> We (consumers) want to hold vendors accountable for policing "hate speech", kiddie porn, or terrorism
There's still a large minority of us that sincerely don't.
There's still a large minority of us that sincerely don't.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_attack#Stochastic_te...
Free speech absolutism is poison for actual freedom.
People still don't blame Sharpie or USPS or Verizon. People have tried to blame WhatsApp, it doesn't stick because WhatsApp is private. The culture hasn't magically changed. Companies like Twitter know that when advertisers and users complain about hate speech, they're not just asking for Twitter to be held "responsible" or whatever that means, they're telling Twitter that they will leave.
The issue came when the news media decided that it was newsworthy that undesirables we're saying undesirable things on social media and blamed the platform as a whole. Now it's a pr issue for advertisers to be on the platform at all whether or not they are adjacent to undesirable content.
Not to diminish the issue, but this is mostly an American problem as far as I see it. I realise these are also American companies, but conflating the entire world to be in danger is a bit disingenuous imo.
MANY European countries (speaking from a Scandinavian perspective) don’t suffer from this, and while there’s a danger of American policies trickling down, that has been severely diminished in the past decade as there’s a movement of all of us (that I’ve seen) sort of re-evaluating our admiration of the US that was built in the 90’s - 00’s.
From the outside this isn’t a direction the world seems to be moving in. Just more crazy US spiralling.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2021-02-...
I agree that people have more and more sources triggering their fears and prejudices for a buck, which is making them angrier and angrier.
Having a job that doesn't pay enough to afford to pay rent & utilities, buy food, pay off college loans. I could go on. Just saying unemployment is low doesn't capture the nature of the working poor. Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed covers this well. People who work in software and make six figures tend not to be squeezed to afford the basics, except perhaps if they have to live in one of the highest COL cities in the US, but there are millions in the developed world that hold 2-3 jobs and still barely afford living.
Unemployment is at an all-time low? That's great, but people are working their backsides off and cannot afford to eat or heat their homes.
In the UK we have had twelve years of the right-wing extremist Conservative government and their "economic austerity" to "right the ship". What this has meant in practical terms is that wages have not risen in twelve years, taxes have gone up and up and up, and public spending has gone down and down and down. We had the woefully inept Kwasi Kwarteng who blew £60 billion off the UK's economy by raising taxes on the poorest and cutting them for the richest, collapsing most people's private pension pots. We went from roughly 40,000 people in the UK using food banks in 2010 when the Tories took power to 2.5 million people using food banks in 2022 - and these are not just "poor people" who the tabloid trash papers sneer at "well somehow they can afford mobile phones and TVs, why can't they afford food" - no, there are people on £30-£40k per year, who simply cannot afford to feed their families because they have to choose whether they keep the lights on, buy food, or pay their mortgage.
The political right have over the past 20 years done incalculable damage to the world.
Thus, traditional parties represent the interest of some subset of the established elites. Which means that the current socioeconomic arrangement is broadly in their advantage. They know that those problems are real, but they can be only solved by giving up some part of the pie. And organizations are much more selfish than individuals, so they never give up unless they believe that the alternative is to lose even more (hence why a messy revolution somewhere else can often do wonders).
we've just pissed away 700 billion on measures that most of the population banged pans on Thursday for.
my sympathy is running out.
So why doesn't that matter? Because the "employed" are not gainfully employed. They work longer hours for less wages. Longer hours because the competition pool is larger, and less wages for the same reason PLUS inflation.
The average joe may not understand this. But he certainly understands that he can't take vacations, he can't get sick, his electric, gas, and food bills have all doubled or even tripled (in some regions). Despite working, objectively, harder than ever he seems to only get further behind. This makes Joe angry. When Joe can no longer blame the government either due to perceived incompetence or manipulation by think tanks, he is soon to blame his neighbor.
This is the secret of the majority of "extremism" that makes the news. They will certainly sell it as racism, or sexism, or fascism though.
There's certainly a rise in talking about stuff being "extremist", but how much of this is genuine?
The incentives (more outrage, more views, more clicks, more ads) don't exactly encourage honest reporting or even discussion on this.
Fully in agreement extremism is on the rise and the internet aids this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/25/business/ethiopia-violence-fa...
That was Facebook, not Twitter, but this is not just a problem for America.
Not the smartest choice to make yourself identifiable, but such legislative blunders still need to be corrected.
I don't believe a house search is some trivial policing. I think the state failed again to protect reasonable rights. And yes, the hate speech legislation of Germany should be adapted to the 21st century. This won't happen politically, because society currently loves pointing fingers at small missteps. A wrong joke and you get a shit storm.
It is the usual suspects, you hate women or are a racist are the most common accusation. People really start forgetting what these qualifiers really mean. And I believe they get far too much political support and that this isn't a healthy development.
You are correct if we treat social media companies as content curators. If we treat them as speech platforms you are wrong.
Regardless of your belief a "speech platform" (email, etc) can and honestly should allow these things in the spirit of actual free speech. If it is a content curator, then yes, one can infer that by curating so-called hate speech they are indirectly promoting it.
This difference is lost on people. Personally, with the amount of censorship and ads I am fine treating social media companies as curators and treating them appropriately. There are billions currently flowing into congress to stop this. Primarily from those social media companies that want to censor but still be called a "speech platform".
People often conflate their feelings with law. There is no law stopping you from going into a park with a megaphone and spewing what some people may consider hate speech. Consider even how vague the term "hate speech" even is. If I "believe" in two biological genders this, according to some, is the same as denying the holocaust. To some, criticizing the effect asylum seekers from certain countries has had on my country is consider not only racism but "hate speech". We have to be extremely careful what we consider "hate speech". Because the current definition of "hate speech", "disinformation", "misinformation", etc all center around one idea: "things I don't like should be banned, and things I do like should be promoted". This is party-neutral. Both sides of the coin want the other side to be considered hate speech mongers.
“You’ll take down CSAM but not spam/incitement to violence/revenge porn!?”
Further, user reporting as your only form of detection doesn’t scale well or protect your reputation.
I don't think Twitter gives a shit on what people think, but if advertisers complain then Twitter/YouTube will make sure to be very careful with what is allowed. I am not convinced by the arguments this advertisers have about not appearing on some "legal but bad" content" but is their money so they have the right to ask on what kind of content the stuff should appear.
To be clear they were not accused to of being anti-social. People who don't want gun manufacturers sued for what is done with their guns were called child killers, "sandy hook hoaxers", etc. The Bloomberg (yes, it was Bloomberg) money machine paired with the noise machine that is Mom's Demand Action has absolutely dominated the narrative around this.
But I think the real reason gun manufacturers are getting targeted is because the people who have been victims of gun violence see no other recourse. Gun control in the US is mostly laughable, and it's politically difficult (if not impossible) to fix these sorts of problems. So the next natural step is to probe the system to see if there are any creative ways to change things. Targeting gun manufacturers with lawsuits is one of those possibilities.
Public airwaves (TV, radio) have have fines for breaking various rules even when it’s a member of the public speaking live. Thus the classic tape delay and bleeps on all life content.
Further back Newspapers, advertising, and letters to the editor etc where limited for so long that it was a constitutional issue in 1776.
So having platforms is hardly a new thing. We have been debating such freedoms for so long it’s part of various countries cultural identity.
You're welcome to hold that opinion for closed 1-1 messaging platforms that don't have amplification features, but it's just plain wrong to assume that any platform that can amplify ones voice into the unwilling or ignorant and somehow be immune to this level of scrutiny. It's a farce and will certainly never end well for those that try.
Edit: I also think no discussion of censorship/moderation is meaningful without addressing the cannon of falsehood and stochastic terrorism. Those are massive, very real problems that must be addressed.
Probably because Twitter has already demonstrated an ability and desire to curate what people see in their feeds (all in the name of increasing engagement and pleasing their advertisers). So, naturally, people see this, and tell Twitter that if they're going to interfere to the degree they already are, then they must also help ensure the safety of their users, and deal with bad actors directly. In a way, this is Twitter's own fault.
No one expects that Sharpie even has the ability to police the use of their markers, let alone the desire or resources to do so. Most people don't want the USPS reading their mail (and it's a federal crime to do so!). I think the Verizon example is where we're starting to get in a grey area, with telcos getting pushed to implement tools and protocols so people can verify calls are legitimate. That's more about the spam/scam problems with the phone system, not about stopping bullies, but it's a bit closer to that. A further issue is that most people hate phone calls, but love posting stuff online, so naturally they're going to focus on the thing they actually willingly spend their time doing.
I think a further issue is that most people can't really opt out of USPS or the phone system, realistically. But if Twitter passes some threshold of toxicity for them, they'll just stop using it. Twitter (the company) doesn't want that, obviously, so it's in their interest police their platform.
Also if you run a platform that ends up being used to say live-stream mass murders, it seems pretty reasonable that you would want to ban that. Ultimately companies are run by people. No one wants to work for a company that becomes a platform for that kind of horror.
I think that Twitter or other social media may have tiered censorship based the number of followers to limit it to be the appropriate human-scale of influence
We need to exam these issues in the context of social impact.
The mid-20th century USA ended up developing extensive case law about the phone system. Once upon a time, quite a few people did think it was the phone company's responsibility to prevent such calls, within reason. And they litigated the question.
Does the phone company have the right to disconnect abusive and profane callers? Does the phone company have an obligation to disconnect such users? If the phone company fails to do so, are they civilly liable? Given the government-regulated quasi-monopoly status of the Bell system, was there a First Amendment or due process angle, if the phone company disconnects users for placing obscene or offensive calls?
The answers to such questions were not particularly obvious and it just sort of evolved organically to the status quo today. New laws were passed to deal with the situation, such as one that makes it a federal offence to knowingly place an obscene and unwanted phone call. And there are a number of regulations that impose an obligation on the carriers to try to reduce spam, unwanted solicitation, maintain calling logs, etc.
I can imagine that "problems with your Apple ID/Apple Card" scams are more convincing if they appear to come from an Apple number. I figured it was a scam but I called Apple up anyway to confirm.
That’s without getting into the issue of allowing that type of stuff to continue to exist on platforms if the ideal scenario is for Meta/Twitter/etc. To just not police their platforms at all.
Or we could just say people on the internet are assholes and you need thicker skin. Would you be okay with government ID required to sign up to any website? If so, I can see why you have a vengeance complex.
We're talking about holding people accountable for child porn, and inciting terrorism. What the actual fuck are you talking about "need a thicker skin"?
Such a service would make plain a simple truth we don't want to acknowledge: screens hold powerful sway over people, and algorithms hold sway over screens. That power (mood manipulation) can be used for good or evil. Maybe if people are given control over their own tools in this way, they can better appreciate the control that is exerted on them by others, and so better resist it.
I guess we will shortly see AI empowered moderation, where AI analyses text and gives it a hate score. I would prefer platforms that make no content suggestion at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY
Note that assault (which could be words, threats to life for example) is already against the law, it's psychological warfare to make up a new term "speech I don't like" and parade it around (write long wiki articles, mfg consent etc) like it has meaning. It's a term in the same class as "conspiracy theory" and designed by the same class of social engineering experts.
There'll be bluster, but it won't lead anywhere.
The people are now online and the people want this.
I did. Because I've been running discussion forums on and off for 40 years. If you let them, a tiny tiny number of foul people will take over your site by driving away all the normal people who don't want to be exposed to that garbage. Free speech absolutists have trouble understanding that such bad faith actors exist, and in sufficient quantity to crush what could otherwise by a robust, diverse discussion.
Build up some case law about what is and isn’t so it’s applied uniformly and take stronger measures against repeat offenders.
On other, less-enlightened forums, this would earn you a .jpg of a dog cocking its head to the side quizzically.
This will end up with masses flagging the current not popular thing. This is precisely why you need laws that ensure freedom of expression, self-determination and other human rights.
HN’s flagging system is more aggressive than what I want with less oversight. If you feel like you have freedom of expression here then surely HN but with a looser grip ought to be even more, ya?
We had content manipulation for political purposes. There is no guarantee that this will stop now, but changes were certainly needed. It isn't too great that it is now in the hands of Musk perhaps, but he at leaset has a different goal. Even if that is just a pretense it would still be an improvement. And no, some alleged bots are no excuse to just editorialize topics.
This inhibits people forming their own opinion if they will be fed with preapproved messages. So yes, it was a severe problem. Even European leaders called out Twitter when they banned Trump. And it was certainly not because they liked him.
I do believe that flagging is abused on HN from time to time. It just doesn't happen too often and HN isn't too relevant for public discourse. Twitter sadly is since a large part of journalism is about the latest Tweets people can be enraged about. Overall HN is tolerant of diverging opinions as far as I have seen.