I'm curious what commenters here think should be done about this, if anything?
[1] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE10...
So you're stuck between doing what favours US intelligence services (coordinating with these private companies behind close doors and directly/indirectly pressuring them to increase moderation) or foreign intelligence services utilizing fake news and bot accounts to sew distrust in western elections.
If you're Twitter the answer is to not censor anything and to allow people to disseminate the information and to decide for themselves weather it looks relevant, fake, or whether its trustworthy. The United States has had yellow journalism and fake newspaper rags on sale for hundreds of years, just because it's easier to consume fake news now doesn't mean we need a radically new solution.
Your arguments don’t seem to support this conclusion, why not? Methods change when technology changes.
Although to be more precise it is talking points of said propaganda that is multiplied to a far greater extend.
And if you do that, Twitter then becomes a 280 character 4chan/8kun-like platform.
Moderation is essential to keeping internet forums from devolving into cesspools.
The question then becomes, "who should do such moderation?" Should it be private entities (of which there are more than one within any political boundary), the government (which one can't opt out of short of physically moving) and/or both?
I believe that government should stay out of the business of moderating speech, leaving that to private entities who (within certain limits, many of which don't apply WRT digital communications) can moderate/remove any content they choose.
If I don't like how such entities do so, I can vote with my feet/wallet and go somewhere else. Which isn't generally feasible when a government does it.
All that said, there definitely is a problem with disseminating dis/mis-information that has, and will (increasingly) continue to negatively impact discourse and political discussion.
So what's to be done about it? That's a complicated question. For me, the answer is to try and get accurate news (not opinion -- opinion isn't news) from multiple sources and make a determination for myself as to the value/validity of information.
Unfortunately, many folks are unwilling or unable (whether that be time constraints, lack of access, lack of knowledge/interest in sources that challenge their preconceived notions, etc.) to do so. And so many folks just assume that their Facebook/Google/Instagram/Tik-Tok feeds are accurate and honest.
If/when that turns out not to be the case, large swathes of the population are now being misled and won't even know it.
That DHS is looking at dis/mis-information as a national security threat isn't the problem -- in fact, I applaud them for doing so.
The problem is one of institutional distrust (whether valid or not in this or any other circumstance, it exists), providing bad actors the space to spew false/misleading/irrelevant information to advance their goals.
Which makes it more difficult for those with unpopular (not false or misleading -- there's a difference) ideas to gain traction. And that's a problem as well.
How does this play out? I don't see anything close to a positive outcome (i.e., generally free speech and discourse with a strong tilt toward rewarding factual information and penalizing mis/dis-information).
The best-case scenario in my mind would be more decentralization of discussion forums. That gives us both the best and worst of both worlds: Folks can express themselves freely in forums that are accepting of those types of expression, while limiting the impact of mis/dis-information to those who actively seek it out.
Which isn't all that great for a "best-case" scenario, but seems more appropriate than heavy handed, centralized (private and governmental) moderation.
I won't hold my breath.
4chan is a forum. Everyone who browses a 4chan board sees the same posts. For that reason, these boards are moderated, but apparently not heavily enough for the tastes of some people, to whom for 4chan is the epitome of horror.
Twitter is a platform. Everyone who uses twitter decides who to follow and who to block. Everyone sees different tweets.
Twitter for a long time had almost complete freedom of speech. It described itself as the free speech wing of the free speech party[1]. In that time, it had fewer rules then 4chan. But to use twitter did not feel like using 4chan, unless you decided to follow the kind of people who post on 4chan.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-w...
I feel like it's important to note during these discussions that twitter was a 4chan-like platform until it started doing political censorship leading up to the 2020 election, and it is currently a 4chan-like platform that practices political censorship and virtually no other type (4chan is a very successful and influential platform that other platforms, like reddit, imitated.)
You can freely follow any random person and reply "you're a fucking idiot" after every tweet they make, and twitter will not be interested. You can create a #fuckingidiot hashtag and organize hundreds of people under it with the sole purpose of harassing this one person. Twitter will not be interested in it, and will not censor you.
Twitter is not censoring for civility, it's censoring for orthodoxy.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...
This isn't true, I've reported such tweets in the past and Twitter ended up locking accounts and suspending some for it.
Our own governments should be as open and liberal (in the classical/literal sense) as possible and always treat their citizens' agency as fundamental. Distrust doesn't come from foreign propaganda; it comes from betraying the core principles that our democratic institutions are supposed to be protecting. It's initiatives like these that sow the distrust. Foreign states can only nurture it.
How does that not slightly represent a ministry of truth?
Also it's worth point no arbitration of "true/false" occurred, the use cases were fraud spamming etc.
Even if it were effective, we've been encouraging the "teaching [of] critical thinking" for all the time I've been alive and pretty much nothing has changed (at least, not in the direction of increased critical thinking!). At this point, a call to teach critical thinking is a call of no action.
Those same politicians that paid lip service to ‘teaching critical thinking skills’ yet have clearly failed to do so.
This is the problem with the world today. We have decided that the average person is so dangerously stupid that we need to have governments protect us from 'average people'.
…which (totally coincidentally) was Reddit's "Most-Addicted City" in 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.reddit...
Nobody is ignoring it. Platforms are detecting this and providing more content around it, informing the user. This is annoying to some, but far better than banning or shadow banning the content.
There are plenty of solutions. The good ones revolve around providing MORE information, not suppressing the information you don't like.
This is what I'm worried about. Shutting down conversation seems like obviously not the right solution, but I'm becoming increasingly skeptical that these ideas can be countered by the truth, as more people tend to highlight what they want as being The Truth, and dissenters as being brainwashed.
what if readers do not want more information? or what happens when they dismiss it as brainwashing without consideration? that is happening today all over fb, all over tiktok, all over reddit, and all over here as well.
This isn’t even debatable either historically or in the present day.
You're "becoming increasingly" one of the people you criticise.
Which is absolutely fine.
The question then is why would you seek government help to censor your own thoughts.
What if the police abuse their power, well then I guess we shouldn't have any.
Then people are free to speak out against it. But if they weren't, that question would indeed be unanswerable.
This will sound impractical: I think the internet is a revolutionizing force, and a free and open internet is incompatible with our current conception of the state. The natural correlative of a free and open internet is a society of individuals who are citizens of no state in particular. The state will react to the free and open internet by limiting its scope (as China has)
I don't think it's a matter of "what should be done?" from a policy standpoint, but "what should we do?" as individuals. If the US government is unable to adjust to the new reality, then I would choose the internet over the US government
It's technically very feasible. The "unknown" flag could be used in cases where it's difficult to determine an origin, because that is informative as well.
And users should be given the ability to filter out content from origins they don't wish to interact with.
And this isn't xenophobia or racism or anything like it. It's about controlling and understanding who you're communicating with so you can take that into account.
In fact, in many cases users may find it useful to filter out content from their own origin, to get a foreign take on a topic, for example.
>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It doesn't say who is allowed to speak, just that the government cannot interfere. (The fourteenth says that they can't interfere through third parties either.)
So this conspiracy between the DHS and tech companies is unconstitutional twice.
Past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
The biggest problem that I see with all of the younger people begging for their government to censor the internet is that it streamlines propaganda efforts that motivate war.
People also need to realize that governments have a history of deciding that anything that puts them in a bad light is disinformation. And your government is not immune to that.
Because of the poor education about propaganda, or deliberate mis-education, as well as continued centralization of information distribution, global warfare is just as big a risk as ever, despite the mass instantaneous global communications. The key enabling factor for warfare is disinformation that dehumanizes the enemy.
By empowering the government and centralized platforms to unilaterally decide what is disinformation and what is not, this allows those governments to spread their own disinformation in their own population when they feel it is in their strategic interest to engage in mass murder (warfare).
Easy. Don't believe everything you hear/read on the Internet. If some random Internet commenter is telling you about the secret torture dungeons in the basement of a pizza place that doesn't even have a basement, you should be able to readily conclude that they're just making $#!+ up.
Now it remains to be seen if there's anybody bold enough to sell the dream of democracy without increasing material benefits.