They underlying interview is pretty amazing, mostly not about this subject:
https://www.wired.com/story/bill-gates-on-covid-most-us-test...
Normally we'd merge the threads but most comments here are responding to the narrow title of the knockoff article.
Disappointing to see that Bill Gates isn't concerned about the slippery slope of regulating encryption. It frankly sounds like he'd be on board with the EARN IT act.
As long as we're only undermining freedom for the children or to make sure there's no wrongthink going on, no problem.
"Q: As someone who has built your life on science and logic, I’m curious what you think when you see so many people signing onto this anti-science view of the world.
A: Well, strangely, I’m involved in almost everything that anti-science is fighting. I’m involved with climate change, GMOs, and vaccines. The irony is that it’s digital social media that allows this kind of titillating, oversimplistic explanation of, “OK, there’s just an evil person, and that explains all of this.” And when you have [posts] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger].
Q: Well, you’re friends with Mark Zuckerberg. Have you talked to him about this?
After I said this publicly, he sent me mail. I like Mark, I think he’s got very good values, but he and I do disagree on the trade-offs involved there. The lies are so titillating you have to be able to see them and at least slow them down. Like that video where, what do they call her, the sperm woman? That got over 10 million views! [Note: It was more than 20 million.] Well how good are these guys at blocking things, where once something got the 10 million views and everybody was talking about it, they didn’t delete the link or the searchability? So it was meaningless. They claim, “Oh, now we don’t have it.” What effect did that have? Anybody can go watch that thing! So I am a little bit at odds with the way that these conspiracy theories spread, many of which are anti-vaccine things. We give literally tens of billions for vaccines to save lives, then people turn around saying, “No, we’re trying to make money and we’re trying to end lives.” That’s kind of a wild inversion of what our values are and what our track record is."
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.
Which would be absolutely wrong. (Not arguing, just backing up your point.) We've seen time and time again that misinformation doesn't spread as well through back channels and niche forums as it does through public figures, media and very notorious social networks. A post on 4chan will look like a scam, a post on a Facebook group of 200,000 people will look legitimate-ish. Encryption is not the tool of misinformation, people's gullibility, money, and compromised values are.
(1) The current velocity of disinformation is high -> (2) this leads to socially harmful outcomes -> (3) providing P2P encryption in turnkey form via social network apps isn't a good idea.
I don't see the suggestions of panopticon you do. I see someone saying 'Most people on social media platforms aren't responsible, thoughtful enough media consumers to earn a right to encryption.'
Personally? I think it's a perspective worth considering. {Low-effort P2P encryption + low-effort forwarding} is a fundamentally different social value proposition than {Medium-effort P2P encryption + medium-effort forwarding}.
How can that be achieved short of outlawing all encryption, heavily enforcing it and then allowing encryption "for the good guys"? If you outlaw encryption on FB or WhatsApp, even if you somehow get Telegram on board ... if people care about encryption (which I doubt, but let's pretend), somebody will provide a low-effort solution and you can't really stop it.
You're also absolutely right that most of the spread is just happening in the clear on normal FB or Twitter posts, and not as encrypted WhatsApp messages.
I think that FB has a moral imperative to significantly reduce the easy of sharing, frankly. It's a single click to commit a share/forward that passes along misinformation instantly with no effort on the part of the sharer. It should require _some_ effort: having to create your own post, for instance. It would dramatically slow the viral-spread-like-wildfire aspect of the most egregious pieces of viral misinformation: where people simply see a salacious headline that confirms their biases or aligns with their views and mindlessly clicks share.
That is addressable by reducing the patterns meant to increase viral spread, which admittedly is a huge part of what lead to Facebook's success, but it's now causing far more harm than good.
4chan mocked the hell out of the Christchurch shooter and Elliot Rodgers. None of those comments would be agreeable to the general public. The only places I've seen these guys, as well as Tsarnaev and the Columbine shooters praised is... Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit.
While I'm concerned about child pornography, there's more of it on Pornhub and XNXX than I've seen on Tor. And it's the low barriers to access on public porn sites that use automated filters that cause more of an issue. Bing itself will find adolescents if you type in keywords like "2k4" and "2ke" with adult terms.
Maybe Bill should focus less on trying to expose private paths and more on addressing the glaring gaps that come with over-automating platforms.
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.
The distinction (whether intended in Gates' source or of my own mind) I find interesting is between veracity and velocity.
Like you, I have enormous problems with deploying censorship to completely obliterate any type of thought from readable form. I see it as society's job to target the demand (the reader's desires and education), not the supply (the writer). If people want to start believing crackpots in large numbers, well, maybe society needs to look to its basic education systems...
That said, velocity is somewhat of a trickier matter.
As a thought exercise, what would the net effect be if Facebook implemented systems that resulted in misinformation being slowed? I.e. I share {link}, it takes x1.5 base time to propagate to my friends' feeds.
The information would still be available, and shared, but the viral velocity would also be reduced.
(Note: Of the available options, delay-only seems far preferable than anything else that could lead to a de facto shadowban)
Child pornography is a strange example. Someone would serve more time for possessing an image than molesting someone. This is based on the notion someone might be distributing it or doing something else.
Some NGOs bizarrely make the claim that possession of child pornography is worse than committing a physical crime.
It's much worse than that. Over the last several years he has been increasingly arguing against encryption. People should not be charitable toward him regarding his anti-privacy, anti-encryption, pro-authoritarian position, call it what it is. He's arguing for tyranny, plain and simple.
He isn't just not concerned about the slippery slope, he's fully aware of what he is arguing for. This isn't a naive, technologically or politically oblivious person.
They are pro security for sure, but...
Security shouldn't be abused by malicious actors. And those malicious actors shouldn't be able to hide behind encryption.
In the same sense, privacy is important but I'm not sure if it's that important in Covid times ( eg. The decentralized requirements from Europe).
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".
Yeah, IF. In reality however, it's orders of magnitude worse than any crimes that could be prevented by it.
"Infinite Retail Networks Invalidate Technology" can easily be achieved by segregating dot.com to its own "Internet/Network".
"Snowglobe or be snowglobed" is a better analogy than "everybody lives in a glass house except them".
ISH(water) and IRN(oil) don`t mix without constant agitation, so who better to add "business cycle" to archived knowledge and put a price on bits and bytes?