I cannot believe that the one thing we have bipartisan consensus on is destroying strong encryption.
I guess I’m biased since this is essentially my whole livelihood, but this is crazy, right?
I guess I’m biased since this is essentially my whole livelihood, but this is crazy, right?
The master keys became available on 3D printing sites after the TSA allowed a photo of them to be published in a news article: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/lockpickers-3-d-print-tsa-lugg...
And to make it much worse, we would now also have to ask "how soon until the required systemic weaknesses themselves are used an attack vector for a mass breach?".
Just for a moment, ignore all arguments about citizens' rights to privacy, potential for abuse by the organizations authorized to access the secrets (and their many fallible and corruptible employees), and so on. Of course all that _is_ important, but just for the sake of argument, ignore it. The problem remains that if anything resembling the "EARN IT" bill passes, then attacks against encryption will _scale too effectively_, and the USA will have exposed itself to having the secrets of thousands of politicians and civil servants leaked to an adversary at once. What do you think happens to democracy when that happens?
I get that many people are short-sighted, or even simply apathetic to the long-term consequences of a law that might make their job easier today. But it seems that whenever computers are involved, lawmakers become _so_ incredibly short-sighted that it verges on madness.
Consider this: a bill requiring a small GPS and remote-controlled bomb to be installed in the engine of every car would allow the police to entirely avoid dangerous high-speed pursuits. If it could be done cheaply enough, should it be done? It's pretty easy to understand the myriad ways this could be abused, so it would never happen. But add computers to the mix, and suddenly any kind of foresight goes out the window.
The game is different than it once was; They aren't out murdering like Genghis Khan, but they are no less indifferent towards the people they harm in their conquest. The extent of their love for their country and it's people is the extent to which they can control it all. I've gotten to know this kind of sociopathic power-obsessed personality up close, and have no doubt certain mega-rich assholes out there influencing the political sphere have the same "defect".
It is also a very electable sound bite. Everyone is against the "bad people". Re-election at any cost is the goal. We have government of the people and by the people but we stopped being for the people long long ago.
In the UK, the soviets were almost totally successful largely because the British establishment could not believe that someone who came from the right place and went to the right place could really be a communist spy. Even after, with or without hindsight, it was obvious Kim Philby was almost exonerated and re-entered MI6 to an extent purely because the people above him decided it was simultaneously too damaging and unlikely for a Cambridge man to be a communist.
"This bill, COICA, was introduced on September 20, 2010, a Monday. And in the press release heralding the introduction of this bill, way at the bottom, it said it was scheduled for a vote on September 23 — just three days later.
And while of course there had to be a vote — you can't pass a bill without a vote — the results of that vote were a foregone conclusion. Because if you looked at the introduction of the law, it wasn't just introduced by one, rogue, eccentric member of Congress. It was introduced by the chair of the committee — and co-sponsored by nearly all the other members — Republicans and Democrats. So there would be a vote, but it wouldn't be much of a surprise, because nearly everyone who was voting had signed their name to the bill — before it was even introduced.
I can't stress enough how unusual this is. This is emphatically not how Congress works. I'm not talking about how Congress should work, the way you see on Schoolhouse Rock. I mean the way it really works. I think we all know that Congress is a dead zone of deadlock and dysfunction. There are months of debates and horse-trading and hearings and stall tactics.
...
Whoever was behind this was good."
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jwherrman/how-aaron-swa... (excerpt from talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqriFtr2k-k -- FWIW the lobbyist behind sopa/pipa was Chris Dodd, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Dodd#Motion_Picture_Asso...)
As much as I hate it, I can at least understand the back door argument from a [ignorant] lawmaker perspective. If I pretend and say their intentions are noble, I understand.
What concerns me though, beyond the obvious backdoor problems, is the who is next? Because I doubt big corporations will satisfy their greed for power and information. Especially since anyone who has anything to hide or cares about security will move into open source.
As a developer with a passion for developing distributed, encrypted software - when are they going to threaten me? Worse yet, the software I write I purposefully do not have control over. So am I going to be held liable for the fact that I literally cannot help them?
No matter what they threaten me with, the best I could do is break the application for future users. So what are they going to do to control these distributed systems? Especially ones who truly aim to be distributed, P2P & self hosted by every user?
As terrifying as the current anti-encryption behavior is, I'm oddly more concerned about the move after this.
There's clearly a valid argument from the other side. For example:
>Facebook announced in March plans to encrypt Messenger, which last year was responsible for nearly 12 million of the 18.4 million worldwide reports of child sexual abuse material, according to people familiar with the reports.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
It's not clear how many of those lead to convictions but even a tiny fraction of a percent represents a significant number of children being rescued. Encrypting Messenger, as an example, will stop 3/4s of abuse reports and make it much safer and easier for paedophiles to exchange images. There's a pretty direct line from that decision to an increase in abuses like:
>“inserting an ice cube into the vagina” of a young girl, the documents said, before tying her ankles together, taping her mouth shut and suspending her upside down. As the video continued, the girl was beaten, slapped and burned with a match or candle.
>“The predominant sound is the child screaming and crying,” according to a federal agent quoted in the documents.
I'm actually fine with some kids biting the dust (yes literally being killed) to prevent the greater evil which is that of normalization of mass-surveillance within society (any more than it is already) which will ultimately destroy more lives. I'm not saying these kids don't deserve justice but more power to cops never solves anything (especially in poor volatile countries where cops are in fact part of the problem and happy to look away ...)
No, but there's a huge excluded middle between the level of abuse with easy E2E encryption and no abuse.
>prevent the greater evil which is that of normalization of mass-surveillance within society (any more than it is already) which will ultimately destroy more lives.
Facebook has been around for 15 years now without E2E encryption. I have not noticed lives being destroyed but perhaps you can share examples?
>I'm not saying these kids don't deserve justice but more power to cops never solves anything
Here's one that comes to mind:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7gd9b/facebook-helped-fb...
Facebook helped develop a zero day exploit that the FBI used to catch a predator that abused dozens of girls. In this one specific case clearly more power to the cops solved something.
I can't cite any numbers, but it seems the majority of convictions I've read have some variation of evidence being found on phones, computers, or from sites like Facebook. It stands to reason that if we saw default E2E encryption across the board it would be a lot harder for the police to get evidence and would lead to a lot fewer convictions.
I am firmly-albeit-reluctantly OK with this, if the alternative is widespread surveillance of what should logically be private correspondence/communication among private citizens.
I value the privacy of the hundreds of millions of the citizen population over a slight increase in the conviction rate of the tens to hundreds of thousands predators.
To prevent someone from growing dependent on or vulnerable to an external abuser, we could invest in mental healthcare and counselling for conditions like depression which is all too common in teenagers nowadays.
Facebook should not be in the business of writing malware. Malware which could well be used against activists.
Would it not be better to figure out ways we could tackle that? Counsellors taking a close look at children? Teachers trained to identify abused children? CPS making a closer examination of suspicious households?
I know you're coming from but online crime really is a tip of an iceberg. An iceberg that is easy to spot but one which masks the true scope of the insidiousness going on below and makes it all too easy to say mission accomplished.
I am probably in the minority here on HN but I think bundling together encryption with platforms like Facebook/IG is a bad idea given how easy those platforms make it for bad actors to meet/identify potential victims. Signal/whatsapp etc I am ok with since they dont provide that same ability.
call me old fashioned but every time I look at porn (which is very rare these days) I am disgusted by the meta-data that is added to these videos. It shows that people love to click on videos that read "stepdad and stepdaughter ..." and similar taglines. America has a problem with the whole "call me daddy" fetish. I never understood what this is about. It's deeply pedophelic imho and it's the main reason why I hate porn. It looks like it's hard to find videos where some form of domination (rough sex) isn't part of it. the way women are treated is IMO the gateway which normalizes violence first against women (even pretend rape is a genre here pushed by pornhub & co). why do people get off on this and why do porn companies get away with it ?? <- my opinion is to start the crackdown on this type of messaging here and before even cracking down have a discussion about wtf is wrong with people? why do they have to strangle each other during sex?
> Facebook has been around for 15 years now without E2E encryption. I have not noticed lives being destroyed but perhaps you can share examples?
the problem with FB is mostly that it many countries FB _is_ the Internet. Myanmar (the Rohinga's) would be a fitting example. Also the Philipines where the Duarte government is currently using it on their brutal war on drugs. If there would be justice Zuck and anyone working at FB would be rotting in jail even before we discuss pedophelia. thousands in the Philipines have been killed thanks to Duarte's messaging. FB literally kills and gets away with it.
FB agreeing to develop 0days to crack down on a few cases doesn't make them the good guys. I believe the world would be better off if FB wouldn't exist at all.
Vice is also known to push a pro-cop pro-LE agenda. I stopped watching their videos and reading their content when they showed how cannabis production in Albania hurts Europe (wtf) ... they are a pro-cop & ultra-conservative outlet. Screw vice and screw cops.
> I can't cite any numbers, but it seems the majority of convictions I've read have some variation of evidence being found on phones,
I know security companies love to cite their work with law-enforcement and how they help fight crime. when I had an interview with the biggest Swiss security company few years ago they bragged about their work with Interpol and how they help fight the bad guys. But nobody ever mentions that the software companies like NSO, Gamma, HackingTeam makes doesn't just allow LS to compromise phones (people assume it's read-only) when reality is the features are always read-write. Putting things on these devices is possible because from an engineering pov why would you limit a feature and not allow write access ... I know enough cops who brag about how they abuse their power . So why would I trust them not to plant shit on these phones (especially when they're convinced that they're dealing with a bad guy).
I would challenge that. I would argue that it is a that there are a lot of people (regardless of country) that get a rise out of things that are taboo. One of those things is the step-parent/child thing (because parent/child is too far for many people).
It is impossible to have a discussion on this topic when some people use the word Pedophilia to cover "babies and small children" and others are using it to cover zero to eighteen year olds. While it might be immoral or illegal if a 55 year old is having sex with a 16 year old it isn't pedophilia. A Daddy kink is incest, again not pedophilia. Please use the correct terms. Otherwise it muddies the discussion until no one can discuss it at all.
>why do they have to strangle each other during sex?
Okay, now it smells like SJW and white-knighting. Many women fantasize about being raped, dominated and strangled. There's nothing bad or wrong in living out those fantasies. It doesn't normalize violence or cause rape.
FB Messager report function sends a decrypted copy to Facebook AFAIK.
Most differences between republicans and democrats are superficial. Republicans don't really believe in small government no more than Democrats really believe in social justice.
Then everyone will be like “Whoa?! Who would have thought something like this could happen!”. I feel like this is a tale as old as time.
Hawkish foreign policy would be another one.
> we
"It's a big club and you ain't in it" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5dBZDSSky0
Have you noticed routine protest and informed debate occurring throughout the US for oh say 30 years to be generous?
Political reality isn’t logical, it’s on the nose. There’s no engagement to prevent this, and decades of flag waving as enforcement funding is cut.
That has an impact.
The generation that still holds the most seats in government has no idea how any of this works.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt it’s ignorance not informed malice their intuition is nevertheless “expand police state.”
I’m sure we’ll all take a break from HN and debating flat or skeuomorphic to tell them piss off
Not sure what is the solution here, the popular people's choice couldn't even get elected.
They have continually made moves like this, in a boiling frog fashion. Until we the people wake up from the two party divide and conquer system, very little will change, excepting very rare circumstances of pressure exerted en masse (SOPA/PIPA is a good example outlier).
I've thought about solutions to this problem for a long time, and my conclusion is the things needed are the following (in order to prevent a long term overton window shift as has been happening):
1. Renewed participation in local politics and elections, especially at the state level, but also county, city, etc.
2. Once that is achieved, voting in ranked choice voting initiatives. This will enable the next step.
3. Stop voting for anyone based on party, in particular the main power structure is based on the majority rule in the house and senate... the end goal would be to take away the majority from both parties. This is a huge undertaking, so I'm not saying it would be easy, or even possible, but I think it is what is required. I think those paying attention enough and not enured to the tribalism of the parties understands they cannot be reformed from the inside. They are simply too entrenched, and have too many mechanisms to get rid of those who seek to do so. The point is that we don't need to gain a majority with this new coalition party of independents and third parties, we simply need to take the majority away from the two main parties. To get this done though, [1] must be done, because many of the state laws have been manipulated by the duopoly to prevent third parties and independents.
3.1 To avoid fracturing of the coalition, there should be some very rudimentary and base document that all persons running can agree on. This is also difficult but, since all congresspeople swear an oath to the constitution (5 U.S. Code § 3331), something that reaffirms the principles of the constitution would be the best start. If they violate this, the coalition should work to remove them immediately. (something similar to Gingrich's "Contract with America")
4. Currently, and many don't know this, congresspeople have to sign an affidavit (5 U.S. Code § 3333) confirming their oath. I think we should then work towards enforcement of the laws against violation thereof, the primary one being perjury, or something similar (18 U.S. Code § 1918, 5 U.S. Code § 7311). For example, how many people have straight up lied to congress and had no action taken against them? (Clapper is one of the more egregious ones that comes to mind, but the point is congress is in dereliction of duty in enforcing perjury laws)
This would give the people a real opportunity to start passing laws that represent the people (such as term limits), but are still constitutionally sound.
The legislative is the branch closest to the people, and this is why it should be the focus. From a cleaned up legislative we can begin to resurrect the separation of power between the branches that has been egregiously eroded, primarily by the executive. The current checks and balances system is crumbling. A huge part of this erosion is the surveillance system, which enables compromise of congresspeople by the executive and the MICC. We must fight for privacy, both encryption and anonymity, as a fundamental part of protecting the checks and balances system.
INTJ?
I've thought about it because I honestly considered running for POTUS, but even that is because I consider my oath the the constitution still valid even though I've been out of the military for a long time, though I'm still recovering my brain.
In fact, the patriot act has been prolongued 5 times, no matter the administration, and is still in effect.
As a european, I don't see any party that actually have american people's interest in mind.
Fighting for either seems so futile from here.
Of course, we have similar problems as well so I'm not going to pretend I have a solution.
As an American, I don't see any party that has my interests in mind. Elections always seem to be having to choose the lesser of two evils.
https://www.fairvote.org/alternatives
Maine has converted to RCV already and it's stood up in court; 49 to go.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Gavin-Newsom-ve...
If you're wondering why it was vetoed, maybe look at the history of CVRA lawsuits and how having districts has helped communities more than RCV. RCV is an apportioning method, which doesn't necessarily make it a good voting method.
1) When they say RCV they specifically mean Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). There are many other, and better, RCV methods.
2) They overclaim IRV's ability to solve the spoiler effect (see my other comment for links). While other RCV methods have strong resistance to spoiler effects, IRV has a weak resistance. CGP actually hints to this when he talks about that IRV doesn't prevent a trend towards two party systems.
"Ranked voting" is the more general term.
> Ranked voting is any election voting system in which voters use a ranked (or preferential) ballot to rank choices in a sequence on the ordinal scale: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. There are multiple ways in which the rankings can be counted to determine which candidate (or candidates) is (or are) elected (and different methods may choose different winners from the same set of ballots). The other major branch of voting systems is cardinal voting, where candidates are independently rated, rather than ranked.[1]
> The similar term "Ranked Choice Voting" (RCV) is used by the US organization FairVote to refer to the use of ranked ballots with specific counting methods: either instant-runoff voting for single-winner elections or single transferable vote for multi-winner elections. In some locations, the term "preferential voting" is used to refer to this combination of ballot type and counting method, while in other locations this term has various more-specialized meanings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting
I share your frustration with FairVote and CGP Grey (and recently an episode of Patriot Act) painting an unrealistically rosy picture of RCV/IRV as the solution to our voting problems.
There are some other systems that aren't ranked voting at all that I think would be significantly better than IRV, such as approval voting, range voting, and STAR voting (which is basically range voting with an immediate runoff between the top two).
For some reason, FairVote persists in claiming that in approval voting (which is like traditional first-past-the-post voting except that you can vote for more than one candidate), you somehow maximize your voting influence by voting for only one candidate. They call this bullet voting. I don't know what possible reason one could have for believing this.
This manifests in their comparison chart:
https://www.fairvote.org/alternatives
They show "resistance to strategic voting" as "high" under RCV and "low" under approval voting. This is somewhat subjective, but I think they've got it backwards. Under approval voting, strategic voting and honest voting are basically the same: you vote for as many of the candidates as you can tolerate, and maybe if there's a candidate you really don't want to win you vote for everyone but them. Under RCV, it's only safe to put you first choice first if they are either clearly in the lead or so far behind they have no hope of winning. If the outcome is in doubt, it's possible to cause your first place candidate to lose by putting them first. (That's a weird problem for any voting system to have.)
For this reason, I don't trust FairVote; I don't think they're presenting their preferred voting system or the alternatives honestly. They're more of an advocacy/PR organization that's pushing their chosen solution out of a sense of inertia or something.
The Center for Election Science is a smaller, less-well funded group that advocates for approval voting (and similar methods) that I donate to from time to time. They had a successful campaign to convert Fargo ND to approval voting back in 2018.
https://www.electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basi...
Thanks for donating to CES. I'm the co-founder who filed the 501(c)3 incorporation paperwork back in 2011. We've come a long way, and Fargo was very exciting indeed.
Except elections rarely work like that. There isn't a set of options I can tolerate and a set I can't. I want my preferred candidate to win more than I want any of the "fine I guess" candidates. And if I have to pick between "bad" and "horrible" I still want to vote for "bad".
With approval voting, I am forced to vote strategically, considering what point in my preference order to draw the line at in order to maximize my chance of causing the highest possible position in my preference order to win.
I realise that IRV isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than any non-ranked choice voting method as far as I can see, and honestly I think the risk of the situations where honest voting results in a sub-optimal outcome is massively overblown, though I don't have data to back that up.
I would note that IRV has the advantage of being actually put into practice at scale (Australia, Maine), and also comes with the nice property that it can be fairly easily adjusted to work with multiple winners (ie. STV), so you can have systems like Australia where IRV is used in single-winner races and STV in multi-winner ones without the voting public needing to learn two systems.
I cannot think of any way that IRV beats out STAR. In STAR's worst case scenario (1-sided strategy) it still has a VSE equal to IRV's best scenario (100% honest). Any more honesty that people have in STAR just improves peoples' satisfaction. This is actually one of the main arguments of cardinal systems over ordinal systems (e.g. STAR vs RP/IRV).
If you're really into the ordinal camp, I'd also strongly encourage you to look into Ranked Pairs. The satisfaction is A LOT higher than IRV does. On the ballot side it is no different than what the voter sees in IRV (really this is fairly consistent for ordinal systems, by definition).
But I want to stress that STAR and Approval are not equivalent. I also want to stress that scoring is an extremely familiar concept to most people. "Rate this drive out of 5 stars." "On a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate..." etc. So I'd argue that STAR is fairly expressive (which seems to be your major complaint) and is a simple and easy concept for voters to understand (since they are already familiar with it).
Here's the first email I received from Mark Frohnmayer where he discussed STAR voting, following my speaking at his conference at University of Oregon, that gave birth to it. :) https://twitter.com/ClayShentrup/status/1278118075972202496
Utila? I think I ran into you on Reddit yesterday. Good to see you're also on HN. Small world (if not, then from your tweet I met Mark).
I see this as more when you're creating something. Like if you're writing software if it is good enough then don't continue if you have other pressing matters. Essentially this saying is about Pareto.
But when you already have things invented and you're just selecting things, this saying doesn't apply. We have 3 options: option 1 sucks, option 2 is meh, option 3 is pretty good. Which do you choose? It is pretty obvious that you should choose option 3. There's no other conditions on this problem. You don't have to spend more resources to get option 3. Option 3 is just objectively better, so why not pick it?
And if you think I'm exaggerating, I'll note that IRV is a 6% VSE improvement on plurality. STAR and RP are both 15% improvements on plurality. This is part of why people are frustrated. There's options that are objectively better, so why pick the worse one? And it isn't like they are differing in "betterness" by small amounts, we're talking about a pretty big amount!
You're calling 6% "vastly better" so doesn't that make 15% "astronomically better?"
This is exactly why it makes no sense to waste our limited activist energy and resources on IRV.
https://medium.com/@ClayShentrup/momentum-e5fd12ffce2a
> and also comes with the nice property that it can be fairly easily adjusted to work with multiple winners (ie. STV)
Score voting (and by extension STAR voting and approval voting) have a proportional multi-winner analog that's much simpler than STV and arguably better.
scorevoting.net/RRV
> RV vs RCV
These terms are too similar and really just confuse people, which is why I push back against it. I try to use "ordinal" a lot, but it is best for places like HN but not when I'm discussing with family. RCV makes people think that this is the only way you can rank people.
> STAR
Anyone who is advocating for STAR has my approval. It is the preferred system in my mind. I want to plug my longer post that has a lot of links and expands on all the topics you described
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23705413
> Fair Vote frustration
I think this is a style of argument that is increasingly becoming more common and is destructive. Pushing the your argument past the point of validity in an effort to make it stronger. Their use of broad classes is a gross mischaracterization. When they discuss Condorcet methods they discuss several types, lumping together the worst features from different ones. But they ignore the good methods like RP and Schulze. The comparisons are unfair. But then again, they aren't trying to appeal to people that are informed on the subject, they are trying to appeal to the masses which are completely unfamiliar with the subjects. But I do not think this justifies the outright lying and mischaracterizations.
> Spoilers and Strategy
In my other post I actually link an example of where IRV fails, and it is the specific type of spoiling that we are about: when similar candidates spoil (e.g. Bernie and Biden, not Stein and Biden). IRV doesn't solve this (but FV claims otherwise).
For strategy, this is the argument that I get into with the Condorcet camp (though we're clearly on the same side and these are nuanced friendly arguments not hostile). To me STAR is good because its range of VSE is more compact (i.e. resistant to strategies). The Condorcet camp claims that there is enough dis-incentivization to not vote strategically therefore just maximize VSE (VSE is only slightly different between STAR05 and RP). So for anyone listening on the sidelines, this is really what we're arguing, minutia. I'm certain everyone in the Condorcet camp would vote for STAR and everyone in the STAR/Score/Approval camp would vote for Condorcet (specifically RP) if given the chance.
> Center For Election Science
I'd also like to mention Equal Vote, which advocates for STAR. https://www.equal.vote/starvoting
Eh... I'm in the STAR/Score/Approval camp and I would be somewhat inclined to vote strategically against Condorcet, because it's worse than what I want and once it was implemented it would be even harder to dislodge in favor of STAR/Score/Approval than the status quo.
It's also a false compromise because the opponents aren't generally people who benefit from the worse voting method, only people who haven't yet understood why it's worse.
Of course, if we were using STAR/Score/Approval to vote on which voting system to use then I could express my preferences more accurately.
This is fair and I won't really push back against it. This is the reason I push so hard against IRV. Because once IRV is the status quo it will be hard to continue moving forward. After all, we already have the capabilities. If you have to chose to eat acid, plain oatmeal, or chocolate pudding you don't eat the oatmeal then the pudding, you just jump straight to the pudding.
> It's also a false compromise because the opponents aren't generally people who benefit from the worse voting method, only people who haven't yet understood why it's worse.
While I'm in this camp I do think it is unfair to completely rule out Condorcet methods. The interview I linked to with Dr. Arrow I think expands on this well. If asked to advocate for a system, advocate for score (STAR). But that isn't to recognize that there's so much uncertainty in Social Choice Theory that we can trust theory alone. There's smaller experiments that have been done, but nothing on the scale we are advocating for. Of course we expect the theory and experiments to be relatively accurate, but we must acknowledge the lack of empirical large scale data. Frankly, you can only get that by doing it.
> Of course, if we were using STAR/Score/Approval to vote on which voting system to use then I could express my preferences more accurately.
;) For me
STAR 5, Score: 4 (4.5), Approval: 4, RP: 3 (3.8), Schulze: 3, IRV: 1 Plurality: 0
I'm pretty similar. I like STAR and score about the same because I like simplicity, and don't see STAR as that huge an improvement over score. So maybe:
STAR: 5, score: 5, approval: 4, *Condorcet: 3, IRV: 2, plurality: 0
Cognitive dissonance around the idea that there is room for improvement is inevitable.
And I'm surprised that I get the same blank stares from Americans that have lived for a decade in Europe. It's like they've never contemplated any other way of electing. Of course it's not true about everyone. I'm generalizing a lot here, but it still surprises me.
I also believe that "whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." -- Lysander Spooner
No Treason should be required reading
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks it is because IRV doesn't effectively change things. The realist in me thinks it is just trendy.
For others: See me other comment (it is large, you can't miss it) explaining these topics in more detail (with links!)
It's made much worse by the bad voting system, but it's perfectly possible that I simply disagree with enough of my fellow citizens that any compromise we can reach will be some "lesser evil".
I think there's a strong argument that RCV/Approval would shift the incentives and game-theoretic landscape away from polarization and turnout, and towards big-tent coalition building, to appeal to the greatest quantity of left, right, center, and independent. That does mean compromise, and likely policy concessions; but i think that would be a huge improvement over (a) taking turns at obstructionism, and (b) a de-facto one-party system regarding corporate interests, the military-industrial complex, etc.
The problem is that IRV/RCV doesn't capture your preferences, because it ignores all your preferences except your top choice, until your top choice is eliminated. IRV is reasonably good at making sure that third-parties can't prevent first-parties from being elected, but very bad at actually allowing third parties to actually be elected even if they have widespread approval.
Approval is a good compromise, and fully ranked systems (e.g. Condorcet) would be even better but much harder to enact. I would happily support universal adoption of Approval.
That all said, full ranking systems are definitely the superior option, and I’d certainly take approval over our current state.
No. Approval voting has been extensively studied by game theory experts like NYU political science professor Steven Brams, and found to be one of the most resistant to tactical voting. Computer simulations show it performing exceptionally well even with highly strategic voters.
https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html
https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/vse7
There's even a mathematical theorem (proof) that, given plausible strategic behavior by voters, approval voting always elects a beats-all "Condorcet winner" when one exists. This is mild (some would say GOOD) reaction to strategy.
https://www.rangevoting.org/AppCW
> Checking approve on someone I believe to be more popular than my favorite candidate lowers the chance my favorite candidate wins.
Yes, this is beneficial not harmful. The alternative is that the voting method must ignore all preference data about the relative support of X vs. Y as long as the voter prefers X to Y. That causes big problems.
https://medium.com/@ClayShentrup/later-no-harm-72c44e145510
It is precisely why ranked voting methods like Instant Runoff Voting are so vulnerable to tactics. If I prefer the Green, my general best strategy is to tactically rank the Democrat in 1st place, thus "burying" the Green and making the mere appearance of un-electability a self-fulfilling prophecy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
https://www.rangevoting.org/NESD
The major moral of voting theory is to AVOID RANKED VOTING METHODS, favoring RATED voting methods like score voting, STAR voting, and approval voting. Here's a presentation I gave in 2015 to the Colorado League of Women Voters explaining more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyBm_Hcu4DI&t=488
I would also recommend the 2008 book "Gaming the Vote". Full disclosure: I'm in it.
scorevoting.net/IrvIgnoreExample.html
I would disagree about Condorcet. Score voting and variants, such as STAR voting and approval voting, are vastly simpler than any ranked method, and perform better in voter satisfaction efficiency calculations, and plausibly make better Condorcet methods than real Condorcet methods.
https://www.rangevoting.org/AppCW
The biggest moral of social choice theory is: avoid ranked voting methods.
I think most people wildly overestimate the popular appeal for compromise. Only about 20% of the population would support an opposite-side moderate over a near-side extremist. A true centrist party is doomed to lose in any system that knocks out unviable candidates, since it's the first choice of almost nobody.
I think there's a LOT more room for nuance than "this" or "that" even among the ignorant and/or unengaged. Just look at sports-team divides in the US for evidence.
Other countries with other systems don't really do much better.
The fundamental problem is that the people who want this sort of power are the last ones who should ever be allowed to wield it. When people are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get a job that pays $500K a year, you have to wonder what's really going on.
(I'm partial to approval voting (vote "yes" or "no" for each cantidate separately and if the winner doesn't have at least 50% "yes", the office is vacant until the next election), but I suspect the party line would immediately become "you're a traitor if you approve anyone but the Party's candidate".)
Not voting, but it is a real election system, known as Sortition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition). It was used in ancient Athens.
Also, yes, approval voting is a great approach and we should absolutely use it. We'd still get people who vote party-line, and it'd take a while for people to truly internalize that they can safely vote for other candidates they like, but it'd be a massive improvement.
I vaguely remembered that, but not the name, thanks.
- What they are referring to as RCV is called Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). IRV is a RCV, but RCV isn't IRV. Think "Rock and Roll is The Beatles" vs "The Beatles are a Rock and Roll group."
- IRV isn't that great when it comes to Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE)[0]. There's even other RCV methods like Ranked Pair[1] that are exactly the same for the voter. Essentially IRV is a 6% improvement upon plurality (what we currently use) but RP is a 15% increase from plurality. So I ask, why go to IRV when we can do twice as good? (or better! Keep reading)
- Fair Vote claims that IRV has a high resistance to spoiler candidates (a candidate that takes away votes from another similar candidate). This is actually why the distinction from RCV and IRV is important and why Fair Vote is misleading. While RCV is better than plurality in this respect, some RCVs are better than others. IRV doesn't adequately solve this issue (but there are other RCVs that do!). IRV fails when two candidates are similar in positions and similar in popularity. [2] This is specifically the kind of spoiling that we are trying to prevent. We're trying to prevent a candidate like Sanders from spoiling Biden (or vise versa) not Jill Stein spoiling Biden. IRV prevents the latter, but not the former. I am specifically upset with Fair Vote because they are misleading in this context. Because they claim IRV := RCV, they take all the things different RCV methods solve and claim IRV solves them. This is simply not true (and why I make the first bullet).
- There are just better methods besides ranking (also called "ordinal" methods). There's a class called Cardinal[3], that is actually simpler. The simplest is called approval. An example of approval is Netflix's rating system (binary). It does pretty well. Better yet is range/score voting. This would be the old Netflix system where you rated out of 5 stars. The difference in ranked vs cardinal is that you rate each candidate or policy independent of the others. This allows you to be more precise/honest (you may actually like two candidates equally!). It also reduces complexity because a common accident in ranking is rating two candidates the same. In ordinal systems this is a bug, in cardinal this is a feature.
- I want to specifically mention STAR voting[4]. While STAR isn't perfect, it much better handles various types of spoiler candidates, has a high VSE (similar to that of RP), and handles strategic voting well. The last is the major reason you should choose STAR over RP (and there's no reason you should choose IRV over RP, because RP is strictly better). While all three systems encourage honest voting (in a single agent scenario) strategic voting is always an issue. Under no circumstance is STAR worse than IRV because STAR handles strategic voting. Specifically the most important kind is the "1-sided strategy"[5] which is arguably very common.
- Lastly, I want to appeal to authority. Kennith Arrow (who you may be familiar with from Arrow's Impossibility theorem and Gibbard's extension) is a Nobel Laureate and said cardinal systems are "probably right."[6] And I think many of us know science speak into the confidence that conveys. That link is a full interview with him from Election Science. It is a good read/listen.
TLDR: We want a good voting system, use STAR, not IRV.
[0] https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs
[2] https://www.electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_voting
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting
[5] https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/
[6] https://www.electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/voting-t...
Two counterpoints:
- I'm aware of Arrow, but I file it under "perfect being the enemy of the good". :) Whatever the flaws of IRV, it still represents an order of magnitude improvement over FPTP at capturing political preferences. (We suffer so much status quo bias, it takes a lot of activation energy just to communicate to the average voter that better options exist at all!) But I happily cede the point: IRV is not the best choice of all the available options.
- My favorite is actually Approval, and I don't always bring it up because it has lower mindshare and is less self-descriptive / "sticky-branding" compared to Ranked Choice. My reasons for the preference:
(a) There's no nitpicking over counting methods: whoever gets the most votes wins.
(b) Easy to explain to voters (including the counting system), and degrades gracefully for those who still want to vote for only one candidate. (I've heard objections that some voters hit a cheater-detection trigger, that "some people get more votes than others"; this can be solved by reframing as "Y/N" per candidate, so X candidates = X Y/N votes per voter).
(c) I believe it largely sidesteps Arrow by redefining the success condition: rather than attempt to perfectly measure ideal preferences, it definitionally represents "Consent of the Governed": not who's your favorite, but who are you willing to live with? This would make it more difficult for bolder and more unconventional candidates, but at the benefit of rewarding coalitions and consensus-building. Polarization and sowing distrust would cease to be a viable strategy.
(As an aside, in a perfect world, a blank ballot would be counted as a meta-vote for "None of the Above"; and if it wins, a whole new election of all-new candidates must be held.)
This is 100% how you should think about it. But what I'm trying to say is that we already have substantially better methods, so why not use them? Perfect is the enemy of good, but if I have the choice of eating acid, a bowl of oatmeal, and chocolate pudding, I'm going with the pudding. Perfect is the enemy of good when we don't already have the choices sitting right in front of us.
> [IRV] still represents an order of magnitude improvement over FPTP at capturing political preferences
And here's where I'm disagreeing, but only slightly. It is definitely better, but not an order of magnitude.
> Approval voting
I love approval voting. It is great because of its simplicity. That's why they use it in systems like Netflix. Easy to collect and gather results from. Honestly I use it all the time. It is how I solve the "where do you want to eat" problem with friends. You just list things until you get a unanimous vote or if you exhaust your list you just take the most approvals. Simple and easy.
The reason I don't like it for elections is that it makes tying easy and I do not believe it has enough precision. The interview I linked Arrow talks about this so I'll deffer to him (he's clearly smarter than me). In elections you need a clear winner.
Why I like score voting (and Condorcet methods, like RP, which is again RCV) is because I actually hate party systems, but I recognize that they can't be destroyed. But these methods drastically reduce their power (I don't think IRV does).
And I highly encourage you to dig more into the subject and am happy to provide links. I also highly suggest looking deep into everything that the Fair Vote chart discusses, mainly because I believe you will be as frustrated as me (and others, like Condorcet proponents) when you learn what each of those topics are. Everyone I know that is well read in the subject is frustrated by Fair Vote's mischaracterizations.
I think this, all by itself, would be a great thing to have in elections. If this had existed in every election in which I have voted, I think I would have used it at least half the time, quite possibly more.
At any rate, I'm very much in agreement, I think it's a sound policy across the board, even in the context of FPTP. One thing our election system fails to do is disambiguate between voter apathy, and the implicit protest vote of staying home (Australia's mandatory voting being another solution, albeit lacking the teeth of a "None of the Above" reboot).
An alternative for many posts would be to have no one in the office once the incumbent's term expires. For example, suppose no one wins a race for a seat in the House of Representatives: when the incumbent's term expires, that seat could simply be vacant, and could be deemed to have voted "abstain" for all votes during the term in which it is empty (or until a new special election is held to hopefully fill the seat).
(For an office like the President, there might have to be some other provision made.)
This would also handle the other case you mention:
> For more local elections, where running unopposed is not uncommon, there's also an interesting conundrum: should that candidate be rejected if they only receive a plurality, ie under 50%?
I would say yes: that counts as no one winning the election, so the seat remains vacant until a new special election is held (assuming someone does win that).
> What if literally no one else wants the job?
Then I would say the will of the people is that they prefer to have no one doing it, if they do not approve of anyone who wants it.
There are conditions which resolve this (e.g., when ballot markings in a method like score voting represent the amount of some valuable resource the voter commits to paying if the given choice is elected, or where markings in approval represent a binding commitment to not participate if an non-approved option is chosen and/or to participate if an approved options is chosen.) But these resolutions are typically not available or desirable in most public elections.
> that there is no objective question about preferences that they ask
I don't see this as an issue. I also don't see it as a problem to specifically non-ordinal, but to every system. I like to try to explain a STAR05 ballot simply to people with a forum they are very familiar with. A ballot might look like below
How do you feel about ___x___ candidate?
Very Unfavorably, unfavorably, neutral, favorably, very favorably
Those are your 5 options. Yes, this isn't exact, but we can't have an infinite score. But as we understand distributions, we know that the fluctuations won't matter much. If a group of people have an "honest" opinion that a candidate is rated "favorably" (or a 4) we'll see a distribution around this (a fairly tight distribution). So you'll get some 3's and 5's, but most people will give 4's and the average will be 4. So it isn't an issue. Similarly, if you are ranking people and view two candidates equally 50% of people will put candidate A in front of B and vise versa (well real world there'd be a bias for things like: who is listed first, "nicer" sounding name, familiarity, etc. But still, that's not too big of an issue because at the end we get pretty close to the optimal efficiency that the system can provide). You have to remember that there is no perfect system, Arrow and Gibbard showed that. But the question is if we statistically come close to the optimal (that the system can provide).
I want to point out that simple approval voting is VERY effective, even though it is low precision. You're literally choosing "like" and "dislike." Analysts aren't that concerned with the lack of objectivity in the difference between a 4 and 5 or a 3 and 4 because it is much more refined. If this is a major concern, then extend the expressiveness by increasing the range, e.g. 0-10.
I would also encourage you to listen to that interview that I linked. Arrow briefly discusses this topic. He makes some criticisms of score voting but also says it is the option he would push (question is which he'd advocate for). Remember, there is no such thing as a perfect voting system. There's always a trade-off. We're just trying to minimize the trade-offs.
And personally, if someone made RP popular I would gladly advocate for it. But because we're trying to trade one shitty system (plurality) for something only slightly less shitty (IRV) I am going to be vocal about the issues and lying that is happening. I don't really have an issue with RCVs, but specifically IRV. This is why I wanted to make a clear distinction between the two. Because when the discussions come up we end up using different languages, using the same words to describe different things. This may have been a smart move by Fair Vote, but we're on Hacker News and there's an expectation of more nuance than we'd have in other places like Reddit or in person.
So I am happy to try my best to answer questions and provide more resources. If you like game theory, this is a great subject to learn and has clear and immediate applications (even outside of elections).
> to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness
The two parties do not significantly differ on indefinite detention of American citizens on US soil.
The two parties do not significantly differ on domestic spying, dragnet-style data collection and warrantless wiretapping.
The two parties do not differ on their support for backdoors in encryption.
The two parties do not significantly differ on allowing extra-judicial targeted killings.
The two parties do not significantly differ on the use of unmanned drones, either for combat or domestic surveillance.
The two parties both support pre-emptive "cyber" war and non-defensive hacking.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their support for continuing the War On Terror and War On Drugs.
The two parties both support maintaining US military bases around the world.
The two parties do not significantly differ on favoring Keynesian economics.
The two parties support delegating monetary policy decisions to the Federal Reserve, including support for quantitative easing.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their use of earmarks and pork barrel spending.
Neither of the two parties have (recently) proposed plans for balancing the budget.
Neither of the two parties plans to significantly cut defense spending.
The two parties both favor taxpayer-funded foreign aid.
The two parties are largely backed by the same corporate sponsors and special interest groups, with a few key differences.
The two parties both backed TARP and in general favor bailing out companies too big to fail.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their general support of "economic stimulus" as a tool to prop up the economy.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their support for and allegiance to Israel.
The two parties both favor and continue sanctions on Iran.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their use of super PAC funding and their support of unlimited spending from corporations and special interest groups.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their use of gerrymandering to gain political advantage.
The two parties oppose any measures that would strengthen the viability of a third party.
The EU has been considering similar anti-encryption legislation for years. Primarily supported by France, UK and Germany. The main opponents to it in the EU have been NGOs, which mirrors the American experience on this issue.
The cynic in me speculates the reason the EU parliament hasn’t pushed the issue further is simply because it’s waiting for it’s influential members states (or the US) to pass the legislation required to gut these services, so that they won’t have the potentially unpopular task of doing so themselves.
Also Germany is very, very, pro privacy. Germans would probably lynch any government official that suggested anything resembling Stazi surveillance programs.
It most certainly does. Security and Justice are very clearly established as areas of “shared responsibilities” in the EU, granting the EU parliament has full authority legislate.
> Also Germany is very, very, pro privacy. Germans would probably lynch any government official that suggested anything resembling Stazi surveillance programs.
Sorry to disappoint, but...
https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/15/germany_joins_antienc...
The EU has also explored a number of backdoor-by-another-name options, including a very concerning Function Encryption initiative [0], and forcing E2EE service providers to refresh secrets to insert government actors into conversations.
[0]: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/780108
My primary motivation for posting the parent comment was that any EU resident who thinks their governments are above this sort of thing is absolutely wrong, and if you’re complacent and fail to hold your governments to account, this is exactly the sort of thing that’s going to happen. You can’t just read the feel-good press releases and hope for the best. European politicians are politicians too, and if there’s anything politicians of all stripes have always been good at, it’s accumulating power and lying.
As a european, I don't see any party that actually have european people's interest in mind.
Really? What country are you in, if you don't mind me asking?
As a human, I don't see any party that actually have regular people's interest in mind.
Also, we don't vote EU wide so it is apples to oranges.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_summary_of_the_Patriot...
Lindsey Graham(R) tried to extend this- but Trump has been somewhat vocally against this extension due to his own allegations that the FISA courts were misused to spy on him.
It's a mathematical model and accompanying explanation that shows that simple plurality (first past the post) voting produces bi-polarization, while other voting methods like approval voting do not. It also shows that the instant-runoff voting method that people are trying to replace FPTP with is non-monotonic, meaning that gaining a few points of support can actually hurt a candidate.
To be fair, us Europeans have the same issues with our politicians, with the exception of socialists, communists and Greens. Just look for the article13 fiasco.
We're all being fucked.
So, not really.
[1]Kind of, Democrats think tech companies got Trump elected, Republicans think tech companies are suppressing conservative viewpoints, but either way, they agree on the problem.
What multiuser system would survive a libel-law attack from a highly unfriendly jurisdiction? Email, forums, comments, and other forms of posting opinions would immediately cause any small operator to shutdown.
You just need a friend to make libelous comments on discus and then sue any site you want. 230 isn't a loophole, it's essential for speech on the Internet.
The President wants to kill 230 because Twitter is censoring his tweets. His response was to suspend their protection from liability lawsuits under 230.
It's politics; everything's always about politics. Whether this will be good for the industry and society is another question.
They clearly state in their ToS that speech is limited on their platform.
> His response was to suspend their protection from liability lawsuits under 230.
Well, his response was to state he was "looking to see if he could suspend their protection". There is nothing to be worried here, because anyone can tell him that the answer is that he can't suspend their protection.
It was just infantile bluffing that in most other situations would cause the person bluffing to lose face, but not in the current political reality. In most situations, it's best to not state orders that you can't possible enforce and that reveal your weakness.
I suspect “get off my property”.
Twitter and Facebook and everyone else have those same rights.
I myself believe that companies should be doing a better job at moderating the contents they host in their websites, but also that by repealing such provision, smaller ventures with not enough money to enforce the rules, would either go bankrupt or simply suppress any third party content to avoid issues with the law enforcement.
A huge portion of Google Ad income is malicious content, and as long as they can't be sued or indited for it, they're going to continue to automatically approve and profit off criminal activity.
The problem with Section 230 isn't about one guy who posts something bad, the problem is with systemic abuse on platforms which are financially motivated to allow the abuse to continue.
Citation needed.
Also, wouldn't this also apply to broadcasting companies? Say, potentially harmful commercials airing on prime time.
And importantly, broadcast television doesn't get Section 230 protections, and does just fine. A great example of why tech companies don't need immunity. Broadcast TV ads are sold on a smaller scale, such that humans are involved in the process and bad actors are caught early.
> Citation needed.
The general problem here is that Google is the only one with meaningful data, and obviously they're very motivated not to reveal how big a market illegal activity is on their platform. Note that even in legitimate verticals, scams push the bidding higher for advertising on their platforms. So not only does Google make money directly off scammers, they also make more money off legitimate advertisers because the bidding was higher. Google both claims that there's no data proving their business is illegitimate, while keeping all the data secret. So we have to rely on the evidence we can see.
A great example is what The Verge uncovered in 2017 with rehab scams: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-go... where they found some insane CPCs: "If you’re in Arizona, and you click on the top ad, you’ll cost that advertiser around $221", and Google was actively soliciting business in this extremely valuable market: "The search giant actively courts treatment centers, both online and off. In May, a Google “digital ambassador” was a featured speaker at the Treatment Center Executive & Marketing Retreat". They had multiple people directly focused on cultivating business in this particular market. Scammers were both harming consumers directly, and also pushing the CPCs up to insane levels for real drug rehab centers, hurting consumers indirectly as well.
You can also see an interesting way Google helps bad actors stay hidden here: "The 800 number was ephemeral. ...Google offers advertisers unique “tracking” phone numbers that forward to a company’s phones, so they can understand which ads are bringing in the most clients. The phone numbers only stay up as long as the ad does." So you can't even meaningfully trace out a phone number on a scam ad back to the company that pays for it. Everything is laundered through Google accounts.
After this piece, of course, Google finally acted and more or less shut down their entire drug rehab vertical for a while, and retooled it. I'm sure it's drastically less profitable now. But the problem is, they got to keep the millions and millions of dollars profit they got from engaging in a business practice that was directly harmful to people.
My long time example, which Google still refuses to address, is searches for "mapquest". MapQuest is a top search term for seniors, who don't realize that other directions sites exist. To it's credit, MapQuest is still pretty decent. Problem is, Google sells ads for "Maps Quest" that look like the real site, but redirect you to sites that require you install browser-hijacking add-ons in order to proceed (add-ons hosted in the Chrome Web Store, I might add). No matter how many times I've attempted to report them, these sites are allowed to continue doing this. A Googler actually had them removed once, and Google re-enabled the same sites' ads within a couple of hours.
Another fun part of this, is that if MapQuest wants to be presented above those malicious ads, MapQuest has to outbid them... for it's own trademarked brand name! Ad squatting is another way Google rakes in massive revenues via essentially blackmail: Pay us or we'll let scammers place higher than you for your own name.
I wouldn't hazard a statistic, because it'd be a guess, but I imagine if Google were forced to disclose advertisers and spends, you'd find a substantial portion of Google's profits were ill-gotten gains.
I'm not denying that Google profits from these, that would be silly. My point is that broadcast companies run morally questionable ads all the time, yet it seems that we should be holding Google for a higher level of accountability.
Take for example drug commercials. If you are concerned about scams targeting seniors, then you must have reservations about these, since the way they portray drug positive effects, and downplay the adverse ones, is clearly misleading. Or, say, political ads. Facebook is taking a lot of flak because of these, but local TV stations have been running misleading and often borderline hateful commercials for ages, e.g.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-met-jeanne-ives-b...
https://www.kcur.org/show/up-to-date/2016-07-25/asian-americ...
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/10577284453865390...
None of the broadcasters involved in playing these commercials faced any sort of legal consequences. Shouldn't that change, too?
I did address it, though the answer is disappointing: Only Google (or someone with Google's private business data) could give you that number. But it's absolutely much higher than they'd like you to believe. I just can't tell you if it's 30%, 60%, or 90% of their revenue, the public doesn't have access to that information. I'm confident that how ever much you believe it is, it's higher.
> yet it seems that we should be holding Google for a higher level of accountability
On the contrary, repealing Section 230 would place Google on the same level of accountability as broadcast companies. Section 230 carves out a special immunity to prosecution and lawsuit that only applies to online platforms. Broadcast companies are already held to all of the laws and risks that Section 230 is protecting Google and Facebook from.
Well, that's pretty much wishful thinking.
> Broadcast companies are already held to all of the laws and risks that Section 230 is protecting Google and Facebook from.
Are they now.
Let's put it this way: section 230 protects Facebook from being held accountable for the anachronistic opinion about Jewish people, and violent tendencies derived from it, of a random user. Such random user, as a TV show guest, could spout a call to arms to an audience of 2,5 million spectators, and the broadcaster would not suffer any legal consequences.
Repealing section 230 _without_ a reasonable alternative would indeed held Google for a higher level of accountability than, say, Fox News.
Under what law? Section 230 is a special exemption for tech companies. Without it, Google is indeed subject to the same laws as Fox News. Now, it's possible those laws aren't strong enough... but they'd be equally not strong enough upon both Google and Fox News.
Currently, Fox News is held accountable poorly, and Google is not held accountable at all whatsoever.
Name a single US based TV station prosecuted because some of their guests made false or hateful comments on air. Heck, it is in fact easier for the FCC to nail a broadcast company for "indecency", rather than hate speech.
Which means, if Fox News isn't held accountable enough, you shouldn't see any reason for Section 230 to exist: It's not protecting tech companies from any effective law as it is, so removing it won't harm anyone.
Up until now, major social media (FB, Twitter, Youtube etc.) have been free to suppress conservative voices in the name of opposing racism and white supremacists. The tech platforms have been shielded from lawsuits by 230. Once 230 is suspended or repealed, they will no longer be shielded from lawsuits.
As a result, someone gets doxxed, fired from his job, threatened with violence etc., he now has the wherewithal to go after the platform that facilitated the cancel mob.
Speech is supposed to have consequences. How else could it be?
> Up until now, major social media (FB, Twitter, Youtube etc.) have been free to suppress conservative voices in the name of opposing racism and white supremacists.
I guess nazis can be seen as conservative voices by definition. But isn't that the same thing as Fox in the other direction? Corporations suppress viewpoints they don't like. Have you read the ToS?
> As a result, someone gets doxxed, fired from his job, threatened with violence etc., he now has the wherewithal to go after the platform that facilitated the cancel mob
So newspapers will be unable to report the news because people might lose their jobs? People lose their job all of the time when newspapers report on their crimes/actions.
Cancel cultural is a bad cultural phenomenon. We need to develop a healthier culture to fix this problem. Hamfisted Federal laws are not going to make a significant difference here without causing significant harm.
I started writing a reply to parent before I saw yours but I stopped when I saw this sentence because there's no way I could put it better.
Section 230 just makes the courts more efficient. There is no loophole.
Sorry to keep posting this link but the Section 230 misconception is very dangerous.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
That said if this does pass, we can only hope that the attractive nuisances of webapps will fall out of fashion. User-advocating client software is the real anti-censorship future. Of course what will likely happen is the frog will slowly continue to boil, and the censorship regime will be extended to p2p communications as well.
I doubt it (though feel free to link to a statement), because they aren't "allowed" to put labels on tweets because of Section 230, they're allowed to do so by the first amendment.
Summary: there is no loophole.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...