Its time for another amendment.
EDIT since this is related, another horrendous idea that recently disgraced my timeline
Look at what’s happening. The end results of allowing anything to happen on social media are not good. We’re not in a good place. So we can ignore that for rigid principles, or admit that those principles don’t stand up to the real world.
No, no one hundreds of years ago had any idea about the scale or effect of social networks. Yes there was propaganda and brainwashing, but the speed and adaptability and design of these systems is so different as to be categorically unrecognizable.
So. What do you propose?
I'd gladly take a world with disinformation over a world in which an unaccountable third party determines what is truth, and therefore okay to say. I can work around the first problem with some effort much easier than the second one.
We already have that - and have had for centuries - the people who control the press control what gets presented as "truth". Look at Fox or any other Murdoch property for a perfect example.
(cf "History is written by the winners" for another angle.)
There is competition in establishing the truth. Not as much as I'd like, but a decent amount. Reducing that competition would be bad.
They're bad we get it, Id rather be able to hear how bad they are in the light. Who was accountable when we spread lies about WMDs in Iraq? That caused magnitudes of more damage than these groups, yet no one is held accountable even with Public figures. Do you want everyone accountable for misinformation silenced or just those you disagree with?
The Downside of the common man having too little oversight is more people believe things that aren't true (Flat Earth), and the downside to too much oversite is people believe different things that aren't true (PRISM, Nayirah testimony, Tuskegee Syphilis Study). The trade off of which is worse varies, but generally most individuals are fairly powerless but there are many of them, and organizations are few but wield much more influence.
We see a problem, we try to fix it.
They’re not unaccountable. This whole thing is about holding them accountable!
If they were completely unaccountable then they wouldn’t do any of this. Why is Facebook taking action against QAnon now when it hasn’t in the past year? Do you think they haven’t seen the polling data for the president, house, and senate races? They’re preparing to fight for their life as a conglomerated monopoly.
What does holding them accountable look like to you?
I get that, now, they've hoisted themselves by their own petard after years of inconsistent policies and enforcement, but I mean in a general sense.
>What does holding them accountable look like to you?
The opening paragraph of section 230 of the CDA, to wit:
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"
There be far worse dragons than disinformation down the other roads. Let's take this to its logical conclusion - you've got people on the left upset about "conspiracy theories" (which is, itself, a pejorative term with problematic origins rooted in thought control), you've got people on the right upset about "bias" against their stances.
When both sides of the political aisle are demanding tighter control over speech for any reason, the intended result should terrify the hell out of you.
The problem you speak of is not "people say false things" (which is not solvable), the problem should rather be seen as "people demand the ability to censor people they disagree with". The solution to that problem is telling both sides to pound sand and take responsibility for their own beliefs, not foisting that responsibility off onto third parties in a way that necessarily restricts freedom of speech.
In the long term, as has happened before, people adapt to the new reality. Marketing has to change all the time because people wise up to manipulative strategies.
The long term solution is a more intelligent public, not censorship.
Not GP, but I propose doing absolutely nothing.
There have always been tabloid newspapers, underground conspiracy theory magazines and various AM broadcasting stations peddling all kinds of nonsense.
The internet is just a new medium that’s joining the club.
There is no substitute for critical thinking. There are always going to be people who will hold opinions that are anathema to your beliefs. Often, those opinions will be the majority and you will be in the minority.
You learn early in life to ignore the crazy people on the sidewalk holding up signs and screaming about lizard-men running the government. You also learn early in life that politeness and civility will carry you a long way towards being respected in your community.
The internet is no different.
If you can’t function without a school teacher in the room, you aren’t ready for the adult world. We don’t need facebook or twitter or anyone else babysitting us as we go about our lives.
I agree that the ideal of every adult is being educated, taking time to check facts, having a critical mind.
But that’s not realistic. It’s not where we are. And the facts of democracy are that uneducated people vote. People unprepared for the internet crazies. They’re not handling Fox News as entertainment or tabloids. They think it’s real.
So, again, we can pretend that’s not happening. We can say, “well they shouldn’t be like that.” But that’s not reality.
Or: Have a counter-disinformation group that responds to political disinformation by creating more disinformation that points in the opposite direction.
To some extent all of the above is done already, organically. In fact, to the extent that Facebook et al. manage to hide the stupidest crap, that would tend to make people believe that what does stay up must be true (or, at least, must have passed Facebook's fact-checkers).
The first amendment and the resulting USA would be my prime counter example. The US wasn't an accident, freedom of speech is a hard requirement for free people and letting companies censor people "for our good" is antithetical to the nth degree.
If people want to advocate for nationalizing social media and forcing platforms to publish speech against their will, and making it illegal for them to moderate content, then they shouldn't pretend they're doing so in the spirit of the first amendment or what the founding fathers envisioned free speech to be.
It's a commonly spread fallacy that only "publishers" are allowed to moderate content, and "platforms" not. The entire purpose of Section 230 is to allow platforms to moderate user-submitted content without facing legal liability for doing so. Social media platforms have always been allowed to do exactly what they're doing.
There are multiple places on the internet where you can access completely unmoderated content. 4chan and 8chan are two popular forums, and yet they are far from mainstream.
The fact is that moderation is a feature which people want. People don't want to go through 200 spam e-mails everyday. People don't want to spend tons of time going through bullshit.
Facebook and Twitter has never been about getting "unfiltered" news. Facebook became useful because your friends was there. Twitter became useful because you could read content from famous and skilled people.
> There have always been tabloid newspapers, underground conspiracy theory magazines and various AM broadcasting stations peddling all kinds of nonsense.
And these will continue to exist on the internet. The only thing that's happening here is that Facebook and Twitter is taking a stance that they don't want to become part of this group. Is that so bad?
"In my research, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic and found that, contrary to what most people think, Germany did have hate‐speech laws that were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti‐Jewish sentiment is irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti‐Semitic speech had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis, including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher, were all prosecuted for anti‐Semitic speech. And rather than deterring them, the many court cases served as effective public relations machinery for the Nazis, affording them a level of attention that they never would have received in a climate of a free and open debate.
In the decade from 1923 to 1933, the Nazi propaganda magazine Der Stürmer — of which Streicher was the executive publisher — was confiscated or had its editors taken to court no fewer than 36 times. The more charges Streicher faced, the more the admiration of his supporters grew. In fact, the courts became an important platform for Streicher’s campaign against the Jews."
https://www.cato.org/policy-report/mayjune-2015/war-free-exp...
Edit: Just noticed you said lizard and I said lizard. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental. I meant something about the basal ganglia or limbic system, whereas yours is an exotic & fantastical sci-fi scenario. Although interestingly if you consider all the venality and viciousness in national politics, and the fact that every politician has that same part of the brain, it's actually kind of true that lizard-men are running the government!
For smart intelligent people, false statements create untrustworthy agents. For oppressive despots, false statements are always the most expedient shortcuts to some desired outcome. What countries like China are doing are playing the despot and preventing their people from thinking critically as much as possible, and silicon valley thinks that's a wonderful idea.
Reinstituting modernized versions of monarchs and clerics who tell us what we're allowed to know and to think.
I neither want Facebook and a few corporations to declare themselves the gatekeeper of morality and acceptable thought nor do I want the oppressive regimes and dictators use freedom of expression against us by flooding us with misinformation and lies. But forking over control to a group of tech figures like Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Bezos, or Pichai cannot be the answer to the threat of Putin and Xi Jinping.
James Madison wrote the Senate should protect the moneyed from democracy, and the Constitution was forever.
If you’re going to point at their ideas, don’t cherry pick nebulous middle ground cartoon versions of their actual positions. Don’t lump them all together as believing in the same values.
https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2012-06-27/gop-op...
> "Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
James Madison wrote the Senate should protect the moneyed from democracy, and the Constitution was forever.
If you’re going to point at their ideas, don’t cherry pick nebulous middle ground cartoon versions of their actual positions, and lump them together as on the same page.
Some enlightened people that knew much less about reality than we do and have been dead for 200 years.
Old ideas of American civic life have become a religion unto themselves. Jefferson wrote of that too: laws must change as human awareness grows.
It’s time to change things, I would agree. I’d start by burying old idols. Little left to be gleaned from men who died without knowing of Einstein, Godel, and the rest of modern invention.
Let them fight disinformation; also require them to be open about how they are doing it so they can’t become a disinformation provider of their own — there are already enough people, left and right, who think FB et al are censoring their ‘truths’ for nefarious reasons.
Here's the opposite catastrophic failure mode which the enlightened free speech defenders fail to notice (or do notice but don't care because they're not the affected parties - or at least doesn't think it affects them or are simply accomplices)
Truckloads and truckloads of unchecked fabricated BS drowning the discourse. Mob censorship.
Such as?
I don't see how that changes anything except the political leanings of the website operators. Can you explain what the problem is?
Another problem is that vetting (/censorship) is often supported when it's "your side" doing the vetting, but I don't trust that any politically tilted group of individuals will engage in unbiased, non-partisan vetting. FB's staff is of a certain political demographic that differs substantially to the country at large and this will likely sway the decision making away from a fair and balanced outcome.
If FB or Twitter engages in vetting I would like to see it done in a satellite office set up explicitly for that purpose where great effort is made to select individuals without extreme political leanings.
What's the disaster exactly? I keep seeing allusions to catastrophe and disaster but I am not seeing any specifics about the material effects of this catastrophe.
> would you feel comfortable if FB came under control of the Saudis while it was engaged in extensive vetting
Why would that make me uncomfortable? Like what are the Saudis going to do with Facebook that would be so terrible compared to what Facebook is already doing under current ownership? The Saudis in particular seem like a weird example considering the already prolific influence of SoftBank in U.S. tech firms.
> Another problem is that vetting (/censorship) is often supported when it's "your side" doing the vetting
I don't have a "side" with respect to what Facebook removes from its platform, I can't fathom a scenario where something being removed from Facebook can be accurately described as a catastrophe or a disaster regardless of who is doing the removing.
Granted, FB is a private company so the extent to which it's a concern is not as big, but given the control that FB has over information flow and the network effects of FB, similar risks are present. Think: swaying elections by permitting misinformation that supports only a certain side. It's an extraordinary amount of power that has the potential to be used maliciously. At the moment it remains a hypothetical but given the China example it is not an unreasonable concern.
It's possible that the fact-checking orgs that have been chosen really are neutral but given the political power they hold in their hands, and given my experience with human beings, I still do harbor some residual concern about this. They seem like a remarkably high leverage attack vector for cynical political operatives. I probably have to do some more digging about who these fact checking orgs are before I come to a concrete opinion, however.
I will however admit that the alternative is also fraught with the exact same risk. Allowing various actors to actively spread misinformation can itself sway an election. Perhaps the best solution is to have vetting that only targets the most egregious, obviously false information, where the information that was censored (unless it is violent/pornographic/criminal), especially that which is relevant to upcoming elections, is catalogued and available for viewing by the public, simultaneously for accountability, public trust and to assuage conspiracy theorists that the vetting is political.
That ship has already sailed. The problem of politically biased vetting is a universal fact of life on literally every media platform in existence; people just need to be judicial in their consumption of media.
> It's possible that the fact-checking orgs that have been chosen really are neutral but given the political power they hold in their hands, and given my experience with human beings, I still do harbor some residual concern about this.
I am sure they will be quite flawed, but I don't see the problem with that, of course they will be flawed, why is that such a problem?
It's not valid to compare vetting by the social media oligopoly with legacy media curation. Social media companies are like the new public commons through which the plurality of conversation and debate flows through nowadays. It's not practically possible to opt-out unless you want to exclude yourself from public discourse. There's also a distinct difference between legacy media bias, which is worn on the sleeve, and the shadowy undocumented impact of vettors whose bias can't be scrutinized by the public.
Any power they have is given freely of their own volition, nobody is compelled to use Facebook. People who rely on Facebook to stay informed about the world are responsible for their own choices, the same way someone who chooses to rely on Fox News or MSNBC is freely making their own choices.
> It's not valid to compare vetting by the social media oligopoly with legacy media curation
Yes it is. The issue in question is an organization's power to influence elections by controlling information that consumer's receive, in this respect, legacy media curation is identical to social media curation.
> Social media companies are like the new public commons through which the plurality of conversation and debate flows through nowadays
Privately owned websites aren't a public commons, the internet is a public commons and citizens have total freedom to come and go as they please or even carve out their own slice of the commons for whatever purpose they desire. There is no reason to wrest control of business prerogatives from private website owners just because lots of people share political memes on a website. If this issue is a real concern then the government should provide a 1st amendment protected platform for citizens not arbitrarily violate the free-speech rights of private companies.
> It's not practically possible to opt-out unless you want to exclude yourself from public discourse
Totally false. There are hundreds of different platforms to choose from to participate in public discourse online and its very cheap and quite common to self-host one's own blog or platform to that end.
I read this, laughed, and closed the tab. The world has gone mad.
Cause no one else has the skills or resources. And things are happening too fast and at huge scales to depend on local law enforcement/courts to handle it. You can see them freaking out everyday.
There was a time I thought the US and EU wld get things under control specifically after Brexit and Trump but its quite obvious govts don't have what it takes right now.
Will be interesting to see what the counter reaction is from bad actors. I highly doubt they are going into retirement now.