The Social Media Problem | Hacker News Reader

The Social Media Problem

jacquesmattheij.com

73 pointsjanvdberg166 comments

Two observations:

1. The crazy ideas jacquesm decries have a limited influence on one's life. Those are (predominantly) singular topics rather than all-encompassing ideologies. They are more of conversation starters than life guides. Aside of some rare dangerous ones (COVID-19 theories perhaps?), their impact places somewhere between stamp collecting and junk food consumption. All the flat earthers, the 5G's, the moon landing hoaxes etc., - let people have weird hobbies. We can handle them as a society.

2. Given how prevalent conspiracy theories are - across times, cultures, geographical locations, social niches - I posit our propensity towards them is not a random fluke of human psyche. No, I posit the conspiracy theories play a role in some other societal processes. I posit that trying to eradicate or suppress the underlying mechanism, without understanding the mechanism in the wider context of all societal processes would cause unforeseen negative consequences.

Also, any effort to regulate via law what people are spouting quickly becomes a cure worse than the disease.

> Also, any effort to regulate via law what people are spouting quickly becomes a cure worse than the disease.

China's economy seems to be doing fine, and the population is docile. What else do you think elites care about?

My point is that the "cure" seems to work fine in practice so long as it isn't too onerous. Any restrictions on speech in the US are likely to be limited to volatile social issues (hate speech) and enforced primarily by elites using the private sector.

I think that's largely an attribute of the US legal system. The debates about legislation last so long and cost so much political capital that legislators are wary of making more frequent but smaller changes to laws.

Also, a law is not always needed. Frequently culture and society have ways to discourage problems created by outliers without turning to new laws. The problem occurs when issues (like conspiracy thinking and lack of trust in long-lived institutions / "the establishment") start to move from outlier status to mainstream.

> I posit our propensity towards them is not a random fluke of human psyche

I remember when Game of Thrones was in its early seasons. I had read the books so knew what was going go happen. I would sit and watch my friends discuss the show (who hadn't read the books) and I would be positively gleeful knowing that I knew more than them. It was like I possessed secret insider knowledge they all craved.

I suspect people who believe in conspiracy theories feel the same way. They know something others don't. Everyone else is waiting for the script writers; they've already seen the source.

It appeals to our ego and inherent narcissism. And frankly, when you have a people who have been told for decades that they are special and unique, narcissism can be an overrepresented quality

> I would sit and watch my friends discuss the show (who hadn't read the books) and I would be positively gleeful knowing that I knew more than them. It was like I possessed secret insider knowledge they all craved.

That doesn't explain why they would share that conspiracy with the masses. Doesn't it mean their insider knowledge won't be special anymore?

If I had insider trade knowledge, I wouldn't share it on reddit or well anywhere.

That doesn't explain why they would share that conspiracy with the masses. Doesn't it mean their insider knowledge won't be special anymore?

Perhaps it helps to believe something so outrageous the masses won't believe it.

The GoT analogy continues if we think that as the TV show continued, certain book plot points were missed out, overlooked, or perhaps even negated by decisions made for the show.

Book readers then had ready ammunition to share with the world "the TV series was WRONG, dishonest and false... the dialogue proves X but they changed it in the tv series!"

So they remain gleeful but they need to share their conspiracy(Book plotline) with the masses because otherwise the masses won't understand the same reality that they do.

> It was like I possessed secret insider knowledge they all craved. I suspect people who believe in conspiracy theories feel the same way.

Then why are they always trying to spread their theories far and wide? Why wouldn't they do what you did and be "positively gleeful knowing that I knew more than them?"

How common are conspiracies throughout written human history? Why would modern history be any different?

Because for a true believer of a conspiracy theory, spreading the "truth" is an altruistic act.

Having been around quite a lot of conspiracy based stuffs, I have to disagree with the statement you make about the impact.

Conspiracy theories are a slippery slope. You might not believe something at first, but they are peppered with enough truth that you begin to accept them all because one part was right. "Question everything," as they often tell you. The problem is, facts and science usually comes from people in authority - the people you're told to question. So you begin blanket distrust all "authority". Which ends up being anyone telling your something with authority. Government, science, medicine, police, Greta...

I'll happily question - but the problem comes when your bias won't let you trust anyone or anything. In fact you deliberately take the opposite stance because "they lie" and they're probably "out to get" you. Then it really is dangerous - and you feel clever, because it's like knowing some secret knowledge the rest of the world doesn't - because the "sheeple" believe the spoon fed lies.

I think conspiracy theories should be seen as a symptom of low quality education, and that makes it a big deal.

It's not that I disagree - but I know some incredibly smart and educated people who are fully invested in conspiracy theories.

Whilst I'm sure there's probably something in it, it's definitely not always the case.

I repeatedly see very intelligent and successful people outright reject the possibility that conspiranoids can be intelligent but misguided. I think conspiracy thinking ("conspiranoia") is orthogonal to educational attainment/quality. I think it's much more likely that we are all susceptible to conspiranoia thinking (we all have the same cognitive biases and we all use good-enough but imperfect heuristics to decide who/what to trust), but that some of us just haven't been introduced to one we are amenable to by a person of trust+authority. Given enough {theories, people we trust, exposure} we will all start falling for some or many of them.

Of course the dumbest of us will fall for more theories, including the more incredible theories, but to pretend like any one person is immune is to ignore the step 1 of a 12 step program.

Do you think Jeffrey Epstein killed himself? If the answer is no, then congratulations, you're a conspiracy theorist. Do you feel poorly educated now?

There are plenty of people with a high quality education who go around talking about how specific rich groups run a massive conspiracy to subvert democracy and promote bad political views. (Indeed, most politically engaged people I've encountered believe multiple such theories.)

I know enough not to do seek it out anymore but I will admit that some of the better conspiracy videos on youtube are pretty convincing if only because they take advantage of how your brain (system 1) decides truth. A lot of political documentaries work the same way.

At the onset of the Coronavirus, the media and medical advice was to NOT acquire masks for daily wear to prevent spreading. My knowledge from Asian nations encouraging masks wearing to spread the disease was counterfactual to what the government was saying.

The people at Star Slate Codex supposed that this was to limit a run on masks.

Dr. Faucci just last month admits, yeah we lied about it at the beginning to prevent a run on masks.

The conspiracy folks in this case were correct. I am not including myself in the echelons or intelligence the SSC provides, but smart people were able to suss our this was a conspiracy.

I have a name for this. Contrarian theory. Contrarians are superficially similar to skeptics.

I sort of agree except I'd say you need to talk about all claims having nothing to do with a person's own life.

Basically, throughout human existence, we have been guided by a lot of language that coded useful information about the world but on an abstract level was somewhere between false and meaningless. But abstract falseness didn't matter because it didn't directly impact our lives. I believe ancient hunter-gathers described a lot of their hunting method religiously. Animal spirits don't actual exist but I suspect one person can teach another concrete ways of hunting using these.

So, really, it's only a somewhat limited group that has good tools for sorting true abstractions from false abstractions from meaningless abstractions.

The 18th to 20th centuries saw a fortuitous coming together of interests where those with power found it in their interests to promote a greater rational understanding of the world, to promote tools that allow more people to determine the truth of these abstract ideas with little impact on their lives. And part of this was having somewhat truthful authorities, which allowed this rational understanding to be much easier since people didn't have to figure things out from the get-go.

Things don't look good going into the 21st century. The expanding area covered by science seems to be leading to less ability of even experts to verify basic science (PCR technician claiming viruses don't exist stands out in the OP). And rationality seems to be of less interest to the powerful.

> I posit the conspiracy theories play a role in some other societal processes

We do know what happens with conspiracies, and it is our neurological processes and societal processes getting stuck in just the right way.

Take 2 forces -

1) Human brains are pattern recognition machines

2) A particular person always goes against the grain

With these two forces alone, this person will always orient their pattern interpretations against what is held by the "majority".

None of these things are bad, they are quite useful to the majority when someone tells them that tulip mania (for example) is irrational.

A book that I keep thinking about years after I read it, is Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_Explained).

While the topic is religion, its more an examination of beliefs, superstition and cultural norms through the lens of anthropology, evolutionary pscy, and other cognitivie theories.

Relevant to our discussion is it highlights how often brains encode information in odd ways, to increase recall, or just as a quirk of our mental wet ware.

A common example in cultures around the world are objects of a category, say Mountains/ancestors, that have an aberration or trait of another category (Eat people/are incorporeal)

Our brains fill in the necessary blanks - no one worries about the structure of the mountains digestive tract, or why ancestor spirits seem to be so human or don't dissipate in the wind/randomly follow movement rules for corporeal people.

The same applies for conspiracies. Somehow when people discuss conspiracies, the agencies involved have super human coordination, error checking, wealth and power.

I also enjoy reading conspiracy theories (as opposed to subscribing to them) and in general agree with your first point, but I think you overlook the degree to which they can be weaponized.

COVID-19 disinformation is absolutely weaponized and that's literally killing people on a daily basis. Likewise, while the objections to 5g in my local community are merely an annoying inconvenience from naive technophobes, in some places it's manifested as attacks on physical infrastructure which are quasi-organized; there are forums where techniques are seeded, shared and refined with an underlying purpose of spreading those attacks to other forms of infrastructure.

The basic problem is that while bad ideas may spread on their own because they satisfy some emotional or pseudo-rational need of the recipients who then go on to reproduce the idea, the 'marketplace of ideas' metaphor doesn't really take account of wilful subversion.

“ As many as one in five Americans would refuse to take a coronavirus vaccine, according to a new poll that follows a surge of anti-vaccine content online“

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewsolender/2020/05/08/many-...

That’s a real life effect. Also from this article: “ Researchers at Johns Hopkins estimate that at least 70% of the population will have to be immune to provide herd protection against the novel coronavirus.“

Regards 2. , maybe the more "everyone conforms" the larger the sporadic rewards for the outliers?!? Like winning the lottery, most outlier crazies lose but occasionally one weird conspiracy plot wins amazingly well.

Imagine you told everyone in the US in 2000 that the NSA would spy on everyone in their own country...(not sure how you'd benefit from that though)

Yes. My work takes me to the research on conspiracy theories (I am creating a database) and I actually read through these because these responses are part of how conspiracy theories function in a culture. eg https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618774270

>The fig leaf of Free Speech will no doubt be brandished as the greatest good and too sacred to be messed with but the facts are that every form of free speech has limitations. And that actively trying to harm others by abusing that right should come with some kind of limit or at a minimum a way to reduce its reach. Most of the reasoning around free speech rights and such are from a time when getting a letter across the country took three weeks.

This is what the seed of authoritarianism looks like: moral justifications for forcing people to believe, communicate, and behave the way you think is correct.

The specific limit of free speech is where it causes legal damages to others.

The particular form of authoritarian scaremongering on display tries to undefine that court-testable line to include any useful moral panic, but never really addresses the notion that loosening that line means their own speech could also easily be suppressed, as the "other side" could use the new suppression tools as freely and subjectively as themselves.

Two things-

What about legal damages but not directly cause and effect. Something like stochastic terrorism? (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_(terrorism)#Stocha...)

If someone is saying “Someone out kill x...” either directly or via dog whistles and whoops someone “crazy” kills them, should we tolerate that as a society? This is being played out by the massive increase, for instance, of violence and crime on Asian Americans because of the rhetoric of right wing media in regards to China but you can’t charge anyone with a direct comer and yet damages are happening. And if the test is specifically legally proven damages then well society makes the laws and the question returns to should we as a society allow people to incite violence and how do we draw that line? It’s not an easy question but I don’t think it’s as simple as “legal damages”.

The second point which is perhaps more to the grandparent is all voices are certainly not equal - especially on the internet. Should a corporation or state actor with the finances to blanket their voice across the spectrum of media not have any limits on it? As speech is weaponized, which it was in 2016 and counties to be done so today, should it be regulated in some way like other weapons are? What will society look like when the voices with the power to spread their message continue to shrink? Everything needs moderation and regulation especially when it can do such harm to society. Again there’s a debate on where to draw the line but I don’t think we want to live in a society of might/money makes right in the sphere of media communications any more than we already are in it.

The points you're making have been known issues of freedom of speech since the drafting of the constitution. I think American society as a whole understands this, and is willing to make these sacrifices because otherwise you open yourself up to authoritarianism by more powerful entities.

Specious argument.

How so?

Equating the assertion of limits with total compulsion, weasel words, outright falsehoods like equating the idea of behavioral consequentialism with demands for totality of belief, an idea which is simply not present in the quoted text.

Unless you want the law of the jungle, any freedom you have will come from restrictions on the freedom of others. That's the basis for civilization. Speech has consequences, there are no reasons for it to fall outside the realm of law.

There is a world of difference between criticizing your government and advocating genocide.

And by the way, governments are the first spreaders of fake news on social medias IMO.

Ain't the software; it's the peopleware.

> But there are a lot of them and they all have the vote, waiting to be pushed as useful idiots to some higher goal. Politicians have started to realize that they don’t actually need to get a real mandate, and that they won’t be held accountable for lying. At that level, every time someone lies more people become susceptible to being pulled in to this web of deception.

One viable thing to do is redistribute political power instead of wealth.

The act of trying to centralize everything into a legacy, monolithic, waterfall, big iron system results in a Tower of Babel.

Its proponents swear it's Progress.

Return to the enumerated powers on the Constitution, and refactor all this Progressive cruft to the State level, where voters can either be wise or spendthrift at their leisure.

Doubtless we'll prefer a more catastrophic collapse, but dreaming is still occasionally legal.

Some level of coordinated collective action is required. It is clear that our local choices have global impact.

The trick is finding mutually beneficial and agreed-upon strategies for getting along with one another.

Much of the trouble in the United States can be traced to Congress abdicating its responsibilities (under presidents of both parties). As voters, we are responsible for that failure. November is coming soon; it is an opportunity to choose those representatives who will choose the right thing over the expedient thing when the choice is required.

I used to think that the fact that the HoR size has held constant since 1910 (!) was among the major problems.

2020 saw a week where:

- POTUS couldn't remove the unconstitutional act of a predecessor, that should have been a Congressional job at all points

- SCOTUS rewrote the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that should have been a Congressional job at all points

- Congress blew fat piles of cash on COVID-19 but did precious little else of which I'm aware

I submit that a https://conventionofstates.com/ is overdue.

What was it that POTUS could not undo and that SCOTUS did?

DACA, whether you think it was a great idea or not.

Ain't the software; it's the peopleware.

What does that mean?

One viable thing to do is redistribute political power instead of wealth

No, that's clearly not viable. The US is still "really" a democracy in the sense those who get the most legal votes really do win - real, fair elections right now, are a big factor in the distribution of power in the US, for democratic-ness on a world-scale, that's pretty good. Yet the extremely unequal distribution of wealth makes a mockery of the realness of voting's impact. Most people are effectively powerless to make an impact on much outside their immediate lives.

Return to the enumerated powers on the Constitution, and refactor all this Progressive cruft to the State level

This is an extreme reactionary viewpoint, taken from the 3-percenters or similar outfit.

This is why I get frustrated when people try to say “the system is broken, we should have a revolution!”

To have a successful revolution, you need to convince a lot of people that your cause is just, and worth dying for... if we can’t even convince people to VOTE for the right people/things, how can we possibly convince them to have a revolution?

You don’t think that the people who manipulate the populous to win elections couldn’t do the same thing to stop a revolution?

You can't manipulate populous forever. At some point they rise and protest. Look at Belarus right now.

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

Sure, but all we have to do to throw off our oppressors is vote.... if we can do that, we wouldn't need anything else.

"Most people are effectively powerless to make an impact on much outside their immediate lives."

Isn't this a good thing? Doesn't it mean that they can't harm others?

It wasn't a good thing in Aushwitz, Birkenau and other death camps for those who were about to die, while others around did nothing to stop it.

It isn't a good thing for people in Belarus right now with dictator applying brutal force when he didn't manage to win even unfair elections. Police simply shoot people on the streets and even aiming to home windows if they scream in protest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-ynUNGNHdk

And also the context was about wealth and unequal weight of vote power. So right now the uber wealthy can do much more harm than the average low income voter who hasn't worked since March

What is the difference between wealth and political power? In the US at least it seems they’re one and the same.

While I agree that there is a people ware problem,

1) We can do both - more equitable and productive distribution of wealth and self determination

2) Technology has created a new set of problems, at the intersection of human cognitive/mental limits, which the term "peopleware" tends to shrug off; the impression is that its more a people/social issue not a tech one.

An example, mentioned in the article was when people see 1000s of conspiracists on a forum and the hardcoding in our brains translates it as sign of trust worthiness. Even though a majority of people would call it crazy.

Localities -- and borders in general -- are less and less relevant as the internet (and technology generally) makes the world smaller.

Strict federalist separation made sense in a world where it took days to travel across state lines, but the modern world requires that nations have a strong central government. Some things can only be done at the federal level (issuing currency, foreign relations, military/defense actions, etc.) and some laws (such as civil rights) should be universal and not subject to local interference.

It's true that we as a nation focus far too much on national politics, to the detriment of local issues which impact us personally much more. I'd argue that's not a problem with which governments hold the power, it's a problem with how the populace participates in politics.

Not only that, but quite frankly the manner in which we currently elect state governments is a mess. I live in North Carolina, the most gerrymandered state in the Union. In 2018 we literally voted using a map that was declared unconstitutional because there wasn't enough time to redraw it before the election. [0] Until this issue is overcome, it's tough for me to get excited about giving the states more power, and it took a panel of federal judges to declare the state's map illegal.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/us/court-north-carolina-g...

Oh, there is plenty of time to redraw maps.

The drawing of the maps can be reduced to algorithms and automated.

The bun fight is not a time-centric problem.

Rather, a political one: a tyranny of the minority.

The problem is really about a group within all populations that is never satisfied with what power they have. You decentralize they centralize. Goes round and round.

They are useful in certain situations and useless in others. With time society understands those differences and gets better at deploying its different resources.

What 'progressive cruft' would you like to refactor to the state level?

Healthcare? Defense? Medical and scientific research? SNAP and (albeit small/not enough) education funding? What about banking regulation, regulating privacy and tech?

What happens when those, by your insinuation, 'unwise' states like California and New York are the only states that can afford anything? I would add it's my opinion these liberal local govs are the only ones willing to vote in their own best interest - e.g. education - but i'm sure we won't agree there on the fundamental premise.

Most of the conservative states rely on money from more populous states to even feed their people. The Republican Speaker is insanely hypocritical here in current stimulus negotiations as Kentucky is the second most dependent on Federal funding. e.g. they are 2nd to last in taking more money in from other states than they give back.

Plus State and local governance already has an outsized influence on people's lives (even many conservatives would agree more than Fed Gov)

and local government seems even more affected by unequal political power and wealth. Just look at all the Q anon and other crazy city council and school board zealots elected all over the place (which sadly has now made it's way into Congress)

I'm starting to think a lot of schemes at the federal level (patent, copyright, securities law, trademark, etc) are robbing these conservative states of opportunity. In the op's proposed system, it's probable that wealth can be generated through better competition in these regulatory systems.

I think I'm down with some changes in those regs, especially for me securities, but I don't know how you could do that on a state by state basis though. How could apple handle different patent rules from each state and then litigate on each of them etc

Since people are discussing conspiracies, I present to you the Batman argument to inoculate your near and dear ones.

1) All conspiracy theories require the evil organization to achieve several super human/ super organizational feats such as: * Perfect coordination - across timezones, personalities, objectives * Great wealth * excellent control of public figures * Advanced technology * Great secrecy Etc.

These are all impossible asks, which any normal person knows if they have worked in any team of people.

Many conspiracies die because of how hard it is to keep everyone aligned, and if people were that efficient in secrecy, imagine how efficient they would be without that burden.

Therefore,

Implication 1) If you believe in the conspiracy, we must also live in a world where such levels of efficiency are possible.

which means that

2) It is also possible for an organization or individuals to exist, who take advantage of these efficiencies and advantages to do "good".

Now if it was possible to stay in the dark, while having advanced tech and great wealth - well you've just described Batman.

So the question you can train all your loved ones to ask, anytime they encounter a great claim, is whether this claim means that we live in a world where batman can exist.

------------------------

While this is a childish way to encode a defense, its meant to be easy to consume, and to protect people who regularly wont have time to spend the effort to verify information or toxic content when they encounter it.

So while it is outlandish, that is partly the point - to diminish the earnestness and terror that conspiracy theories exude, without your active intervention being required.

edit: This can apply to any superhero/or superfriends. I just chose Batman.

This thesis is crap and is blind to much bigger conspiracy theories that have been going on for thousands of years and that still have much stronger holds on societies than anti mask conspiracy theories. Modern social media did not cause them to grow to what they were since it did not exist when they were created and grew.

Christianity: Jesus died and came back to life. He died for your sins. You are going to hell if you don’t repent your sins. Please give the church 10%.

Buddhism: You are going to endlessly suffer. Please contribute to the temple to support the monks. Please pay monks to bless funerals.

Hinduism: You are born into a caste and stuck in it. You are shit and untouchable. If you touch me or try to marry my daughter, I will kill you.

The reality is that you have systems and people that prey on human weaknesses for time immemorial. It is much more interesting to examine how those technologies/systems operate.

Free speech was protection against conspiracy theories and now the author wants to ban free speech to protect us from conspiracy theories. Sheer nonsense.

>The reality is that you have systems and people that prey on human weaknesses for time immemorial. It is much more interesting to examine how those technologies/systems operate.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Michel Foucault's critique of historiography

Next, we'll examine Western notions of 'progress', rationalization, and humanism as being parsable along the same lines

Who gets to decide who doesn’t get to speak? If an individual, we suppress popular opinion unpopular with leadership. If the collective, we suppress unpopular data and ideas that may be accurate or innovative.

You can’t have selective freedom of speech.

I agree selective freedom of speech is hard. Probably too hard.

I tend to support selective augmentation of other people's speech - "fact checkers have shown this to be inaccurate" next to a conspiracy fan's latest comment. As long as it is more precise than just downvoting to oblivion.

And who's to object to that! Speech is free and visible, and no information is withheld, it's just not passively amplified without reasonable vetting.

>And who's to object to that!

I take it you didn't see the outrage around here when Twitter "fact-checked" Trump's statements - even that was denounced as propaganda and censorship.

> Who gets to decide who doesn’t get to speak?

The platform owner, then potentially a judge.

> Filtering out the bad from the good is going to be very important if we don’t want to accidentally lose such minor marbles as our democracies, our health and our safety.

I really think that a better solution to this problem is to fix the shortcomings of our democratic systems. The majority of people don't believe that 5G towers cause COVID-19, or that 9/11 was an inside job. A stable democracy should be resilient enough to withstand a small number of wrong people.

But that's not the case for the US. The election result for the entire country (of 330 million people!) can be flipped by a few tens of thousands of voters in the right electorates.

I recognize that this is going to be a hard problem to fix. But I do believe it would be easier than trying to reverse the laws of economics that drive social media companies to do the things they do.

I have wondered how much less (if any) this is a problem in Democracies with Parliamentary systems, particularly any that don't use "first past the post" voting. Anyone from outside the US have insight on that to share?

I agree we need to shore up the democratic systems. However, I think you are greatly underestimating the amount of propaganda that is fed to a huge amount of people in the U.S. who lap everything up. I feel people sweeping it under the rug are part of the problem. And I think you are also underestimating the amount of people who have extremely strong nationalistic and even white supremist attitudes and seek to spread them. The U.S. is a very big place and many of these people hide in plain site, just waiting for their opportunity for people like Trump or Stephen Miller to get power. I've experienced it from both educated and non-educated, rich and poor. I grew up in a rural, predominately white area. I know these people and how they think, and it's scary.

Social media acts as a medium for people to transmit these ideas at a speed and power not known before. We need to address both our democratic and communication systems.

   > quick way to report a Tweet or FB post that spreads disinformation would already help a lot.

That point is what always goes through my head when a Dorsey or a Zuckerberg or a Wojkiki gives another "more work to be done" apology.

If they've been doing so much work, and it's just the "moderation is hard" problem that has slowed them, why do all of their sites make it so convoluted to report content?

> If they've been doing so much work, and it's just the "moderation is hard" problem that has slowed them, why do all of their sites make it so convoluted to report content?

I think they are trying to narrow what can be flagged. I think they want to avoid people just flagging posts they do not agree with. There is a quote "History is a set of lies agreed upon." To me you could replace history with social media and the quote would be true. Or at least thats the lie I agree with.

How is it convoluted? The "Report" button is quite easy to find in tweets and posts.

I used it a few times to report clear old schools racist stuff. My experience is that it takes 7 steps to report that content on twitter in Germany, and isn’t as easy as expected. I documented the process here:

https://twitter.com/dgellow/status/1274398162711691266?s=20

Also, every single time Twitter responded that they won’t do anything about the reported content (again, I’m talking about clear old school racist content).

To be fair, that doesn't seem unduly convoluted to me. They are doing their due diligence: it looks like you specifically picked the Twitter-is-liable-in-Germany-if-they-get-it-wrong legal option, so they very reasonably give you a questionnaire because they want you to be specific about what you're demanding of their vaguely defined Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz obligations.

Then they got back to you, saying they disagree with your judgement.

That's a lot of "moderation is hard" work and they're doing their job. However much you might disagree with their verdict, they're not hiding reporting functionality or making reports unduly difficult or ignoring reports.

> it looks like you specifically picked the Twitter-is-liable-in-Germany-if-they-get-it-wrong legal option

I don't know what you mean by that. I live in Germany, I used the normal report button, I haven't picked anything special.

In any case, given my experience, I will definitely not use that feature anymore, it's too much effort to just report something that should not be on the platform. The fact that the report button is available and easy to find isn't enough for the platform to self regulate if the rest of the process is broken.

> I used the normal report button, I haven't picked anything special.

When you reported the tweet, you picked the "covered by Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz" option, which means you're demanding that Twitter comply with Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz to act on a violation covered under the German law.

It's clear you live in Germany because Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz reports are only available in Germany, and given that Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz reports have a legally defined scope that only applies in Germany, I'd guess that it's treated differently from reports for regular violations (like "It's suspicious or spam" or "It's abusive or harmful").

Other regular options like the "abusive" one is much shorter and easier than picking out sections of a law.

Sure, but these other choices are also not correct. It was neither spam nor abusive or harmful.

A good contrast is "1-click" shopping. That's what a feature looks like when these companies actually want users to use it. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/amazons-1-click-...

These conversations become hard, because its not well discussed, and the finesse to divide these into "new" and "old" problems is being developed.

For example an "old" problem is that this is how humans interact with information and sensationalism. The news cycle effect, the sale of content along with the packaging of professionalism - was a problem before the net.

But there are also a novel situations where this new rate, scale, and quality of information creation/dissemination result in new structures issues.

An example of this is the perception that a belief is more widely held than it is in the general public, due to social media. IF you got into a conspiracy group, and it were populated by 1000s of real conspiracists, it would still be a small fraction of the population of %(people online)(speak your language)(other filters).

BUT - the human brain sees "enough" activity in the forum/web page to trigger an internal "critical mass" threshold, this creates "social proof" and the belief gets solidified.

A clear field where tech creates new problems is where tech outstrips old societal and human thresholds of functioning.

Social media feeds which reinforce information, constant and from your pocket? New problem

Automated creation of content to populate feeds? New New problem.

Creation of propaganda ? Old problem, new medium, new tools - question on whether scope and scale make it a new problem.

-----

Perhaps the "new" problems can, to some extent, be solved by tech. "Old" problems will almost certainly need tech+political will and manpower to solve.

> BUT - the human brain sees "enough" activity in the forum/web page to trigger an internal "critical mass" threshold, this creates "social proof" and the belief gets solidified.

I think you're pointing out some important but extremely easy to overlook things here. How many newspaper articles, blog posts, and twitter/forum discussions have we had in the last two years about fake news and conspiracy theories, typically written in confident but grave tones? But of the people writing these things, how many of them really know what they're talking about? What is the source of their knowledge? What is the underlying source of the claims Jacques is making in the article we're discussing? How many of the people opining on such subjects actually spend any serious time within the communities they're reporting on?

If the topic/culture was something other than the behaviour of conspiracy theorists (say, African Americans), do you think it would have any effect on how the information would be received by readers? In that case, I suspect a lot of people might fairly quickly wonder if the author actually happens to know as much as they claim, and I think it would be fairly easy to find plenty of anecdotal conversations on the internet to substantiate that prediction.

The human brain "sees" all sorts of things. It can produce an instantaneous answer to most any question you ask it, whether or not it actually has much actual concrete data to work with. There are a variety of ways to control this default functionality, the major progress we've made with decreasing racial stereotyping in the last several decades is a good example. But that took a lot of coordinated messaging, education, and peer pressure, for a very long time. Despite that, we're still rather far from declaring mission accomplished. And that is just one topic - how many others do we have in this same category?

I doubt we'll make much progress on these issues, especially now with the brutal efficiency of mass communication we've released into society (with hardly a second thought), until we can finally realize what the root of the problem is: the human mind. And it's not just "those other people" whose minds are flawed, the problem is with the base hardware and software itself - it's just easier to notice in some people than others, especially when it's constantly in the news.

Funnily, the questioning of authority is a common trait of over turning common sense arguments in conspiracy circles, kinda showing how easy it is to make the argument, and how tough it can be to defend.

And even more ironically, since I Don't have any sources off the top of my head which can link you to good content with research, where people are verifiable sources, I am left with personal experience and memory :).

> good content with research

On which topic?

Maybe the only ethical thing to do at this point is for the founder/owners of these platforms to commit acts of sabotage so that people might become free of them. Investors are all hedged, founders have cashed out, some of them aren't profitable anyway, employees can find other work if its done over time. Nothing of value would be lost.

The point about connecting gullible people is interesting and useful. It's likely social media has just automated the underlying phenomenon behind mass hysteria. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases)

The real social media problem is we've put a slot machine in every pocket, and now nobody can turn them off until the hysteria has run its course and we evolve a resistance to them - or if the founders do this one unthinkable thing.

So we have great tools to facilitate communication between people, and yeah there is downside to having people communicate, does it mean communication is bad? I don't think so.

> It would really help if both Facebook and Twitter would be far more pro-active in shutting down these fountains of nonsense.

When I see this, especially from someone who bills themselves as

> "Professionally I get paid to separate fact from fiction"

it horrifies me. What they're saying is that the existing draconian control of speech that is implemented on the social media networks is not enough, that we need to hire even more people to do moderation, that free speech needs to die even harder, because we can't trust poor stupid people to make their own decisions, read what they want to read, and say what they want to say.

What a bunch of elitist bullshit. Small wonder that people are increasingly finding people like Jacques Mattheij to be unpalatable, nanny-state toadies that are to be routed around at best and attacked argumentatively when needed.

Yes, there's bullshit about COVID and chemtrails and aliens all over the internet. Why do you care so much? You're so worried that people are going to make their own choices, live their own lives, make mistakes that impact others?

This shows me that people have not learned what free speech is, what it is for, and why it was a hard-fought right that continues to need fervent defense. Mattheij can't conceive of a world where his draconian moderation system could possibly backfire. Mattheij hasn't looked at what's happening in Belarus, in India/Pakistan, and what happened during the Arab Spring when governments decided to use the power at their disposal to shut down on the people's ability to freely converse with one another, even about Unapproved Topics, even with Officially Illegal Opinions. Mattheij either didn't read any of the excellent 20th century dystopian science fiction, or thought it was a user's manual for how to create an idealized totalitarian state.

Because of course, gigantic corporations and the government are going to choose what's in everyone's best interests. Of course, it is inconceivable that they would have any agenda of their own, or would want to make cultural changes at scale without the full consent of society. It's never been tried, anywhere, right? Never ends badly?

Ahh, but it's to save us from ourselves, right?

Man, it's sad that HN is going down the reddit rabbit hole, spam downvoting these kinds of well-though-out posts that (admittedly) go against the zeitgeist of SV "know-better-than-thou" elitist mentality -- with absolutely zero discussion or counter-arguments. The arguments here are sound:

- Free speech is a virtue worth striving for

- Disinformation -- to the detriment of the public -- is a price we're willing to pay (barring some narrow cases)

- The alternative is draconian authoritarianism

As Juvenal asked almost two millenia ago: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? I'm sick of programmers that never picked up a philosophy or political science book in their lives think they just solved the world's problems by giving Google or Facebook carte blanche to censor as they see fit (because you happen to agree with the outcome today).

I'm guessing that it was down-voted for the vitriol and personal attacks which aren't relevant to the arguments.

It is not a well-thought-out post. It uses a bunch of emotionally-loaded but content-free trigger phrases like "elitist bullshit" and "nanny-state toadies" rather than well-supported arguments, and is being spam-downvoted for that reason.

It definitionally is elitist bullshit though -- Mattheij's entire post implies that he knows better. Sure the term might trigger you, but that doesn't make it any less true. To wit, I personally would've been much more scathing: I mean, has he even heard of John Stewart Mill? There's been a lot of trial and error here, and the blog post conveniently ignores it all.

>has he even heard of John Stewart Mill

I read On Liberty recently in the hopes of shining some light on the moderation debate. Unfortunately it came up short. I think Mill either ignored or did not anticipate just how dangerous a viral bad idea can be on a global scale.

The closest he comes in the essay does argue that inflammatory speech should be punished:

>No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions. On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn‐dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn‐dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.

Is there some other writing from him that you're referring to that provides more relevant info?

Read “Kindly Inquisitors” by Johnathan Rausch and then read it again. It should be required reading in schools which, ironically, would be against his entire argument.

Are you able to briefly summarize the ideas presented in it? "Go read $book" sort of ends the conversation otherwise.

“ His 1993 book Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (published by the University of Chicago Press; expanded in 2013) defends free speech and robust criticism, even when it is racist or sexist and even when it hurts.”

From the authors Website. Simple to Google - it has been reprinted Ted countless times and is very popular since being published in the early/mid 1990’s.

Sure, the point isn't for me to Google it but to have a conversation here. Thanks for the info, though.

I have another post in this thread that touches on its ideas.

Thank you, a drawback of “read this public domain book” is that (while I should read it anyway) the HN thread will be long dead when I finish.

Yeah, but I can guarantee that you own't have to wait long around here (or elsewhere) for the principles of that book to be relevant to a conversation.

> I think Mill either ignored or did not anticipate just how dangerous a viral bad idea can be on a global scale.

I'll be as charitable as I can here, but the fact that you're even willing to call an idea "dangerous" tells me that you didn't quite understand Mill. Ideas, even though they might be "good" or "bad" -- do no harm. Ideas are meant to be thrown in the marketplace where the stifling of ideas hurts not the idea itself (or its inceptor), but rather everyone else. So an idea like "Bill Gates started COVID" might be a bad one, but Mill's argument is that I would be deprived if, say, Facebook or Twitter, would censor it.

Mill has no problems with ideas, but he does have a problem with harm (this is much more narrow). See, for example, how he differentiates between the two when he writes about the French Revolution[1].

[1] https://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/jsmill/diss-disc/fren...

You're not arguing against the post you replied to. You say "Mill says ideas are not dangerous". The poster said "I think Mill didn't know how dangerous they can be". The poster has already acknowledged what Mill's position was, and has said that they suspect that his position is wrong.

> You're not arguing against the post you replied to

Yeah, I'm not granting the premise that an idea can be "dangerous" (neither would Mill) -- I think the burden is on @tyrust proving how/why/when ideas are "dangerous" because that's kind of a tall order.

It is a tall order! To make it a little easier (and hopefully clear up a potential semantic misunderstanding), I don't mean the idea itself, but its communication and implied call to action. Ideas rattling around in your head certainly aren't going to cause any harm.

The trite example is shouting "fire" in a movie theater. Hate speech or other inciting speech are other examples; this article mentions recent destruction of 5G towers.

Mill argues that the truth will win out, but doesn't (to my recollection) acknowledge the consequences that happen in the meantime.

(I haven't had a chance to read the French Revolution thing you linked, I'll reply to that comment once I do)

> The trite example is shouting "fire" in a movie theater. Hate speech or other inciting speech are other examples; this article mentions recent destruction of 5G towers.

These are edge cases that are well-covered by laws that are already in place. People blowing up 5G towers? Send them to jail. Censorship shouldn't even part of the discussion here; that's destruction of property.

Now you're not acknowledging the consequences, too.

I'll be as charitable as I can here, but the fact that you're even willing to call an idea "dangerous" tells me that you didn't quite understand Mill.

Positioning myself as an implicit authority, the fact that you're willing to write something I can subtly misrepresent allows me to switch rhetorical tracks and 'explain' a rudimentary concept in order to gain the appearance of superior cleverness.

Your unnecessary mental masturbation aside, Mill would never call an idea (or speech, to be precise) “dangerous” — ever under the most lax of definitions. I’d invite any evidence to the contrary.

Your red herring is stale and unappetizing.

The statement you took issue with was I think Mill either ignored or did not anticipate just how dangerous a viral bad idea can be on a global scale.

Nobody argued that Mill held ideas to be dangerous; if anything, that is being suggested as a shortcoming of Mill's philosophy. There is no good reason to solicit evidence for a proposition which nobody was making to begin with.

Sorry, it's not immediately obvious to me how this excerpt is relevant. I don't really know anything about the French Revolution, so that's probably part of my confusion.

I think my key takeaway from it is:

>Men are not to make it the sole object of their political lives to avoid a revolution, no more than of their natural lives to avoid death. They are to take reasonable care to avert both those contingencies when there is a present danger, but not to forbear the pursuit of any worthy object for fear of a mere possibility.

And I can get behind this.

I think the key difference, though, is that there is not really much equivalence between the liberal ideals of the French Revolution and a misinformation campaign to burn down 5G towers. As Mill says, the former "did not choose the way of blood and violence in preference to the way of peace and discussion", but the latter certainly has. The intent behind each are just so wildly different.

It‘s even worse than elitist, it‘s ultimately totalitarian and fascist. Any notion of freedom that doesn‘t include the freedom to be wrong is absurd and meaningless.

Do I really need to think hard about my support for basic human freedoms, every single time I see someone write a "well thought out" post about why they want to take them away? Is this kind of tensiment worthy of some kind of "well supported argument"? Will citing the great philosophers of history change any minds here? Do I need to quote S. G. Tallentyre, will her tired catchphrase strike home?

If the article had been about how we don't deserve the right to vote, or the right to free association, because we might vote for the wrong people or hang out with the wrong people, would you react the same way? Those rights are just as important, I believe.

There comes a point at which the feeling is, oh great, here we go, we've found yet another moneyed professional who has decided that because they personally agree with everything the establishment says, does, and wants, there can be no reason why anyone would want to dissent without being immoral and evil and so forth. Time to shut down people's freedom so they stop saying such annoying things, and then we can finally relax, all the problems in society will be gone!

If only we can make sure that only the Ministry of Truth vets every single thing before people say it, then we can make sure that pandemics never happen, that nobody ever gets mad enough to harm someone else, that nobody ever has a bad day ever again. It will be fantastic! It will be like LinkedIn, everywhere! Nobody will have anything negative to say, and so therefore nobody will ever have anything negative to think. Perfect. Can't wait.

Yes, he's a nanny-state toady. Anyone who wants to use the powers of surveillance capitalism to tell me what I can and cannot say and think is precisely that. It's not meant to be a nice thing to day, it's meant to engage you emotionally, because your freedom is being threatened as much as mine is by sentiments like this.

How much of an argument do I need to summon, when generations of my ancestors and those of many, many people in the west fought for these rights as a new pinnacle of human achievement? Do I really need to expend a ton of personal effort explaining to you why I don't think giving corporate HR departments the ultimate arbitrary authority over what is acceptable to say is the proper way to run society? Are you so hoodwinked? Are you a proud, outspoken person who somehow has zero critique of the current social order?

Agree with everything you said.

My only concern is the political aspect. I see mainly establishment media, elites and politicians are the ones pushing for the censorship because they're afraid of free dissemination of information online. Most others are pushing for the exact opposite, except for some fringe groups who wish to weaponize censorship.

The problem is that Google/Facebook now have to choose which side of a deeply political issue they will lie on, so of course they're siding with the powerful - the alternative would be risking breakup or regulation. No matter what they choose, a large number of people will be against them.

> Free speech is a virtue worth striving for

Whether or not something is virtuous is irrelevant when trying to predict the likelihood of future regulation. Instead, ask yourself:

• How does free speech help grow the economy?

• How does free speech keep the population docile? (the most likely reason for restrictions, see other comments in this thread from "free speech absolutists")

• How does free speech help elites retain power?

If free speech doesn't enable or support those three objectives it will eventually be regulated into something that does, using whatever mechanism (government, education, propaganda, or private enterprise) that's best.

I think elites would prefer we talk within a prescribed (Overton) window, in ways that don't inflame passions, and on topics that increase our GDP, so I expect elites to aggressively pursue restrictions inline with those principles.

What non-elites want or think is virtuous is ultimately irrelevant when it comes to speech, as it is in every other area that has economic significance….

Update: For people who doubt me, consider current speech restrictions in Europe. That's our future once the demographics shift enough—only crusty Anglos have majority support for unregulated "free" speech in the US according to multiple Pew polls, so restrictions are coming. Nevertheless, we'll always be allowed to talk freely about any topic (e.g. science, technology) that's needed to grow the economy since open and free inquiry is the best way to proceed.

>As Juvenal asked almost two millenia ago: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Part of the last 2000 years has been the attempt to development systems of government which inherently reduce the importance of this question. For example, by enforcing churn on "custodes", by creating a culture in which radical transparency is the norm, by encouraging highly participatory democracy.

Now, I will concede that these efforts have not born much fruit. Certainly not enough fruit to make Juvenal's question moot. But we are now in a situation where we may be faced with "draconian authoritarianism" because of the social and psychological impact of social media and its manipulation, so I'm not convinced that this "free speech vs. draconian authoritarianism" dialectic is really useful in an analysis of this issue.

Asserting that there are only two ends of the spectrum: free speech or draconian authoritarianism is very typical American thing to do; other cultures have a much easier time dealing with the idea that while the slope may be slippery, we can choose to take some steps down it and then stop.

(I'm not saying that I know you're American, merely that this sort of perspective is much more typical in the political and civic culture of America than most other countries in the world).

And frankly, I don't think your arguments are sound, because they hinge on a hand-waving claim:

>Disinformation -- to the detriment of the public -- is a price we're willing to pay (barring some narrow cases)

You (and I, and the rest of us) don't know what that price really means.

and to whoever decided to downvote this, how about you step up and explain what you think is wrong with it, rather than just hiding behind the downarrow?

>Part of the last 2000 years has been the attempt to development systems of government which inherently reduce the importance of this question. For example, by enforcing churn on "custodes", by creating a culture in which radical transparency is the norm, by encouraging highly participatory democracy.

Majority of the last two thousand years in Western Europe was inept Roman dictatorship followed by Germanic warlords duking it out. More like the last 500 years, no? Saying 2000 years lends an air of credibility that shouldn't be there, though you may just be going for word play in response to the grandparent

There's nothing inevitable about freedom of speech. China is 4000 years old, and they still don't have it. It WAS hard fought for. Speaking and thinking are the same thing. A society that cannot speak without fear of censorship is one that cannot think. It cannot ask difficult questions. It cannot speak truth to power. It is as much a cultural value as a legal one. It should be promoted and celebrated.

Promoted, celebrated, and continued to be fought for.

If you tautologically define "freedom of speech" as the compromise we have in the US, then that's true that we "have freedom of speech", but if you think at an objective measure of absolute freedom of speech (which would include any combination of words you could say, including what we would call libel, hate speech, copyright infringement, etc), then freedom of speech doesn't really exist anywhere.

There are just variations of restricted speech, some more than others, but also some different than others.

I am mostly a free speech absolutist but let me take one of the example you gave, India.

Only yesterday, there was a FB post which said something negative about Islam. This led to people from that community rioting in Bangalore in which 3 have died and parts of city have burnt. [1]

This is not the first time a social media post has caused this over there. I would say the issue is very nuanced specially in areas where the social fabric is not that strong and if some amount of moderation can help, be it. But as always, who will watch the watchmen.

[1]: Warning: Cancerous ads: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/riot-hit-...

I think you can stay absolutist (albeit, being a bit cold about the situation). The principle of free speech is that it's paid for in blood because it's the least worst choice.

Edit: I personally think the reasonable limit is calling for violence or organizing genocide. But those have never really been protected in common law.

Easy for you to say, because you aren't a Rohingya and don't have to worry about people organizing your genocide on WhatsApp. We have to be able to criticize the government and debate polices, but when blood is involved (trying to get people killed) there has to be a line.

If people are organizing your genocide on WhatsApp, WhatsApp is not the problem.

But how do you reconcile with things like this. Free speech is better, but how much blood is worth it.

Again, going with the current example. Indian subcontinent has had a tumultuous history mostly in the last millenium. It has been ravaged by conquests involving destruction of a lot of things that the pagan culture(now referred as a religion) held dear. Even though now the part of the subcontinent that is India now is majority that religion. There is resentment for/from every religion that came from outside. There are still unresolved things which can cause things to flare up easily.

We have seen this flare up in US, say LA riots. Imagine a culture which has had issues about their identity and injustices in the past for far longer. Imagine people allowed to build narratives that incite violence freely and spread them like wildfire. It can turn deadly fast and has in the past.

> But how do you reconcile with things like this. Free speech is better, but how much blood is worth it.

I mean, the only possible answer a free speech absolutist can honestly give is "as much as necessary."

As with any absolutist position, one cannot permit valuing human life over the ideal. Once you do otherwise, you're a relativist, and the ideal is diminished.

And let's be fair - even most self-described free speech absolutists are relativists at heart.

Not easily, but I think it's the only reasonable stance. Anything else is too subjective and easily falls into slippery slope territory. Long term, I know harm will be minimised through free speech.

I don't really want to go Godwin on you, but do you really think that you can justify allowing the demonization of (e.g.) Jewish people because the eventual genocide perpetrated against them is "the least worst choice"?

The words aren't the problem (unless it's a rally to violence), the action is. Any culture that can pivot to genocide from being exposed to the written word has bigger issues.

Issues that may be intimately and inextricably bound up with the "free" speech occuring within it, perhaps.

You're also dramatically simplifying the processes that lead to things like Holocaust. The usual pathway involves several years (or more) of general speech-based demonization to soften up a population to the idea that the "other" is ... well, somewhat sub-human. The call to action comes much later, after you've sown the seeds necessary to have a significant population that says "yeah, well, i always did think there was something about those people ..."

Considering that the Holocaust was committed by a fascist regime where dissent and resistance was punished as treason, where an average citizen would be deathly afraid to question the regime even to their neighbors and children, it's quite a stretch for you to frame the Holocaust as a consequence of free speech.

Eugenics support and anti-semitism had been present in public discussions across the world for decades and decades, but it didn't lead to the Holocaust until a charismatic politician swept into office by convincing the German people that his noble goals - the restoration of Germany - justified any means; absolute power, suppression of dissent, the permanent silence of many people, it's all worth it, all for the sake of a greater German society.

That's how it starts. That's when the stupid and cruel thoughts in German citizens manifest into something destructive. Because these thoughts are no longer opinions, judgements are no longer subjective, disagreements no longer tolerable. Anyone who disagrees with the Nazi party is a traitor to his brethren. Anyone who supports the Jews is destroying the country.

We're obviously right, they're obviously wrong, and we need an authority to stop them! They shouldn't be allowed to talk about P̶i̶z̶z̶a̶g̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶Q̶A̶n̶o̶n̶ the Jewish agenda! The i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶n̶e̶t̶ printing press has made it possible for every individual to communicate with every other individual! The boring truth hasn’t even put on its shoes before sexy Jewish lies have made it halfway around the world and back. This is real, it is happening now and we are simply unprepared to deal with it! And boy, do we have a solution for you.

If you're incapable of differentiating between speech that disparages individuals or groups, and speech that advocates batshit crazy ideas that don't require the disparagement of groups or individuals, I can't help you.

I think there are risks to Pizzagate or QAnon speech too, and they are underestimated and likely not well understood. But they are completely different than the risks linked to "jewish/black/other people are devils" speech (of course, this elides the extent to which PG/QAnon speech is actually just this, in contrast, say, to flat earth speech)

I agree with you, however, that it's not appropriate to frame the Holocaust as a consequence of free speech, and was not attempting to do that.

It's so easy to think it's easy to figure out the "right" speech, just the "good" speech. I can't express it any better than the "What you can't say" essay:

> It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.

> Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right.

There are always risks to free speech, and there are always those who want you to believe that it's worth the cost of free speech. It'll improve society, they say. What constitutes "bad" speech is as obvious to you as it was to Nazi supporters: it's speech that they deem to be b̶a̶t̶s̶h̶i̶t̶ ̶c̶r̶a̶z̶y̶ ̶i̶d̶e̶a̶s̶ bad at the time.

Step 1: immediately dismiss certain speech with cocksure confidence that you'll always be right. Check

Step 2: mock others as "incapable" of differentiating good speech from bad speech like you can. Check

Step 3: demand the silence of obviously bad speech. Pending...

The problem with your entire approach to this is that is effectively in denial of what the proponents of the most controversial speech actually say.

They do not subscribe to the scientific method. They do not believe in the use of historical analysis. They do not, in fact, believe in free speech at all.

I'm happy for there to be speech from people who believe in controversial ideas that I do not agree with, on the condition that they agree to a methodology by which we can establish truthiness

But the nature of today's most controversial speech is that is utterly denies any attempt to establish a methodology.

I don't want to "dismiss certain speech". I want to avoid speech that is predicated on denying its own fallibility, on denying that there can be any independent investigation of its own truthiness, on asserting that it is based on secret knowledge that if the listener could only share would immediately establish the utter truth of it all.

The conspiracies that have become popular on the right generally fall into this category. You cannot question QAnon, you can only believe. You cannot question "there is no anthropogenic warming", you can only hand-wave.

Useful speech is always subject to interrogation. Is always subject to self-doubt. Is always subject to invalidation. Is always contingent.

So ... I don't care what the content of speech is. I care about what the conditions for speech are. Speech that does not admit to interrogation, self-doubt, invalidation and contingency is bad, regardless of its content.

I am not advocating for the silencing of speech that counts as "bad" by this metric, I am asserting that its presence in our culture causes problems.

> They do not, in fact, believe in free speech at all.

And when they appear on HN and other forums to advocate for the removal of free speech, I'll defend and advocate for free speech just the same.

Beyond that, it doesn't matter what they say or think, nor does it matter how insane or infallible you believe their speech is. I'm not going to pre-emptively silence them to prepare for a world in which they hypothetically silence me.

> I am asserting that its presence in our culture causes problems

Sure I guess, although that seemed fairly obvious to me. A lot of things cause problems, what matters is how we deal with them.

If you're not advocating for the silencing of speech that you count as "bad", then we're in agreement. This thread is about limiting free speech on social media, and I'm glad to hear you don't support that.

> Yes, there's bullshit about COVID and chemtrails and aliens all over the internet. Why do you care so much? You're so worried that people are going to make their own choices, live their own lives, make mistakes that impact others?

Umm, yes?

People are extremely vulnerable to misinformation distributed by platforms and people they trust, even if that misinformation will harm themselves or people near them.

Facebook-propagated lies about COVID-19 risks and fake treatments kill both the people who believe them and the people believers are exposed to.

Facebook was essential in embedding false information into the minds of informationally vulnerable people in order to create the dual democratic disasters of 2016: Trump and Brexit. Feeding seniors a constant misinformation diet of 'vote Brexit or your country will be overrun with Syrian terrorists' until they vote to destroy their children's economic future causes real harm.

Reporting on Facebook's failure to act in response to its platform being used to incite the Rohingya genocide[0] should also put to rest any thought that Facebook, as it is currently operated, is compatible with human rights.

Making people believe in UFOs and bigfoot is harmless; spreading propaganda that incites people to destroy their own democracy (pro-Trump), destroy their children's futures (pro-Brexit), or kill their neighbors (anti-Rohingya) is not. If Facebook won't do anything about their platform being used for these purposes, then Facebook should be shut down.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

> Umm, yes?

So patronizing. Okay, people are "vulnerable" to misinformation; there's an unstated implication here that you've ascended to some higher level by virtue of consuming your daily dose of establishment media, and that you're no longer personally susceptible to this, and that there's no chance that any of your institutionally approved sources could ever misinform you.

> Facebook-propagated lies about COVID-19 risks and fake treatments kill both the people who believe them and the people believers are exposed to.

Well, that's tough, isn't it? If you're so afraid of that, maybe you should get a proper respirator, and only emerge into public to buy groceries, and then just live in full lockdown for the rest of your life. Sounds like you don't trust people to consume the information they want and to make their own risk judgements; too bad you're not in control of their actions. What a utopia that would be, eh? I'm sure you'd never misinform anyone, or say something and then have to walk it back a week later, or anything else.

Blaming Facebook for this is like blaming your municipality, or your car dealership, when you get into a car accident. Yeah, they built the roads, they sold you the car, but it's on you - it's your risk, ultimately, because it's your life. Yes, you can do risky things; yes, you can even do things that increase risks for others. That's life. It's all part of the fabric of living in a free society. You can only actually protect yourself, and even then, only partially. Controlling what other people can say or think isn't actually going to afford you that much more security.

> Reporting on Facebook's failure to act in response to its platform being used to incite the Rohingya genocide

As if these things wouldn't take place without Facebook; as though there wouldn't be some other way for people who are already morally in the position of wanting to kill others for their differences wouldn't just find some other way to kick it off. Again, you're blaming the medium for the message, and you have the misguided idea that somehow, if the right censoring moderators clamped down on discussion just a little bit more, that event wouldn't have happened. Of all the small-souled bugman mentalities, this is truly the worst.

> spreading propaganda that incites people to destroy their own democracy (pro-Trump)

I'm not an American, and so I have no real dog in the fight, but as far as I can tell being in favour of an establishment political party is kind of bread-and-butter democracy, isn't it? How is someone being in favour of your democratically elected president "destroying democracy", and how is acting like that's the case not in and of itself just as anti-democracy a thing to do?

Maybe, just maybe, you Yanks could stop frothing at the mouth about Orange Man Bad for ten minutes, and _use_ your freedom of speech to actually engage with people and find out what motivates them, what their fears are, why they've arrived at their conclusions, and maybe build some common ground so you can actually start to understand the underlying economic problems that have put you in the position you're in. The things that destroyed small-town Main Street are not too far off the things that destroyed the inner city, really....

> If Facebook won't do anything about their platform being used for these purposes, then Facebook should be shut down.

How about this: if Facebook won't do anything about your personal bugaboos, you should follow my lead and just delete your Facebook account and move on with your fucking life. Why do you feel this intense need to enforce your own personal qualms about what people say onto others? It's so easy, bro, just click that big X and go outside for a couple minutes. Get some perspective.

Because otherwise, you're asking for one of the most important freedoms ever won to be thrown away just so you won't be uncomfortable for a couple moments here and there. I can't imagine being so fragile.

I don't have a Facebook account to delete. This does not protect me from Facebook being used to mobilize the information deficient to vote to destroy the society I live in, or, in the worst case, protect me from Facebook being used to mobilize a lynch mob to kill me as a target-of-the-day. Individual actions, like not having a Facebook account, are not solutions to collective problems.

There is no inherent right to incite the destruction of society. That precedent was set when when the people behind Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines were sent to the Hague for crimes against humanity.

> This does not protect me from Facebook being used to mobilize the information deficient to vote to destroy the society I live in

The problem is that there are other people with polar differences in politics from you who also think that the society they live in is being destroyed, for the exact opposite reasons. Facebook should just butt out and let people have their own conversations; they should have no role in curating or doing anything about what people are saying as long as it's not absolutely illegal.

If you don't like it, then you've already made your choice to not have an account. Find some other outlet for your activism if you're so worried that society is being destroyed.

Not all viewpoints have equal value.

There is a very real difference between disagreeing over how to interpret actual reality (e.g. disagreeing over what is an acceptable level of income inequality in society) and disagreeing over manufactured issues created by feeding lies to people to make them fear for their society because of threats that do not exist.

There was no legitimate argument over whether pre-Brexit UK was on the verge of being invaded by Syrian terrorists, whether Obama is an American citizen, or whether there were 'caravans' of migrant-criminals approaching the US-Mexico border. These entire concepts, and the 'polar differences' they created, were entirely fraudulent inventions that Facebook was used to fabricate.

This is the face of the political use of Facebook, and for that it should be shut down.

You're basically saying that we-all-together are a pile of unfixable trash (sorry if this summary is inexact). And yes, that aligns well with what I think about "us". But that's only when you look at it in stasis. This force that tfa represents is one of the forces that glues everything together. If not this "elitist bullshit", who would gonna go and prevent minds from leading into the opposite bullshit? It is easy to blame an apple for falling on your head, but had you turn off gravity, you'd left with not much time to regret.

I'm not even sympathetic to that hn jacquesm if that's him, but it's in our nature to fall into another bullshit pit right after someone pulls us from one. Discussing and questioning methods for balancing between the bullshits is important. You're just conflating that with an actual totalitarianism, because two vectors appear to be aligned atm.

Humanity has to make true information accessible (not only technically, but psychologically accessible, filtering out a complete bullshit noise that overscreams a signal). It's only ten+ years since we found ourselves in this mess,it's not an old thing. People were fed with wrong/insane ideas before, but it never was a world-wide self-sustainable viral phenomenon that no one really controls (as in tv). You're all for people doing their business and leaving them alone, but now many have no basis to rest on, and if that's not a problem for you right now, chances are it will quickly become one.

> Mattheij hasn't looked at what's happening in Belarus, in India/Pakistan, and what happened during the Arab Spring when governments decided to use the power at their disposal to shut down on the people's ability to freely converse with one another, even about Unapproved Topics, even with Officially Illegal Opinions.

For an example that's less dramatic but closer to the western world, take a look at the Croatian (an EU country) authorities arresting a journalist over some tweets: https://www.total-croatia-news.com/politics/38478-duhacek-jo...

Journalists are also regularly getting sued and fined on the count of "hurting someone's honor and reputation", mostly by politicians and (seriously) court judges.

I don't think anywhere in this post talks about whether or not Mattheij has looked at those events, read those books, thought those thoughts, and what his opinions are on them as related to Free Speech. Assuming the worst of your intellectual opponent is extremely uncharitable and doesn't reflect well.

I think he's right, but there's a subtlety here that's often missed. Zuckerberg talks about it directly [0] and I think his approach is probably the most reasonable.

Social Media platforms do have some responsibility to moderate (and they have the legal Good Samaritan protection to do so in the US thanks to section 230). They have a particular responsibility since their 'engagement' algorithms have often historically led to making things worse by elevating controversial content. When they're using algorithms to elevate certain types of content they are employing some level of editorial control and have some responsibility as publishers in how they rank that content (what they choose to show more widely, what they choose to allow to fall into obscurity).

FB for their part has put a lot of effort into determining this kind of moderation standard and what they allow from users [1]. The recent political stuff is interesting in part because Zuckerberg is arguing that democratically elected politicians should be an exception to these rules, basically that citizens have a right to see the speech of their elected leaders (and lies should be corrected by a free press). While FB is legally able to moderate the speech of an elected politician on their platform, Zuckerberg argues it's wrong for FB to decide what political speech is okay to block because they shouldn't be in the position to make that call. I think he's right to be concerned about that precedent. This doesn't apply to the speech of regular users or even to the political speech of non-democratically 'elected' politicians.

[0]: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/16/mark-zuckerberg-and-f...

[1]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/men-are-scum-inside-...

[Edit]: Also this:

> "One thing that interests me and that I have so far not been able to find out is how it starts. How does a ‘normal’ person step into this cult world where up is down and not think to themselves: “Hm, this does not seem like it is believable”."

I think people do think this at first, but I think we are all more vulnerable to being infected by bullshit then we like to believe. People are wildly inconsistent, even in their own views most of the time (yes even you, and me). We think poorly, many people believe crazy things, we argue via motivated reasoning, don't extend views globally, don't consider things the same when they're out of sight etc.

When exposed to lots of wrong information repeatedly I think most people get corrupted, even those that are pretty analytical. I think it takes continuous vigilance to not believe crazy things (and I think people get worse as they get older at being able to do this well).

I don't think these are outliers, I think this is the norm. Most people just don't wonder about things at all so avoid being radicalized into harmful action based on their own crazy beliefs. I also suspect in-person interaction has a lot of built in de-escalation mechanisms that bias towards unity and friendliness most of the time, so things get worse when you lose that natural control.

What I notice about the Facebook way of doing things is that, especially in their mobile app, they will highlight the most outrageous and flame-worthy comment on any contentious topic. The algorithms, I'm sure, are doing this deliberately, because they prioritize "engagement". They want people pissed off so they'll respond, get into arguments, and see more ads in the process.

Remember the classic XKCD comic "Duty Calls": https://xkcd.com/386/ ? It seems the social media companies have decided that promoting this kind of thing, keeping that guy up all night arguing, makes them more money.

They definitely did do this (though arguably not intentionally to spread outrage) and scammers took advantage of it. Scammers spread misinformation that generated controversy to drive revenue to ad farms (and of course Russia leveraged it more for political rather than monetary purposes).

Steven Levy's new book (Facebook: The Inside Story) goes into a lot of detail. One interesting thing was that in 2016 the false stories tended to target pro-trump conservative groups because the lies spread more easily (more willing to just share things that fed into existing cognitive bias). They tried fake lies with the left too, but they tended to be less effective because people would call them out as fake and they'd fizzle out (though I'd suspect today it'd be easy to spread lies feeding into the more extreme aspects of the left too).

Today though they're directly aware of this and FB in particular has a ton of people working on 'integrity' to stop this kind of bad incentive.

Ok I’ll bite. I’m sure this person means well. But I have to ask - why are they the authority on what is OK for people to believe, talk about, and propagate? Who owns the truth? Why is this persons views the correct ones? Or even more, what about things that are talked about on the internet, have their groups, that they don’t find problematic but others do. And why are those ok? Because they believe this?

The foundation of Liberalism (I’m not saying left wing here) is that no one owns knowledge. No one has the last day and all opinions can be heard. And mocked relentlessly. And through this we will discover as close to the truth as we can.

Nobody - no group, movement, person, or authority owns the truth. All ideas are fallible. If people use the internet to say the most outrageous things then do be it. The minute someone gets to say “that’s ok to be said and this other thing is not. End of story” we are in trouble. It doesn’t mean someone can’t be raked across the coals for their awful ideas - you need to own it. But anyone or group that gets to determine what is ok and what is not is, in essence, a fundamentalist regime.

We don’t need inquisitors. We don’t need thought police. We do need people willing to say “that’s bullshit and here is why”. If you can prove that generally speaking 2+2=5 then the foundation of arithmetic is broken. But meanwhile I can poke holes in your argument. Until you can prove it better than 2+2=4 then I can judge you for a sophist at best, a dipshit less generously.

> Nobody - no group, movement, person, or authority owns the truth.

Putting truth itself on a pedestal doesn't really address the problem.

The problem is people are motivated by things other than a good standard of truth most of the time. Social media provides a medium where it is easy for emotion can rule over reason and advertisers profit off of it.

> If people use the internet to say the most outrageous things then do be it.

Let's say everyone online starts calling you a pedophile because a soon-to-be-ex-wife of yours decided to try to cause you harm. What then? Is posting your address next also free speech?

The issue is not the truth, or access to it, but the fact we have large numbers of people that act on things less than the truth and a culture/economy that seems to perpetuate that for those who aren't interested. Putting these people in the same network as people who really want to talk about and debate ideas isn't working.

There are standards of truth but people that aren't ruled by reason won't obey them. They'll go with their gut, or what their friends say, or what they think they should say to impress their peers, or what everyone else is doing. For people who over their lives have been concerned more with survival or overcoming trauma than a real exchange of knowledge or ideas, often these strategies work well.

If I had an ex-wife that made that claim then I would sue for slander. That isn’t free speech or free thought - it’s an attack designed to damage a persons reputation.

Maybe it isn’t working - but why should I trust your alternative of deciding what’s ok and not ok to talk about? Why are you the authority? Why would I be?

We have laws - fire in a theatre, slander, etc. flat Earthers, holocaust deniers, climate change skeptics, etc all can say what they want. Provide the evidence they want. And I can disagree. I can vote in a manner that squashes their ideas from having any real power.

But here is the rub - just because I’m certain they are wrong doesn’t mean I automatically get my way. We need to be ever vigilant in defending what we believe to be the truth. In the end what works will win. What’s the alternative? It’s violence. History has proven this.

Slander and libel laws in the USA are extremely weak (in large part because of the 1st amendment). Your lawsuit will likely not accomplish much, if it wins at all. You need to show damage, not the intent to damage.

And the stories will still be out there, no matter how it turns out.

Then solve that problem. It still had absolutely nothing to do with my point.

You claimed you had some defense against being slandered. I'm pointing out that you don't have much of a defense at all.

Also, certainly you can vote in a manner that would, if done by a majority, squash ideas you don't agree with from having real power.

But you write with the myth of "rational man" in mind, it seems. The 20th century in particular, with the rise of both psychology and marketing, along with a couple of thousand years of insights from great thinkers of the past, should have made it clear that humans are deeply fallible, highly gullible, frequently irrational and easily manipulated.

You can vote however you like, but if there are forces determined to exploit human weakness by promoting lies and half-truths and hatred, there's a good chance that your vote will accomplish nothing. And not because you're wrong and "truth has won out", but because people are being manipulated, intentionally or otherwise.

I don’t really know what you’re talking about I guess. I don’t know if man is rational. But I do know for the history of man we have had (and still do) societies of knowledge-authority that have ultimately cumulated in fundamentalist authoritarians. This ends up in violence.

You have an opinion to be sure but why on Earth should I believe it as truth? What evidence do you have and what are you leaving out? Why is your observation so important as to restrict what others should see, hear, say, etc? Be rigorous.

What gives you the right to limit this? You can express your opinion but why do you think you know what’s best for everyone? I can only trust you know what is best for you. You are but a single voice - as much as anyone else.

Which lies and half truths do you acknowledge and which ones do you ignore or are oblivious to? Which ones are you victim to? You can’t possibly know. But it’s a rather big ask for me, more so the rest of people, to just take your word for it. No one is the authority or has the final say.

If your ideas are right then prove it or persuade people of it. It’s the only way. The other ways involve oppression and possibly violence. What if people decide that you’re just not viable anymore because of your ideas and just sort of publicly execute you as a warning? What happens when the classical liberal epistemology is thrown away because it is inconvenient? Are you SURE your side will be in control?

I'm not proposing any idea other than acting as if people are rational and not subject to manipulation is demonstrably madness.

I'm not arguing any course of action, merely pointing out that a course of action based on the idea that people are rational will not work, because they demonstrably are not.

I agree - people are probably not always rational and people are indeed subject to manipulation. But it changes nothing. If anything it’s BECAUSE of this that we need to agree all ideas are fallible and subject to debate and that no one owns the truth. An appeal to a fundamental authority cant work precisely because we are not rational and are subject to manipulation. We just don’t know. We have a right to opinion, beliefs, and debate but not much more. No one is above this. No one is an oracle.

The thought that came from The Enlightenment to philosophers like Karl Popper to modern authors like Johnathan Rausch explain this better than I can here. I’d read “Kindly Inquisitors” if you have a bit of time (pretty short overall) to get a better understanding of these ideas.

We have a series of liberal democracies in the West for a reason and it isn’t a fluke. Countless wars, inquisitions, and pointless suffering led to it. We are still struggling to fulfill the potential today and have to constantly fight off regressive philosophy but that’s the price.

The most impactful "ideas" in the current (social) media climate do not subscribe to any of your idea(l)s.

Pizzagate/QAnon, as examples, are not "subject to debate".

They are "oracular" in nature (there is a single source of "truth" ) and followers are expect to ... follow.

You can try to apply a Popperian approach to "controversial" or "conspiratorial" ideas, but the end result is that essentially always, such ideas fail to pass any credibility threshold.

But then people show in comment threads online, insisting that "not listening" to such ideas is inimical to the basics of free speech, and that nobody owns the truth.

These kinds of ideas have created a scenario in which nobody benefits, and in which truth, or more accurately perhaps, the pursuit of truth, suffers.

I don’t think you have to listen to them. More so, you have every right to ruthlessly mock those ideas and the people that propagate them if that’s how you want to counter it.

There’s a billion chain-letter bad ideas and rumors floating around. Who chooses which ones must be stopped and which ones ignored? The internet poses a problem in that yea, bad ideas flow faster. But I’d argue so do good ones. I think we need to take the lumps and learn the lessons and be better for it down the road.

Truth doesn't need an authority other than a standard, and sometimes it doesn't even need that.

For example, you have cancer. You may believe you don't, but you're going to die anyway. When you die, things have happened according to your truth and not your belief.

Now, if you accepted a belief on the basis of say, medical authority that you had cancer, you could have done things like chemo, etc. to prolong your life.

Either way, you're still going to die, the truth is unaffected. In this way, authorities and beliefs can be helpful. Or harmful if they aren't resulting in people benefiting. But they aren't synonymous with the truth.

This illustrates how there can be authorities and beliefs that are not beneficial, that they are incapable of modifying truth in any way, and if society is a group of people that stay together for mutual benefit, it benefits them to suppress harmful authorities and beliefs. How and to what extent is up to the society itself.

very well said. upvoted.

Thanks! An upvote for the enlightenment. :)

"Your pretended fear lest Error should step in, is like the man who would keep all the wine out the country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy, to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it. When he doth abuse it, judge. If a man speak foolishly, ye suffer him gladly because ye are wise; if erroneously, the truth more appears by your conviction 'of him.' Stop such a man's mouth by sound words which cannot be gainsayed. If he speak blasphemously, or to the disturbance of the public peace, let the Civil Magistrate punish him: if truly, rejoice in the truth." -- Oliver Cromwell, 1650.

Within four years of this letter, Cromwell would essentially have to put these Presbyterian inquisitors down by force and assume guardianship of the country because these people never stop.

Coincidentally, Cromwell also held that the right to the liberty of conscience, a largely heretical view for another century, was a fundamental requirement of his Protectorate, which he had to personally safeguard against everyone.

"Is not liberty of conscience in religion a fundamental? … Liberty of conscience is a natural right; and he that would have it, ought to give it; having himself liberty to settle what he likes for the public. Every sect saith: “Oh, give me liberty!” But give him it, and to his power he will not yield it to anybody else. Where is our ingenuousness? Liberty of conscience – truly that’s a thing ought to be very reciprocal."

Around the same time that Cromwell penned these inspiring words, he was also busy killing off hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland, amounting to maybe 40% of the population; perhaps as much as 80% in some parts of the country. I leave the reconciliation of his words with his actions as an exercise for the reader.

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

If you want to call Cromwell a hypocrite, the most tenable and intellectually honest but still ungrounded point of attack is that his support of liberty of conscience did not extend to Catholics.

His institutional anti-Catholicism and his suppression of the rebellion in Ireland were not aberrational by his context. That he was successful in achieving these objectives (e.g. defeating an insurrection and effectively criminalizing public Catholicism during the Protectorate) is the aberration. Cromwell was competent and that was his actual sin. He also happened to believe that self-directed (i.e. not dogmatic to a foreign power, e.g. Rome) conscience was a virtue to be established and maintained and for that should be seen as another facet of him as a human being.

That said, I don't disagree that the ethnically Irish have every reason to be livid that it happened, or that comparable events preceded and succeeded it through history, but to act as if Cromwell was categorically evil for what he did to the Irish is like saying America is categorically evil for firebombing Dresden in 1945. Yes, it was an atrocity given the perspective that distance and the luxury of time and peace provide, but it doesn't capture the whole provenance of the situation.

It seems to me you can find champions of liberty whose nice-sounding ideals don't have to be rigidly compartmentalized from commission of genocide and assumption of dictatorial powers.

Conversely, you can take writings from figures like Pol Pot that sound like the epitome of high-mindedness and self-determination - as long as you choose to regard those as a different facet from the genocidal totalitarian one.

Most, perhaps all, dictators have a likeable and reasonable aspect, and exhibit humor and benign intentions toward the mass of people that they consider to embody the national spirit. Likewise, most idealists who leave a stamp on history either commit or endorse acts that are at odds with their stated principles, but we can form some idea of their overall sincerity by examining the perceptions of their contemporaries.

> The foundation of Liberalism (I’m not saying left wing here) is that no one owns knowledge

This is complete BS to begin with. "No one owns knowledge" is a typical ideological statement without any merits or proof. It is an idea that you want to believe, that is based on nothing factual.

Yes, you can have opinions. Tastes. Ideologies. Beliefs. And they could be true, or false, or changing, depending on where you are and how you look at it. They are all subjective.

However, there are things in this world that are neutral to opinions and stands the test of time. Facts that happened in the physical world and mathematical knowledge, are two examples of such objects. They are the truth. They are absolutely correct. There is no room for "disagreement" because they are not subjective opinions. They are facts that can't and won't be changed.

Math is always correct. 100% correct. From day 1 they are discovered / invented till forever. Explicit assumptions and theorems that followed by rigorous proof are absolutely correct. You can expand it later, you can discover more, you can enrich math. But as long as it is correct, it stands forever. Every single second you are using technologies based on mathematical knowledge that was proved thousands of years ago. They never failed, and will never fail.

Facts, in the physical world, are objective as well. You can argue whether a killer is a good person or not, or how good/bad he is, but you can't alter the fact if he did pull the trigger and killed someone. That is a fact.

Physics, based on a wider set of physical assumptions, can be viewed as close to truth, because they have stood the test of time by physical experiments and phenomena. There is a chance that they are not completely true and will be subsumed by more advanced theories, just like Newton's Laws, however, they are close approximations to reality. That's how we get the rockets into the space. By science.

Now comes to my point. You have the right to express your opinions, even if they are harsh criticisms. But you don't have the right to spread false information that can be proved false by facts. You don't have the right to spread lies. You don't have the right to say whatever you want, however you want it.

Why? Because statements against facts are false, are lies, and spreading lies can hurt and cost others' lives, sometimes millions or more. This is why there is law against spreading hate speech, against spreading extremist ideology against human race, against fraud and scams.

Free speech is about being free expressing your opinions within the framework. Outside these boundaries, your speech becomes a weapon that can hurt others and that is not allowed by law and society.

The fundamental rule in the society is simple. You have every right about yourself, but you don't have the right to hurt others.

Yeah I agree mainly. But I disagree that anything, even math, is infallible. Anything and everything can be challenged and the person doing this shouldn’t be killed or jailed, etc. They can have their ideas challenged and refuted and made an ass of though. There’s no guarantees that your ideas will be gently excused. So you ought to have some great evidence if you believe something commonly agreed to be factual is not.

The framework of liberalism - the very system that allows math and science to thrive - is that their is no authority. There is no plea to humanitarian feelings or egalitarianism that makes things right because they feel right. Ideas are free and freely challenged. Anyone can argue 2+2=5 but I doubt they’ll go far with it.

You could say almost anything in Spain but if you spread blasphemy you would be killed because it was sacred and the word of God. Is this what you want? Those people felt just as right and righteous as you and we both probably agree they were wrong. It always leads to violence.

That these facts inhere in the physical world (and I don't disagree) does not directly correspond to the beliefs of the individuals living in said world. Language exists and is the vehicle used to transmit beliefs about facts.

This is why we speak of proof in the first place. The fact that person A died at another's hands does not directly correspond to the belief held by an individual that person X was the killer. This is why we have "beyond reasonable doubt" as a legal evidentiary standard.

I agree that factual axiomatic truths exist in the physical world and are evident to individuals as factual axiomatic truth. The problem is communicating these as such without granting license to counterfeits.

The most successful form thus far has been to let the facts speak for themselves to individuals as factual axiomatic truths.

The least successful has been to establish unassailable dogma concerning what is and is not factual.

The certainty that you and others present concerning your set of beliefs-as-facts-themselves is of the same species as other true believers throughout history. Historically, this has led to the suppression of the scientific method and an open society in favor of a prelatical and clerical class that determines by edict what truth is, often solely at the behest of the hegemonic power and not factual axiomatic truth.

This is why it is preferable to have minimal rather than maximal control over the exchange of ideas concerning the nature of what constitutes a fact, let alone what those facts actually are.

Misinformation spreads because Twitter rate limits users replying to misinformation.

Anecdotes abound, when this is really not the sort of debate that should be conducted using anecdotes (cf. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...). Sure, some societies have uncensored social media and wind up with a lot of people believing that vaccines are a Bill Gates conspiracy, occasionally leading to real harm. Other societies, as a downstream effect of uncensored social media, wind up with racial pogroms, as a commenter elsewhere in here pointed out. On the other hand, some societies with censorship wind up totalitarian hellholes, and some societies didn't even have social media at all and still had racial pogroms (whether initiated by local word of mouth, or the local counterpart of the same elites that presumably would be in charge of censoring social media if there were social media). The existence of these anecdotes tells us nothing about whether we would be better off with or without uncensored social media, or whether some other more subtle solution than censoring or not censoring would lead to better outcomes. So, which one is more likely? Which one has worse consequences in expectation? This argument can only be done quantitatively, and as far as I know nobody has produced the numbers that we would need to do that.

We might as well try to determine whether private possession of bladed objects should be permitted based on a comparing whether an emotional account of a marital stabbing, defense of the cultural value of home cooking or appeal to the value of adults feeling like society trusts them to hurt themselves feels more moving.

(If we stop trying to pretend that there is a meaningful utilitarian argument to be had here, though, on an idealistic level, where emotional appeals are properly at home, I'm with the more critical commenters here. Quoting from low culture like video games may be a little tacky, but: "Beware he[sic] who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.")

> But a person who does PCR analysis and knows the ins and outs of PCR tests that maintains that there is no such thing as COVID-19 is on another level for me. That’s the kind of purposeful refusal of the world as it exists all around us that I can not get my head wrapped around.

A person who specializes in analyzing viruses tells the author something counterintuitive and instead of re-assessing his own assumptions, he labels the specialist delusional. That last sentence, "That’s the kind of purposeful refusal of the world as it exists all around us that I can not get my head wrapped around", could easily apply to the author.

This article sounds to me like a lot of hand-wringing and complaining that people are thinking for themselves and talking amongst themselves rather than worshipping at the ivory tower.

In other words, music to my ears.

downvoted... must've struck a nerve.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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