I wouldn't be surprised if when historians look back in 50 years, that they determine that the Pandora's box of free information interchange from the Internet hastened the end of free society.
The Supreme Court of the US decided that freedom of speech implies freedom of reach, including the financial means to do so.
If people had multiple (interoperable) Facebooks to choose from, and had to pay for them based on how often they visited the site, I imagine the news / social media landscape would look a lot different.
Are there media which are not susceptible to PsyOps? (Edit: for example, print or online newspapers, television, etc. They arguably, by setting a higher standard of rational and investigative rigor, produce fewer propaganda sock-puppets but, by that same token, coalesce trust into personages which can, in one fell swoop, be assassinated or—in the case of Ellen Degeneres—persuaded to reiterate state propaganda.)
And, are only state-actors to blame? After all, Facebook themselves were experimenting with emotion manipulation[0], and transnational corporations have at least as sophisticated branding, PR, and propaganda departments.
0. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...
Many technologists have a Right-Libertarian bent which rests on a fundamentally irrational trust in the ethics of the private firm, as a reflective validation of their own unimpeachable ethics. In short, they hate to be reminded that private corporations are unaccountable, and dangerously unethical. It can make it very hard to sleep at night.
Edit: I mean, there are probably other factors at play, too.
1. https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideo...
Bad ideas and aggressive state actors (doing "PsyOps" or otherwise) were the norm before social media. I see no hard evidence that social media has made any of these problems much worse, other than making people much more paranoid about state actors and the uneducated. (In reality, the traditional press has seeded much of this paranoia. Traditional press feels threatened by social media competition, and so has spent over a decade now raising the hue and cry about social media's "dangers"; they apparently wish to retain their monopoly on fear- and rage-inducing mind viruses only for themselves.)
Furthermore, I see no evidence that in the absence of free speech, state actors will be less aggressive or people will be more educated. I see plenty of evidence that both would get worse in a regime of restricted speech.
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-measles-us-california...
What does this mean? Do you oppose laws against defamation, child pornography, fraud, violent threats, etc? No developed nation has truly free speech. The debate is where the line is drawn. Pretending it is a binary choice just ends up hiding all the smaller choices that we could make that could actually lead to a better society.
EDIT: There is irony in "free speech maximalists" downvoting questions like this rather than trying to answer them.
I think social media is toxic, but not because it allows freedom of speech. Social media rewards virality and outrage is inherently and unfortunately one of the most viral things you can put out on social media. The problem is the platform, not the speech.
Which is why it took until just within the last century to guarantee voting rights to people besides white men? It is bizarre how we want to pretend that those who came before us had some magical foresight to setup rules to govern a world they could never imagine while we ignore so many clear mistakes they made such as calling rights inalienable while simultaneously disenfranchising a majority of the population.
The world doesn't stop outside of US borders and cultures don't all agree on the ideal extent of free speech. I find it silly to assume that the world should revolve around the US constitution.
So yes, the idea that if you say "I support free speech" you should specify more clearly what that means and where it ends, is not really unreasonable.
We have plenty of legal precedent on what is protected in the US.
There is considerable debate, even in the US, as to whether this captures all of and only that whic should be protected.
One should not confuse even well established US Constitutional law with universally accepted moral principles.
As to the substance...
> What does this mean? Do you oppose laws against defamation, child pornography, fraud, violent threats, etc? No developed nation has truly free speech. The debate is where the line is drawn. Pretending it is a binary choice just ends up hiding all the smaller choices that we could make that could actually lead to a better society.
I assumed we all understood what "free speech" meant: the principle that opinions can be aired without restrictions. Obviously I don't think malicious lies, true threats, depictions of abuse and even "fighting words" are somehow pro-social or deserving of protection according to that rule. Malicious lies are the hardest to draw the proverbial line about - if someone has a deranged but good faith belief in some bizarre conspiracy theory that aliens all run the big tech companies or something, is that a "malicious lie?"
Anyway, there are pretty straightforward limiting principles for what constitutes free speech that deserves to be protected by law or in principle.
"Free speech" does not have a universal definition. I doubt people in Germany think they don't have free speech just because they can't legally deny the holocaust. However we allow that in the US even if it is a "malicious lie" that is disputing facts and therefore isn't an opinion which would seem to leave it outside your definition of free speech. Would you be in favor of a similar law in the US to outlaw holocaust denial?
You also seem to be in support of defamation not being protected speech. But why should defamation of an entire group of people in the form of hate speech be protected? Saying a specific person has negative traits X, Y, and Z isn't protected but it is protected when you say everyone of that person's ethnicity including that specific individual has traits X, Y, and Z. Why the distinction?
This idea of free speech is not us straightforward as "free speech maximalists" try to make it appear.
No. People have good faith beliefs in all sorts of insane/horrible things. If I encounter holocaust deniers, I ask them if they're calling me a liar. I've been to Dachau. I'm convinced.
And Germany is hardly the gold standard of freedom.
> You also seem to be in support of defamation not being protected speech. But why should defamation of an entire group of people in the form of hate speech be protected? Saying a specific person has negative traits X, Y, and Z isn't protected but it is protected when you say everyone of that person's ethnicity including that specific individual has traits X, Y, and Z. Why the distinction?
Are we talking about opinions or not? "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year" is different than "I think all of Group Y are dangerous and have no place in our country." Certainly "hate speech" would go after both with equal vigor (and quite a bit more), but only the first is defamatory. The latter is simply an opinion. Other opinions: "I don't trust the Trump administration's COVID vaccine." "The rent is too damn high." "We need to build the wall." Etc.
> This idea of free speech is not us straightforward as "free speech maximalists" try to make it appear.
No, it really, really is. Engaging in good faith is apparently much harder.
What country do you want to use as your gold standard? Holocaust denial is illegal in most of Europe. Many countries outlaw hate speech. Most other countries have more restrictive speech laws than the US.
>Are we talking about opinions or not? "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year" is different than "I think all of Group Y are dangerous and have no place in our country." Certainly "hate speech" would go after both with equal vigor (and quite a bit more), but only the first is defamatory. The latter is simply an opinion.
Either. Both of those are fully legal in the US. Is that a problem? Why do we need to protect speech like "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year"? What is the societal good that comes from protecting that speech?
We need to protect it because humans are prone to becoming very protective or defensive about certain opinions, especially religious ones[1] or, lately, statements like "women are women"[2]. Since drawing the line at good opinions and "hate speech" is impossible, regulating them gives a rise to authoritarianism, as is the case across Europe and in much of the rest of the world. And we know that "banning hate speech" doesn't actually prevent the thoughts from persisting or being expressed privately. Germany still has neo-Nazis[3] and Holocaust deniers[4]; they have merely been driven underground, not reformed. How could they be reformed, since even expressing any of the thoughts they believe is illegal? And, as many have cited, often the small groups whom hate speech laws are meant to protect end up being the primary victims of it.[5]
The social benefits of protecting horrible opinions are not a first-order good, but they are a second-order good once we realize that all opinions are subjective and thus impossible to judge in a systematic way.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/01/908414559/charlie-hebdo-to-re...
[2] https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/11/28/meghan-murphy-and-t...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/24/eight-german-n...
[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ursula-haver...
[5] https://www.jta.org/2020/09/03/opinion/former-aclu-president...
You keep on using the word "opinions". "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year" is not an opinion. Holocaust denial is not an opinion. These are statements of alleged fact that are inarguably wrong. I understand the need to protect opinions. I don't understand the need to protect lies.
>And we know that "banning hate speech" doesn't actually prevent the thoughts from persisting or being expressed privately. Germany still has neo-Nazis[3] and Holocaust deniers[4]; they have merely been driven underground, not reformed. How could they be reformed, since even expressing any of the thoughts they believe is illegal?
I guess that means the US doesn't have any neo-Nazis or holocaust deniers, right?[1] How could beliefs like that exist in a country in which those ideas are easily overcome by opposing speech?
It isn't a question of completely stomping out thoughts like this. That is impossible. It is about preventing them from spreading. By allowing this type of speech, we are making it easier for these hateful people to recruit and radicalize other individuals who would have never come to these beliefs on their own.
[1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/fbi-neo-na...
The message and the basic mechanism is the same, but the scale is what turns this from merely concerning into serious discussion about the end of democracy.
They didn't? Back in the 60s, around half of the US population (100M people) watched the national nightly news on a regular basis from the three networks. What's easier: convincing three networks to run a fake story sympathetic to Soviet interests, or convincing 100M people of something through "impressions?"
And keep in mind that for decades, Western journalists (mostly in newspapers or magazines) parroted stories about how the Soviet Union was advanced and prosperous, when the reality was starkly different. Reality only penetrated through when samizdat, arguably the social media of its day, was able to funnel Khrushchev's so-called Secret Speech into Western hands. That and Gulag Archipelago really tarnished the image of the Soviet Union in spite of coverage from journalists.
Also, quick aside: I remain highly perplexed that otherwise intelligent people in the tech industry believe so strongly in the power of social media to "program" people just by virtue of "number of impressions." Hacker News is the only place on the Internet where I might see side-by-side stories where social media advertising is called out as essentially fraud and also that social media advertising is bringing about the end of civilization because some Russian Bots paid for some Facebook ads. I don't get it. Getting anyone to commit to anything beyond cheap talk is extremely difficult (and even the cheap talk part is hard if it doesn't confer some status).
I stand by what I said, though. The two types of network are not equivalent. People in the 1960s generally trusted media implicitly. Walter Kronkite has the trust of reportedly 90%(!!!) of Americans at the time. I don't think anyone trusts what they see on Facebook because it is on Facebook. Doubly so for Twitter. (Nevertheless, Facebook clearly wants this kind of trust - it deranks and adds disclaimers to posts it claims are false. Maybe this makes some people think Facebook posts are more reliable. Yet their somewhat repeated failure to mistake political opinions that dominate in the Valley for facts[1] has made me trust Facebook itself less.)
Instead, people trust or don't trust what they see filtered through critical thinking, personal experience and individual biases. If a Russian creates pages for "Americans for the Second Amendment" and "Black Lives Matter Network," people already predisposed to supporting those causes will inherently trust the claims a bit more. But very few would be convinced to change their minds based on this. Social media can be used to amplify preexisting polarization, especially given the engagement-based algorithms. (Perhaps that is the lesson we should learn from OP.) But I have yet to see any evidence that state-sanctioned "PsyOps" on social media have been terribly effective at convincing people of lies or narratives that they might not otherwise believe. I have seen gobs of evidence that the mainstream media is still effective at convincing tens of millions of people of the veracity of stories that are propaganda or close to it.
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/adam4d/status/969405110324523008
Speech before Facebook, Twitter et al wasn't restricted in the sense of being actively prevented, there was just much more friction to getting it out widely.
Very succinctly put, but it deserves adding something else: the horribleness of the human spirit. Centralized information control by a meritocracy that mostly got it right (modulo all the bigotry) characterizes the mid-twentieth century West, and this idealized, sanitized view of ourselves was optimistic in the extreme. Indeed, I think we can characterize that controlled optimism as morphing from future-tech-worship (50's) to self-worship as the boomers subsumed the hippy ideals along with the apparently easy money they earned in the wealthiest society Earth has ever known. Now instead of morphing into something else, it is the central control that is changing, and we are seeing why, despite its very real flaws, the benevolent dictatorship of even flawed institutions is preferable to the cynical, hateful chaos that reigns when individuals get a chance to shout their bile to the world.
I'm not entirely sure all is lost, however. Perhaps we can have our cake (absolute freedom of speech) and eat it too (some sort of moral standard) by introducing social norms no-one has even thought of yet. For example, I would personally love it if cancel culture would turn its gaze not to sexual harrassers, but to the more obvious problem of baseless accusers: those who make accusations without any proof, not even bad proof. Such people should be shunned by society, and not listened to ever again, for they have squandered their right to speak. Within academia, something similar might work when a researcher publishes deeply flawed research, they should be expelled from academia. If the academy doesn't maintain a high standard, then the entire thing could come crashing down (and that's already happening in slow motion). If a whole field refuses to do this (psychology, social sciences) then those entire fields should be dropped, lest they damage the reputation of the other fields of the academy.
This sounds harsh, but I think its fair, and it lets us have nice things a little bit longer.
Exactly. And they'll say internet-spread panic caused the unnecessary collapse of the world economy in 2020 -- very similiar to the panic of Y2K, but amplified by 20 years of progress in social media.
Meanwhile, in other non-reported news, ~2.7 million more humans were born this week. And about ~1.2 million died this week from regular non-covid causes. [1]
I now view a workable democracy as something that should be more like a technocracy with good feedback mechanisms, and not like something that should actually give "people" "power". Exhibit A: people on Facebook.
It’s a positive feedback loop. (Positive in the sense that the relationship between input and output is not inverted)
This is an echo of the "dumb pipes" argument, which characterizes social media as neutral carriers of both harmless and harmful content. While I recognize that harmful ideology originate outside of Facebook, it's really unhelpful to deny that in Facebook's capacity as "a fun-house mirror that magnifies some things and minimizes others" it's really very deliberately shaping the discourse, the zeitgeist and, as such, political reality.
We don't know the algorithm's ultimate purpose. It is, inevitably, biased. What biases Facebook management has decreed (and how closely its implementation hews) is an unknown to those of us on the outside. But it's certainly not, at this point an accident.
Whenever discussing algorithmic bias, I am always reminded of the old programming koan:
I don't feel like this is a facebook problem (although I wouldn't object to shutting them down - as long as we kill that other cancer, Twitter, too). I think this is a people-with-poor-education problem.
Every genocide is portrayed as a unique accident, but they follow the same gamelan. Facebook is literally a crowd control mechanism and it works no matter how smart you think you are.
> I think this is a people-with-poor-education problem.
Do you think that German adults in the 1930s had poor education?
This is not, to the best of my understanding, what's actually happening. Such elements are actively cultivated and their reach is facilitated by powerful benefactors. It's not a natural phenomenon. Right-wing populism must be bred and right-wing terrorists must be groomed. It's not simply an inevitable development of environmental factors, e.g. "the shape of the room," or the structure of online discourse. It's a deliberate campaign.
These grooming networks are not organic.
1. https://datasociety.net/library/alternative-influence/
2. https://datasociety.net/library/media-manipulation-and-disin...
Case in point: The Oregon fires are happening in the politically Redder part of the state, but many not too far from Portland. There are rumors going around in those Red areas that "left wingers" and BLM started the fires. Folks in those areas are generally very well armed. If those rumors get traction (and from looking through social media they seem to be) and people think that the folks on the left burned down their houses and towns... it's not gonna be pretty. We've already had trouble with right-wing groups showing up in Portland looking for a fight on several occasions and the police don't seem to be inclined to try to reign them in probably because these groups are so well armed.
At this point I'd just as soon see FB, Twitter, et al shut down before this gets ugly. But I also suspect they'll find other outlets on the internet for spreading conspiracy theories.
Another big problem is how stupid and violent many people are - enough to take Internet bullshit serious and kill people. I would only allow people into the Internet after they get educated and pass a test of not taking ANYTHING they find there too serious.
Facebook is curated, it’s on the oposite side of the spectrum from free.
This isn't a fair fight of the rational vs irrational in open discourse.
Facebook has intentionally stacked the deck in favor of the irrational and amplified them artificially because it's correlative with "engagement".
This isn't an organic outcome that just happens to be mediated by Facebook because it's the agora of our times. This is an unintended (I hope) side effect of a business model that intentionally skirts the line between inflammatory and violent because it also happens to be where maximum profit resides. And it was intentional, strategic, and extremely powerful.
This isn't some accidental outcome of Facebook. Every data point suggests Facebook designed their system from the ground up to maximize it.
[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Jobs/Facebook-psychology-Jobs-EI_I...