Very glad I'm not Facebook. No matter what choices you make, millions (or billions) will hate you. Is decentralization the only solution, if it even is one?
As soon as you start saying "well, we'll censor stuff that isn't accurate", you've opened a Pandora's box of every single interest group hammering you on every single decision and in the end everyone thinks you're screwing them over.
To let them off the hook for the role they had in helping letting the idea of ABSOLUTE TRUTH degrade, as well as the role they COULD have in helping fix it, is not thinking big enough.
Facebook could choose to be an active participant in the quest to reinforce the value of reality-orientated information exchange. They choose not to because it doesn't help their metrics. That doesn't make them evil, that makes them a logical participant in capitalism. The onus is on the rest of us to make them.
Yes, there is right wing fascist parties that are trying to nullify the meaning of the word, and introduce subjectivity where there should not be any, sowing doubt on the very idea of Reality.
But this is not the new normal for society or humanity. I refuse to believe that, or we're truly doomed. This is a temporary hurdle made by desperate people trying to hold on to a world they are being left behind in.
If Facebook doesn't take a stance on facts, lies, reality, and fiction. Then they are by definition agreeing with those that say all these things are subjective, and are therefore themselves unimpeachable and above repercussions.
Not taking a stand is taking a stand in this case.
Philosophy of science isn't that objectively finalized btw. The whole Vienna school which got obliterated by philosophers because it said that only valid scientific statements are those which can be empirically verified.
I understand that majority of the people making a certain viewpoint may be stupid but don't take it as the strength of your scientific statements. Even theory of evolution may need major corrections tomorrow and could even turn out to be completely false.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-...
To be clear I am not arguing against wearing masks, but rather against a misrepresentation of the clarity of current scientific evidence.
The majority of people can be wrong about something (Berenstein Bears anyone?), ignorant about things (e.g. the exciting things the USA did in South America in the last century) or can be misinformed even by reputatable organizations (e.g. WHO advising against face masks). They can also be misinformed about what the science indicates (e.g. anything about intelligence and heritability).
The truth is often not obvious, can be unintuitive or can go against deeply held values. Would you be ok with Facebook censoring anything talking about equality because people aren't all equal?
Except it really isn't quite true and is only an approximation. In reality the Earth and Sun both orbit around their common center of gravity, and both orbits are perturbed by other celestial bodies in a complex n-body interaction. So what is "truth"? If I post on Facebook that the Earth orbits around the Sun should they censor my post for not being 100% true? If not then where is the dividing line?
Where is the dividing line?
Somewhere between "The Sun orbits around the Earth" and "The Earth orbits around the Sun". Where the first is clearly not the truth, and the second clearly is for 99.9% of contexts.
I mean, that's pretty arbitrary too, e.g. FB censors female breasts, which is not considered obscene in many places.
It's a difficult line to walk.
However it is becoming more and more the case. With American platforms and media, their learned attitude of being overly prude also made their way here. Though I'm not sure whether "prude" is the right word to describe the crippling self-consciousness many experience when faced with nude humanity.
I suspect it has be actively instilled by your parents and society around you while you are still young, or you won't ever have it.
But it can very quickly descend into the obscene, and if they didn't filter you'd get nasty dick picks all over the place.
Every social place has rules, not exception. It's just a matter of how they are impressed.
Not only would most people flee, advertisers would as well.
FYI advertisers don't like hate speech as well, which is why there are rules about that.
The perplexing issue comes down to things that are not 'hate speech' so much as a) insensitive things and b) truly 'fake news' ie QAnon, anti-vax etc.
You're right to point out that it is this stuff at the 'fringe' that keeps a lot of people engaged. Hence the paradox.
The main issue is the sheer volume of content. Four seconds – that's their estimate for how much time employees in Facebook's "censorship farm" centers have, on average, to make a decision about whether a reported post gets deleted or not. As a result, management decided to aim for the lowest bar: consistent enforcement of a limited set of rules. That's hard enough as is: is all blood gore? Are all references to race hate speech? Etc. etc.
So the censors simply have no capacity to fairly fact-check every single political post, and when in doubt, they err on the side of free speech. ML can help suppress certain viral posts, but not consistently so. I'm not a fan of Facebook by any means, but in this case they really are in a tough spot.
I'm not familiar enough with how large scale moderation works, so is this solvable, with near unlimited funds?
I don't think this accurately describes Facebook's position. They have deleted several people for essentially pure ideological reasons, including people who they readily admit violated no rules.
It's not a Pandora's box, though, because these laws have been around for decades and centuries. But they don't want to, they haven't built the tools to do so, and they make money from it. It's the same as their rationale around moderation in general: "well we built this to be wide open and have zero tools to control it, and now it's just too complicated to do so!"
It's like building a car without brakes and saying "Look, congressperson, we're in the business of helping people get to wherever they want to go. We don't think it's our place to dictate the speed of travel, and there are many companies making brakes for these cars, for people who want them. Competition!"
Twitter used to be always about who you choose to follow is what you see, or what tags you click on, it was opt-in and it was great. The popular feed wasn't your feed by default (via other peoples friends of friends which you have zero control over nor blue checkmarks being heavily promoted - which are usually the most tribalistic and FUDy).
Many subreddits have different sets of rules & restrictions. If these options were significantly expanded, could that ever meet the requirements?
Another interesting niche example is stackexchange.com, which isn’t a social network in the traditional sense (yet), but it has many different communities with different rules where a single identity, but variable set of privileges, follow you around.
Could these evolve into what you consider federated social networks, or are there more strict separation requirements (such as different login / identity providers among sub-communities)?
[edit: typo]
If a specific corporate site was coordinating the effort it would be shut down (eg, I think the Pirate Bay was knocked out of commission a few times, and blocked depending on the country). But it doesn't help because the actual data is highly distributed in a redundant fashion. Any piece of infrastructure to share torrents (DNS, websites, trackers, client software, information about where to look) can and has been targeted but it is too cheap to replace.
The key is the actual data - ie, the movie being torrented - is redundant and distributed. That property isn't present if one corporation controls all the data as is the case with Reddit, Facebook or StackExchange. It isn't technically prohibited from mirroring it all, but with bittorrent the peers provide the storage (which is the part that doesn't scale) and there is a nice cheap unit to work with - one movie is an irrelevant amount of data and static. Social data is a bit more dynamic - the attention of the speaker is important - and doesn't seem to work quite the same way.
Communication is a public utility. They shouldn’t need to be operated for profit.
I feel that question is too often discussed without enough context. To be able to find a solution, we should first agree on what is the problem.
So, what's your problem statement?
The current networks herd you into echo chambers and show you more outrage so you’ll engage more as they chase advertising dollars in a race to the bottom.
Only recent, after settling down, feudalism, growing cities, and the last blip —globalization—, moved us towards centralization.
If anything, humans are great at managing small communities, and very bad at operating in a large, centralized, globalized world. Radicalism is often a product of that globalization, and would be unable to exist in a hunter-gatherer tribal system of small moving groups.
The size of the community is probably less relevant that how it is grown. Self-selection (like e.g. hackernews) is certainly much more vulnerable to groupthink.
On a federated maps product, some communities can label Nagorno Karabakh one way, others another. Unlike Google.
https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...