Are you still going to be onboard when Signal is banned from the App stores? How about when backdoors are required?
Bear in mind, Signal has no moderation - that's baked into the product.
I'd contrast this from a platform like Parler where they actively encouraged extremists to adopt their platform. It is one thing to say "free speech" as a dog whistle and another thing to say "free speech" in the true meaning. Parler sought out extremists from the get go, Signal has been focusing on mass adoption. There's a big difference.
Can you share evidence of this? Because it clashes with all the messaging I've seen from Parler.
The messaging for this and Gab may thinly suggest otherwise, but it’s clear what these communities target, and it absolutely is the dog whistle version of free speech.
"the lack of moderation on Parler is not the issue. they actually have very robust moderation tools and all new users start out shadowbanned until enough of their post get approved for rightthink by their user moderators"
She also claims that influencers were being paid to post material without disclosing the payments. The FTC frowns on this. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/how-parler-app-plans-to-make... talks about this.
Basically, the idea was to get attention and make sure that it was a safe space for people who believed certain things, making sure that different viewpoints wouldn't be heard.
That might not be their messaging but that's what they were doing. Assuming this is true, of course.
What were these things? How right was too right, how left was too left?
But I'll point to videos I can find which aren't as bad. If anyone can find the original ads that I mentioned I'd appreciate a link. Here[0] Ingram mentions radicals like Alex Jones and Candice Owens mentioning that it is a social network specifically for conservatives. It is easy to find plenty of videos like this where they consistently talk about it being a social media platform for conservatives. Here's one where the CEO complains about fact checking the president[1]. He does end struggling to suggest that Parler is gaining diversity, but also says that Twitter is a Biden community in the same sentence. But I've never been one to think that Twitter was specifically targeting conservatives. But you'll find that a lot of these interviews do still focus around the politics of the issue. Compare that to Signal's much more neutral stance on the matter.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6iyAt1Ydpc
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8IcjsFHwc8
Edit: Downvoters, would you mind explaining? Is it that I no longer have a direct link to Parler using Info Wars/Alex Jones and Breitbart as endorsements? Or do you not think those are extremist websites?
If you cannot understand your own tone, maybe you need to take a step back and consider you may be part of the problem (being unable to regulate your emotions and have a neutral conversation)
Can you expand on this? I understand Breitbart more since people like Milo were more clearly trolls. But Alex Jones frequently talks about conspiracy theories and is promoting the current insurrection (see below). But if many extremists frequent your sites then maybe the line is pretty blurry and you should expect others to confuse them. And to quote from an article that is on Info Wars' front page (in its entirety)[0]
> They continue twisting the occupation of our nation’s Capitol by frustrated citizens and using it to destroy anyone that stands in their way.
> As DC Mayor Bouser lords over her potential future state with a 15 day emergency order following the Capitol Building siege, the National Guard, including 1,000 soldiers from New York, are stationed in the nation’s Capitol to protect the illegitimate inauguration of the Manchurian Candidate Joe Biden while the old establishment propaganda ratchets into full protection mode and the defenders of the New World Order crawl out of their holes to justify the plague that is exterminating liberty.
How do you differentiate this from extremism? Reading words like "occupation", "illegitimate inauguration", "New World Order", and "exterminating liberty" seem to me like extremist views. I'm not sure how you differentiate the two, but saying that a deep state rigged the election and calling those who attacked the capital "frustrated citizens" is in my view an extremist stance. These words encourage those actions. Extremists always use inflammatory language, so where is the line drawn? When does sensationalism because extremism? When you have followers that act on your words? I feel like we're there.
[0] https://www.infowars.com/posts/selling-the-illusion-of-insur...
Saying that free speech doesn't count if you're not using it the right away, is literally the exact opposite of the concept. It's the same reason the ACLU has spent so much money defending literal Nazis.
To clarify on the dog whistling part more, let's think about a recent example. Conservatives have frequently said that free speech is one of the most important things (Fox News, Trump, etc, not your neighbor). But then these groups also advocated for kicking athletes out of the country for kneeling in protest[0]. The president used his position of power to lead a boycott against a private organization[1]. The hypocrisy here is about that there is no right form of protest if you don't agree with me but even extreme forms of protest are okay if you do agree with me. Someone who says that is not actually advocating for free speech no matter how often they use the term. You saw organizations and the president saying that this wasn't a protest and that if it was they should do it another way. Then you see BLM and say that they should have protested peacefully and we would have solved the problems. From a different perspective you can see this as protesting escalating from peaceful to more disruptive and including violence. We see the "two sides" arguments (Charlottesville), encouraging supporters to run Biden's vehicle off the road[2], encouraging kidnapping of a governor[3], and I can go on (do we need to talk about the several cases at the Oregon capital?). Free speech isn't unlimited. Nor is "free speech for me and not for thee" free speech either.
If free speech is unlimited for one group but not for another, that is not free speech it is a dog whistle.
You can call a cat a dog but that doesn't make a cat a dog. And it doesn't matter if you take your cats on walks or you teach it to play fetch or other tricks or convince a bunch of people it is a dog, it is still a cat at the end of the day and won't ever be a dog.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44232979
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/sep/22/donald-trump-n...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/31/biden-harris...
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/27/politics/trump-gretchen-whitm...
And the difference between Parler and Signal is that Parler is a social media platform, Signal is a messaging platform. It's the difference of having a group of terrorists[0] in your restaurant everyday audibly planning a terrorist attack versus being the site of a message drop that occurs discreetly. Accessory charges are likely in the former unlikely in the latter.[1]
[0]Replace terrorists with criminals or whatever is palatable to you, it was the example we were using at the time.
[1]Standard disclosure I am not a lawyer/prosecutor/etc.
Again in my non legal estimation of the law (not that I think anything I'm currently suggesting has been tried in court).
https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/issues/118#issue...
https://www.vox.com/2018/7/19/17594156/whatsapp-limit-forwar...
If we are making a restaurant analogy, I think a more accurate one is that the restaurant provides a sound proof room where a group can enter and discuss anything they want without anybody overhearing. The restaurant does not know what anybody uses that room for. It could be people planning a birthday surprise, it could be a group of terrorists.
The sound proof room would be more apt for the later comparison to signal.
I'm definitely not cheering on deplatforming – I think it's fraught with problems – but I do think there's a grave danger being posed by extremists plotting violent attacks using these platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Parler) right now. It's complicated! Here are some of my thoughts on the issue (which may conflict or have logical inconsistencies – I'm just a person trying to think through this stuff, and I don't have the answers).
- Private conversations should be private, always, and there should be no back doors, ever. The only regulations regarding private conversations should be to strengthen them. I think it's okay for law enforcement to try to crack those private conversations, but I am vehemently against requiring a "secure back door" that (supposedly) only the government has access to, or laws preventing tech companies attempting to make uncrackable encryption.
- Any rules created about this stuff should be applied equally across the board to all people, regardless of political persuasion or position in government.
- I'm in favor of internet access being considered a public utility or even government funded; nobody should be "deplatformed" from basic internet access. Assuming that's the case, I don't see what's stopping Parler from setting up a server. AWS isn't the only way to serve web applications, and Twitter isn't the only way to broadcast messages publicly. However, if Parler's primary content is plots to violently overthrow a democratically elected government, I'm not sure that should be legal.
- I'm troubled by the stranglehold that payment processors have on our systems of commerce, and I'd be in favor of more decentralized payment methods.
- Broadcast mediums are fundamentally different from private conversations, and I don't think free speech should be confused with right to Tweet. Trump, in particular, is the most powerful person in the world and has the biggest platform in the world; he need only step out to the press room and every news outlet in the world will report what he says. I don't feel this is the best example of someone being suppressed. He chose (and arguably drastically increased the importance of) Twitter, and he avoids reporters, because he can spread disinformation and propaganda there without focused criticism.
- The idea that Trump and his supporters haven't been heard is laughable; I feel like we've been living in a Trump theme park for the past five years. It's all we've heard about every single day. I try to remember what it was like not thinking about Obama for two weeks at a time, and I look forward to not thinking about Biden for two weeks at a time.
- It feels like everyone on all sides of this issue agrees that the big tech companies are too powerful in many ways: as you point out, they have the ability to tamp-down public conversation, but on the flip side they have the ability to propagate disinformation on a massive scale. (There's also obviously their anti-competitiveness, but that feels like a different topic.) I have no idea what, if anything, should be done about this. Just as consolidation of power in tech companies is worrisome, so is consolidation of power in government.
- Speaking as someone on the left, I'm also troubled by (and I hate this term) "cancel culture". In recent weeks I watched someone I care about get destroyed for no reason other than the tone of a jokey story they told missed the mark. In my mind, "Internet Mob Justice" is as worrisome and problematic as government or corporate overreach, and I'm extremely skeptical of it regardless of which end of the political spectrum it's coming from.
- The disinformation thing is a huge and serious problem, and I haven't seen many "total free speech at all costs" advocates address it aside from saying something along the lines of "let each person listen to all the arguments and decide for themselves". That feels naive to me; flooding the airwaves with propaganda and disinformation is another way to quell free speech. I thought this was an interesting article on that topic: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/free-speech.html
- Facebook in particular allows for a dangerous combination of broadcasting and private conversations, which is to say they allow broadcasting to specific targets in a way that can't be observed from the outside. One thing about public free speech (including disinformation) is that everyone can see it and at least try to refute it (difficult in this age of 'bubble' media, but still feasible). The way Facebook allows the spread of disinformation seems especially dangerous in that it's secret but also at scale.
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I dunno, that's just some of what's going through my head in regards to all of this. My serious questions for you are:
- Do you think there's a problem with the way technology has enabled the scale and precision of disinformation campaigns? If so, do you have any ideas what we can do about it?
- Do you think there should be any moderation whatsoever? In other words, should people be allowed to incite, advocate, and organize violence in public forums? If not, where is the line? If so, what's remedies do we have as a society to the subsequent violence?
This raises a really interesting question about where the line between regulated utility and free commerce should be drawn. I generally agree with what you've written in your post, and struggle to come up with an answer.
For some of the reasons you mention, I think that I think Facebook and Twitter and the various App Stores generally belong on the "free commerce" side of that line.
But what about DNS providers and ISPs? What about browser vendors and certificate authorities? And in particular, what about AWS?
I could imagine a world in which DNS providers and ISPs are regulated and cannot deny service without a court order, and in which AWS ends up straddling this: EC2 + Route53 get regulated, but S3 and on up are treated as unregulated free-commerce businesses.
As an aside, I'm really surprised that the Parler team didn't defend against this by hosting with multiple providers. Given their positioning, it seems like a pretty obvious risk. I wonder if that's an oversight / miscalculation, or if they made a decision that getting de-platformed at some point would be a good thing for their long-term brand / agenda.
Apple in particular will reject App's for all sorts of reasons (i.e. opinions about your UI was a common early one). That's fundamentally incompatible with the idea that they can be regarded as a public good.
> Do you think there's a problem with the way technology has enabled the scale and precision of disinformation campaigns? If so, do you have any ideas what we can do about it?
Better education. Especially with regard to critical thinking skills.
Even if we removed the Internet, there would still be disinformation and propaganda that the population would have to contend with. Be it from the media, politicians, governments, books, friends, family, etc. Just as there always has been.
So I think the more comprehensive and sustainable approach would be to upgrade brains. Teach critical thinking and philosophy from a young age.
> Do you think there should be any moderation whatsoever? In other words, should people be allowed to incite, advocate, and organize violence in public forums? If not, where is the line? If so, what's remedies do we have as a society to the subsequent violence?
I'm absolutely for moderation on public forums. They are better for it. And by default they have to remove illegal content at least. Beyond that, it's up to them what the moderation policies are. HN is an example where I think moderation is really well done.
This gets a lot harder for platforms that are the de-facto town square like FB and Twitter. I don't know how we should handle that yet. But I think they should mostly stick with removing illegal content and act like a common carrier. If that's a problem due to the nature of social media, then maybe we should revisit the laws of the land. The fundamental issue here is having a few tech giants with a high level of control over the nation's discourse and who optimize for engagement (e.g., outrage, anger, bias confirmation). Which is fueling a lot of hate in the first place. They're not optimizing for thoughtful conversation and interaction. Not even remotely.
I'd also explore some other kinds of governance. Maybe an external non-partisan committee or a crypto governance approach. Not sure, but something external from these platform holders is key I think.
A bit of a tangent but - I know what you mean by this and I generally agree but I think their concern is not about the amount of media attention they have gotten but about how their views are represented (or misrepresented) in the media. The media tends to take the most extreme in a group and paint with a broad brush. Is being in the same camp as racists a good look? Not at all, but when someone calls all trump supporters or those who espouse beliefs in common with trump racists it ignites and incites and misrepresents.
I’ll admit to feeling this at times. I’m a moderate left and I once voiced support for tarriffs on Chinese goods and was called racist by multiple people because I have a belief in common with trump on that. It didn’t make me more likely to evaluate my belief on that it made me angry and sad and a bit silenced. How am I to respond to an accusation like that? I’m really not sure. If I had more beliefs in common with Trump I can imagine being a lot worse off in that respect.
People are very quick to work out whether they're being listened to or whether they're just soundboards for another's ideology. When they're treated like soundboards they tend to get entrenched, when they're listened to they tend to listen in return. People listening to each other is the only hope of finding a common way forward, everything else just ends in sectarian violence. It is amazing that simply tolerating a diversity of opinions and listening to them has become such a radical notion!
> It is amazing that simply tolerating a diversity of opinions and listening to them has become such a radical notion!
I hope and believe that in time it will become less so again.