Notice how everybody seems to have accepted that non-mainstream positions, sources, and interest-groups must be banned, and now they're simply arguing about who should be doing it and how?
This is not OK.
This is not OK.
In any case, the article doesn’t even come close to saying that. It details an internal discussion at Facebook about whether they should make data about the most popular posts public. Where is the word “ban” even mentioned?
Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Con: LOL no...no not those views
Me: So....deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones
First of all algorithmic censorship is real and has been exposed quite a few times with whistleblowers, undercover journalists and just banning people for things mainstream media organizations do routinely (like filming someone's house). The bar for repercussions is set lower for anti-establishment and "right-wing" content creators, although it is beginning to affect radical leftists too and they are beginning to wake up to this fact (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/anti-corbyn-blair-censors...)
And your post only mentions one specific aspect of the libertarian / fiscal side of conservatism while conservatism is much more broad and now due to the polarization of society other non-related issues have gifted themselves along partisan lines (most of which used to be populist left wing causes): Vaccines, masks, lock downs, Israel, free speech, 2nd amendment rights, anti-establishment stances, free speech, section 230, big pharma, etc. And even then for fiscal conservatism, which is the more benign and popular aspect of it, it is hard to find on front pages and default news feed of the major platforms anything related to it.
Talking about cutting social programs, which is the counterpart of cutting taxes, will draw criticism, especially if it affects the favored minority of the time in some way in some percentage, will get you demonetized and demonized which usually means lynch mobs, mass reporting and worse.
> And your post only mentions one specific aspect of the libertarian / fiscal side of conservatism while conservatism is much more broad and now due to the polarization of society other non-related issues have gifted themselves along partisan lines (most of which used to be populist left wing causes): Vaccines, masks, lock downs, Israel, free speech, 2nd amendment rights, anti-establishment stances, free speech, section 230, big pharma, etc. And even then for fiscal conservatism, which is the more benign and popular aspect of it, it is hard to find on front pages and default news feed of the major platforms anything related to it.
I see all those topics in my FB feed so at least from my perspective I have no idea what you're complaining about.
Shapiro, even if he is at the top, only represents a very small fraction of the overall attention space people see compared to everything else that's on Facebook. This is a cherry picked example at best. Also Shapiro is not anti-establishment by any definition of the word, see his stance on BlackRock buying up real estate as a recent example. Also outside debating naive socialist college students, he's not really an intellectual powerhouse outside variations of "it's a free market, they can do what they want and it will turn out fine; here's my cherry-picked facts", which is a narrative Facebook has a direct interest to promote. Anyway I digress.
> I see all those topics in my FB feed so at least from my perspective I have no idea what you're complaining about.
Your personal anecdotes are irrelevant. Also I never said they were outright banned, I said algorithmically manipulated. For instance Facebook is actively suppressing topics that are discussing vaccines in a negative light, such as discussion on long term effects which we obviously don't know since they just came out.
Presumably, you work at FB otherwise you wouldn't know this ;)
Hardly -- look at Roose's posts about CrowdTangle.* He is in the top 10 in every report, usually multiple times. Mostly the top 10 is Shapiro, Bigino, Fox etc.
* Good collection at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/technology/facebook-data.... But if you don't like the NYT you can simply read the daily reports on twitter yourself (up to the date when FB removed access to the tool). It reports the opposite of what you claim.
You are conflating being at the top with having a majority of the attention volume.
And even if this kind of content had the majority of the volume, the presence of popularity doesn't negate efforts of suppression. If anything that proves that Facebook is more popular with Boomers as opposed to the younger audience, which is also the kind of demographic these talk heads attract.
The story at least proves that FB has a need to for certain content suppression and has failed doing so, at least in the eyes of the leftists public opinion.
Twitter suspended Jason Whitlock for tweeting "Black Lives Matter founder buys $1.4 million home in Topanga, which has a black population of 1.4%. She's with her people!"
They suspended the Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan for supporting the COVID lab leak theory.
They blocked sharing the Hunter Biden story (for which they later apologized, after it blew up despite their efforts to suppress it).
So while the implication you're making is obvious, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The evidence shows that social media companies censor people for political reasons.
I was responding to the idea of "people start talking abstractly about “non-mainstream positions”". Whenever anyone gets that generic about what the problem was, be suspicious.
How do we address this systems design challenge without censorship?
I see the root problem as the same as general device addiction. Seeking instathrills. So, teaching mindfulness and attention-strength-training. General mental health.
Today, a significant percentage of the population believes that the election was stolen from donald trump due to extreme election fraud. Another, similar, significant percentage believes that vaccines are at best dangerous and at worst implanting microchips and turning people magnetic. That's people not operating under the same basis of facts as everyone else.
Email has been in that position for a long time, so much so that the quality of censorship is frequently advertised as a feature by mail services.
You can still pretty easily "opt in" to receiving their communications. You just can't force someone else to be the middleman. If they set up their own blog or forum you're completely free to visit that.
This is similar to how you can't force bob@example.org to forward you your friend's messages, but your friend can send them to you from their own personal email.
The locus of agency is on your friend to put in the effort themselves if they can't find anyone willing to help them spread their speech.
Maybe bob@example.com says something Google doesn’t like so gets blocked from sending to gmail.com or any other email server hosted by Google, which is a huge swath of people similar in scale to the YouTube audience.
Through either the accumulation of capital (e.g. computational power) or consolidation of political power, central authorities can police traffic to censor information on a massive scale, even on decentralized protocols like email.
So yes, at that point, you could argue that the locus of agency falls on Bob to start his own tech empire or whatever, but that becomes absurd. We’ve already seen censorship at the infrastructure level and even the domain registrar level, which is extreme.
There’s always a middle man on the Internet, or any peer to peer system with more than two edges for that matter. The problem arises when that middle man grows into a giant leviathan hell bent on manipulating the conversation of parties between itself.
If these people continue to use Gmail rather than more open alternatives, does that not indicate that they don't want to hear what Bob has to say?
> We’ve already seen censorship at the infrastructure level and even the domain registrar level, which is extreme.
There is absolutely zero good-faith use of the internet that can result in you getting irreversibly banned by a significant number of domain registrars, therefore this example is completely unrelated to the original quote (replicated below for convenience):
> it is better to leave a few “noxious branches to their luxuriant growth” than to risk “[injuring] the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits.”
There is a lot of validity to the quote. I largely agree with it. But the second part is important - it cannot be interpreted as "we better make it illegal for Twitter to ban people calling for genocide".
How is it unrelated? A noxious branch is exactly something that many or most people would consider abhorrent and perceive as not in good faith.
There will always be some moral veil put forth by censors to justify their actions. A good example is banning discussion on Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID. Some consider that a noxious branch — quackery endangering public health — but if it’s immediately pruned we won’t be able to see if it yields proper fruits.
Because that quote fundamentally discusses cases where pruning said noxious branch is a risk to non-noxious branches.
Sometimes you can just prune a noxious branch and that's that.
This quote is from the The Report of 1800 [1], where he goes on to say:
> Had “Sedition acts,” forbidding every publication that might bring the constituted agents into contempt or disrepute, or that might excite the hatred of the people against the authors of unjust or pernicious measures, been uniformly enforced against the press; might not the United States have been languishing at this day, under the infirmities of a sickly confederation? Might they not possibly be miserable colonies, groaning under a foreign yoke?
He’s crediting the formation of the United States to speech that was “noxious” to either the British parliament or the Confederate states in power at the time. This noxious speech was absolutely a risk to the extent that sedition acts were being threatened. He’s advocating freedom of the press even when their speech may excite hatred.
[1] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-17-02-020...
One would think that's fairly obvious. What did you think; that there would be more of a need to restrict it if it were becoming harder?
Nor was there an existence of platforms that not only enable but encourage the creation of echo chambers that reinforce preexisting views and actively attempt to intervene for our attention. There is no practical limit to mistruth "content" that can be made, whereas proper information takes time and effort; I think we're nearing a point where genuine information will simply be crowded out and buried.
This assumption does not really work when "the echo chamber" of algorithmic curation and optimization for attention does not expose you to ideas outside of your bubble. It's also true that access to evidence based research, say in open journals, is now easier than ever; that doesn't mean I have enough knowledge to properly understand their implications. That significantly limits the permeability of good, solid information compared to garbage.
It's not at all related to the topic at hand, but Japan recently liberalized their power plan so that consumers can choose who generates the power; a study on Japanese public perception of energy liberalization[0] found that over 30% of these that did not consider power plan switching and over 20% that seriously considered it decided to not go through with the provider switch because they couldn't find enough information or had a hard time understanding. It's just a singular data point, but I think the actual hurdle to absorbing the information as opposed to accessing it is a lot higher.
Things like COVID safety or the shape of the Earth is far more personal and complex (once you go down to quality, evidence based information) than power plans, and they lack the financial incentive that switching power plans have. What makes you think that these people in a bubble would venture out to find quality information or listen to an outsider pointing out just how wrong they are?
Unlike the GP, I'm not personally in favor of censorship, as you say, the freedom of expression and information has far too much benefit to restrict mindlessly. Rather, I want to go back to the pre-"algorithm" days where quality content was spread via word of mouth and not through some engagement metric.
[0] 10.1016/j.erss.2017.09.026 - It's just something tangentially related that I've read recently.
The founding fathers got plenty of things wrong, knowing they were designing an imperfect system.
For example, first past the post voting. Washington cautioned against the rise of political parties knowing full well that they were an inevitable consequence of the system he was complicit in engendering.
Your appeal to authority could also be applied to suffrage or the abolishment of slavery. "What makes you think that now, xxx years into the most propsperous society in human history, is the right time to revisit the institution of slavery"? Times change.
That said, there's nothing in particular to stop a political party in the US from being completely anti democratic and bringing down the entire system of both government, elections and the constitution. It just hasn't really started happening since the civil war until now.
This is an over-generalization so I don't think your premise completely stands. Some truths are very engaging, and support large communities of people working together to explore them.
I would put forth that the systems design challenge has to start with the human mind. People need to be taught proper grammar, logic, and rhetoric to reason properly and be able to express and debate what is true and what is false. Getting to the truth is often difficult, but a critical thinker can quickly sort through bad information, because it's full of contradictions and fallacies.
However, the "system" doesn't seem to actually want too many critical thinkers, because that would make it more difficult to wield power over its population. Cognitive ability only needs to be trained up to a certain point where individuals become useful corporate inputs, so there's an incentive for conformity to outweigh critical thinking and even creativity. Therefore, I don't think a top-down approach e.g. federal education reform, etc. would actually work.
What might work is organizing a more bottom-up approach of building peer education systems. If you'll permit me to use Star Wars parlance, imagine 1,000 Jedi academies forming and coordinating at higher levels where possible. These academies could take many shapes and sizes, and some current examples include Khan Academy, Ad Astra Academy, Acton Academy, or even homeschool cooperatives.
1) Yeah... And some didn't.
2) The mis- and disinformation-spreading machinery is getting ever more effective and efficient.
3) Removing the worst of the mis- and disinformation is not the same as "forcing a uniform 'misinformation-free truth" down peoples throats through censorship".
There is not one channel I am part of that does not constantly post contradicting information and yet the same people sit there to agree.
The admins only care about their herbal affiliate links, they rarely engage in discussions.
What I am saying is, it's the people that are to blame.
No one who is willing or able to do their own research, or who does not have some kind of brain damage hindering them should be very well able to fact check and realize what these groups actually are.
FWIW, I think it's perfectly fine for people to make those claims and put them in the town square, but Facebook doesn't just provide the venue, they amplify and drive users to that content, encourage them to engage with it, and then reshare it to their own networks, putting a veneer of truth and acceptability on it.
EDIT: I said "half the country", I should have said "half of the republican party" - apologies for the mistake.
That's nothing but an excuse.
If there was a true marketplace of ideas, everyone would have an equal playing field to build their own audiences, sway people to their positions, debate and discuss. But that's not how facebook works - engagement drives eyeballs, eyeballs drive revenue, and so Facebook optimizes for engagement, which itself happens to optimize for the most extreme and dramatic and horrifying positions. "Were the COVID vaccines hurried through approvals too fast?" doesn't drive as much engagement as "Covid vaccines are killing thousands, data shows".
Calling it that makes it easy to say it should be banned - but remember that the wuhan lab leak hypothesis was characterized exactly the same way. And that turned out to be acknowledged as plausible and even likely. If you're pro-censorship here, then you're in favor of banning speech about things that could be true and important.
But there were also people saying, "china intentionally released covid to kill americans" and calling it "the china flu" and encouraging aggression towards china. That's obviously much more inflammatory.
I'm not even arguing THAT should necessarily qualify as an outright falsehood (though I don't think it's a helpful way to have a conversation about a complex subject). I'm talking about, "Covid vaccines are killing thousands, so you shouldn't take one". Or, "the election was stolen from donald trump".
I'm also not really arguing for censorship here - I'm just arguing that Facebook is a net negative in that they algorithmically optimize for the most inflammatory, most aggressive content, with the side effects that it amplifies the least true content.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/facebook-lifts-ban-on-w...
> "The social media giant banned any content that asserted COVID-19 was man-made or manufactured in February but told Politico the decision has now been reversed."
There was no distinction made between 'lab leak' and 'intentional leak' when censoring the conversation. To me, it's a great example of why censorship of these things should be nipped in the bud. There's plenty more examples if you ddg "lab leak theory".
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/24/republicans-...