Online Speech Is Now an Existential Question for Tech
wsj.com
wsj.com
Take an example of Timrit Gibru[1]. Whether you agree or not, she seems to be completely and utterly glued to Twitter. She posts so frequent, at the time of writing this post, her last tweet was 5 minutes old. She tweets every few minutes in her waking hours. Vile, contemptful tweets of her agenda and rallying up support for her unchallenged arguments. Over 100k followers. These people are out there to aggressively spread their influence bypassing press, bypassing their counter parts and ramming through without challenge.
I am afraid, this is going to get worse unless we institutionalize professional journalism again, with deep analysis of the issues and present both sides of the view, and allow public comments. The society is like putty, it can be shaped and formed by those in power, we've just provided them with a massive Tech steamroller that flattens any bumps.
I understand Parler and other fringe social media platforms and how they can be damaging to the society. I am equally concerned of this slow motion political-correctness-mob-justice culture that will be impossible to evade. I want to go back to old days to be honest. Handing over press amplification to individuals is a shit idea. I want proper institutions and journals to present content in long form with citations of their sources. Imagine if we get rid of Science journals and just let researchers tweet their experimental results. No one challenging their claims, no peer review, nothing. That's what press has become now-a-days.
Arguably, if a private company is pressured to censor by a government, their censorship actions becomes state action. First Amendment protections may apply in the US. This is an unresolved area in US law. It's come up where cities have outsourced management of some public spaces such as parks and plazas, and the outsourcing company prohibited protests.[1]
Worth seeing: "Censored", an official U.S. Government training cartoon from WWII. Written by "Dr. Seuss", by the way.[2] In that era, censorship was made very explicit. Letters didn't just disappear. They had sections cut out and were stamped "Opened by Censor".
Maybe if you put your name on it, you should be able to say it without prior restraint. Most of the serious problems come from anonymous speech.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-detroit-agree-inter...
1. healthy amount of diversity and competition among a large number of publishers
2. robustness of free speech protections
My speculation is that the more competition there is among a large number of publishers, and the more diverse their reasons are for publishing, the harder it becomes for attackers to chip away at free speech protections.
But it's just speculation so I'd like some background reading on the topic.
It's certainly worse if a small number of providers have a monopoly. The European Union uses, as a rule of thumb, that there have to be four independent alternatives in a market for price competition to work. That may also be a useful guide for free expression.
Book publishers now have a choke point - Amazon. That's a monopsony problem, where there's one dominant buyer. When there were many publishers and many bookstores, there was no central choke point. That's over.
terse: anonymity + ephemerality.
Now, with the good has come the questionable and outright bad. Q-anon being only the latest example.
The chans are the modern equivalent of city parks with their soapboxes. There is both good and bad, because speech on the 'chans is almost completely free. And, IMO, that's a good thing.
I firmly believe that civilization in general would benefit from more truly free spaces online. Free and anonymous speech is one of the cornerstones that the US was founded upon, after all.
Not to say any of that's a bad thing; in fact I'll say it's why the site is more of a culture factory than both the mainstreams Twitter/Reddit types and the alternatve Gab/Parler/whatevers
This is a passage from the Unabomber's manifesto he wrote back in the 1990s. Turned out to be disturbingly prophetic.
I also don't think the right and left axis is misleading. It's up to the majority on right and left to realise they generally have more in common with the majority on the 'other' side than they have with the extremists on 'their' side.
Perhaps someone who pays for the WSJ can weigh in.
This is not an interesting or prophetic statement, it's simply how human beings have worked and have always worked.
This is honestly restating the obvious and IMHO not contributing much to intelligent discussion here.
It's unfortunate that the glamour of violence adds nostalgic credibility that isn't particularly deserved.
(It's a bad way of discrediting an argument; there's little in the Manifesto that isn't a regurgitation of some other previous thinker, and unless you're in the cabin pooping in the hole with him, there's really no such thing as Kaczynskism).
Maybe in some narrow context it would make specific sense to add, but randomly sprinkling it across various threads is negligence if not vandalism.
I came across this found it interesting and decided to share. If I post something but later find a more appropriate place to make that comment would it be better to delete the old comment?