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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

Until now censorship advocates have restricted themselves to demanding that institutions that already have the power to censor use this power. The idea that we should systematically centralize information, to make it possible to censor it, is new and worse. And why stop at IPFS? What about HTTP? Maybe it's not such a good idea to allow everyone to have a website. Look at 8chan. Maybe it would be better if all discussion happened under the benevolent moderation of facebook and youtube.

I would have thought that even people who are in favor of some censorship recognize that most censorship is not "benevolent". That even though they might dislike that IPFS will make it harder for facebook and youtube to decide what people are allowed to think, they would like that it will also make it harder for the governments of russia and china, and that this would more then make up for it.

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Reading the article, the view hinges on a gross mischaracterization: that a free speech environment has led to extremism and death. But this is absolutely not the case. First of all, the websites where the vast majority of extreme ideas are shared are not free speech environments. Second, the people who do bad things do it because they're damaged, or disillusioned, or some other personal motivator, the only difference now is that we can read and understand their view (not implying that we should be sympathetic, only understand even if we vehemently agree).

Another point I have a bit of a gripe with is that the person fails to point out the misdeeds associated with the ideology he (probably) is more sympathetic towards. Interestingly, the view that people should not be able to freely share ideas with one another and judge ideas on their merit with their own cognitive capacity seems to be common among those sympathetic to this ideology. I wonder how the author feels about those people controlling the environments where discussion happens and policing discussion on extreme topics sympathetic to themselves.

Why, yes, free speech does help spread all ideas, including those which lead to death.

The only truly safe environment is a very strict prison where inmates are not allowed to do basically anything, because anything can be risky and ultimately lead to death. Ideally, thinking should also be restricted for the same reason.

Danger cannot be removed from trying new things and learning unknown things. Danger, suffering, and death are inseparable from any progress.

So it goes. Don't try to make an environment too safe, because it's inevitably stifling.

Of course, every individual extremist has their own story, but we are also all products of our environments and it is clear that the web creates an environment in which extremism thrives.

Personally I think free speech is worth it but we can't pretend there's not a cost.

The free speech web has created the most peaceful least violent society in history. Censors on the other hand are found constantly endlessly and relentlessly at the vanguard of the bloodiest most extremist movements of all time.

What is this cost exactly? Censors have shown an utter and complete lack of evidence that censorship reduces violence whatsoever when you look at the long run and broader picture. They also love destroying the economy as well as art. Censorship at the end of the day always ends up being a particularly evil form of power politics regardless of the noble intentions it sets out with. Outside of a very narrow scope of things that ought to be censored (calls to violence which would include 8ch, defamation, fire in a theater, etc)

> Censors have shown an utter and complete lack of evidence that censorship reduces violence whatsoever

That's because the scale and untracked nature of such noncensored sites make their impact difficult to quantify. We know that social contagions exist, but we don't know the extent to which they affect people.

School shootings are far, far more common than they used to be. They started to really rise around the same time that sites like 4chan glorified the shooters and discussed the issue like it was a game. They spoke of becoming an hero(sic), talked of getting a high score, and made memes of their dead bodies.

The world tends to loathe extremes. We know that extreme censorship causes social issues. Why wouldn't complete non-censorship combined with anonymity cause issues too?

https://ourworldindata.org/exports/homicide-rates-across-wes...

https://marginalrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Vi...

https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2018/02/Sc...

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

the world is roughly 100000% less violent than it used to be, and the violent crime rate has not increased much in the past 5-10 years. this is a total lie.

This account name is trash.

This isn't a lie, but it's also more nuanced than this. The world has been seeing a massive decrease in poverty. At the same time, only something like 4.6 billion people have internet.

I'm not saying that social media causes a flood of violence, I'm just saying that there are violent social contagions that should be addressed. Think of ISIS's social media campaigns for recruitment.

> free speech web has created the most peaceful least violent society in history.

Not sure what makes you think that. Free speech certainly has helped, but so many other different things and changes has happened the last 100 years.

In any case, hateful let's-do-a-genocide ultra free speech didn't help.

Such things I think it's good to censor.

>In any case, hateful let's-do-a-genocide ultra free speech didn't help.

Absolutely it did. We get to see who the crazies are. We get to see what extremist ideologies threaten our peace. We get to talk to people that hold those ideologies, understand them, sometimes demonstrate the error in their view and sometimes simply prepare for them.

They exist whether we hear their voices or not. It's better to hear their voices than not.

You live in the US?

I start wondering if you've gotten your worldview messed up

That you over estimate how dangerous various ideologies are

Compared with traffic accidents, and possible worse, those who sometimes get elected as presidents in your country.

I'm wondering if the places on the internet you apparently visit, slightly have brought you into a fantasy world now, where you worry for and want to prepare for the wrong things. I'm wondering if you believe you need weapons to defend yourself? Whilst being less interested in climate change and wildfires?

But never mind me and have a nice day

> In any case, hateful let's-do-a-genocide ultra free speech didn't help.

have you read 1 thing by any political revolutionary of the past? ones you like. washington. lincoln. malcolm x. rosseau. they're quite violent, and would get censored by your 'lets-do-a-genocide free speech' laws.

Not "web" but the "attention economy" which tries to lure users into echo chambers and raise outrage in these chambers, so that the users spend more time there and click more (political) ads.

Stay away from the outrage machine. Be polite. Assume your partner in a dialogue is neither a fool nor malevolent. Quench flames. Try to understand, not to prove you're right.

Sounds easy and obvious, doesn't it?

> it is clear that the web creates an environment in which extremism thrives.

No, it's not clear. Please elaborate.

The strongest weapon against extremist ideas is other views on the issues that created the extremism in the first place. Most extremists don't want their people to communicate freely, for a reason.

Your argument presumes that the natural tendency of the web is to foster a free and open market of ideas, rather than a system of closed echo chambers each inhabiting distinct realities in a post-truth landscape.

That by no means seems to be a sure assumption today. If anything, the question now is whether the latter state of affairs might not be the default, and if so, whether it is reversible at all.

The web doesn't create anything. People create things. It doesn't have a natural tendency.

Echo chambers were created by people censoring viewpoints within their networks. The solution to that problem is not more censorship.

Just like people, not markets, create deadweight loss, rent, and negative externalities, and people, not institutions, cause systemic racism? /s

The web is a complex system that is more than capable of producing outcomes that are drastically different from the sum of its inputs (i.e. "people"). Based on what kinds of mechanism design and incentive structures are put in place, it is not only probable, but more mathematically likely that even a web filled only with rational correspondents will eventually devolve into a mess filled with falsehoods and echo chambers.

The important corollary to this insight? There's an entire class of structural remedies we can take that you're not even considering, before we even approach anything remotely resembling censorship on the individual.

You're talking about the "social media" in specific and not the web in general. Yes, social media create echo chambers, that's what they are for. The web never did, it created search engines to find arbitrary content, self-published blogs, online courses, Wikipedia etc. etc.

The web most certainly supported bubbles: who you link to has a huge impact on where readers go next and the language people use affects which results they get for searches (even before Google started personalizing things based on your past history).

It was slower than Twitter/Facebook but the effect is exactly the same as the social media problem. I have a relative who went down the conservative conspiracy theory rabbit hole in the years after 9/11 and the web was a huge accelerant for his intellectual decline because once he found a community of fellow travelers he’d stay in that network of blogs where they strenuously resisted outside sources or the general idea of objective reality. When those communities moved primarily onto social media, they moved faster and got wider range but the practices didn’t change at all.

You are arguing that the choices the web offers result in bubbles because some people choose to stick with particular types of content after discovering it through links. The web however offers just as many ways out of bubbles and there is no better remedy than this freedom. Your relative would not have been saved by a "nanny web" strictly policed by authorities, he would have stayed in a social bubble of personal relationships where the information choices available on the web are inaccessible. It's how extremism thrived before social media.

Having such freedom available is of no use if people won't make use of it. You assume a "nanny web" is about taking away these freedoms, when in fact it's about incentivizing people to actually utilize them.

I agree with you insofar as Mill's free market of ideas is the best remedy against bigotry and extremism, but you have the wrong idea about how to achieve that -- unregulated laissez-faire "freedom" on the web does not result in actual free discourse. On the contrary, that's just a recipe for a web overrun by all manner of adware, malware, spyware, propagation of unconscious self-censorship by means of universal targeted and mass surveillance, and straight-up disinformation ops and public opinion manipulation from hostile actors. How are you going to have sincere exchanges of ideas at scale over all that noise?

People are just as free to follow diverse viewpoints on social media but for many people that’s not the point. They want that bubble and are determine to avoid it. That doesn’t change with the choice of forum.

Similarly, there’s not that big difference on “policing” - the social media companies enforce very basic terms of service but most people use web hosts with relatively similar terms. The major difference is the discovery mechanism (and the fact checking applied to certain politicians’ accounts which aren’t banned on public interest grounds) which is closer to how search engines avoid sending links to certain sites with bad reputations. A lot of what Twitter/Facebook block will also be dropped by Google or many free web hosts. You can definitely get away with more but I don’t see much reason to believe that it’s a major difference rather than minor variations depending on which companies and content you’re talking about.

> an environment in which extremism thrives.

True. But what if other, more virtuous things thrive more ?

There's a possibility that if instead of discussing and debating ideas we disagree with, we repress them and try to bury them, it will just form a darker, more extreme underground network. Extremism isn't some new thing. Right now certain political viewpoints are allowed to be discussed and others are not. The Overton window is very small. That leads people who disagree to try to find each other and band together, form some kind of opposition. Because their opinions are repressed, they stay insulated in their bubbles (as do people with mainstream opinions). The isolation leads to extremism.

If you look at the polarization of politics in the united states, both sides hate each other and they won't talk. Maybe if there was some kind of discourse, things wouldn't be so bad. Right now the only words exchanged are insults, all republicans are alt-right, all democrats are communists. It wasn't always like that. It used to be possible for people who vote differently to be friends, or even live in the same household.

That is exactly right. It also gives them an intellectual martyrdom card and a veneer of coolness. If you want the next hip counterculture that all the kids are into to be Naziism, by all means suppress it.

Nazis don’t deserve to be handed the “2 Live Crew effect.” For those who don’t know this was a mediocre booty rap group whose record went triple platinum after attempts were made to ban it.

A parent poster raised another great point: the echo chambers that are full of this toxic stuff are themselves not free speech zones. They are heavily moderates safe spaces for specific ideologies and cultures. I am not convinced that this stuff would fare so well on a level intellectual playing field. It’s asinine.

On a final note it’s important to point out that the original explosion of e.g. Qanon happened not via some decentralized free speech zone or even the chans (where it was always ironic or a prank for most) but on social platforms with algorithmic timeline.

The algorithmic timeline is what has really ruined online discourse and promoted an explosion of insanity. Discourse on these sites is not equals but is weighted toward what will maximize engagement. Trolling, demagoguery, shock mongering, and various forms of “porn” (outrage porn, fear porn) are what maximizes engagement.

The algorithmic timeline would be extremely hard to implement in a decentralized system. That’s perhaps a good thing. It might look more like the genuinely flat forum world of the old Internet where discourse was comparatively far more reasonable.

> The algorithmic timeline is what has really ruined online discourse and promoted an explosion of insanity.

This is a really good point. I think it's important to point to this as the root of the problem, and realize that what's good for Facebook and Twitter isn't what's good for society.

I think a lot of this debate is on false premises. It’s not free unbiased media vs censorship but a debate over different kinds of biased media. All social platforms that implement any form of gamification or algorithmically weighted presentation are absolutely not neutral and will tend to promote whatever best satisfies the algorithm or echo chamber effect (in the case of gamified forums).

If the goal of the site is to maximize engagement, that’s going to be extremism, edgelording, porn, and trolling.

the algorithm also enables you to see content you like. Genuinely, what's the issue?

The algorithm has absolutely no way of knowing what I want. It can only guess by looking at what I've viewed, and the real motive is always to keep me on the site and maximize engagement.

As I said: negativity maximizes engagement.

Let me give you a simple example. Lets say I walk past you on the sidewalk and say hi. Not much engagement. Now lets say I walk up to you and punch you. I have just maximized engagement. Which is a better interaction?

It's what the parent comment said.

I agree with your sentiment that this can be a slippery slope, but I also think that you (and TFA) are glossing over an important point: there's a huge difference between distribution infrastructure and discovery infrastructure.

The internet was full of conspiracy theories, crackpots, and silliness, well before the facebooks, youtubes, and so forth. The key difference is that these were hard to find. Early on, the most effective discovery infrastructure was based on hand-curated indexes (e.g., [1,2]). These moved slowly and were hard to game. Now, those same indexes are generated by algorithms, the gaming of which has spawned an entire cottage industry.

The parent's viewpoint and TFA are not incompatible, as long as we don't assume that content distribution and content discovery have to come from the same service. The open internet survived for over 2 decades without bringing down democracy. At the same time, it would be a good idea to see a bit more editorial responsibility from services driving discovery. Better still, if hosting and discovery are decoupled, there's no network effects or content archive creating a captive audience if editorial power is abused.

Tying things back to TFA, and perhaps the point that you're trying to make here, amadeuspagel: IPFS seems mostly aimed at providing hosting infrastructure rather than discovery. I'll emphasize the point again: censorship-free hosting has been largely unproblematic for the past two decades. What's been getting us into trouble now is discovery without editorial review (and forcibly tying discovery to hosting).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!#Founding [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User%27s_Guide_...

I think this is it exactly. It's not the content, it's the sociopathic drive for engagement that promotes it.

I'd fight for the right for 8chan to exist. Everyone deserves the right to be stupid, even if they're abusing it.

An interesting counter point: the marginal cost of stupidity rises with the technological advancement of society.

Does it? Do you have any data to support that?

I thought about what you said, and immediately connected it with several other claims of things that also rise with tech advancement... marginal impact of weapons, medicine, intelligence, entrepreneurship/luck, sports, games, entertainment, communications...

So if the marginal impact of everything rises, then maybe that’s just the way of technology? It increases leverage. But then in relative terms, all those things still have the same impact? Or maybe the ratios between them change (e.g. weapons/nukes became more more powerful than communications)? Or maybe there’s other areas that massively reduced in marginal impact (e.g. production of food)...

There is an idea out there that it is always easier to destroy than it is to create or maintain order. As technology progresses, the power to destroy, create, or maintain increases, but do they increase at the same rate? It very well may be that the power to destroy has vastly outgrown are ability to create or maintain. Case in point, our nuclear bombs could kill most of us within the hour, yet science is barely learning how to stop the great killer, aging. Will we get to a point where any individual can order a few parts and kill millions? It seems inevitable if we continue along our current trajectory. Agreat Scifi book that explores these questions is Rainbows end [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End

At this level of approximation, so to rises the wealth of society to afford such stupidity.

It costs more to undo damage than it does to create it, so if they grow at the same rate you still fall behind.

as someone's finger hovers over a button in US, UK, Russia, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel or North Korea...

I miss when we justified censorship with the fact that children might see something. At least that actually happened instead of being a fantasy.

George Carlin, whom I highly respect, has a fantastic bit on "saving the children". It's more like a child fetish and it isn't healthy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIlv17AwgIU

> I miss when we justified censorship with the fact that children might see something. At least that actually happened instead of being a fantasy.

So, you're saying: "At least a nuke went off?" or that a nuke going off is a fantasy? You know that plenty have gone off, and a few killed a lot of people, right?

I don't have any big problem with nuclear power, but I don't want to see a nuke go off.

"If people have the freedom to share bad ideas, surely that is a slippery slope to having the freedom to kill people with nuclear bombs" is a fantasy.

The radicalisation directly driven by 8chan, in particular, has led to a large number of people being shot. Dead.

There are dead people, because 8chan was allowed to exist.

That is not something that you should be fighting for. You are not fighting for any greater good there. You are promoting something that leads to actual, real people dying.

I support the right for you to have your own opinion. You should support my right to have my own, too. In this circumstance though it feels like a knee-jerk reaction without citation or factual evidence supporting your strong opposition.

The reality is the reason why people commit crimes, including violent ones such as murder, is a deeply complex subject that has the full time focus of many highly educated people. A simple one-liner attributing extremism to a specific site you find distasteful isn't constructive IMO.

Here's a quick primer on the history of crime and criminal psychology walking through the various phases of understanding why people commit criminal or violent acts. https://law.jrank.org/pages/12004/Causes-Crime.html

Favorite execrpt from link above:

> Children who are neglected or abused commit substantially more crimes later in life than others. (© Roy Morsch/Corbis)

I have an absolutism posture on free speech. Everyone should say whatever they want without fear or retribution. This includes offensive speech. If this incites violence, so be it. Why not invest in mental health care instead of suppression of speech? The history of mental health care in the USA is abysmal.

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.11.3....

My personal opinion is that positions such as your own can also be characterized as radical.

> Everyone should say whatever they want without fear or retribution. ... If this incites violence, so be it.

This is not a logically sound stance to take. Violence, by its nature, stifles speech of its intended victims.

You are only promoting the free speech of the boldest or most ruthless. You are not promoting free speech for those who would be victimised by them.

I'd be happy to engage here but I'd rather not discuss opinions. Can you please provide evidence to support your position?

I also come down staunchly on the side that freedom of speech should be broadly and zealously protected.

However, that doesn’t mean to me that speech should be free from consequences. To do so, you’d have to make it free from side-effects (including changing others’ minds) which would make it pointless.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

The warmongering driven by the New York Times regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in particular, has led to a large number of people being blown up. Dead.

There are dead people, because the New York Times was allowed to exist.

That is not something that you should be fighting for. You are not fighting for any greater good there. You are promoting something that leads to actual, real people dying.

This is false equivalence.

Whilst the media can influence people, including politicians, there is very little in common between the lead up to the Iraq war and the mass murders the parent poster is referring to.

I don’t think the NYT is any bastion of the free press. They are far too corrupt.

I’d be happy if both NYT and 8chan didn’t exist.

The death of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987 effectively killed the integrity of journalism and allowed op-ed and infotainment to take place of informed and factual reporting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

I'd be happy if this was successfully reintroduced. I can't imagine why this isn't widely supported, especially by those who detest "fake news" and want misinformation to be suppressed.

Agreed, the death of the fairness doctrine led to shock jocks and opinion untethered from any counterpoint.

You need a stronger justification to censor people other than that they might say something that causes weak minded people to do harm.

Just in America alone... more Americans have died of automobile accidents than total deaths in World War 1&2 __combined__. Going by your knee-jerk reaction that maybe a few people died from an internet forum, we also should absolutely abolish automobiles, right? I mean, automobiles crashes have literally killed more humans in ONLY America, than both world wars, terrorism, and extremist hate speech combined. Why do vehicles get a pass? And then this just leads us to the old "NERF the world" sentiment in which, every single thing humans do is dangerous enough that maybe we shouldn't allow anyone to do anything at all? Right?

According to Wikipedia:

>> Records indicate that there were 3,613,732 motor vehicle fatalities in the United States from 1899 to 2013.

Also 70 - 80 million people died in just the second world war.

So your first claim is wrong by well over an order of magnitude. If you meant just US deaths in both wars, you should say so. But in this case, I feel you should choose another comparison. To be so selective would be disrespectful to approximately a hundred million non-American war casualties.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/mor...

Yes, you are correct that I meant to say Americans and not total all deaths like I typed. However, the point that vehicles are acceptable even though they cause vast deaths, yet for some reason if one thing someone doesn't like causes hardly any deaths, they can strongly condemn anyone being allow free speech and create a slippery slope.

If you were to add automobile accidents in all other countries combined with the US figures, you do get obviously a much higher figure. Automobile accidents are very high up on the list of cause of death.

(The article also only takes into account US traffic deaths since 2000 being greater than both world wars, and of course there were magnitudes more deaths going back to the 1970s, likely in the earlier decades as well I wasn't trying to be super pedantic, which is why I'll still leave my above post intact.)

You want to ban everything that leads to deaths? What about the bible and koran? I'm sure the stats on those just dwarf those from 8chan.

As does cop shows and popular media and video games. Where do you draw your line?

a system that simultaneously depends on the opinions of the populace (consumer choice, voting) to make good decisions, and can't trust those same people to make a well informed choice is kind of at odds with itself

This looks like a paradox but it's easily resolved when you realize that trust isn't binary.

The "wisdom of crowds" depends on the question asked, the algorithm used, and the countermeasures that keep people from gaming it.

A simple example: if you want to have good restaurant reviews, it's a good idea to exclude people who never ate at the restaurant in question. That alone isn't necessarily going to get good results, but it will help.

Just letting strangers do whatever they want in group activities online typically has bad results. This has been tried many times. If you want to get good results you need some kind of structure.

Who imposes this structure? The people building the system.

Any discussion of Freedom Speeches™ must also account for inauthentic speech.

Trolls, bots, socket puppets, propaganda, gaming the algorithmic recommenders, flooding the zone with bullshit, etc.

And who is fit to determine the trolls and propaganda?

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Uhh... wait a minute... is this sarcasm?

I hope it's sarcasm.

hehe, seems like it, link is a link to a youtube rick-roll video

Self determination. Sign your works. Anything unsigned is gossip, or worse.

it doesn't seem clear from the recent political situation in the US that owning up to your lies does anything but give them more strength.

Yup.

My goal is to break feedback loops. Authenticated speech empowers us (the receiver). Like spam filters for news (outrage).

I don't care if other people are gas huffing QAnon, just so long as I don't have to ever hear about it.

But that's the paradox. Who said an uncensorable IPFS will not become completely overloaded by corporate and government propaganda? How is it harder for them than individuals to create any narrative that suits their agenda? IPFS is not a panacea to powerful overlords.

Uncensorable by governments doesn't imply unmoderated by anyone whatsoever. You can have someone ejecting trolls and propaganda but not censoring legitimate speech, as long as it's someone you trust. And, importantly, not everyone has to trust the same party -- if they start censoring something you think they shouldn't then, unlike censorship by government or corporate monopolists, you can go and get it somewhere else.

That's literally the exact system we have right now at the http level.

> That's literally the exact system we have right now at the http level.

And you might notice that the http level is not where the existing problem occurs.

I don't think there is a problem, at least not a technology problem.

For now.

A good example of the hypocracy of facebook is, while they censor content for the good of all, they run an onion site-- facebookcorewwwi.onion to evade censorship by others.

As much as facebook is a thing I love to hate, I don't see the problem there. It's not because you have an onion site that you are forced to allow any content whatsoever, and in fact many onion services explicitly forbid certain types of content for good reasons.

You're free to not connect to their platform either way (and to be subject to their limitations regarding contents and behaviour), whereas setting up an onion service can be about stuff that people aren't free to avoid (i.e. censorship by the only ISP they might have, by a state, etc). There's no issue with consistency there.

Still amazing that they brute force generated that onion address.

why is that hypocrisy? Even if facebook censors, it's plausible that their positios is that they want to let you opt-in to censorship. an onion site lets you use the site that they censor on an opt-in basis. (I opted out of facebook just over a month ago).

The hypocrisy is that the company chooses to fight the 'free speech' fight by evading the censorship of governments when it benefits them and censors those it disagrees with otherwise.

In the end it will government which ends up picking and controlling the censorship. And then it will pick your poison. USA, some European, some Middle-Eastern, Chinese, Russian? I wouldn't trust any of them, not to even mention raising Africa and Americas... Or other East-Asian...

Likely it will devolve to regional or country specific centralized web with those currently in the lead making the decisions. That doesn't sound too great...

It seems the current pro-censorship group has a fairly homogeneous political slant as evidenced by the author's statement:

> It’s offered a megaphone to those promoting dangerous ideas like white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other anti-LGBTQ positions, and sometimes outright Nazism.

This group always seems to willfully ignore or is ignorant of 20th century history WRT Russian and China.

I also find it interesting how the spread of extreme ideology is characterized as being the result of the free flow of information, when a cursory look at the situation shows that it is not the case. There are sites such as this one where anyone can pretty much say anything they like, and you don't see this phenomenon here. Where you do see this phenomenon is on sites where algorithms control the spread of information directly based on business incentives centered around attention grabbing and emotional reaction, and less commonly (but increasingly more commonly) sites that outright require ideological conformity to participate.

I’m not disagreeing with your general point, but this is definitively not a site where anyone can pretty much say what they like. Individuals flag posts and comments, which can keep them from showing up. The mods here are very active, responding to user reports and dealing with content that breaks the site guidelines. IMO that moderation is what makes this site generally tolerable, as compared to other discussion forums on the internet.

It’s possible I misinterpreted you and you meant “anything they like” in the sense of being able to hold (almost) any opinion and be able to express it, provided it’s expressed politely and in good faith. In that case, I would still argue that it’s only the selective moderation of impoliteness and poor faith arguments that keeps this site bearable.

aka monetizing outrage.

If you want to predict the future just look at history. The belief that somehow these groups will get it right and aren't inherently harmful is false.

At my prior job we were fairly big (1000+) and had internal meetings more or less instructing people how to vote. We had a significant social reach and the ability to promote arbitrary articles such as news. We had editorial guidelines forcing us to be politically biased. As much as I disagree with the current president I do think there was some sort of attempt at manipulation. Whether it was successful or not is beyond my ability to analyze.

agree. And no mention of the spread to black supremacy in the form of BLM, Antifa, and other hate based organizations

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