When it comes down to it - i like moderated spaces on the internet. I dont want to wade through spam, not to mention violent and abusive content. I don't like seeing shock images.
So yes, i support having moderation. The question to me is not: yes/no moderation, its where you draw the line; what are your policies and how are they enforced.
Fundamentally i think the solution is competitors. This was a much easier position to take when the web did not just have a few social media giants with network effects, but still: if youtube becomes to dranicon, start a new website. The tools to stream video (albeit not at scale) are just an apt-get away.
I agree. I wouldn't have a problem with YouTube doing anything if YouTube wasn't the video website. We need decentralization.
But at the same time more and more often I also see these same concerns raised with decentralized networks (going beyond standard practices like blocking and preventing federation with instances), and that gets me worried.
We could just change our culture to be satisfied with 720p content and use traditional websites that don't use p2p tech. Like, we could all just start using bilibili.com or some other chinese competitors instead of youtube.
Complaining that you don’t have a ready made audience is pretty weak. You need to hustle for this stuff. People used to xerox and give away zines for an audience. As the Pirate Bay founder said recently[0], it’s embarrassing how easily people are giving up.
It’s almost as if they don’t want to actually put the stuff out there, but rather be held up as martyrs. Pirate Bay and SciHub are still up, and have multiple billion dollar corporations actively gunning for them socially, legally, and extra legally. It can be done.
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an7pn/pirate-bay-founder-th...
It can be done, people are just being lazy instead of creative.
It’s like there’s a whole generation of engineers that don’t realize that you can actually buy a computer instead of just rent someone else’s.
- Scuttlebutt
- GNUnet
- Secureshare
- Fereenet
- ZeroNet
- Retroshare
- Diaspora
- Mastadon
- Matrix
- Cabal
Decentralized platforms put more responsibility on the user (key management, account recovery, content hosting, etc) which is unlikely to get mass adoption from mainstream users unless the decentralized platform is as easy to use as twitter.
What would be a good way to make these platforms mainstream? Would you support some sort of a mandatory requirement to federate for the big players? Of course, they would still be able to refuse to talk to instances that violate their own policies.
But isn't that ability exactly what many people consider a violation of free speech on mainstream social media platforms, only applies to accounts rather than instances?
Then you're in luck, YouTube is not the only video website. It's not even the biggest. Some video formats it can't even compete in because competitors are so far and away superior.
I think you really mean that YouTube is a popular site. But it is certainly not the site going by site size. That would be FB. Not the most engaging either with snapchat and tik tok out there. It's certainly better than the other "also rans" like daily motion though.
(Actually, now I think about it, I'm not even sure I would say it is necessarily "better" than DM. Maybe a better phrase would be "seems to be more popular"?)
Reach
You can't have competition when some of the competitors can't use the infrastructure. It is not without reason that utility providers can't discriminate and I think it is time to decide what is considered a utility in the internet age.
No one likes spam, abusive content, fake news... However many won't qualify a given content the same way.
IMO, for example, history shows that anyone thinking that he is _right_ and has to educate others by coercing them to pay lip service to his ideas and also by censoring contradiction, walks on a path leading to violent and abusive acts.
Is that not what we do currently? (subject to certain legal restrictions, but generally in usa the restrictions other than copyright are pretty light. And if they aren't, well Tor). You have pretty wide discretion if you self-host, especially on bare metal. Not perfect mind you, but pretty wide.
We already have the problem of people creating too many filter-bubbles in their online lives. A fragmented social media environment will not usher in an age where everyone gets exposed to a more diverse set of ideas, we'll just get FoxNewsBook and MSNBCBook, or ChristianTube and MuslimTube, or whatever other social groups happen to be the most defining.
Moderated communities are basically the HOA neighborhoods of the internet. There is nothing wrong with liking the high property values, but competition alone does not prevent their abuses [3].
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/expresident/all-the-por...
[2] https://www.foodbeast.com/news/pepsi-boycott-kendall/
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/homeowners-...
In real life, you get to choose the people to be friend with or associate with, and we all have number of circles with interests that doesn't necessary overlap the same circles. That's pretty much the same thing that I have on the internet when using certain social media. It's great since you don't have spammers, and you don't have to deal with racists or people who just turn up the temperature of a room. Maybe that's the way it should be.
It's also much more difficult to spread vitriolic meme since it has to infiltrate the various disparate communities.
Moderated communities are basically the HOA neighborhoods of the internet. There is nothing wrong with liking the high property values, but competition alone does not prevent their abuses [3].
OK. Pretty much any places that aren't garbage have moderation of some sort. If nothing else to keep out spam.
And a community isn't a HOA, which you are basically stuck with if you live in them.
I mean, ok? Can't you simply not watch that content? What if there were a warning on the content, so that you could choose to not watch it?
Or maybe you could specify on your account, that you don't want to see that content, so it never shows up for you. Problem solved, and everyone wins.
You are clearly ignorant of the kinds of shit actual YouTube alternatives have to deal with. Their websites and videos get de-ranked or de-listed from search (Rumble [1]), their apps get removed from app store (LBRY [2]), their infrastructure gets constant attacks (BitChute [3]). Meanwhile, the mainstream media smears them at every opportunity.
This is nothing like the environment that Google and YouTube were started in.
https://rumble.com/vcxrxh-rumbles-anti-trust-lawsuit-against...
https://lbry.tv/@lbry:3f/googlebanslbry:7
https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/censorship-bitchute-depl...
- Nothing should be done, whether regulation or consumer action, because everything can and will be fixed by the entry of a new company.
- We are living in the best of worlds. Otherwise, a new company would have sprung to fill the gap and then we would be living in the best of worlds again.
I am yet to convince people holding this belief that it may not be the case.
> Fundamentally i think the solution is competitors. This was a much easier position to take when the web did not just have a few social media giants with network effects, but still: if youtube becomes to dranicon, start a new website. The tools to stream video (albeit not at scale) are just an apt-get away.
There's no serious YouTube competition because YouTube is not (just) a video host. Video hosting isn't that big a deal (though hard at scale).
YouTube is a network of videos, creators and viewers powered by recommendations, subscriptions advertisements (paying creators) and massive network effects.
You could build yet another video host and even have niche success with it. But you have no chance of providing the equivalent effect of a video landing on the YouTube frontpage.
Most people on Youtube never even have their videos land on the frontpage, and yet many of them are successful. That network effect and scale isn't necessary for the ability to broadcast and disseminate speech online, so it doesn't really contradict the premise that free speech on the web (as far as video is concerned) requires Youtube as a host, or that competition couldn't be as effective as, say, repealing Section 230 or having the government take over Youtube and force it to act as a public utility.
At the end of the day, all Youtube is, is popular. They're not like J.P. Morgan, holding monopoly power by physically controlling infrastructure and making competition impossible. The reason there isn't "effective" competition isn't because Google controls the web, it's because no one considers anything less than Google-scale to be "competition," so they write off the tons of other media streaming sites and social media platforms as irrelevant because they can't gain dominant market share. But this conflates the free speech argument with arguments about effective business strategy.
Even as recently as the 80s and 90s, liberals were much more likely to be anti-censorship. Now people who claim that label are all for shutting down "bad" things, without understanding that "good" and "bad" are largely human constructs, and the things that are considered "good" and "bad" can and will change over time. What about in the far future when bigotry inevitably becomes commonplace and systemic in a much worse way than humanity has already seen? Do we really want to just hand these tools of suppression and control to people like that on a silver platter? The entire point of freedom of speech is supposed to transcend that sort of control.
To go on a slight tangent, it's quite similar to how many traditional Christians in America would wish for their religion to have special privileges in law, when they don't realize that it would open the door for any other religion to do the same, should their population grow to the numbers they'd need to influence policy. The very same people who would wish to make Christianity privileged would bemoan Islam one day becoming the majority religion and instituting Islamic law via those same legal mechanisms. Nobody I've talked to face to face in my area has any kind of answer to that one.
On a more detailed note, I draw a sharp line between normal speech and selectively amplified speech. Twitter and Facebook are in a bind because their business is to curate speech amplification in order to maximize exposure to ads. So if you ask “why did person X see post Y?” it’s because Twitter/FB decided to show Y to X. So they have automatically become at least partially responsible for the effect of that post.
So to me this Twitter/FB censorship fiasco is not about free speech censorship whatsoever. It’s about these companies being in the business of deciding who sees what, being externally pressured to do a better job.
It wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever to ask Twitter/FB to “stop censoring” while admitting that they should be allowed to curate feeds to maximize ad revenue.
This seems to equate the ability to publish with a society that's filled with falsehoods, uncertainty, and violence. Is it possible that society won't have any more or less falsehoods, more or less uncertainty, or more or less violence than a society in which you don't appoint some "knows better than the reader" censor to decide what people are allowed to see and read?
It seems insanely presumptuous to me that some censor at Facebook or Google won't turn into a violent maniac when they see the things you seem to propose that they censor, but the general, unwashed masses will. Give adults some credit.
We've had the church around spreading falsehoods, uncertainty, and violence for centuries, and the world is still here (and still improving). I don't think letting people publish whatever legal content they like is going to suddenly send our world to hell in a handbasket. The danger from uncensored publishing is overblown.
Not to mention the world is getting better only in a very narrow sense. Environmentally, we're entering a very dark period. The falsehoods surrounding climate change will cost us a great deal.
Those falsehoods comes mostly from old people watching fox news. Young people who grew up with mostly unfiltered communication on the internet are typically for doing something against climate change. So this only strengthens the point that free flow of information is more desirable than filtered communication.
People who want to manipulate the masses hates this though, so they try to make every argument they can that free flow of information is harmful and we need to stop it. Basically anyone with power have nothing to gain from you and me being able to freely communicate, so they want to reign that in as much as possible. I'm not sure why you want to make the rich and powerful even richer and even more powerful, but that is what you are arguing for.
It would be a horrible outcome if speech maximalism succeeded and prevented people from acting to protect their customers, property, society, etc., against destructive speech.
Of course, you can say "yeah but if you allow suppression of speech then it'll be used for evil" -- as in, Twitter can kick off whoever they want. But going as far as legally protecting any and all speech, in any situation and on any public or private property, is far more destructive in my opinion.
I think this is perhaps a straw man. Nobody is asking to protect unrestricted speech in all private venues.
Would it be so bad to make it illegal for large services that have private DMs to snoop/censor those, such as we do presently for large services that have private telephone calls?
The dichotomy isn't public/private. The phone company is private and they aren't allowed to tap your phone (unless they're doing it for the government), and they're not allowed to shut off your service because you called members of the "wrong" political party too often.
Your stance is super reasonable. But look around, many people in this conversation are effectively arguing in favor of totally, globally unrestricted speech, which I find extreme and untenable.
Do you think that if we somehow broke this monetization model, that companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google would cease to be the behemoths they are, and the amplification mechanism might go away?
If these platforms presented the content without interpreting and curating it for profit, they could at least take the stronger stance of being a platform instead of a speech curation/distribution/amplification system.
For example if Signal was externally pressured to take down speech based on its content, they would be like "We don't have that ability." But in the case of Twitter and FB, that ability and practice is at the very core of their business model.
The problem, IMO, is that most users don’t understand how social media works from a business perspective. Advertising companies put a lot of effort into not being known as advertising companies.
Another fun thought experiment: consider who runs political ads, especially local advertisers (highway billboards etc) and what speech they’re willing to accept. Consider Comcast / cable networks and what speech they’re willing to accept. Who are their customers, how are they making money, and how does that affect what speech they are willing to accept on their platforms.
That says a great deal doesn’t it? They are too ashamed and know it is an immoral business.
You mean a society where the most charismatic/popular members get the attention of the masses, mostly by telling them what they want to hear? Yes, I think I'm prepared to live in such a society.
I think, in your attempt at making free speech look undesirable with your mention of "amplification", you forgot that this amplification is for everyone, including you and those who agree with you.
What Facebook and Twitter are doing is providing a product that amplifies and places speech in front of particular eyeballs and ears. There are many, many issues with what Facebook and Twitter are doing, but they're all unrelated to the legally-protected constitutional free speech.
Some people have argued that "posting on Twitter/FB may as well be considered protected speech, since society depends on it so much" which is an interesting concept for sure, but has no basis in law yet.
Finally, to your last point, the amplification is not for everyone, and that's at the core of why people hate these companies right now. Users are subjectively amplified or suppressed, or kicked off. And this unequal treatment of users is at the very core of their business model: they make money by selectively amplifying content.
The US Founders thought that people must have the ability to speak their mind, to discuss and challenge each others ideas. They thought this ability was so important they enshrined it in law.
public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence toward a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation
Free speech doesn’t mean you’re protected to speak whatever you want in any setting. Speech is subject to private property and common sense. If you are profane on my property I’ll kick you out and ban you. That is NOT a violation of your free speech.
Yes, obviously. "But people may say false things on the internet" is not nearly as strong an argument as "you will be prevented from criticizing your government on the internet".
This is truly ironic given that exact abuse has been perpetrated by these tech companies in order to build their empires in the form of advertising and manipulating users on their platforms.
Also, your dismissal of humanism is appalling.
Neither side of this coin is a straight answer; you can easily poke holes in either by imagining the terrible consequences of the alternative. The answer IMO is people, groups, societies, should decide what's constructive and destructive and converge on a balance that works for them.
Your approach results in a star chamber of elites that make value judgments on what people can SAY, which directly impacts what they can DO. Society is limited to their judgment and belief system.
There are countries that exist today with this model, and it is not a pleasant existence to be a regular citizen in those countries especially for creative “weird” people who represent most of the major innovations in the world. Read history and see for yourself how this approach leads to poor outcomes for the majority. In fact, it is at the core of the founding of the United States itself.
One approach leads to a narrow, controlled, and directed society that is controlled by the elite; the other brings breadth and freedom to pursue crazy thoughts that can lead to major innovations.
You seem to be mixing up “free speech” in the constitution and the normal to and fro negotiations and tensions between people. In private life people need to be allowed to act against speech that they find harmful.
I dont believe in what those people imagine free speech means. I believe in the “first amendment” which includes freedom of association including for the non-government people that create venues and platforms. “We have the right to refuse service to anyone” as seen on any shop any where.
If you would like Congress to create a new regulation on interstate commerce preventing internet platforms from doing some particular thing, then articulate that specific position.
I am absolutely not bothered the current reality, it is the expected reality and I would like the same privileges on my own venues and platforms.
What does this mean?
Can you give an example of a protected class and how the business would be impacted?
So it’s more a question of how to maintain fair platforms, than it is of free speech. The free speech debate will likely be the dominant topic of the coming decade yet no one actually wants unmoderated public spaces. We just can’t agree to the terms. If this debate really was just about the rights of a few fringe groups of extremists, rather than perceived bias in moderation, it wouldn’t be popular.
You can solve this conflict simply by setting clear rules that everyone must abide by. Rules you’d assume any rational person would agree to. Let’s say: On public platforms you’re not allowed to target any individual or group with attacks. But then you’d also have to ban people who say that conservatives are evil. Which we both know is never going to happen - as just the suggestion would lead to political deadlock. The utilitarians believe in catharsis through the expression of justified hate and anger; no, we weed rules that censor not any division, but unjustified division. We need not rules that protect personal dignity, but the dignity of some over others. In Reddit’s term of service they ban abuse of minority groups; specifically because they don’t want to ban abuse of majority groups. The ministeries of truth of our time are staffed by blue haired ideological activists with a social engineering agenda who love science but only as longs as it’s produced by a faculty that’s struggling with a falsifiability crisis.
If you’re running the communications platforms at the heart of our modern societies you must either govern it from the center, or accept that your subtle guidance however well intentioned is driving us towards ever increasing conflict. You have to govern from the center even though your personal ideology tells you that everything is relative, that truths are only meaningful in context, and that ethics is a function of cause and effect. Because to people who rather view ethics as a categorical imperative _you_ are the one who’s is driving division and pushing us towards disaster. And regardless of who’s right or wrong; it’s arrogant and dangerous to allow yourself to become dogmatic.
More and more evidence shows that political beliefs are inheritable[1]. Should that be protected? What about height? We know that shorter men earn less than taller men. Should short people be protected from short jokes? Should the government ensure short and tall people have the same salary? What about attractiveness? Again uglier people are less successful and have less sex. Should they be protected? Should the government put their finger on the scale to ensure ugly people have the same amount of sex?
Either, I should be able to discriminate on any basis, or I can't. The problem at the moment is we have it both ways, in ways that asymmetrically attack one particular group of people.
Nobody really things through any of these inconsistencies though because it doesn't impact most people. As the values in Silicon Valley have significantly diverged from large parts of the US, more and more people are being impacted by these policies.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/09/study-on-tw...
Ideally, I think the concept of protected classes shouldn't exist. I'm not sure if there is a difference of teasing/insulting someone about their height or their race. However, I understand the historical reason why these protective classes were created and why they were needed at the time.
I'm not sure how we move forward on this
Have you ever considered why Silicon Valley exists in America? It's because as America grew, it welcomed in people from all over the world with extremely different backgrounds with extremely different ideas about how to do things. Over time, that situation resulted in extreme innovation where the best ideas prevailed.
Because radical change generally leads to very bad things so you want a slow evolution which means you suppress ideas so they spread more slowly and thus society has more time to process them properly.
>Over time, that situation resulted in extreme innovation where the best ideas prevailed.
And the existence of giant corporate beasts, massive wealth concentration, massive income inequality in the bay area, spread of socially destabilizing ideas, foreign influence over elections, privacy failures, etc., etc. And many would argue many of the ideas, especially recently, aren't revolutionary but rather simply better ways to cheaply exploit people and hide externalities (that society but not the company pays for).
So is this your viewpoint on all forms of diversity, such as racial and socioeconomic inclusion? Or are you selectively changing your definition as you go?
> And the existence of giant corporate beasts, massive wealth concentration...
This has nothing to do with what we're discussing here.
> foreign influence over elections
So you recognize foreign influence over elections, but think it's ok to silence people whose underlying animosity is rooted around accusations of foreign influence in the most recent election?
> and hide externalities
Interesting choice of words considering you're in support of literally hiding externalities of the situation as a whole
Yes. Although in the US we've been working on socioeconomic and racial inclusion for the last few centuries so I feel that's moving slowly enough for society to adjust. Communism shows what happens when you move on the socioeconomic side too quickly and it's not pretty.
I do find it funny how some people think racial and socioeconomic inclusion is a new thing that is just now happening. Do you people never pay attention to history, ever?
>This has nothing to do with what we're discussing here.
You talked about the glory of change in terms of SV. I mentioned the dark flip side of change in terms of SV. You can try to cherry pick parts of the story but I'll keep pointing out that you're doing so.
That's pretty hyperbolic.
A lot of people do. You can't really find out what's going on in the world from the mainstream media in any real resolution or detail, and "other websites on the internet" don't generally have thousands and thousands of people livestreaming actual live video of what's happening.
Perhaps this could be rectified by our society working to make bandwidth an order of magnitude or two cheaper, so that there can be lots more live video hosts. As it stands, you're pretty much stuck with a few giant megacorps like Google or Twitch.
Meanwhile there are tons of crazy extremists streaming. A lot of it doesnt provide an accurate view and might only be useful as a potentially biased first hand account to digged through by journalists and historians after the fact
Regardless of whether you listen to the streamers, it's an amazing tool for seeing what is actually happening in a specific place. You can ignore the commentary or ideology (not that that is really an issue, most streams are just normies) and see what is happening.
Western mainstream media is a lot of things, but comprehensive and nuanced it is not.
This isn't just the stations own content. If you paid to put content on television, radio, or in the paper, the publisher has always had the right to publish or not publish content (with some limits, but nothing this article speaks about would be protected by law). You couldn't have a cable community access channel with whatever content you wanted.
YouTube/ Twitter/ Facebook have been and remain far more permissive in publishing outside content than any other media in history.
You are implying that there is some kind of "new" restrictions on speech, but this is literally hundreds of years old.
Let me use your analogy, though.
Let's say there are many newspapers in town. Is it fair for me to refuse to publish certain things? Sure.
What if I own the only newspaper in town? It gets more complicated. But hey, perhaps the town has a thriving samizdat culture, so maybe it's fine.
But then what if I start buying out every printing press in town? And on top of that, what if I'm pressured by the mayor to not publish something? This is a big issue now, right?
How can that situation be addressed? People often suggest regulating that sole paper, but to me the answer is taking steps to ensure that we never end up with one newspaper in town. And we definitely don't let that paper control all of the printing presses.
The "Public Square" assumes the space is owned by... well the public. Either the town or city. That's not the case here. Even if it were, the reach of a person in the public square is tiny... a few hundred people if they are absolutely lucky.
Besides... your rights in actual public squares haven't changed a bit. Save the fact that COVID has shut down many public spaces.
> But then what if I start buying out every printing press in town?
You mean the way Clear Channel has actually bought up a huge percentage of radio stations?
The way big right wing corporations have bought up the majority of local television stations in the country?
Is it "fair" that the majority of television broadcast stations are owned by a few right-wing media companies?
For what it's worth, all three "competing" local broadcast television stations are owned by the same company now.
I'd love to know why people think it's super important that Facebook and Twitter cease their supposedly "biased" curating while so many broadcast companies which reach 10s of millions of homes get a free pass.
By the way, I don't think forcing broadcasters or social media to not police their content is the way to go - I'd much rather make sure they don't become monopolistic. The situation you describe with TV must not happen with social media too.
Is it more because it's conservative views being censored now?
American conservatives, being as... loud as they are, did make the issue more mainstream, but people have been bringing up these problems for as long as the internet has been around.
I'd love to see more variety in social media. Unfortunately network effects favor big single player. Also, every time a new entrant threatens, they get sucked up by an existing player. Sadly, since we've allowed Facebook to swallow everything which isn't bolted down, the only real competition seems to be Chinese owned[0].
(And I sympathize with foreign governments struggling with Facebook & Instagram being US owned).
[0] I have no qualms about Chinese people or even Chinese companies in general. But the way the Chinese government operates, I am skeptical of platforms based on speech.
We also have to acknowledge that content moderation at scale is impossible.[ß] The lines are hazy and fluid, context matters, and incentives are outright perverse. The volume of incoming material is overwhelming. On top of that, people with money, fame or lulz on the line will game any rules based system.
But what if these online syndicates had to publish corrections for their worst offenses? News outlets have had to do that for decades, after all. We could as a society take this as an opportunity to move the goal posts for the better. Instead of allowing the correction to be buried in a dark corner nobody ever sees, specify that the correction itself has to be displayed as prominently as the original news itself.
You're doing print? Then that correction will eat up prime eyeball real estate from the publication. (And make it clear you messed up.) You're an online syndicate? The correction needs to go through the same amplification mechanism and get as prominently on top of the users' feeds as the original item did. It eats up prime screen real estate and makes it equally clear that you messed up.
This would have three benefits:
1) Content publishers become accountable for their actions. The US media in particular is obsessed with just throwing whatever they get their hands on out there and have the readers sort it out for themselves. To hell with accuracy.
2) The requirement to surface corrections as widely as the original item(s) provides a second-order incentive. Your publication forfeits revenue and opportunity from whatever other news are currently floating around, costing both money and reputation. Mess up more often, get punished more often.
3) The readers would benefit from increased media literacy education. Get bombarded with garbage and outright lies? Receive more fact-checks after the fact, published and syndicated through the same funnels that fed you the original trash.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from accountability.
ß: Mike Masnick has been saying this for years. For a longer take, see https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...
Lets say Biden Tweets a big fat lie to his millions of followers. That lie in turn gets retweeted by millions of people. Next, Biden posts a retraction. Do all of his followers also have to post a retraction? Does Twitter have to implement some kind of retweet retraction mechanic?
What if the original user is obscure and someone famous quote tweets a big fat lie instead of inventing their own big-fat lie? Does it make a difference if the quoter was agreeing with the original?
How do you deal with users who refuse to post a retraction or even leave twitter entirely? Is there an auto-retraction? Who decides if and when something is retracted?
> The requirement to surface corrections as widely as the original item
Imagine for a moment you are running an obscure little website, "The 2nd amendment times", and you post a little story on your blog about how Obama is getting appointed to replace Biden in 2024 and he's coming to take everyone's guns. All 17 of your readers read your story and laugh it off except one passes it on to Rush Limbaugh who Tweets it.
Now 17 million people blow up your blog. You are featured on Fox News and dozens of top right-wing pundits repost your site.
Who is "accountable" here? How would this get retracted? If you post a new article on the front page of your blog saying you dreamt the whole thing after smoking too much weed, does that make it all good even though only your original 17 readers are likely to see this correction?
That's a confusing phrase. It took me a while to realize you meant "supporting privacy violations" rather than "supporting restrictions on privacy violations". You seem to be lumping speech restrictions and privacy violations into the same bucket, but I see them as very different, often even opposed to each other. The US elevates free speech higher than privacy. Europe elevates privacy higher than free speech. In many European countries the press isn't allowed to report the names or faces of suspects. In many European countries you can't take pictures of people walking on the street.
Doxing is a clear case where free speech is directly opposed to privacy. Same with right to be forgotten.
And yet today there was an article in the front page claiming that Signal is a problem because its end to end encryption can be used by anyone, even "bad actors", to communicate. That's an attack on both privacy and free speech, and I wouldn't be shocked if GP had that article (and others like it) in mind.
Mind you, most of the comments here rightfully called that article out for the absurd fear-mongering it was, and even the increasingly common censorship apologists were unusually silent. I was pleasantly surprised, even if it did still get a lot of upvotes and reached the front page.
For what you bring up with doxing, I don't think I have a very satisfying answer. I definitely won't advocate for keeping it on social media websites. But I can't advocate for all-powerful tools that would allow even for actually dangerous content like that to be tracked down and removed from everywhere, because there is no way to ensure that tools like that will not be abused.
Remove it from Twitter, block it on your own federation nodes, try to bring the perpetrators to justice, but, as painful as it is, you shouldn't have a magic button that would be able to completely eradicate that from the internet.
It would also be good to reduce data collection and to teach people to be more conscious of what they share to prevent private information from leaking to begin with.
I’m reminded of folks claiming that their voices are silenced but say so on Twitter, at physical events, on the news, etc.?
The irony seems mind boggling to me.
No. There was for a little while, but the number of avenues that one has for publishing unpopular speech are at a major low vs 10 or 15 years ago.
Now, the internet has reached the status quo of broadcast media prior to it: a small handful of gigantic powerful organizations have total veto over what can be published.
Everyone's words and ideas should be able to live or die on their own merit, and not be bottlenecked by shitty hosting and blanket domain bans in posts/DMs.
There are tons of places where you can post stuff; Facebook will happily censor DMs between consenting adults that contain your domain name when they want to share links to your content to others.
Become too unpopular (or, more accurately, increase in popularity too much with the "wrong" people) and your host will cancel your account. There aren't that many datacenter operators.
But these platforms are owned by these companies.
What rules do we put in place that they have to host some of this content? Blatant misinformation, vague encouragement of violence... hate?
Is the price of free speech that someone has to host it? Who doesn't want to?
Why do they have to be rules? Why can't we have a culture of tolerance? Robots aren't running these companies. They're people, just like you and me. They can choose to be tolerant.
Tolerance is about tolerating the most horrid things. Not because it's nice or those things have some value. They're horrid, they have no value. It's because the alternative is worse. Because censorship is worse. Because when a person is censored, when they can't speak, they resort to violence and through censorship, you encourage violence. And violence can't be censored. It can only be suppressed with further violence.
What does that mean exactly? By that you mean you require someone host, intolerance?
Is it a "culture of tolerance" if someone spews hate on me on a social media platform because of my race, because we're tolerating that?
I'm still trying to figure out what folks think this alternate choice looks like... do we require people to host whatever gets posted?
Anything that’s not harassment, a direct threat or direct call to violence should be allowed.
To your example, if someone attacks you personally then that would count as harassment and be moderated out.
Let's say I have a platform that let's people comment, so outside of direct harassment I shouldn't be allowed to delete things?
Is your platform as large as Twitter, is it one of the main communication platforms in society, does it allow users to wield social and political influence? Is it a proverbial public square?
If so, then in my view a wise and emotionally mature person would elect not to censor opinions, realizing that there are more important things at stake than hurt feelings.
Of course I might be wrong when claiming that censoring opinions and mandating a specific morality will lead to more conflict (see another comment I made in this thread for more on that). Maybe it won't. I guess we'll find out in the next decade or so.
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.[1]
If you haven't read Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies" then I'd suggest you do.
> If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
I think it's safe to say that the extent of censorship perpetrated by the big tech is not limited to the voices that teach others to "answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols". They of course ban some of that too, but they ban quite a lot more.
The real paradox of the paradox of tolerance is how many people use Popper quotes to rationalize their own intolerance for people with differing ideas, without any awareness that Popper was speaking only of intolerance for people who resort to violence.
And yeah, I have read Popper as well as Wikipedia. Saying "it's not accurate" isn't accurate.
Big difference.
I copied and pasted the entirety of the top section of Wikipedia with no editing. That section says "if a society is tolerant without limit" (my emphasis) which goes to your point that there is a threshold here.
No it isn’t. No society survives if it is tolerant without limit. You are arguing that anything and everything should be allowed. No laws, no justice.
I suppose it is a valid position to have but I don’t think a practical one over the long term if you want to be alive.
But that doesn't actually happen in the vast majority of cases. Most people try other outlets. If there are no other outlets available, then they tend to give up. Deplatforming has been shown to work.
And it's worth remembering that going violent means putting their life at high risk. Their family at risk. Their possessions and personal freedom at risk. And it means hurting other people. There's fortunately not many people willing to take that step and pay that price.
Just think about what would cause more violence: banning all nazis from Twitter? Or allowing nazis free reign to talk about how horrible minorities are, and what they'd like to do to them?
Like, the problems you're describing are real but they aren't new, and aren't particularly a bigger threat now than they were before.
Politics is hard, and absolutist ideas like completely unrestricted speech, a completely unrestricted economy, or complete privacy are at best lunacy, at worst downright impossible. I don't think I would want to live in a society where anyone could say anything whenever and wherever, where corporations were completely unregulated, or where law enforcement could never hope to gather evidence because of privacy restrictions. So I think tools and methods for restricting speech and privacy must exist, and they will fall into the wrong hands, but it's ultimately up to the public to collectively decide and enforce what is acceptable and what's not. It's an endless struggle that's been happening not since the birth of the Internet, but since people started living in groups.
Yes, because society has a plurality of institutions that constrain power. Restrictions (even speech restrictions themselves) are subject to the court of public opinion (we're talking about them right now), there's the judiciary, political opposition and so on.
This argument never had any pull for me for the same reason I'm against abolishing the police or abolishing surveillance or anything else. Power, even in the hands of people I don't like, can't be exercised arbitrarily.
My birth place influences my position a lot. After the end of the war we enshrined the principle of 'militant democracy' in our basic law. Giving the state and its institutions the explicit power to deal with threats to the constitutional order, not repeating the mistakes of the weakened government of the Weimar period that gave rise to unchecked extremist forces.
To bring it back to the topic of the US and Facebook. To me the censorship is not a sign of authoritarianism or anything, but lack of strong institutions. In the face of rising extremism and disorder Facebook effectively has to step in and do something to their best ability because in general the US has very few tools to deal with this at a democratic level.
When I see pictures of someone dressed as a shaman on the dais of the senate and lawmakers cowering behind benches it's very weird to me to draw the conclusion that the pressing issue is too much authority and not enough freedom of expression.
Obviously you don't want to dismiss a growing problem, but things seem much more manageable today than during these past incidents.
No
You're basically saying, I don't worry about abuse of power because there will always be some check on it, no matter how ineffectual. That just flies in the face of every time someone managed to use their power to overcome whatever checks were in place.
And this is like a constant theme in history. All the checks on Ceaser's power didn't prevent the Roman Republic from falling.
In this case it is Utilitarian ethics.
https://www.projectcensored.org/top-25-censored-stories-of-a...
Just to pick any example:
What's the culture war label for the fate of journalist Abby Martin?
https://www.projectcensored.org/24-silenced-in-savannah-jour...
Isn't this what is basically happening right now?
I don't have a horse in the game, but I do remember that quote:
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
When I see lots of "this group denied" and "this online account disabled" stuff, I think they should weather the storm.
I don't know, is this just a control-grab-during-a-crisis move?
If a different private company wants to host the neonazis, they can go for it. It turns out it's /difficult/ for them because most people find them repulsive.
I don't hear anyone making this argument for child abuse images for what it's worth.
Regarding the “different private company”. Some of your people are already trying to deplatform Telegram now, because those “neonazis” went there after they were banned everywhere else.
I have been using this platform to connect with my family for years and now all of a sudden my family and I are supporters of the “neonazi” movement somehow, because of how broad the definition of “neonazi” is, for the American left wing activists.
Maybe you are okay with the collateral damage “for the greater good” but I am not willing to make this sacrifice to satisfy the American left-wingers and their witch hunt. I sympathize with the idea, but no, thank you. Please, think of another solution for your problems.
Maybe, just maybe, you need to somehow use the law system of your country to stop them criminals? Or, in case they don’t do anything illegal (I’m not implying that they don’t, I’ve no idea) - maybe you just leave them be until they do something illegal? And then like catch them and stuff? And leave me my Telegram to call my mum every evening?
Or - wow, even crazier idea - you do not ban them at all, but instead of that you follow their threads and actually prevent them from doing anything illegal when they starting to discuss it? My guess it would be much easier to do when you have this kind of transparency.
I understand it’s not that easy as massive bans of everything that moves in a slightly different direction than yours, but this would probably be the right way. Thanks in advance.
If the moderation is too strict then people leave and setup elsewhere. If it is just the trolls leaving then no one cares and it is a win/win.
It seems unlikely to go wrong the other way, since people are mostly sane about this stuff and agree on what should be shut out (calls for violence, conspiratorial nutjob stuff, widespread misinformation). obviously the calculation would change if Putin-style misinformation was being defended by these people, but it's not.
I do not think censorship is justifiable for potential or non-quantifiable, collective psychic harm.
Can you provide an example?
However, the imminent apprehension of harm (from a direct, credible or specific threat), does comport with the concept of assault and is grounds for moderation. Likewise, demonstrating proximate cause from someones actions to a specific harm/damages, would also be grounds for censorship.
This includes moderation of left wing users and things that probably should not be banned(especially minority voices). It's just the the current crop of far right and conspiracy folks complain a lot more/louder.
That said I do worry that it will be an extra excuse for authoritarian countries but it probably won't change their behavior
Twitter can omit realDonaldTrump, no concerns whatsoever.
But any one prohibiting realDonaldTrump from trolling, by whatever medium, would be alarming.
Imagine if Hitler were currently alive and rising to power in Germany, and imagine if Silicon Valley were located in Germany. Would you be ok with Silicon Valley de-platforming and doing everything in their power to silence the Nazi-opposition political party? And knowing what's about to come, do you think the stance of "they can build their own communication systems" would be beneficial to humanity as a whole?
I'm aware this is kind of extreme but there are multiple responses that missed the point.
Contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilising anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech.[1]
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-v...
Probably yes.
What everyone's been talking about the past few weeks has absolutely nothing to do with shutting down dangerous websites, and any terrorist who leaves a trail of online posts that can be used to track them doesn't need anything special to be done to make that possible.
People have been talking about the major social media platforms—who are, arguably, already pretty high up there on the list of "the wrong hands"—deplatforming users actively supporting attacks—physical attacks, in some cases—on our government, our democracy, and our Constitution.
I mean, there is stuff to be genuinely concerned about in all of this as regards the future, and there's a real discussion to be had here, but frankly, I don't think this is it.