Hacker News Reader

The problem is defining harmful content. For some it's china lab theory, for others CRT/anti-racist propoganda or stolen election. What ever FB censures, half the country will be mad at it. FB can't win here.

Personally I think "harmful content" concept is extremely dangerous when applied to social networks. If 5 years ago it was unquestionable that USA has more press and thought freedom than India, Russia or China, the situation now is much more nuanced and really depends on the topic discussed. What it mean for democracy in US long term is a big question.

> Personally I think "harmful content" concept is extremely dangerous when applied to social networks.

It's a kludge. The real problem is broadcast technology becoming too easy to access (in the form of social media). It's reduced transmission friction too much, which has seriously undermined the ability of the "marketplace of ideas" to filter the good from the bad. There's a sweet spot between monopolization and total democratization of broadcast technology, and I don't think we're there anymore.

> If 5 years ago it was unquestionable that USA has more press and thought freedom than India, Russia or China, the situation now is much more nuanced and really depends on the topic discussed.

Come on. You could only say such a thing if you're almost totally ignorant of "press and thought freedom" situation in China. About the only thing you can say China is more permissive of than the US is outright racism, and that's only at the social level (you can still legally be a flaming racist in the US, it's just that many people won't want to associate with you and many will remind you you're full of shit). I'm less familiar with Russia and India, but I highly doubt the situations there will salvage your statement.

This is actually a really insightful way to look at it. I gather you are saying Facebook should not be the one to do the "filtering," but also that it's not ideal for each individual to have to do it themselves. What's the solution?

> What's the solution?

The easiest and least problematic is to add friction, which in my fantasies would be to ban sites like Facebook and Twitter outright that provide too-easy access to ready-made audiences of millions. They're basically like handing out loaded guns to a class of first graders playing on a playground. Guns are fine and shouldn't be monopolized by one group or another, but they should also not be in the hands of untrained first graders on playgrounds.

A somewhat less radical form would be to kneecap the ability to share widely on social media sites: no public posts, sharing limited to direct connections (and a cap the number of those to 1000 or something), no features to easily re-share a post outside of its initial audience, get rid of groups, kick out organizations, etc. Bring back classic web forums for communities, and push people who want to build an audience back to blogs and personal websites.

>The easiest and least problematic is to add friction, which in my fantasies would be to ban sites like Facebook and Twitter outright that provide too-easy access to ready-made audiences of millions. They're basically like handing out loaded guns to a class of first graders playing on a playground. Guns are fine and shouldn't be monopolized by one group or another, but they should also not be in the hands of untrained first graders on playgrounds.

Friction, or training? In the example of guns, there are SCREENING (not exactly the same as friction) and education/training that many seem to agree are a good solution. Could the same be applied to social media?

>A somewhat less radical form would be to kneecap the ability to share widely on social media sites: no public posts, sharing limited to direct connections (and a cap the number of those to 1000 or something), no features to easily re-share a post outside of its initial audience, get rid of groups, kick out organizations, etc.

This is again just letting Facebook dictate the solution - not that much different than the unilateral censorship they do.

>Bring back classic web forums for communities, and push people who want to build an audience back to blogs and personal websites.

Seems like this is happening today, and might be a good approach.

> Friction, or training?

Friction.

> In the example of guns, there are SCREENING (not exactly the same as friction) and education/training that many seem to agree are a good solution. Could the same be applied to social media?

Not really. The analogy between guns and social media is not perfect. Training as a solution has special problems with applied to media access that it doesn't have with guns. Specifically, it would probably amount to some kind of indoctrination program. Gun training is a technical topic, like how to drive a car safely.

>> A somewhat less radical form would be to kneecap the ability to share widely on social media sites: no public posts, sharing limited to direct connections (and a cap the number of those to 1000 or something), no features to easily re-share a post outside of its initial audience, get rid of groups, kick out organizations, etc.

> This is again just letting Facebook dictate the solution - not that much different than the unilateral censorship they do.

Actually, that was me dictating a solution to Facebook that stopped short of shutting them down. I'm pretty sure they'd hate to follow it.

And the important difference is that everything I suggested is content neutral, so it can't accurately be called "censorship."

> Seems like this is happening today, and might be a good approach.

Yes, but if it's happening today, I'd bet money it's mostly people who can handle social media relatively well. The problematic people who probably shouldn't have access to a broadcast megaphone are likely still on Facebook and Twitter and are unlikely to leave.

Adding friction helps slow down the honest but gullible. But if you have an organized, professional disinformation campaign, they're willing to do the work to push against the friction.

I suppose they count on their gullible followers to multiply their efforts, and hindering that will have an effect, even against organized campaigns, and that's good. But I wonder whether it will make organized campaigns relatively more powerful. If so, that might not be a net win.

What a lot of people mean by "Harmful content" isn't opinions and discourse on whether something is good or bad. Harmful content is disinformation about what something is.

It's a concept that can be abused for certain, and I suppose that makes it dangerous.

Unfortunately, there's also dangers in not intervening.

Every space in which valuable discourse takes place has to take some form of order including restraint seriously, otherwise the bad drives out the good. And if you look at the places we take discourse most seriously -- institutions of learning, courtrooms, legislative bodies -- because valued outcomes rely on how robust the discourse is, more order and restraint requirements seem to become the rule. And yet there's also lots of thought put into how to allow as much input as possible, even outright adversarial input.

It's possible that at a certain scale, social media systems have to move from a laissez faire approach to some sort of similar balance. It'd probably be best if each took responsibility to decide what that is. Twitter's approach doesn't have to be the same as FBs, but everybody has some responsibility to try and make discourse as good as they can (at least, if the reason they value freedom of speech is because of the value of discourse, rather than as a personal indulgence).

> What ever FB censures, half the country will be mad at it. FB can't win here.

People across the political spectrum are already mad at FB, and some have decided on a posture that lets them push the drama that FB is biased against them no matter what FB's actual policy is. FB has nothing to lose by making its best faith effort. And I'd like to think that no matter what someone's general political sensibilities are they can find a way to advocate for them under conditions where order and some degree of accountability for truthfulness is required of them.

> And I'd like to think that no matter what someone's general political sensibilities are they can find a way to advocate for them under conditions where order and some degree of accountability for truthfulness is required of them.

The problem is that the sides don't even agree on the same facts anymore. For example, some think there was election fraud, and some don't. Some believe there is actual evidence of election fraud, and some don't. And neither side is without some evidence. For example, there have been election audits and those seem to show there was no fraud, so that's evidence. But at the same time, there are other auditors that show very convincing evidence that there was at least some additional voter fraud beyond what was detected in the audits.

If I recall correctly, there were some science experiments in the past that sort of "wiggled around" the truth for a period of decades as they got closer to the truth. With current events, it seems like it's a lot more like that than to just look outside the window and say it's raining or not.

For example, look at how certain views were banned on YouTube... until the CDC/FDA/etc. itself reversed its position and now those are the mainstream or at least acceptable views.

Isn't it usually the case that a difference in opinion ultimately is the result of a difference of belief about facts? And if that's the case, if a biased moderator of any platform can decide what the facts are, that is effectively the same as deciding what opinions are valid. And although there are some clear cases of ridiculous beliefs that we can think about (flat earth, etc.), very quickly we get into murky territory.

I mean, just imagine if Facebook was established in the deep south, and suppressed all non-Christian opinions as counter-factual? "The evidence is clear" they would say, "here in the Holy Bible".

> The problem is that the sides don't even agree on the same facts anymore.

That's certainly going to be the case at times, but that's also no reason to give up. Where substantial outcomes rely on facts, good institutions build ways of addressing contention about the facts themselves into to the order they impose on discourse. It can't guarantee a correct outcome -- as you say, sometimes you have to wiggle around the truth for a while first -- but it's better than the nihilism of failing to engage the problem altogether.

> some think there was election fraud, and some don't.

The institutions where questions of election fraud were mediated were accessible to both sides in equal measure -- arguably biased toward the side that lost, given how the privilege of selecting judicial appointments has shaken out over the last two decades and who held the resources/power available to federal and various state executive authorities last fall. And they seem to have determined that evidence of systemic outcome-changing fraud was thin indeed.

I suppose it's possible to imagine a different outcome from a similarly robust process over time, but if there are "other auditors that show very convincing evidence" of outcome-changing fraud, it would be interesting hear what that specifically is, and why that evidence didn't make its way into the venues that actually mattered in a moment when the outgoing administration had considerable advantages.

> But at the same time, there are other auditors that show very convincing evidence that there was at least some additional voter fraud beyond what was detected in the audits.

What evidence, exactly? IIRC, there were some professional-looking mathy analyses that claimed to find it, but they all had glaring methodological errors.

I think there are cases where "the sides don't even agree on the same facts anymore" and both have some claim to truth, but it's not on election fraud or the election results.

> ... and some have decided on a posture that lets them push the drama that FB is biased against them no matter what FB's actual policy is.

"The only way to find the limits of what's possible is to push past them to the impossible." I forget who said it, but some people will push what they can get away with as far as possible, and then try to go farther. No matter where FB sets the line, they'll try to go past it, because they care about winning, not about civil discourse or reasonable standards or fairness or anything like that. (Rules are for the other side.) The fact that they can then play the martyr that FB is oppressing is a side benefit.

> Harmful content is disinformation about what something is.

This is the crux of the issue. Legacy institutions are used to determining what is true and therefore what is inside the bounds of allowable opinion.

This was their domain for decades but it can now be seriously challenged by relatively few people due to the amplification in sharing of human thought through the internet.

Their degradation was the only outcome likely from networking so many individuals together.

'Disinformation', even if you are inclined to trust legacy institutions, should be viewed with a healthy degree of skepticism. Even if we grant that legacy institutions always had the closest approximation reality over the past several decades (and this is generous).

Everyone should now be able to recognize these players for what they are: self interested actors bending public perception of reality to convenient conclusions for their own benefit. Given this, it is not surprising that people are more motivated than ever before to uncover past warpings of past narratives. They are searching for their historical moment.

Now we can grant that it may be best to have these legacy institutions looking out for our interests rather than some unknowable future state of governance. But checking their past conduct is a textbook littered with dark chapters that is now being viewed with the understanding that these are the rosier sections. Not a good look. As we move forward in time the failings of existing governments will only become more apparent not less; and it will continue to make less and less sense to believe in them.

The alternative to this would be to either restrict information flow to some pre-digital age or to perpetuate totalitarian regimes in charge of protecting their own existence by manipulating the masses into passivity.

And here is the second crux, it is only the legacy institutions from the 20th century who are perpetuating the conflict. Were the doubters given license to control their own territory, we have every indication that they would leave the past well enough alone and forge ahead. But the 20th century just cannot let go its dreams of total domination of thought and reality.

> "These people, most of whom would speak only anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss internal conversations, said Facebook’s executives were more worried about fixing the perception that Facebook was amplifying harmful content than figuring out whether it actually was amplifying harmful content."

I don't work at FB, but I suspect this is bullshit.

This passage is a good summary:

"Facebook is not a giant right-wing echo chamber. But it does contain a giant right-wing echo chamber — a kind of AM talk radio built into the heart of Facebook’s news ecosystem, with a hyper-engaged audience of loyal partisans who love liking, sharing and clicking on posts from right-wing pages, many of which have gotten good at serving up Facebook-optimized outrage bait at a consistent clip."

And then there is the advertising profit that these enthusiasts of the absurd generate for the corporation. What former US President DJT called, "the golden goose".

Trustworthiness simply isn't in their corporate DNA.

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im...