Comment by kick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kick | Hacker News Reader

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Facebook isn't a collection of books, and it isn't a collection of speech: the speech is a side effect.

Facebook is a virality engine. How do you get content that's appealing to the widest variety of people shoved into their faces?

The popularity of a President almost always goes up by starting a war, because the American public loves war. It's how Bush Jr. got the popular vote after losing it so miserably the first time.

People love hate, so an engine aiming to do nothing but push content with the possibility of going viral, viral, will endlessly promote the most inflammatory content. It drives engagement! The speech doesn't matter at all; it could be anything. On their other popular platform, a platform with a younger population, the most popular post is literally a picture of an egg. It's more a video game than a "marketplace of ideas."

Of course, the obvious solution would just be for Facebook to stop suggesting this content algorithmically rather than removing it outright, but hey, I'm not Facebook. It's not an attack on speech for a company that makes money off of suggesting content to other people to stop suggesting some variant of content, though, because again: the content never mattered.

>Facebook is a virality engine. How do you get content that's appealing to the widest variety of people shoved into their faces?

This is a very good way to put it. I haven't figured what the best stance would be yet, but it's clear that the old concerns about censorship are quite outdated. Almost no one can make information disappear, and instead, what modern platforms can do (as you've so well put it) is restrict or encourage virality.

What is the role of old free speech absolutists when ideas still remain accessible, but the fight is simply over how how mainstream, and how viral those ideas are? I'm not really sure, however I don't worry about things being censored on facebook. Cloudflare's power, although perhaps less impactful in practical terms, seems scarier: the withholding of DDoS protections from individual websites who hold controversial views. (and to be clear, 8kun's loss is probably a net benefit for society, I'm just thinking about the modern equivalent to a free speech principle)

I'm a free speech absolutist in that I think governments should not be able to punish speech outside of direct and imminent attempts to induce others to commit crimes, false reports of dangerous situations that imminently cause real dangerous situations, and the like.

I don't extend that to private platforms. Facebook should be free to host or not host whatever it likes, arbitrarily. What's becoming problematic is that the algorithms of tech giants now dominate content discovery. If Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Reddit decide something is bad, that something will probably have trouble gaining traction.

Most of us, me included probably think attempts to color the perception of historical events to serve racist ends are bad, and do not want them to gain traction. That does not, however mean that I want Facebook to have the power to decide what ideas get traction. I'd like to see online content discovery grow more decentralized again, and I think using algorithms optimized for something other than maximizing engagement will probably tend to reduce extremist content without much active intervention, but I don't know how to get there from here.

>That does not, however mean that I want Facebook to have the power to decide what ideas get traction.

I know this is part of the point you're making, but that ship has sailed long ago.

I'm aware that's the status quo, but it is most certainly not immutable. Many have been advocating for legislative solutions such as removing platform immutity for editorial algorithms or even regulating algorithmic feeds.

I'd rather see something more decentralized become popular organically, but I rarely get what I want.

> Facebook is a virality engine. How do you get content that's appealing to the widest variety of people shoved into their faces?

Couldn't someone have said the same thing of the printing press in the year 1440?

> Couldn't someone have said the same thing of the printing press in the year 1440?

Yes, and they did. Society went through a period of disruption and experimentation and came out on the other side with new institutions and cultural norms.

The same is happening here. That suggests what's considered acceptable for pamphleteers and public speakers may not be acceptable on an auto-curating micro-targeting real-time nonlocal platform like Facebook.

There was a balance between free speech and the common interest and it's been disrupted. Holding as absolute policies and norms from mass broadcasting in the era of social media is delusional.

The question would then be whether the owner of a particular printing press should be required to publish materials widely considered false and offensive.

They have done so, and it has been argued by people worried about Social Media that the introduction of the printing press directly led to the Protestant-Catholic schism and all the associated bloodshed.

The printing press lowered the cost of making copies considerably but it was still not cheap. Options for widespread distribution of the copies you made were very limited. On top of that the literacy rate was only around 30%.

You have to get rid of those kinds of barriers before you can get anything like what we are seeing today, where some crazy idea with no evidence to support it can quickly spread far and wide.

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