Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

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That makes no sense to me. Do you think social networks would be less toxic and less abused if all the devs at Facebook or Twitter were apolitical? How would that work?

It's the quest for "engagement" and getting always more users and ad views that generates this situation. What can be used to sell you shoes and earphones can also be used to sell you political ideas. When the algorithm wants to show you some inflammatory and misleading political factoid because it knows that it's very likely to make you react, it's working as intended. Not because it was written by a communist, but because it was written by somebody optimizing for this metric.

As a counter example: do you think HN manages to remain mostly not completely trash because it's run by apolitical people or because it's effectively run not-for-profit? I think I know the answer to this question.

It's amusing how I've seen this "internal politic" boogeyman pop up in discussions over the past month or so. As if all the woes of the silicon valley could suddenly be blamed on those pesky "woke" devs while everybody else just tries to get the job done. This American election can't be over soon enough, everybody seems to be losing their marbles.

Well, Paul Graham, YC founder seems to agree with me:

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1310583298666696705

Edit: To clarify, he is saying the right way ahead for companies is to be apolitical, or, "mission-founded".

Coinbase offered employees not comfortable with the non-political mission-founded way exit packages:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24636899

Those thoughts aren't welcome on HN any more.

As a European looking at this spectacle from a distance: SV is eating itself. Well, good for Europe, I guess.

Edit: but also good for China, and they're a lot better positioned to take advantage of this.

As a citizen of the world with several passports including a US one: this happens every 10 years. The last time was conservatives doing it so people are shocked that liberals are just as insular. The 90s PC culture wars are a thing that went in the memory hole really fast when Clinton needed the women who were accusing him to be sluts and harlots again.

On the bright side social media is becoming so unbearable that we'll see more decentralization. It's hard to get banned from a forum when you run an instance of it yourself. And hard not to be when they are run by the mentally ill who think that saying crazy is a bannable offense for being ableist.

And hard to get people to show up when you run your own forum.

The majority of people are not worth talking to.

I agree. For example, they'll whip out ableist slurs like "crazy" at a moment's notice. It's tedious.

Is cute that you find it so tedious that you went through my post history.

Post history? You complained about it a few posts up in this thread.

How on earth does anything in the current discussion point to "SV eating itself"?

Add another European, wtf you talk about? For one, this is not SV eating itself issue, this is America eating itself and going into dangerous state.

Second, if America eats itself, impact on Europe will be negative. There is little Europe has to gain on this and a lot to lose.

I don't see how that has anything to do with the topic at hand. We're not talking about Twitter's success, we're talking about its influence on elections. If anything it's because it's been very successful (by some metrics) that it's in this position.

I'm not saying that an ultra-politicized workplace can't be an issue, I'm saying that it's silly to blame this particular problem on it. The very concept of ad-supported social networks is the issue, not the political alignment of the guy who writes the CSS.

There's a difference between corporate culture being 'apolitical' - and the responsibility of a large curated network to worry about misinformation.

Dang will kick you off HN for all sorts of reasons - that's his right, and it's generally not 'political'.

It's hard to ban 'fake news' without maybe getting possibly political, but it's not rocket science.

There are already all sorts of things on FB and Twitter that are censored, and it shouldn't be 'political'. If you say you want to murder someone, well, then that's a problem.

Now email that's different. If you want to be a moron over completely private network, or, you want to be a moron on your own website, then go ahead.

>Do you think social networks would be less toxic and less abused if all the devs at Facebook or Twitter were apolitical?

It isn't possible to be completely "apolitical" but you can be non-partisan. For me this isn't a left vs right or Republican vs Democrat issue, its an establishment vs everyone else issue. If this policy was in effect in 2002 and 2003 people would be getting censored and banned for disputing "the fact" that Iraq had WMD. Just a few days ago NATO members blocked the former OPCW chief from giving testimony on the (very much disputed) narratives regarding the alleged chemical attacks in Syria. You can be sure the people being blocked and censored by Twitter won't be those pushing the official US government narrative. The argument Twitter is making that, "people are too dumb to figure out what is true, so we will tell them what is true" is very dangerous when Twitter doesn't have a monopoly on the truth, and is run by people with a vested interest and belief in "establishment" narratives - no matter how questionable (or provably false) those narratives are.

I'm not denying this at all, but again this is not the point I'm discussing. All companies have a political agenda one way or the other, even if it's just driven by profit.

As a thought experiment: imagine if Twitter did the same thing as Coinbase did, got rid of all the politicized people. Problem solved? Of course not. The problem is that Twitter has this incredible influence. Asking them not to do anything is also not neutral and not a solution, you'll end up with 4chan or gab.

Take WhatsApp in Brazil. It's been instrumental to Bolsonaro's election due to the astroturfing and dissemination of fake news by pro-Bolsonaro supporters. Do you think it's due to Facebook's employee being pro-Bolsonaro? Or Facebook itself espousing a pro-Bolsonaro stance? Of course not.

It's really missing the forest for the trees IMO.

> people would be getting censored and banned for disputing "the fact" that Iraq had WMD

Literally nobody was buying that Iraq had WMD. It was clear that the politicians were riling themselves up in a patriotic furvor.

The evidence was weak from day one and it was clear a propaganda machine was in play.

> Twitter doesn't have a monopoly on the truth,

I am so sick of statements like this that ultimately lead to inaction and apathy.

SOME THINGS ARE JUST TRUE AND SOME ARE NOT. There is no "two sides" to them. There is objective truth and objective lies.

That last sentence doesn't apply very often in the real world. We're not talking about philosophically pure truth in most cases, we're talking about things like headlines, in which the same factual event can be spun in innumerable ways, all of which are superficially true.

Bullshit isn't always, or even mostly, an outright lie. I'd go so far as to say that making shit up whole cloth is the rarest kind of deception.

>Literally nobody was buying that Iraq had WMD.

You must be very young, because this is totally false. Both political parties, every network and every newspaper was not only uniform in their belief and assertion that Iraq had WMD, they ridiculed and attacked everyone who denied this falsehood.

>Israel, Russia, Britain, China, and even France held positions similar to that of the United States; France's President Jacques Chirac told Time magazine last February, "There is a problem—the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq. The international community is right ... in having decided Iraq should be disarmed." In sum, no one doubted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/01/spies-l...

There should be no doubt that disputing the official narrative on Iraq WMD would have been censored by Twitter and other big tech companies that use establishment narrative as the only benchmark for truth.

>SOME THINGS ARE JUST TRUE AND SOME ARE NOT. There is no "two sides" to them. There is objective truth and objective lies.

And just who should decide what these things are, you? Twitter? The US government?

From my perspective in Europe in 2002/2003:

There was an incredibly harsh and damaging debate on this matter. Back then I was on the losing leftist side. We watched the Fox News broadcasts in horror.

Nowadays I find myself on the rightish side. Fox News is still insane though.

In my mind the current equivalent of the outsized influence of 2002/2003 Fox News programming is the political influence of employees of SV companies.

Somehow the common factor here is americans imposing their misinformed view of the world to the rest of the world with force, be it physical or cultural.

> the political influence of employees of SV companies

Maybe employees have power in Europe, but here in the United States employees have almost no power. Employment is at-will, and anyone who causes trouble for management is summarily fired.

Even management itself can be summarily fired by the board of directors of publicly owned corporations, like Twitter. Jack Dorsey is answerable to the stockholders, and also to the advertisers who generate Twitter's revenue. Not to the employees, who could all be eliminated and replaced if necessary. Jack too could be eliminated and replaced if necessary.

The only exception is Mark Zuckerberg, who set it up so that he has total voting control over Facebook and is untouchable by the stockholders. But that also means Zuck is untouchable by the employees.

The idea that SV corporations are run by the employees is a strange one.

> Literally nobody was buying that Iraq had WMD.

This is literally false. As you said, "SOME THINGS ARE JUST TRUE AND SOME ARE NOT."

I didn't buy it myself, and there was certainly significant opposition to the Iraq invasion, but to say nobody was buying it is a huge exaggeration, unfortunately.

Perhaps, but a problem is that people aren't nearly as good at discerning one from the other, and they are especially bad at conceptualizing the notion of unknown, which is what most things are. Luckily, the media is able to define a lot from that category as axiomatic, so most people no longer have to consider those ideas, provided those who aren't down with the program can be managed (which can also be effectively managed via axioms).

How do you not get that this is the exact point? “Experts” in the US government and the “intelligence agencies” declared forcefully that it was true. You—-not an “expert” and not a member of “authoritative” US intelligence agency—-claiming that it was just “propagandistic patriotic fervor” would be “misinformation” stated “without evidence”. Stopping people from questioning the narrative is fundamentally against free speech and having a small group of people presume to be the final arbiters of truth with the power to suppress contrary speech is dystopian to the max. You want free speech when you agree with it and suppression when you disagree with it. That’s deeply unprincipled.

>Stopping people from questioning the narrative is fundamentally against free speech and having a small group of people presume to be the final arbiters of truth with the power to suppress contrary speech is dystopian to the max.

I am so sick to death of hearing this "argument." Because it's irrelevant to the situation. And I'll tell you why:

In the United States,

1. Private entities are not bound by the First Amendment. That means they can host (or refuse to do so) any speech they choose, because that's the First Amendment right of all individuals and private entities;

2. The US government is forbidden to be the arbiter of speech, except in a few, clearly defined areas (advocating the violent overthrow of the government, making credible threats of violence, etc.);

3. If you don't like decisions about speech that a particular individual or private entity makes, you are perfectly free to speak out against those decisions, organize others to do so, and/or vote with your feet/wallet and don't engage with that individual or entity;

4. Unless you have a management and/or ownership role in a private organization (e.g., Twitter), you don't have the right to change their policies or speech;

5. You absolutely have the right to speak out and say just about anything, but you don't have the right to force others to host that speech on their private property. And that's a very good thing. If that weren't the case, I would have the right to blare midget furry porn or all-goatse-all-the-time projections or all manner of other offensive, hateful, disgusting things in your living room.

I'm sure many will disagree with me. If you do, please engage me in discussion in addition to taking other action -- both of which (and thank you HN for making that possible) are your free expression.

I agree that private entities can largely can do whatever they feel like. But there is something deeply obnoxious and unprincipled when these entities piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining. They’re actively suppressing non-establishment viewpoints while pretending to be a non-editorial, neutral platform. And, perhaps most insidiously, because of their secret suppression of ideas and voices, they make it seem as if certain mainstream viewpoints are actually unacceptable fringe ideas. Suppose I ran a forum used to discuss crimes in my city, but secretly hid anyone’s post unless the crime they were discussing had an Asian or Arab person as a suspect? And then, suppose I also secretly deleted any comments from people complaining about the secret editing. That’s not the style of forum people should be defending. It’s legally permissible but all types of dystopian.

>I agree that private entities can largely can do whatever they feel like. But there is something deeply obnoxious and unprincipled when these entities piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining.

You won't get any argument about that from me.

>That’s not the style of forum people should be defending. It’s legally permissible but all types of dystopian.

I'm not defending any such forums. In fact, I avoid them like the plague.

But I do support freedom of expression.

And whether you (or I, for that matter) dislike Twitter or Facebook, or even Stormfront or the ACLU, while we are perfectly free to express our dislike, expose dishonesty or bias, recommend/create other forums and encourage others to do the same, we aren't allowed to block the speech of others.

What would you suggest as a viable alternative to the status quo?

I think Justice Brandeis[0] said it much more succinctly than I did: "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_v._California#Quotes

> This American election can't be over soon enough, everybody seems to be losing their marbles.

Brace yourself then, because this election will not end on November 3rd. And the craziness we see today will be nothing compared to whats coming next. Regardless of which side "wins".

This is my biggest fear

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