Bill Gates calls Microsoft’s TikTok deal a poisoned chalice

I read all of what you pasted before I posted. I don't see how it changes my point at all.

There's a complete disconnect between the first statement about encryption and the second. Unless Bill Gates really thinks that the vast majority of spread is through private messages.

Even accepting the premise that censorship is the right approach, the vast majority of spread comes from public, unencrypted post. The connection to encrypted messaging is tenuous at best.

Acting as if killing encryption is the solution to combating misinformation sounds like a convenient strawman that Bill Barr would love to throw around.

It seems like he's against the notion of "I disagree with what you're saying, but I will defend to the death your right to be misinformed."

Basically, if something can be proved as false information, and yet it's still allowed to spread to millions of people that unlike the average HN commenter will not do the research and end up believing the misinformation, what's the value in that? Why would we allow something that's false to spread?

This is a dilemma that creates a lot of dissonance in my mind. On one hand I support encryption, and believe that banning certain types of information on the basis of being "wrong" is a slippery slope when all of that hinges on what "wrong" means and who controls the definition of "wrong." On the other hand this kind of misinformation can cause material harm to society and innocent people who are affected by the misinformed. Without censorship or any way of shutting down this information before it reaches people who would hypothetically always believe it if they were to know of its existence, it feels like the most we can do is stand by and watch it spread. Imagine trying to convince millions of people to change their minds once they've been set for good, and that those people are now convincing your friends not to vaccinate their children, or similar.

I think what Gates is saying with regards to child pornography is that it's the only type of digital information that is prohibited to be in possession of by law. The reasoning behind this is that having child pornography distributable creates a market by which other child pornographers will have demand to keep producing more of it, which by the nature of child pornography means exploiting children. So I guess what is meant is that if you can be arrested for consuming one type of materially harmful information that provides no net value to society, why not stop other kinds of materially harmful and valueless information from spreading? There is already a status quo. Child pornography proves that there is a class of information that is so damaging to society to have publicly available that governments believe it must be outlawed (censored?) entirely.

However, child pornography different from publicly available viral videos. By its nature child exploitation doesn't spread virally online. It isn't mainstream. Viral videos on YouTube are specifically produced to reach as many people as possible, and being safe enough to exist on YouTube is pretty much necessary for this to occur. People would have to take steps to prevent child pornography from spreading to the wrong people, because of the nature of modern society where any average person would be inclined to get them arrested if they knew they were in possession of it. It is firmly ingrained in a vast majority of society that child pornography and exploitation is evil and the miniscule amount of people who believe otherwise will be endlessly shamed for their viewpoint and the shamers will never be debated on that point, because nobody generally debates things related to child pornography, and if you are discovered to like such a thing then you instantly become the scum of the Earth in almost everyone's mind who knows this fact. But those same people are happy to let harmful misinformation slide if they can't or won't understand what it actually means, information that could harm children just the same, like anti-vaccination material, but are instead marketed from the standpoint of protecting children instead of exploiting them. And if criminals are going to use encryption to hide it all, then that's how it's going to be. Encryption is just a tool. Criminals can buy knives, too.

Still, I think if we're going to allow misinformation to spread on the principle that all information should be allowed to spread, because of the fact that it's information, then we should be prepared to clean up the aftermath of the rioting later.

It's possible the encryption part is just Wired's editorializing and not what he intended. I might be jumping to conclusions.

> In short: he's not saying security is bad. He's saying government spying isn't that bad IF the government can be trusted.

Which is a long way to say "security is bad because it might keep people safe who we don't want to be kept safe".

> He's saying government spying isn't that bad IF the government can be trusted.

Yeah, IF. In reality however, it's orders of magnitude worse than any crimes that could be prevented by it.

I heard it from Jonathan Haidt.

Tweet: https://twitter.com/jonhaidt/status/1083018993991077888?lang... Study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2664031

The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI6rX96oYnY

There’s an ad when you return to the app. Since you’re expecting a full screen video to auto play, they often aren’t out of place. You can skip them immediately as well.

Besides ads, one would think there’s endless ways to monetize a strong fun brand.

If you ask me, ads with the ability to pay a monthly fee to remove them is the ideal situation.

This is rather common knowledge. I don’t really understand your comment. For what am I supposed to thank you? And why later?

Not any more; he stepped down earlier this year.

https://news.microsoft.com/2020/03/13/microsoft-announces-ch...

He is no longer part of the board. He isn't chairman since 2014 and left the board in March this year.

Boiled down to: nobody ever gets a promotion for maintaining the success of something that's already successful.

Which is a shame, but the corporate game theory optimality of leapfrogging between hot projects has held true at essentially every company I've ever worked for.

I mean some of the biggest examples have been tech. AOL and Time Warner was a hot mess that destroyed both, for instance.

Yes, but so is Hollywood’s, for example. The algorithm is geared around imitation style creative proliferation. It shows you videos similar to others you've liked. It simply seems like lots of people like to watch other people dance to catchy tunes. And even watch people react to watching other TikTok videos. The top videos on the platform get hundreds of millions of views, far more than what you’d expect if this content was supported by pockets of underground “pedophiles”. On one hand TikTok is an amazing and disruptive tool for creative expression. On the other hand, it simply reiterates our timeless cultural desire for sexualized female-gendered expression. If you find this aspect of human nature problematic we have also developed tools and institutions to combat it: religion. But those seem to have pedophile problems too. Joke aside they have fallen out of popularity of late.