people, many of which were important and intelligent, to side with him and his ideas while he’s in character.

- It would be a good comedy and satire to see an entity like the ADL rave and cheer for certain ideas. Then again, he admits some people might not find it funny.

Thank you Mr. Cohen, my new favourite character ;)

'Final solution' was classified all the way till the end of the war, only some of the party and SS officers knew about the scale of the plan and the name itself. Ordinary Germans, both soldiers and civilians, knew little about it. Any kind of deliberate violence was never on Nazi's electoral leaflets (who would voluntarily vote for it?).

This speech is precisely an example of what it is exposing – clickbaits.

Exactly!

On the other hand, "doing something about" the victims of the camps was there from day 1.

I really think he is wrong on almost all counts.

This TD article sums it up well i think: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191122/00412943432/sacha...

Here's the video with a transcript.

https://www.adl.org/news/article/sacha-baron-cohens-keynote-...

It's really disturbing that FB will run any political ad given the Russians are still f'ing with our elections.

I think TechDirt has the best commentary on this: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191122/00412943432/sacha...

This speech reminds me of the following Adam Curtis documentary, where he touches upon the same observations that Sacha brings up. It's an interesting watch, and aired on BBC back in 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh2cDKyFdyU

rich, coming from a guy whose entire career is stereotype "comedy"

if censorship is cool now, how about starting with the crass bullshit people like SBC beam into people's living rooms?

i'm willing to bet money that people will do a better job sorting fact from fiction when they're no longer immersed in hollywood stupidity 24x7.

I can't believe the same man responsible for the vile minstrel show that was Borat is so often lauded as some sort of progressive champion. I guess it's ok to be racist as long as the targets are Kazakhs and not Jews.

You're pretty dense if you think borat etc is unfiltered racism. Even people in kz see borat as high comedy. If you think anyone is offended by borat and etc then you yourself has unreasonably soft skin.

Your points are voided, in any cases.

If Borat is your version of high comedy then I feel sorry for you. That scene in the beginning where he calls his sister the highest ranked prostitute in the country really makes you instrospect. You can say Borat is some sort of modern Tocqueville but Tocqueville didn't spend the entire time pretending to be German and telling everyone about how they drink horse piss in Germany.

Why make personal attacks? You could have made the same points without calling him names.

Its not personal at all, sir. "You" and all the other aspects is the royal you, not at all anything personal against the good sir. "You" is just a wider you, do not worry about it. Thank you good sirs. We have no problems sirs.

My experience with this is very different. I used to know a few kazakh fellows and their views on Borat were resentful to say the least. They said Sacha Cohen is a universally hated figure in Kazakhstan, along with the Borat movie itself, to the point where a lot of people genuinely want him dead. I have no doubt some Kazakhstan citizens actually enjoy Borat but to generalize it as being seen as "high comedy" over there is a vast and incorrect exaggeration.

Yep. I know that your version is correct, as well. My only point is that there are several young kz thst are not offended by it. They just don't associate it with Kazakhstan, and take no offence. It's just like the red sonja movie or whatever with Schwarzenegger, in russia, they just think it's disconnected fun, and has nothing to do with Russia. But i agree sir

Kazakhs weren't the targets.

That's what makes it worst, the theme didn't even have anything to do with Kazakhs, they just threw in the low-effort stereotyping for comedic effect.

I think GP means to say that the target was our privileged ignorance.

Yup, the controversial scenes in Borat's "home village" were actually shot in rural Romania. But I'm not sure that stereotyping poor, rural Romanians is any better.

Neither Romanians nor Kazakhs were the but of the joke.

They were a vehicle to poke fun at ignorant westeners.

> Neither Romanians nor Kazakhs were the but of the joke.

How could one tell?

A few things

- Kazakh people (mostly) look nothing like Borat

- It was clearly (to me, a European) set in eastern Europe

- Cohen played on our ignorance to make us believe Rumania is Kazakhstan

- Everybody he encounters thereafter is American

- Cohen uses Borat to mock stereotypical American[0] behaviour

- I am aware just how much juvenile humour there was too

[0] applies to most places, but the film is set in America

Romanians, too, were not the target.

I doesn't matter. If I make a movie to make fun of german but the main character is jewish and greedy, that would raise a lot of eyebrows.

It does matter.

Jewish people portrayed as greedy is an existing stereotype with a sad history. There is no such existing stereotype for the people of Kazakhstan in the target audience of the movie.

Also, say what you mean. Raise eyebrows? So what. The last Star Wars movie raised some eyebrows. This thread already has enough people righteously missing points, so just say what you mean.

That logic is not generally acceptable when it comes to ethnic and racial humour. I don't believe many Kazakhs felt good about it.

Borat wasn't the stereotype of a Kazakh. It was the stereotype of a stereotype of a Kazakh.

I thought it was a representation of our ignorance towards eastern culture. Even his opening lines are polish and nothing at all to do with Kazakh..

Playing on the west’s ignorance was the joke, and him convincingly reeling people in for interviews was the comedy. Not the character itself, the reaction to the character.

Not sure if he is serious (sounds a lot like ministry of truth and stuff) or if it is just his best performance so far. I think it is the latter and he is trolling his audience yet again. He is doing it in the same way he described his previous performances. Just geniuos.

Cohen is right. It's total nonsense Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc. can not and are not algorithmically remove hate speech and dangerous lies. If they can detect a nipple, they can detect a nazi.

And it should be a two pronged effort. The baseline should be companies employing teams of people of sufficient size to review their products, then using and tuning algorithms to increase the efficiency.

It's interesting that this story has already vanished from at least the first 100 'news' entries on HN, 9 hours after posting, and currently at 400 comments.

If you don’t like the popular social media sites, it’s never been easier to make your own.

It has also never been harder to opt out of popular social media sites. You literally can't, even with aggressive ad-blockers and a PiHole.

You can't even choose to visit websites that are free from Google ads. They're too ubiquitous.

You have no choice as a consumer. There is no invisible hand that can hurt Google or Facebook now, which is why the breakup talk is important.

Eh debatable. There are plenty of folks that go Google-free, Facebook-free, Twitter-free, etc. It's not hard to apply digital minimalism. SDC is right: outrage is what drives clicks and the recommendation algorithms are designed to maximize clicks. However, it really just comes down to education. You need to be an educated consumer to make an informed decision on your own. It really isn't the responsibility of the publisher, data broker, etc. if you form an opinion using their platform. If that were the case, then we'd filter every single website that touts anything false - it's just not possible. People need more critical thinking skills, not Facebook.

You can't browse the web without Facebook and Google tracking you. Website owners cooperate with them. You could avoid their sites, but you'll still be in their data sets.

You also can't contact Google Fi or Gmail users without Google tracking you.

I'm glad SBC brought up Myanmar. The headline seems overly muted (something I never thought I'd say about headlines) -- FB already _sold_ ads facilitating genocide. I wish the general American public took that more seriously.

The actual policy is not to fact check political ads, but they will still take down "ads that encouraged violence or seek to suppress voting." (after quick googling I found this, there are probably better sources: https://apnews.com/64fe06acd28145f5913d6f815bec36a2 )

I don't know like you, but Hitler's 'final solution' seems to be fitting the violence bucked, so should be taken down. So at least the title is not right.

Social media’s ability to spread fake news (both left and right wing) is equally dangerous as is their ability to suppress real news that counters their own corporate agendas.

The solution is not crying to facebook/google/etc. to censor any talk of flat-earthers or remove the accounts of holocaust deniers.

The solution is to educate others how to understand and process the sources of information they're getting/receiving; what's being said and not said. This applies to everything, not just "social media".

*Sacha

Thank you.

(thought this was about deep fake, kinda disappointed)

Wait a minute. Zuck, a Jew himself, is saying the Holocaust denier ads are okay-ish?

Edit: note that (1) paid ads are not free speech and (2) while you can say what you want, a commercial entity has no obligation to amplify your voice.

An astonishing cascade of irony, isn't it.

I know at least one person of color who doesn't consider racism a problem because it doesn't personally affect them in their day-to-day life.

People are allowed to have independent thoughts outside of their identity you know? If you don't want to wake up one day with government agency deciding what truth is, then a lot of unsavory stuff becomes ok-ish even if you dislike it personally.

I’m also Jewish and believe anyone even stupid misinformed people should have the right to free speech. Corporations shouldn’t have power to determine what is or isn’t true

Thank you for this refreshing viewpoint.

There is great value in allowing everyone to speak their minds, and sorting out who the idiots are afterward. Freedom of speech works very well.

Paid ads are not free speech.

For one, these are presented to you (as facts) with no direct channel to argue for and against.

Consider that normal (not political) TV ads cannot make any wild claims about their product. Is that also limiting free speech to you??

That’s not what ads are. Facebook is letting anyone with money speak their minds. The “organic” feed is already filtered algorithmically. To counter them you would also have to spend money. Facebook gets paid twice.

This seems like a very convenient coincidence of “morals” and economic incentives.

This is ridiculous. Facebook bans photos of nursing mothers. The average person already doesn’t have the “right to free speech” in the absolute sense on Facebook. So why does Facebook moderate hints of nudity but not holocaust denial? It’s a choice. That’s not to mention that most other ad companies would refuse to run a holocaust denier ad.

Also ads are “special” on Facebook. They show up on your wall whether you want them or not, while normal content from your friends goes through an algorithmic sphincter. In a sense Facebook is already limiting the free speech of normal users by putting their speech through some kind of “engagement” black box. Meanwhile, if you have money, you get to say whatever you want to whomever you want.

Facebook allows photos of nursing mothers.

https://m.facebook.com/help/340974655932193?helpref=uf_perma...

But not exposed nipples right?

I've watched the whole thing and while I appreaciate the sentiment, I can't agree with it. I mostly agree with his description of the state of the worlds where platforms attempting to maximize for "engagement" prioritize fake news and conspiracy theories aimed at basic instincts. Hovewer, the solutions he like many other commentators on the subject is proposing, releval poor understanding and lack of consideration of the complexity and potential ramifications.

Here's some quotes of him that I believe illustate it really well.

> This is not about limiting anyone's free speech. This it about giving people including some of the most reprehensible people on Earth the biggest platform in history to reach the third of the planet.

This basically advocates for banning people off Facebook if they fall into a certain category deemed undesirable.

In a tightly connected world social networks like Facebook play increasingly important role in people's lives. More and more social live migrates there and losing access would have very significant career and social implications. In a way, you could compare modern day social networks to roads and highways, except privately owned. Imagine being "banned" from drinving on the road. Sure, you can still walk to some places, but so much opportunity would become unavailable to you just because travelling trivial distances is prohibitively expensive. In this sense, social networks become much closer to being a "utility" rather just a service one could choose to use or not to. I don't think this trend is going to slow down any time soon.

So, maybe losing access to Facebook is not 100% equal to limiting free speech, but it's quite close.

Again, maybe we could somehow limit the reach of information that has undesirable effect, but more on that futher...

> We're not asking these companies to determine the boundaries of free speech across society, we just want them to be responsible on their platforms.

Leaving the ambiguity of "be responsible" aside here, I think these platforms are quite representative of the society as a whole. Again, Facebook is not some elitist club, it's almost an utility being used across all of the society.

> Now if a neo-nazi comes into a restaurant and starts threatening all the customers and say he wants to kill jews, would the owner of the restaurant, a private business, be required to serve him an elegant eight-course meal? Of cource not. The restaurant owner has every legal right and moral obligation to kick this nazi out

This is a perfect example of false equivalence. SBC raves about the importance of Facebook, and then compares this situation to some private restaurant. Facebook is a more like a restaurant chain, available all over the world, that dominates the market to the point where none other restaurants are able to compete and are forced to shut down. If you're not welcome in Facebook-restaurant, you're not welcome in all restaurants. There's no other place you can go to to have a meal. This is a very important distinction imo.

> Six unelected individuals in Silicon Valley imposing their vision on the rest of the world, unaccountable to any government and acting like they're above the reach of law. It's like we're living in the Roman Empire and Mark Zeckenberg is Caesar.

Except it's the opposite. SBC critisizes people who refuse to become arbiters of what's acceptable and permissible on their platforms as "imposing their vision" and urges them to impose more control of their own vision on their platforms. This is a very clear contradiction.

Again, he calls Zuch unaccountable Ceasar for refusing to exercise his power to control.

> Now here's an idea. Instead of letting the Silicon Six decide the fate of the world, let our elected representatives, voted for by the people of every democracy in the world, have at least some say.

Multiple problems with this one.

Certain democracy in the world have elected Donald Trump. This individual has a known tendency to call any information not representing him in the best way possible "fake news". He, while not being terribly informed, has opinions on almost every subject and has would love to "have some say" in what Facebook should and should not allow to host and what Google/Youtube should show in its search results.

Having politicians control what is allowed in public discource is a terrible idea and I'm surprized SBC actually uttered this with a straight face and audience cheered. Have we all lost our minds?

> Objective facts do exist and if these internet companies really want to make a difference, they should hire enough monitors to actually monitor.

This is so naive and idealistic and impossible in real world with the current state of technology and failing to recognize it is a massive issue.

> Yes, drawing the line can be difficult, but here's what he's actually saying: removing those lies and conspiracies is just too expensive. These are the richest companies in the world, and they have the best engineers in the world. They can fix these problems if they wanted to.

Nobody has yet proposed a solution that is actually viable and not prohibitely expensive. It doesn't mean that the solution doesn't exist necessary, it just means that similar to traveling salesman problem, existing tech can't solve it at a large enough scale.

> Twitter could deploy an algoritm to remove more white supremacist hate speech, but they have reportedly haven't because it would eject some very prominent politicians...

Define "white supremacist" first. There's some fringe tankies on Twitter who consider Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters white supremacists. Whose definition of "white supremacy" should Twitter use here? Yours? Well, you're also one according to some.

It's easy to speculate on how Twitter could just do this or that when you forget that other people might have criteria that is significanly different from yours.

Twitter is already in some very interesting position where they're forced to remove tweets quoting established scientific facts in response to some crazed trans-activists because those are deemed hate-speeach (see https://twitter.com/louiecaruana/status/1186861368835788801)

Nobody can agree on what is or is not bigotry anymore, and forcing their hand here is hardly beneficial to anyone.

Is anyone tired yet of the over the top rhetoric? The only group of people currently in the world who belong in the same sentence as Hitler is the communist Chinese government. After having conducted tens of millions of forced abortions and sterilizations, it is running actual concentration camps in which members of the Chinese Muslim minority are being tortured and mutilated. And guess what, Google, etc., are happy to publish ads from Chinese state-sponsored companies, universities, etc.

It's indicative of profound moral confusion that we're talking about Alex Jones for some reason instead.

I mean, it's Sacha Baron Cohen so over the top rhetoric feels kind of appropriate.

>it is running actual concentration camps in which members of the Chinese Muslim minority are being tortured and mutilated

Are you unaware of what the US is doing to asylum-seekers at the US-Mexico border?

That is what I mean by over-the-top rhetoric. On the scale of bad things, the asylum situation on the US-Mexico border is below what Australia is doing on Manus Island, below what India is doing on the border with Bangladesh, and none of those should even be discussed in the same paragraph as what China is doing.

It's Orwellian. When you contort the rhetoric and language such that you're unable to describe graduations and degrees in what we might all agree are bad things, you lose the ability to think clearly and make judgments rationally.

Pretty incredible speech. He explains that his racist films have been civil rights advocacy all along. How foolish of anyone to think otherwise, apparently only bigots would have thought there was a problem with wearing blackface. Trudeau as well is another civil rights advocate who uses the blackface medium to call attention to the disenfranchisement of minorities and the damage that negative stereotypes can do. Cool.

>An invocation of Hitler or Nazism is not a reductio ad Hitlerum when it illuminates the argument instead of causing distraction from it

Not really. Take the current position of Facebook. Assume Facebook was around in 1930. Now answer, would Facebook block nazi propaganda?

its discussed in limits on that wiki page

Propoganda? No. Outright ads on the final solution? Probably yes, but also bear in mind the Nazis weren't exactly broadcasting their plans to the outside world. (At least I don't think they were - am I wrong on this point?)

>Probably yes,

real vote of confidence there.

you are right, it was a secret.

I encourage everyone to visit the Holocaust Museum. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deceiving-...

Judging from another American tech company that faced the same challenge, one could argue they would not block. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

The fact that this is coming from a man whose people were actually in history targeted by Hitler himself gives weight to what he is saying.

Given that the NAZI movement could be classified as a populist movement, it seems safe to say that most companies and most people in Germany would have supported actions taken by NAZIs.

However, my understanding is that the NAZI party did not run any ads for the 'final solution', despite Hitler's having totalitarian rule over the NAZI empire, thus, were facebook in existence during the period of Hitler's rule, Hitler would likely not have ran ads through facebook for the 'final solution'.

If ads (political or not) had to be true to be run then nobody would run any ads at all, ever. Ads are all lies and everyone knows that.

Also, as for the role of truth in public discourse: If at least a majority still gave a shit, Trump couldn't be president. The propagandists produce, but the masses gobble up that crap as if it meant their life. Entertainment has won over truth and without the customers ("users", like if the product were a drug) that buy it the propagandists, and Zuckerberg, would have no market and nothing to sell.

> Ads are all lies and everyone knows that.

No. Some ads are simply straightforward and factual. Ads which tell you that "the election is on" or "the circus is in town" or "items are now half the usual price" aren't lies.

Yeah, like amazon sales are all 100% factual. They indeed slash the price by 50%, two days after raising it by 100%.

So.. not the usual price then. I always find the lack of media sophistication interesting. I think it must come from having isolated yourself too much from practical realities. You lose the ability to evaluate what's in front of you and your judgement is impaired.

While you're absolutely correct, I've never seen an ad like that. They must exist, but they're also a tiny fraction of all ads.

One might also argue that a purely factual, straightforward ad is a fairly ineffective one -- one of the reasons no major corporation would point you to Wikipedia or an investigative news piece to learn more about them.

Assuming some amount of Darwinism in the ad space, people who make purely factual ads will go out of business pretty soon.

Here are some effective, factual ads:

- An ad for a tour of parliament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5tEKKRf8WY

- An ad for an exhibition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeM0ktptknI

- An ad for ballet performances: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC13KUebpxE

- An ad for concert dates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf3Ih7aaBq4

They tell you what it is, they tell you when it's on. If they're lies then they won't be getting any bookings and they will be going out of business.

Like I said, I believe you that these exist, but they are a tiny fraction of total ads. It's not unlikely that most ads aren't even for legitimate products/services.

> but they are a tiny fraction of total ads

Prove it. Factual ads are far more likely to be the largest fraction purely because they're simpler and cheaper to make.

I can’t prove it other than to say: go to literally any website and count.

My claim, that ads are more dishonest than honest, seems much less controversial. If you can find me even a single podcast episode with only honest ads, I’ll concede.

So you found the 0.05 % of ads that are less of a lie than the rest. Congrats, you are this week's winner of the split-a-hair-with-your-bare-hand-blindfolded contest.

Even if it were true it doesn't have to be true. It's possible to not have adverts full of lies.

I'm sorry you feel that way but this is exactly the kind of speak that got us here - everyone but us are 'deplorables'. I don't think more of this will help us get to higher ground.

At this point it shouldn't be controversial to call Trump a liar. I don't believe saying so creates the consequences you describe (as opposed to deeper issues about tribalism, education, and opportunity in America).

I urge you to watch this video, esp if youre an American. I'm not even a fan - not even by a mile - of Bill Maher but the man has a point when he implies that you are not going to be able to just make the other half vanish into thin air, by beating them in an election. They will still be around and you will just have to live with them, come what may.

[1] New Rule: Let It Go | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW6C1UaQKhI

I understand his/your point, but you can beat them in an election and then take better care of them than their own party has.

There are conservative people who voted for Obama twice, which almost certainly was because of the broad economic recovery under his presidency.

People are a lot less ideological than everyone thinks. If they're worried about money or health, many will vote for whomever gives them the most hope.

Good speech. Had to come from a comedian, cuz who else is going to say these things? Politicians? Tech CEO? FHO.

Most of SBC's "comedy" would itself be considered hate-speech if they weren't targetting socially undesirable groups and other easy targets.

Most, if not all, points have been made before. That doesn’t make them less important.

We need more officials with common sense—and I’d like to say we need officials with guts, but it seems there is one with guts, who made it to president of a very large country, lacking all other attributes one would expect from a world leader, so obviously guts is not enough—and integrity. Most cases are not gray-zone free speech or not. Most cases are pretty damn clear cut.

Why is everyone who disagrees with SBC getting down voted? Are people not allowed to have different opinions on this? This article and speech are extremely subjective in their own right. Not too mention it's being sponsored by a literal _lobbying_ group. What am I missing here?

how does a downvote imply that one is not allowed to have written something? Comments and votes are both open.

> He added: “The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged – stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear.

This is rich coming from Sacha Baron Cohen who made a career out of appealing to our baser instincts. Pretty much all his films are built on outrageous scenes and mocking people.

His movies are ridiculous social commentary. He's making fun of people's fears.

>He's making fun of people's fears.

I must've missed that facet in 'Da Ali G Show'. Aside from the occasional accidentally poignant political interview, he mostly just made fun of people who were similar to his character, and the trope of British 'chavs'.

>His movies are ridiculous social commentary.

I agree, but much like Michael Moore, the ridiculousness of your person limits your credibility in 'Real Life' at a certain point.

Ali g was full of social commentary of the type that culminated with the Borat movie. You must also take into account that that show was some time ago, his awareness and opinions might have changed since His current stuff mostly deals with mocking late capitalism ridiculousness. Micheal Moore is another beast, he uses propaganda techniques to get his point across. He 'sins' in the same way his targets do.

Cohen uses, supposedly, inferior slapstick humor to build very poingent satire about racism consumerism bro culture fakeness etc.

I feel better about a comedian doing outrageous stuff to make a living than I do about journalists doing the same thing and people presenting other similarly outrageous stuff as legitimate scientific research.

Isn't it ironic that this is said by Sacha Baron Cohen, who made a fortune from creating fake characters that attempt to trigger folks with existing prejudices? His characters try to get a reaction from people's antisemitism, islamiphobia, bigotry, etc.. I am not at all disagreeing with what he is saying in the video, and I love all of his content, but it strikes me as hypocritical. Why is it okay for him to gain personally from provoking these reactions from people, yet it is evil when others do the same?

It's about the aims.

Sacha Baron Cohen does it for comedic effect. Others do it to influence elections, destabilise societies, hurt minorities etc.

I think it would be reasonable to conjecture that part of the reason he does it is to hurt, or at least humiliate, those he doesn't agree with politically and thus, to indirectly influence elections.

By that logic, any action we take indirectly influences elections. See how ridiculous this reductionist argument is?

About as ridiculous as suggesting Cohen's only motivation is comedy.

Hmmm, I’m starting to feel like you might be sympathetic to the kind of people that Cohen is satirizing. Perhaps you may even share their same viewpoints as well.

Did you feel personally attacked by ”Who Is America”?

Nope, just pointing out the cognitive dissonance.

No it isn't ironic. You just have a very poor sense of priority and scale.

So what I am reading is that you don’t understand the distinction between satirizing bigots and actually being a bigot?

It isn't ironic, his work was satire.

Ironic coming from a guy whose entire career is built on racist, classist, and homophobic caricatures.

I'm sure he'd agree with you. Say what you want about his comedy, dude's smart.

Agreed. But if he’s turning a corner I’ll give him another chance.

He is the finest satirist of our times. I think if you review any of his works beyond the surface you'll agree as well.

The entire purpose of his characters and his comedy is to hold up a mirror to society, and it works(ed) very well.

"Sometime my sister, she show her vazhin to my brother Bilo and say 'You will never get this you will never get it la la la la la la.' He behind his cage. He cries, he cries and everybody laughs. She goes "You never get this." But one time he break cage and he 'get this' and then we all laugh. High five!"

eyeroll yeah, real biting satire. Really makes me reflect on society's ills and totally wasn't just a thinly-veiled excuse for racist frat boys to laugh at brown muslims amidst a backdrop of endless illegal wars on muslim countries.

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