To be fair, when the ideas include what’s on 8chan, you can see why they worry - like the article author.
Civil society, in theory, is supposed to be about keeping civil with people that you have fundamental disagreements with - so that society can function. That has morphed into one highly religious in tone, in which it's not merely enough to tolerate other people - you have to convert them, and if they refuse to comply, excommunicate (deplatform) them.
Because it gets to the point where it becomes young adults planning mass shootings on the Internet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...
The problem is that there is no such thing as "freedom of speech" it's BS, there is a right to have an opinion, but some opinions are crimes and should never become speech, let alone be public
Corollary: public speech must be granted to everyone, because it's in the US Constitution, but you should not use it to badmouth the US
No. The US does not criminalize thought, and doing so would be tyranny.
you should not use it to badmouth the US
Also No. The very purpose of freedom of speech and the press is to maintain channels for criticism and change.
Hard disagree here. Unless you're using some definition of crime I've never heard of, opinions can never be crimes in the US.
Even the advocacy of violence is constitutionally protected speech here.
Looks like 99% of the mass shootings are organized by young people and 99% of them happens in the US (in the west)
(I just realized that both happened mere blocks of my residence at the time. Maybe if I become homeless we will be able to prevent these horrific events)
> men running trucks over people in Christmas markets like in Berlin?
This is one of those events that we can consider extremely rare.
Nobody can prevent the actions of some lone wolf
Anyway, the point is that we can not solve social issues with technological solutions. You are just acting on the symptoms but still never going to get a cure. Block a "cancerous" open site, and crazy sick people are just continue to do what they do in a darker corner of the net.
Like a few times in a century, not hundreds times in a year, every year, sir.
Closing social networks is not a technological solution, it's political.
Public speech must not be controlled by private entities
Unless you are the US and don't understand it.
Crazy people with their forums for crazy people have no ability to target hundreds of millions of people through paid ads
Please, try to understand it, because it's really not that hard
There's a reason why every developed country in the World strictly controls firearms but not knifes
There's a reason why the only "developed" country where mass shootings happen all the time is the only developed country that refuses to strictly control firearms
It's the most evident proof of Einstein law of insanity
This is part where we disagree. Not that I am defending that private entities should "control" public speech, but rather that this control is circunstancial. Remove Facebook and Twitter (and every big media conglomerate as well, FOX, CNN, NBC) all you want, people will still look for groups that share their views and messages that confirm their biases.
This is not just a guess. I am seeing this first-hand with the people looking into leaving Twitter and joining Mastodon. Go to /r/mastodon and you will see me arguing with every one that comes with the idea that different instances mean different "communities" and "interests".
Also, consider the alternative. The article is saying that we shouldn't want a decentralized web. Who would you propose to "control" public speech? If not private companies and if not smaller groups, the only alternatives left is, guess what, Big State and tyrants
Those places didn't weaponize their feelings and weaknesses against them to sell them ads
Want to make a global social network?
The State should be able to control them (every single state they operate in) and their decisions should be held accountable in court
The SN banned you?
They should have human support to solve the issues and a judge could overrule the decision, while now they are black holes
I trust the State, more than Facebook, if someone doesn't they shouldn't impose their decisions on other groups, including other countries
It's weird to read that people living in countries where the police can arrest you for not stepping out of the car or saying to a police officer to f*ck off defend the right to wear swastikas or private companies keeping public speech hostage in the name of freedom
Decentralised web can exists only among many small actors, when there are a few behemoth that control everything, of course segregation is gonna be the most obvious response: Russian internet, Chinese internet and let's hope European internet soon.
This can be said of every media company. Every newspaper, magazine (low-brow or high brow), radio, TV station, cable TV company.
Every. Single. One.
> I trust the State, more than Facebook.
It doesn't matter who you trust more. It matters who you are able to disengage from. We as individuals and as groups can choose to keep Facebook of our lives. Can the Chinese say the same from the CCP?
> segregation is gonna be the most obvious response (...) let's hope European Internet
So, you are so afraid of Facebook's "control" of the internet that you would actively advocate to put in the hands of tyrants and kleptocrats?
Either you don't understand the concept of "decentralized web" or you are just fucking with me.
As a slight tangent, Britain actually does strictly control knives - a short folding non-locking penknife is the only knife that can be carried in public without good reason, and “self defence” is considered never a good reason, and the penknife can still get you arrested if you happen to have it on you in an inappropriate place (bar, nightclub, sports event, etc).
But that's about carrying them, not owning them
The point is that you can buy a butcher knife or a chopper from IKEA but not a rifle gun
For obvious reasons
So you didn't notice they happened blocks away from you when they happened?
In other words, he's not arguing against the claim that a lot of mass shootings are organized by young people and that most of them happens in the Us.
He's saying that young adult planning those attacks on the internet is miniscule.
It is not
Unless you have proof that they only talk in person and through rotary phones
Being killed in a mass shooting in the US is only approximately one order of magnitude more likely than getting struck and killed by lighting in the US.
Free speech has never been free, some limitations has always existed. So I'm not sure what observable consequences you are talking about.
Free speech is not gratis.
It needs care.
The real issue is echo chambers, and getting people to voluntarily cross- pollinate their bubbles. Censoring actually makes this issue worse though.
The action of that central power will be called censorship.
You could also try to have some guarantee of interoperability to reduce network effects and thus make the market effect weaker and reduce the selection for virality. That seems like something we could try.
Yet I don't see anyone calling for further control of The New York Times or implementing restrictions on the corporate media.
When racists (or similar "undesirables") share a larger platform they've kinda got to be on their best behaviour, they can't be too obvious instead they've got to be subtler and in doing so they likely attract more people to their cause because susceptible people tip toe in their direction gradually.
If they're all forced out onto their own platforms because of "muh free speech" the users won't tolerate being policed and so the absolute worst comes out and anyone stumbling across the community is going to be repelled fairly quickly.
There are two problems with this. The first is that it works both ways. If you expel all the heretics then your site becomes a cesspool of groupthink that immediately repels anyone who has had so much as a conversation with someone from the other side, because you'll be saying things that are transparently wrong to anyone who has had any real-world contact with the subject matter and be unable to correct yourself because anyone who spots the error fears being ejected for pointing it out.
And the second is that the version of the opposition on their best behavior for doing recruitment doesn't actually disappear, it just ends up in separate places. Your opponents will have their home base which is full of their own obviously wrong groupthink, but there will also continue to exist places where moderates gather.
Which means you have a new problem. The place where moderates gather will still have the subtle extremism you were trying to eject, but now, because your population hasn't been exposed to it, they're more susceptible to it. They're unvaccinated. So now you have to not only eject the extremists but also the moderates, because anyone who starts listening to the moderates may start to realize that some parts of the things your own extremists say aren't exactly true. Which puts them at high risk of switching to the other team. And you've already turned the other team into a coalition of crazy extremists. But ejecting the moderates turns your team into a coalition of crazy extremists, which is likewise quite ungood.
We choose our social circles and the material we consume in real life it's not unsurprising this happens online as well. These broad platforms like twitter, reddit e.t.c. aren't any more immune to this than offline.
Someone on that forum posts the following statement. "The concept of white privilege is anti-Semitic because the subset of white people who are doing better than black people are disproportionally Jewish."
The factual component is true, it's not obviously spam, so the moderators leave it there. But what happens when people on the left read that?
It pits members of the same coalition against each other. If you're black you start wondering whether Jewish privilege is a term you should start employing, but you're not likely to be pleased with the response if you do, and that may leave a bad taste in your mouth. If you're Jewish you feel attacked and suddenly nervous about a popular tenet of your party's platform. If you're a non-Jewish white Democrat who has never been exposed to anything like this before, you're primed to receive some outright Nazi propaganda next.
Statements like that need to be encountered for the first time in an environment where the problems with them can be analyzed thoughtfully and without vitriol or recriminations, because otherwise, when they are encountered, they create internal conflicts and push people into the arms of the opposition.
If you ban them from your filter bubble, that is not the context in which they'll be first encountered.
"Statements like that need to be encountered for the first time in an environment where the problems with them can be analyzed thoughtfully and without vitriol or recriminations, because otherwise, when they are encountered, they create internal conflicts and push people into the arms of the opposition."
This will never happen in social media. Unless in some highly highly moderated forum setup for the purpose, which is its own filter bubble and in which expertise of the participants can be ascertained.
Any forum like that essentially excludes most of the general public.
But then those people bring the heresy into the rest of their lives and get thumped by the mob for crimethink when they bring it up. And then once they're declared an enemy by their own tribe they seek refuge in the opposition.
Even the real world consequences of fringe online groups are minuscule in comparison to their perceived threat.
The psychological effect of terrorism is at least as significant.
Did 8chan make you pick up a gun? Did 8chan turn you into a nazi?
Just because seeing something published makes you upset does not mean that publishing those things is inherently dangerous.
You need to trust the other people in your society a bit more than you do, and stop assuming most readers are ten years old.
Your conclusion is based on fear, not the millions of people who read "objectionable" things online and go "ugh" and then close the tab (and sometimes go write long-winded blog posts about how censorship is essential to prevent violence).