Nicholas Carr on how to fix social media
thenewatlantis.com
thenewatlantis.com
I want tools that help me communicate with other people. Learn things, get exposed to new ideas. And we can't have that with a huge system designed to prevent people from saying the wrong things.
Our ability to communicate and learn freely is dependent on the ability for people we disagree with to also have this ability. You will be censored if you want other people censored.
You can communicate freely, but that doesn't mean there isn't consequences for things you speak and nobody has to host you while you're broadcasting it. I find this type of argument devolves into "I want to be a crappy person and not be judged for it or face consequences", which just isn't the reality we're living in.
Whereas I find your counter-argument devolves into "Crappy people are those who disagree with my point of view and they should face consequences"...
The truth is there are extremes on both sides; but the censorship seems to be overwhelmingly driven by one.
It's idiotic.
It’s stupid.
In Korea they use this to cow people into behaving “properly” whatever the fuck that means. There is no reason to maintain the belief it will only be used to smoke out the “bigots”.
In context of what the parent post, are you under the impression that gay people were cancelled after going through some due process?
People having done a bad thing in the past does not excuse doing a bad thing today.
edit: never did I say that a previous wrong justifies a wrong today. I'm challenging your assertion that this is "new." At the same time, I do think that some cases of so-called "cancel culture" are just fine, specifically when it's no different from any other business owner booting a customer for being abusive towards staff or other customers. Some examples of so-called "cancel culture" are in fact bad, and I agree that folks who said dumb shit 20 years ago should get some leeway if they've changed in the meantime.
And no gay person suffered millenia of persecution, not even non-persecuted individuals live that long. You might as well say carbon-based lifeforms suffered millenia of persecution at their own hands and call it a day.
Yes, but the power balance shifted so that the dissatisfaction of "small" people can now be perceived and felt by the wealthy and powerful. "Small" people can organise around a cause and make the powerful uncomfortable, so the powerful attack.
The only new thing is that it's labelled "cancel culture" which makes it somehow "bad" for some people.
There is nothing extreme about getting booted from facebook because one can't behave like a reasonable adult. As noted above if anyone did any of this in a setting like a restaurant they would be asked to leave, coupled with assistance from law enforcement and even possible arrest for trespassing and disturbing the peace.
So who's wrong here? The businesses that don't want to be subjected to certain types of speech from customers because it impacts their business or the people that feel they have the right to say whatever they want free from consequence? Why can a McDonald's ask a customer to leave their establishment because they used the N word in front of customers, but Facebook can't? And let's be clear, in both cases no censorship occured, there was just consequences after the fact. Looking forward to your reply.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. There are times and places to censor and be censored. Not all things should be said at all times.
I think the problem is that we see censorship as something bad, so anyone quelling speech inappropriate for the setting can't be censoring because they're doing something good, not bad. But censorship isn't bad in and of itself. It's the reason for the censorship that makes it good or bad.
Censoring people because they are criticising you? That's bad. Censoring people because they are talking about hockey on a basketball forum? That's good.
So I would say, don't fall into the trap of getting into an argument about defining censorship. Keep the argument focused along the lines of kicking assholes out of McDonalds. Have them explain how its different from that.
In American constitutional law, this case established two important rules:
under the California Constitution, individuals may peacefully exercise their right to free speech in parts of private shopping centers regularly held open to the public, subject to reasonable regulations adopted by the shopping centers
under the U.S. Constitution, states can provide their citizens with broader rights in their constitutions than under the federal Constitution, so long as those rights do not infringe on any federal constitutional rights
So far the court has rejected the application of Pruneyard to the online space, but it might change with more sympathetic plantiffs
I mean, I can see how sometimes the internet seems to promise even more freedom of speech than in physical spaces and also that sometimes there are not very clear written laws or policies for those digital spaces, paired with unclear or unfair enforcement of those laws and policies.
Makes me wonder what the future of digital governance will look like. Do we have the digital equivalent of cops roaming semi-public spaces like Twitter and Facebook? If so, by whose consent are they governing? Do these orgs hire the equivalent of private security guards or bouncers? Have they already done so through moderators and such?
Anyway, just got me thinking about some of the challenges in the governance of digital spaces.
What you can say under such circumstances is pretty diverse.
A lot of content Facebook removes would be protected speech in a public space.
In a private physical space its up to the owner. And there is a lot of racism, misogony, bullying, sexist, misandry, threats to public figures, drugs sold, hookers, evil gossip, conspiracy theories, fake news, bad medical advice, locker room talk, inside deals, threats that go on in pubs, gyms, bars, clubs, by people of all races, genders, and ages (once you are allowed in).
If you owned a bar and you swore to avoid all of the above, you would need to kick out nearly everyone on a good night with lots of spirits and beer sold.
"Ok Bob, I know we are in rural Arizona, but what you just said, well some academic in California could find that offensive, you have to leave now. "
There are a couple of problems with this line of reasoning. Cultural attitudes and mores and standards of decency shift constantly. Something you say today that seems within the bounds of good taste could be taken out of context or deemed racist/harassing later by different people. I trust you are a good citizen online and don't touch controversy, but you can't possibly know how language will evolve. I've seen simple and honest disagreements on Twitter turn into accusations of harassment in real time. The threat of misinformation is even more elusive and mercurial. I remember just a year ago when saying SARS-CoV-2 might have accidentally leaked from a lab was WIDELY considered dangerous information that should be scrubbed from the internet. Now it's at least acceptable to discuss in congress and on legacy media outlets. The "don't be a dick" model of speech regulation is full of traps and loopholes and problems that make it a bad guideline in many circumstances.
It was so incredibly stupid
It's not an opinion of mine, it's a well documented phenomenon[0].
[0]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/covid-19-has-led-to-an-...
Also, don't keep pasting the phrase "information is subjective" into your comments, it's giving the game away.
What matters is that I'm offended. Heck, "bastardchild" doesn't even have to offend me because it is clearly offensive to bastards and possibly children.
Your "justification" for such offensive behavior is no different than the offensive explanations by folks who wanted to have lawn jockeys.
How dare you. Your account should be deleted.
That's how cancel culture works.
You left a couple use cases for censorship off your list, so I added them back in. I totally agree with you, I don't do any of those things either, so no big deal for the two of us.
On YouTube just saying your name would get your videos demonetized and I have a feeling your username banned.
https://www.youtube.com/user/BastarD/videos
Being demonetized is not censorship.
For example on Facebook men are allowed to show nipples on pictures while women are not. For Canada at least, that’s discrimination based on sex / gender. Many big tech moderation policies actively encourage discrimination.
It's great to know your username is currently acceptable to YouTube.
Basically what happens on FB is comments get wildly misconstrued by the mod team / AI, thankfully it appears the mod team or it AI has a limited vocabulary so as long as you use 5 syllable words to describe your thoughts its pretty easy to avoid.
I tend to agree with you that censorship is probably an inexact or overreaching term for what's going on. Of course social media is balancing a number of factors, pleasing their regulators, pleasing their advertisers, pleasing their employees. It feels like the creation of a Digital Singapore in the vein of William Gibson's 1993 article Disneyland with the Death Penalty. (Of course the penalties are much less severe) https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/
-------------
"IT'S LIKE AN entire country run by Jeffrey Katzenberg," the producer had said, "under the motto 'Be happy or I'll kill you.'" We were sitting in an office a block from Rodeo Drive, on large black furniture leased with Japanese venture capital.
Now that I'm actually here, the Disneyland metaphor is proving impossible to shake. For that matter, Rodeo Drive comes frequently to mind, though the local equivalent feels more like 30 or 40 Beverly Centers put end to end.
;-)
Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it? Singapore's airport, the Changi Airtropolis, seemed to possess no more resolution than some early VPL world. There was no dirt whatsoever; no muss, no furred fractal edge to things. Outside, the organic, florid as ever in the tropics, had been gardened into brilliant green, and all-too-perfect examples of itself. Only the clouds were feathered with chaos—weird columnar structures towering above the Strait of China.
You didn't did it yet. All of those are moving targets, and moving extremely fast especially in the US. I could say a dozen of totally non controversial statements in my country of residence (Japan), half of which being controversial or labeled some kind of -ist in my own country (France) and all of them warranting me cancellation in the US. At this rate what you are writing now will be categorized racist, threatening or harassing in a few years or so. Even your nickname could already be considered some kind of harassment as it single out kids born out of wedlock and is thus enforcing "the patriarchy". (Think it's far-fetched? Have a look at GitHub renaming the master branch)
I'm sure there are tons more actual legal things you cannot freely talk about on FB.
I get the idea of not having all the "so and so friend liked so and so's post" which feel low quality in a feed, but part of a custom feed is prioritizing updates from people you actually want to see updates from
Also, the tools exists on all of these social media products to actually go and check on your friends' pages where you can see their updates. Nothing stops you from doing that and consuming the content you wish.
People of color are more likely to be called that slur, and you are their “operator”? I talked to my BIPOC friends and they think that’s incredibly racist. They say you are dehumanizing them and are clearly a white supremacist who celebrates operating POC. They are experiencing trauma right now given the outright violence of your name.
They cut the phone lines in Chernobyl for the same reason.
But your username is enough to get you kicked off of many.
However, I feel Carr has made a mistake with his attempt to differentiate between private communication and broadcasting based on "number of followers".
I think the better distinctions looks something like:
private communication is anything delivered ONLY to people to whom it is addressed or who have actively opted-in to receive communications from the sender. some authentication must be implied before they can read what I have delivered.
any other communication, regardless of the medium, number of followers, etc. is considered to be public.
If I post something on my own private blog that requires a subscription to read, that's private communication. If I post the same thing on a medium where it can be read by anyone, that's public.
If I email my family about something, that's private; if I post a comment on a tiny open wordpress site with less readers than I have cousines, that's public.
This differentiation says nothing about what the difference in regulation between public and private should be. There are good arguments for many different schemes, some of which involve zero regulation for either form. But to discuss the merits of them, we need a clear distinction between private & public communication, and I think Carr's is wrong and mine is (roughly) right.
This requires:
* Routes - both parties to be on IPv6 or either party to have something like port address translation on a IPv6 interface.
* Identity - This will require a combination of CA and STUN. The certificate from the CA and corresponding key pair associated with that certificate ensures a user is who they say they are and their keys are respectable. The corresponding key exchange ensures the data is confined to the two parties. The STUN server correlates the unique user ID, such as that which is certified by the certificate, to an IP address.
Anything less is just another game for some media company to use you as a product.
This is my go to response as to "what to do about social media."
And I opine|rant|blather on about it whenever I see folks complaining about or claiming that some rules|regulation|policy will "fix" social media.
And such tracts are becoming more and more common (cf. this article[0][1], entitled OK, but What Should We Actually Do About Facebook? I Asked the Experts. from today). But, as in the article linked, no one ever suggests decentralized communications.
I'm not sure why, but there certainly are barriers to making decentralized "social media" work. Those same barriers are what make centralization of much of our digital universe necessary and hugely profitable.
Those barriers are primarily (there are other issues, but are mostly part of the result rather than the cause) related to the ways in which end-users are provided access to the Internet.
I'm specifically referring to asymmetric internet links. Most internet links are $X Mb/sec download and ($X / 25 or so) Mb/sec upload.
What's more, there are often policy restrictions on "consumer" internet links that block them from "running servers," whether that be port blocking or throttling.
This keeps decentralized communication from being viable. Other than these artificial barriers, there's nothing stopping folks from hosting their own cat/family/meme photos/videos and/or other content.
There are plenty of decentralized platforms that can do so with minimal set up and configuration.
However, if you can't serve more than a couple of concurrent connections at a reasonable speed, that breaks the whole decentralized/P2P paradigm. Because my upload bandwidth is the limiting factor in being able to host content.
If, on the other hand, you have a link with symmetric bandwidth without policy restrictions, serving your own content is a no-brainer.
As such, my "solution" for addressing the "censorship" of the centralized "social media" platforms is to make them irrelevant by eliminating the entire reason for their existence -- asymmetric bandwidth favoring download vs. upload on internet links.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/facebook-experts....
[1] (same as [0], just from archive.md): https://archive.md/qpNtV
Edit: Added title of linked article in the comment.
As a result I am writing a peer-to-peer application assuming universal fiber, 4K displays, and IPv6 are already common.
I hope you're right. Where I live (the US), most ISPs have cable TV systems, interests in streaming platforms, or both.
That provides incentives to maintain the status quo WRT asymmetric links and centralization.
ISPs like Verizon, which had previously pushed hard on fiber deployment, are refocusing on wireless, as that's a much bigger profit center for them.
I hope you're right about the inevitability of (multi-)GB/sec symmetric connections, but the current incentive structure argues against it, at least in the US.
Which is why I believe that last-mile FTTP[0] should largely be local, public/quasi-public[1] utilities that support themselves by selling interconnects to multiple ISPs.
Those ISPs can then compete on speed, price, services, etc.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_x#FTTP
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/q/quasi_public_corporatio...
Let's raise the level of discourse by reviewing our history. There are and have been in the past decentralized social applications. One of the most notable of them in terms of adoption was Skype. It was acquired by Microsoft. In the past it was normal to use Skype in gaming communities. It was a competitor to Ventrillo and TeamSpeak. Skype moved away from decentralization.
It's really common at this point for people who are simultaneously paranoid and outraged to start exclaiming with indignation that clearly corporations are evil. This failure to engage with reality is common online. Putting aside that social companies only discovered a few years ago that connecting people had disastrous consequence and have been devoting billions to try to address these so-called simple problems ever since it became clear these problems existed lets try to see if we can find a non-paranoid good-faith reason for Microsoft to have moved away from decentralization.
What do you know, but Discord displaced Skype for a reason within gaming communities!
Why did gaming communities move away from Skype? I've been in gaming communities. I've heard people express some of their problems with Skype. One of the issues that Skype had was that... it was decentralized and that could lead to the leaking of your IP address. Therefore if a streamer or even another person accidentally showed their Skype they could get DDoSed. At high levels in various competitive games this was a severe problem, because as you might guess... in social media you tend to be connected with people who are socially connected to you! So you leaked your IP address very often to just the sort of people with the incentive to capitalize on that by DDoSing you so they could beat you in a game.
Now Skype isn't decentralized, but it didn't matter. They didn't do a good enough job to serve some segment of the community. So Skype was doing just what you suggested. Being decentralized. And they had a higher friction process than a competitor, which is the case for your solution. And as a direct result of these things... (and others, mind, but we have to simplify reality at least a little to understand it)...
Discord found product-market fit in the gaming niche! And it grew increasingly popular. And now everyone in the gaming communities is on Discord, not Skype. Moreover, Skype has lost share even outside of gaming to Discord as Discord executes the standard niche to general playbook that so many social companies have found success executing.
Congratulations: your simple solution has already failed. You thought it was simple, but you were just ignorant of the actual challenges. But now we get to the real problem. The problem you completely missed. All of what I just said? It isn't the real problem. Those are details. They are suggestive of the real problem, but you need to step back and think about this from a level higher to see the true problem. It isn't technical. It is social. It's in the name. Not technical media, social media.
The true problem is so complex that it is almost certainly impossible to solve in a way which will please everyone. I'd go as far as to say it's probably fundamentally unsolvable.
Here is the real problem outlined using what we covered above:
1. Notice that decentralization is important to you.
2. Notice that it is outright against the desires of others.
3. Notice that social applications get more powerful as the number of participants increase.
Now lets generalize the above and make it more clear why those things matter:
1. Some people love X where X is something.
2. Some people hate X where X is something.
3. These people are incentivized to use the same application due to the utility of social tools growing with number of participants.
This problem is absolutely nutty in its complexity. It's also the actual reality of social applications. Almost all the issues with social applications boil down to the problem that people have different desires and those desires aren't in alignment with each other.
The technical aspects of the problem don't even matter. The problem isn't simple. As proof of this: mass murder and every other woe you try to lay at the feet of social media applications predates those applications. In actuality, the difference is that poor people have more power now relative to how much they had before.
1) Social media has a profit motive to increase engagement
2) Social media has an expensive moderation problem
The solution is also simple, but certainly not easy. There are technology problems to solve.
When you remove access to the user content from the service provider they have nothing to moderate and cannot increase engagement through manipulation of the message (algorithms).
Most people (current developers) refuse to see this simplicity because alternatives are a world directly in conflict with their current livelihoods. This is a behavior called Cognitive Conservatism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_(belief_revision)
I will explain the alternative like this: content on demand directly at the source. Its like what Netflix did to cable and network television. Users take the content when they want it a la carte without waiting for a content provider to prescribe a fixed schedule. Instead of waiting for a media service to make features or content available, or even for their users to make user content available via upload, in a peer-to-peer reality the content is available the moment a user allows remote access. Facebook is like old cable television. You have to wait and hope the desired content appears when you want it to.
In a peer-to-peer world if you want family photos simply use your peer-to-peer application to connect to the remote family member's hard drive and browse or copy all those family photos you want without any web service in the middle. No uploads to Facebook. Just allow reading from a file system directory to authorized users across the internet. Now imagine that directness also applies to messaging, application access, video calls, and anything else digital. The best part of this model is that personal opinions will not dictate remote availability and simultaneously you have privacy in a way that isn't feasible on the current web.
So you arrange to have your IP address changed and you remove the people who had it and that works for a time, but it turns out that if they know you're username they can use that to discover your IP through the social graph. So it happens again and you realize what is going on and so you change you're username.
And for a time that works, but one day you're streaming to thousands of your fans and you accidentally tab to the wrong window and your username becomes visible and your IP gets leaked again and you get DDoSed.
You're not a technical person, but you're tired of it. A non-decentralized service hides your IP. You sign up. Because it is monetized it is free and so the sign up experience is frictionless.
We started in your world. There was a problem. The resolution of that problem resulted in leaving your world. In a market place in which everyone was allowed to compete with each other someone else offered a higher utility service than you did. Their service also had the benefit that poor people can use it, while your service is subtly oppressive and elitist requiring you to own resources like a stable internet connection, a router, a computer, and other things which many people don't have in order to have a complete experience online. So you were lower utility and you oppressed poor people.
We take as a given that you solved every technical problem. Your simple solution didn't work. So now you're going to have to complicate it. Also, this isn't hypothetical, because this evolution has literally played out historically already. So if you don't like it or don't find it to be realistic you can be frustrated with reality and history and humans. Because it be like that.
There are so many other use cases and spaces that would benefit enormously from decentralization that I couldn't even begin to list even a small portion of them.
As for leaking IP addresses and DDOSing, that's only relevant if you are communicating with those who are potentially adversarial and definitely mean spirited. My use case doesn't include any of those sorts of people.
My privacy and PII are too valuable to me to allow others to monetize them.
And I don't care to share details of my private life with people I don't know or care about.
As such, decentralization (e.g., a Matrix server for my extended family -- which exists and works wonderfully -- except for the crappy upload speeds I get) is absolutely a valid and viable use case.
That you can't see past your own experiences and prejudices says much more about you than it does about centralization vs. decentralization.
As for your assertion that "decentralization has been tried and it failed" isn't anywhere close to being the truth.
It hasn't been tried at any real scale and hasn't gained a lot of traction because of the perverse incentives of asymmetrical bandwidth, user-hostile TOS and the willingness of companies to burn cash in order to stomp out/acquire any other group that attempts to compete with them.
tl;dr: You're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too. Yuck!
I get why you came to this conclusion, but you're pretty far off from understanding my actual point which had nothing to do with decentralization. I'm actually a fan of decentralization. There are obviously technical means of solving the failure case I shared. I'm not trying to generalize my experience to everyone. Actually, that is kind of the exact opposite of my point. I'm saying that the problems in social media aren't technical, but social, because people are different.
> It hasn't been tried at any real scale and hasn't gained a lot of traction because of the perverse incentives of asymmetrical bandwidth, user-hostile TOS and the willingness of companies to burn cash in order to stomp out/acquire any other group that attempts to compete with them.
My core point was that the problems aren't simple, because they aren't technical, and you're kind of making that point as well now.
You're right. I didn't get that from what you said at all. Which is likely my fault. I'll go back later and re-read the comment to which I replied to confirm that.
>My core point was that the problems aren't simple, because they aren't technical, and you're kind of making that point as well now.
The person you originally replied to didn't say the problems were simple. They said that the solution was simple. And I agree.
The solution is quite simple. So much so that in a previous comment[0] I noted how surprised I am that it isn't much more broadly discussed.
However, Implementing such a solution at scale, given the current barriers is, as you imply, not a simple matter. On that point we definitely agree.
I'd add that those barriers don't just incentivize centralization of social media and community discourse, it also incentivizes centralization of most everything in the digital universe.
that includes hosting of internet-facing apps, services and other content, which (IMHO) reduces competition, creates arbitrage opportunities to suck value out of existing business sectors without adding real value, and destroys locally-based businesses and business communities.
My core point is that, as a society it behooves us to knock down those barriers. Chief of which are the monopolistic ISPs, their asymmetric bandwidth and abusive TOS for "consumer" connections.
When most or all of us can simply and reliably (the technical tools are already available, as you correctly point out) host our own content, whether they be videos of the grand-kids, in-house restaurant/retail store ordering systems, and all manner of other apps/services, etc., etc., etc., we can shun these centralized services and avoid the many harms (engagement algorithms, "targeted" advertising, giving corporations the power to decide what speech is acceptable, rent-seeking "apps", etc.) caused by the centralization due to those perverse incentives.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29112551
Edit: Cleaned up my prose slightly.
The article seems to be arguing that social media companies need to be judge, jury and censor over every message that is "broadcast", i.e. sent to more than a few close friends.
It admits that defining a "public interest" standard is basically impossible, but assumes that this ambiguity won't be exploited by whichever side is in control of whichever body gets to punish the social media companies for under- or over-censoring.
If someone tweets "Click here to read my 400 page manifesto about what is wrong with America", would Twitter need to assign lawyers the task of scouring that document for "problematic" passages like "defund the police" or "give more power to ICE"?
Perhaps if there were a workable system in place for silencing extreme and misinformed voices on the TV and radio, we could try applying it at scale to the internet too, but right now that's like trying to run before you can crawl.
In the UK TV broadcasters get their licences and general charter terms from the government, based on standards previously contested in law and, I believe, broadly enshrined in statute and/or regulations. One of those terms is a crucial clause to the effect that broadcasters are not allowed to broadcast anything that would make ordinary people throw up over their TV dinner or grannies die of apoplexy, etc.
Various entities, people or single issue political parties for instance, have attempted to get broadcasters to show films containing grisly stuff, and when they meet refusal have attempted to sue broadcasters on free speech grounds. However, the right to free speech does not allow a legal entity or person to compel some other party to shout out noxious views on their behalf. So broadcasters in the UK can exercise their rights against such compulsion and filter out extremal horrors if they wish. The tests they use are designed to maintain the same two or three standard deviations of a normal distribution curve that maximises their customer base and matches the same standards civil law requires to maintain order on the civil scale anyway.
In that context, what are social media companies if they are not media intermediaries between legal entities? Thus they can not be compelled to relay anyone's content to anywhere else if they don't want to. Their T&Cs typically say so anyway.
Folks worried about censorship of their partisan or minority views on such platforms don't seem to get what rights those intermediary companies have. They play nice relaying messages because they like mass market incomes.
So really the issue might be purely about how many messages could MetaFB/Twitter afford to kill off and still be popular enough to survive?
I see a lot of stuff like, "Terrorists use the platform to organize and plan attacks!", which is true...but that seems like you should be solving that by solving the reasons people want to be terrorizing, not by attacking the mediums they use. If you want to attack mediums, then you'd be just as justified wiping away USPS as you would FB/Insta. It just seems like FB is being used as a scapegoat for lawmakers to avoid actually solving problems instead of pretending to solve them.
You might be interested in this: https://www.wired.com/story/jargon-watch-rising-danger-stoch...
stochastic terrorism: the use of mass media to incite attacks by random nut jobs—acts that are “statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.”The way the world operates in 2021 is a mess, unfortunately this is normal so few people seem to notice.
I don't trust people to make good decisions. Admittedly incredibly paternalistic, but I've met a lot of people, and most of them are just making one bad decision after another.
An article from a professor publishing via W.W. Norton about the internet is cut from the same cloth as newspaper vs radio, imo.
I've never agreed with this idea and I don't think I'm alone in that. Possibly "public interest" is the wrong word.
> It’s worth remembering that Congress’s decision to license radio operators after the Titanic disaster was about more than just allocating scarce spectrum. It was about bringing those who speak to the masses out of the shadows and into the daylight of the public square. It was about making broadcasters, whether individuals, businesses, or other organizations, visible and accountable. We may not need to establish a formal licensing program for social media, but we do need to bring the spirit of the common good back to broadcasting.
Except operating in the clear is a well-known danger as well. People using the words "accountability" and "consequences" almost never want to discuss the upper and lower limits of such ideas. If the concept of "punching up" is any indicator, it's at least partially a dog whistle for who it's okay to abuse these days.
Such a system would need to be private as well, instead of operating in full transparency to prohibit the litany of performative exercises people will undergo these days to make their point. The author seems to try to assuage that only "powerful private interests" would take issue with the proposed system.
> An ambitious Digital Communications Act along the lines sketched out here would be complicated and controversial. It would be resisted by many powerful private interests. It would not be a panacea. But we can no longer pretend that social media will fix itself.
At the core of social media problems is bad human behavior of all persuasions. Some people just manage to learn or detach themselves.
Personally, I partially blame public API concepts for most of this mess. Whether you're talking about limitless graphs for sharing "information" (in its most general definition) or API's which can be enumerated. Their legitimate use is finite and at worst it's entirely extractive. Better regulation, to me, would be the government regulating what sort of information you allow to be open and possibly the use/limits of virality.
Do you agree or disagree with the notion that since the electromagnetic spectrum is a limited resource, actual broadcast (using the spectrum) needs to be regulated?
2, before people criticise social media™ they should come from a position of experience having run their own site or even just a forum
That's the basic issue, an ignorant American jabbering on about something they have zero experience on.
Facebook (or Instagram) don't seem to have good options for this so for the most part I don't use them.
Discord works chronologically, for now at least, and as long as it does I'll be happy to keep chatting with my friends there.
I would expect most Fediverse applications don't have much of a ranking algorithm yet, or at least it should be configurable.
This isn’t very likely. But it’s more likely than someone charging to aggregate IM statuses and put them in chronological order.
One has to realize that FB is only optimizing for profit (and Zuck not going to jail). The only times they curbed was when bad PR was threatening their profits (and Mark’s freedom).
This statement seems to have always been technically true. What does control mean?
> Conversation and correspondence, far from being treated as confidential, are rifled through by marketers to extract sensitive personal data.
It seems that the public doesn't really care about this.
> Propaganda, lies, and defamatory attacks get broadcast to the masses, often by sources that can’t be traced.
This statement also seems to have always been technically true.
> Rather than promoting an informed public, social media has promoted polarization, extremism, and, all too often, ignorance.
I guess the questions is whether Americans want the government to tell them what they can and can't read or look at. Should that right be taken away? Shouldn't informed adults be able to make their own choices about whether or not they want to spend time on their Twitter or Facebook feeds?
And I live in an area affected by Hurricane Ida. I've started following my local government on social media because it is one of the best places to keep up to date on what's going on concerning cleanup and what not. And I would say a government run page concerning that government is about as political as you can get.
As is your community page. A lot of things related to your town is political. I mean, politics is the word we use to define how groups make decisions. So any time you're talking about making decisions in a group, you're talking politics.
But of course, that's not what you mean when you say "politics". It's not what anyone who complains about politics mean when they say politics. They either mean "things I don't agree with", "things I find uncomfortable to think about", or "evangelizing a viewpoint".
For instance, someone complained about Squid Game being "too political" because it had an underlying message of "rich people fuck with poor people for sport". But it isn't a political statement at all, it's a sociological one. But thinking about how a less exaggerated version of that is basically our day to day makes that guy uncomfortable. He wanted to tune in and drop out. But "this makes me uncomfortable" is a him problem. He's trying to make it an everyone problem.
Personally I think we have a human nature problem, and not a technology problem looking for market fit.
Anyone is free to join the channel, no limitations or anything, just an opt-in. Rule is posted obviously and we remind people frequently.
I've lost 4 people because they were upset that this rule is enforced against everyone, out of a group of maybe 20. They wanted their politics to be everywhere and not constrained to one channel.
I never thought this tiny little policy was going to cause such a mess. It has dramatically improved the rest of discussions - you can actually just talk about stuff without people jumping in with their political takes - but it's been an upsetting policy in ways I did not anticipate.