They didn’t ask to go viral | Hacker News Reader

They didn’t ask to go viral

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The "everyone:1" ratio of internet criticism also has had an interesting effect on politics. Given the sheer amount of vitriol directed at politicians no sane person would run for election. A plausible base-case scenario is a group of socially disabled internet dwellers dedicate their life to hounding you for imagined wrongs. Let alone the pressure of making any decision in a situation where large groups of people are in conflict. As a result I think we'll see detectable pressure for only risk taking narcissists to run for public office. Even beyond what is usual for politics.

I don't think we have a choice about allowing roving internet mobs - the cost of forcibly breaking groups up would be too high. But as always, the more protections we have to slow action down in the real world the better. Mobs make decisions that are foolish, fast and often final.

Journalists can make a controversy out of anything, and find a clique of accounts with any given opinion on anything, and therefore portray Public Opinion in any way that the editorial board directs. The accounts don't need blue checks, they don't need to be notable, they don't need to be human, to find the next Antoine Dodson ranting with a memorable sound bite.

> A plausible base-case scenario is a group of socially disabled internet dwellers dedicate their life to hounding you for imagined wrongs.

The intersection between the set of chronically online people who see this content and the set of people who actually vote is much smaller than you might think. Voter turnout is consistently very low among young people, despite how actively interested they may appear on sites like Reddit.

Most of this content also turns into preaching to the choir. They congregate in online communities where people already decided who they were going to vote for, so the online anger has little to no effect on the people who might actually vote for the candidate.

This works both ways. Weaponising the non-voting chronically online naysayers to rile up your own base who _will_ vote.

> The intersection between the set of chronically online people who see this content and the set of people who actually vote is much smaller than you might think. Voter turnout is consistently very low among young people, despite how actively interested they may appear on sites like Reddit.

Not all chronically online people are in the young voter bucket. There are Boomers with terminal Facebook brain and a lot of Redditors have accounts that are almost old enough to vote in America.

I think it's a mistake to assume this will always be the case.

A decade ago, more than half my 40+ yo extended family was still only beginning to get exposed to the internet due to touchscreen phones and basic data plans becoming the default in the US. A few of them are now brain-fried Facebook conspiracy group people.

It seems reasonable that eventually most people will have a "safe space" on the internet to share their thoughts. And eventually, mass hysteria and mobs and general opinion that used to only exist online will (and clearly already has started to) become an IRL phenomenon.

Interestingly, the most successful politicians in recent years have adopted the techniques of old-school internet trolls.

It goes like this:

  1. Do or say something that's a bit edgy and controversial.  
  2. Pull out a lawn chair as the opposition attempts to stir up a shit storm.
  3. Under no circumstances engage with the criticism directed at you, just be somewhere else when anything is coming your way.  Never defend or explain anything you've said or done.  
  4. When the shitstorm is fading, GOTO 1 to ensure all focus remains on you, depriving the opposition of any opportunity to talk about what they want to do.
  5. Win the election because your opposition looks completely unhinged and you look unfairly persecuted.

It's basically like watching Muhammad Ali in a boxing match. Always has the initiative somehow even when he's ducking punches left and right.

If you think this describes anyone in particular, you're probably right; but the point is this playbook has been used basically all over the world with an insane degree of success.

completely agree with this. it's difficult, but the right answer is to ignore all media contexts and criticisms of political candidates AND their actions, and entirely focus on the ground truth of "what" they have achieved in the past, and not the "why". That seems risky, as motives matter, but there simply isn't a way to get an unvarnished assessment of a persons motives from the media (mass or otherwise). even still, there is a risk the only thing you learn they achieved is filtered via the spin factory, or what their achievements were by grift or illegal means, but what's the alternative?

Many of the most explicitly trollish politicians make their motives explicit and easy to recognize. I don't think ignoring "why" is a good strategy; I'd rather vote for less-effective people who aren't successfully tearing down civil society.

Finally someone spells it out. Ever since the first twitter US president I've noticed a great uptick in politicians and other public figures doing deplorable things for the sake of attention. They'd be publically called out and ridiculed for months on end, and meanwhile you wouldn't hear anything about other people at all.

There's nothing I can describe this as other than "trolling", yet people always look at me confused when I mention that. Trolling is just being mean to people online, right? Surely there coudln't be an ulterior motive to it, right?

I guess we never learned to stop feeding the trolls.

It's old. "There's no such thing as bad publicity".

The objective is to use these non-voting high replication nodes to reach your voting public.

> use these non-voting high replication nodes to reach your voting public

Nice, this really distilled the strategy down to something tangible for me, thanks.

I think two-term US President George W. Bush provided one pre-Twitter but modern example of how this effect could work, maybe not intentionally.

Here's a bit from a 2004 NYT piece that stuck with me:

> That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. "You think he's an idiot, don't you?" I said, no, I didn't. "No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!" In this instance, the final "you," of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-...

I'd guess this might've been a political effect/tactic that's been known or rediscovered for thousands of years.

> In this instance, the final "you," of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

It’s incredible how the author was so dumb to take the exact bait and dig in further.

Yeah, I almost cut that out of the quote here.

However, during the Bush 43 administration, it might've been coming from the then-underdog position, so maybe less superior than it sounds now, but still bitingly dismissive.

I vaguely remember "reality-based" was a term that was being tossed around, as a criticism of "faith-based" politically-motivated government approaches to problems. I don't know how long that lasted.

10% of US presidents were assassinated and 20% of them had assassination attempts. Congressmen have been assassinated, judges, state politicians, mayors. If you go into politics, getting made fun of on the internet is the least of your worries, you're going to need a thick skin. If someone is making fun of you on Twitter, at least you've got name recognition.

In my opinion that is underestimating the tidal wave of coordinated hate that seems to be on display in the era of twitter. Everyone dies eventually and a lot of us make peace with that, but human minds aren't built to be able to deal with being continuously insulted and abused publicly.

"US President" is of course not synonymous with "politician"; even if we look at just the US, minor politicians that are only of limited local interest can now run the risk of becoming a target of a sea of vitriol, in Twitter or elsewhere.

If I look at Dutch Twitter then it's basically a small army of extremely motivated trolls with a lot of spare time who will comment on what seems like every single political tweet so that basically any engagement in any way has become all but impossible. These are people who call the Dutch equivalent of the Tories "extreme left" and consider anyone on the "extreme left" a traitor and fair target for seemingly anything.

Imagine every single comment you make on HN having several hundred replies ranging from calling you an asshole, to accusing you of all sorts of "crimes", to threatening to literally cut your throat. These things really do wear you down, especially if you're not really looking for the limelight, which most politicians aren't really (for every MP you can name there are a dozen more backbenchers).

With the internet, citizens can anonymously criticize a politician, publish compromising information on the politician, ridicule the politician, and even call them insulting names!

With political power, the politician can restrict the freedom of the citizen, confiscate the property of the citizen, order the citizen to the front lines, declare the citizen a non-human, torture the citizen, execute the citizen, and exterminate the citizen's family. This has happened in every country on earth, including yours. It happens right now that you're reading this.

So the balance of power is far from being thrown by online free speech.

“Don’t worry, sane people can still run for office, they just can torture and execute their constituents family” is quite the argument to make..

That would be quite the argument indeed.

That doesn't really seem like a good-faith reading of the parent comment.

> As a result I think we'll see detectable pressure for only risk taking narcissists to run for public office. Even beyond what is usual for politics.

I love the word "detectable" thrown in here for good scientistic measure.

What exactly do you claim you'll be measuring here?

Well when the Democrats were in their darkest hour, democracy in the US was on the brink, Congress was on the verge of falling to raging mobs, etc, etc and they faced their greatest political bogyman in the last few decades ... they put forward Joseph Biden as their best hope of defeating Trump.

With benefit of hindsight now that we have a few years of opinion polling, we might suspect that he isn't actually the best that the party could come up with, and that there are a number of much better candidates who are choosing not to run. He is wildly unpopular and would basically only beat the previous generally-unliked president Trump.

I don't think that is normal. We've had 2 electoral cycles now where only unelectable candidates stood up. As recently as 2007 we had the likes of Obama, and before that Clinton (who say what you will, had approval polling that trended in the right direction) out of the Democrats. And Bush was popular until the chickens came home to roost on the horrific foreign policy blunders.

So we can detect that something has gone wrong in the last few electoral cycles where either the quality of the candidates has declined or the visibility into what the government is actually doing has improved. I argue both, but today I'm focusing on the former.

Yes, this trend has been becoming more observable - particularly in the past ~10 years IMO. Of course, as another commenter points out, it has been increasingly adopted by some politicians themselves.

At some point, all of the "megaphones" we handed every single person with access to the internet, started to be more and more co-opted by actors whose primary use is propaganda, trolling, etc. And, particularly, in the sense of what has been termed "coordinated inauthentic activity" and the like. So, whereas, 15+ years ago you could look at comments on YouTube, say, and see a mix of discussion and some 'low quality' comments of various types (like trolling, random nonsense and non sequiturs, etc.), more recently, there are specific efforts to hijack comment threads, "stir the pot", etc.

A lot of the "bad actor networks" hinge, as usual when it comes to humans / statistics / networks, on a small set of "high volume central nodes". Although, apparently, that has been evolving as well, presumably as a sort of war continues to play out between companies hosting various platforms, and people, groups, countries, etc. who wish to exploit their availability. [1]

There are two potential mitigations I see forming more and more. One appears to be proven in a practical setting, already, though it has negatives that have also been fairly substantially discussed. The other involves a tool gaining more and more ground only even more recently:

1) Turn off / remove general (and especially unmoderated) "comment" features*

2) Use increasingly sophisticated ML and other models to handle various types of activity and language that are being deployed for corrupt purposes.

The problem with "1" that is most frequently cited is that this can push "networks of bad actors" more into the shadows - where it's harder to know what they are up to etc. However, this is obviously a trade-off against their reach in general etc. In the shorter-term (and, I personally think, likely even in medium- to longer-term), this clearly "works". It substantially reduces harms to individuals, various social groups, societies as a whole (arguably), etc.

The second option is of less clear value, so far. Automated moderation has been around for 30+ years - that's about the time I have personal experience with. It's only in the past 7 - 10 years that more sophisticated statistical models etc. seem to be being deployed (AFAIK). And, we are now in a period of really rather more significant change with ML capabilities and the like. I'm inclined to think we're still not at the level required to make this "easy" / "silver bullet". But, I also think there are likely significant improvements being implemented and seen in practice, currently. Of a type that is relatively "transparent" to most users ... so, not being involved in any such efforts, not having spent time looking into these efforts more closely, I'm entirely speculating here.

In any case, much as "publishing" went through periods of less and more "regulation"**, we've had a reasonable period of very low "regulation" of the internet. Regulation need not, of course, mean government regulation. But, it seems increasingly likely that regulation in some form or other will increasingly need to be imposed on the internet (at least the "mass / easily accessible" parts) to diminish the influence of bad actors and keep the internet valuable for everyone (else).

* Obviously, this depends on nature of platform - for many platforms, these features are far from core. Something like Twitter/X is, of course, pretty much "pure comments" ... so, irrelevant there, regardless of who is running it.

** There were periods where pamphleteers in America (where I'm more familiar with the history) were running wild in political and other discourse, and then this was brought under more of a semblance of and practical "moderation"

[1] E.g., https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3522756 (just one of a slew of relatively recent papers, more and more being published each year, of course)

...I think we'll see detectable pressure for only risk taking narcissists to run for public office. Even beyond what is usual for politics...

I know you added the "even beyond what is usual" part, but I think it's been clear since way before the US existed that decent people dont pursue power.

That doesn’t capture the whole picture. Great leaders may not have been decent people, but it’s also clear that being a decent person isn’t what makes for a good leader.

The concern would be something like, only a strong narcissist would risk extreme public scrutiny, but while great leaders might exhibit narcissism, they have other more dominant traits. Is any overwhelming narcissist capable of gathering advice and delegating effectively?

I reject the notion that no decent person seeks to lead.

I agree it is hard to stay in power without getting your hands dirty, but many good people have been leaders. And to normalize the idea otherwise would be a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy.

It is hard to argue that Jimmy Carter is not a good person. It is also hard to argue that he was a good president.

The online shaming culture at tumblr, twitter and reddit was what convinced me that you need to stay pseudonymous on the internet at all cost.

There are so many people that participate in this and haven't realized yet that they are being an asshole to random strangers.

100% this.

Learned in the 90s early internet about the emotional harm that I’ve seen happen to people.

Slightly different topic. I think state and federal laws need to be passed regarding medical, police, evidence, and other types of private videos and photos from being leaked online. Too much of it magically leaks out and it’s just the people that are trusted with the data that are posting it online.

For sure. There was a show called “LivePD” that took live video as someone was arrested by the police.

I watched for years.

Now it feels so gross…if someone is having the potentially-worst moment of their life, society should offer them the decency of not putting it on live TV.

Didn’t those people all sign releases?

Maybe, and kinda.

From a NYT opinion piece[0] a few years ago:

> But “Cops” cameras, of course, are not news cameras, so unlike a traditional news crew, the shows’ producers have to obtain the written legal consent of every suspect whose face appears on camera. The producers of “Cops” claim they do. We found a different reality. Tracking down the people who have been filmed by “Cops” is not easy. But of the 11 suspects we interviewed, all but one said they either did not give their legal consent to appear on the show, were too inebriated to consent knowingly or were coerced into signing — with the police and producers, troublingly, working together to get those signatures.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/opinion/cops-podcast-inve...

Don’t try and pretend HN takes the moral high ground. This is something - regardless of how big of a problem you think it is - that permeates.

Once a month there will be a link to some GitHub or issue where everyone will pile on about some stupid issue.

Then flag it, too. HN shouldn't be the torch & pitchfork store.

Ad hominem is at least nominally against the rules here. Most egregious instances will get flagged and deleted. It’s not perfect but there is some effective immune response moving things back in the right direction.

IMO, the issues are much milder on HN than I have seen elsewhere.

HN is human-moderated, by both members and staff moderators. There is ... limited ... automatic moderation. Which means that some things do slip through the cracks.

(There are multiple mods, though dang is the public face.)

If you see something, say something: by flagging every-day dreck, or by emailing mods in the case of something exceptionally bad.

I do both. Flagging is a daily thing, email for abuse / transgressions maybe a few times a quarter.

Edit: Clarified first 'graph.

In the late 1980s, I got online. I refused to use my real name anywhere. I said, "Someone could run this Usenet group off to tape, restore it some time later, index it, and somehow make that available." I was derided as a paranoid fool. And yet here we are. One of my "handles" is still visible in a help file from 1993.

I was asked to provide a quote for a silly fluff lifestyle piece my friend was writing for the college's newspaper. 20 years later, that piece is number 5 when searching my fairly unique name (I've done as much as possible to scrub myself from the public internet).

I wonder if there's a service that could be created here, using AI to create sterile/whitewashed ghost accounts, and flood them all over social media, etc., for people so that the real, human identity is pushed down on the search results.

For sure against TOS, but I'm not sure that I personally care.

It's a common PR SEO service, no AI.

This is why I still wear a mask outside. If I'm filmed, at least I'll be harder to recognize.

one of the COVID silver linigs

Online I always try to talk about people as if the person I'm talking about would read it. It's always easy to be harsh when no one's watching, but the thing is that online you never know if they are. This doesn't mean I don't criticize posts or people, I just do it as if that person would read it.

I started doing this after some of my weblog posts (mostly about programming) ended up on Reddit and HN, and I read some of the comments on that. Some actual quotes (mostly from Reddit's /r/programming): “moron”, “idiot”, “retard”, “you must have an IQ lower than 65”, “fucking suck at making software (and I guess generally anything)”, “you’re like the anti-vaxxer of front-end development”, “this is hate speech” (context was about a technical topic they disagreed with, no politics at all involved).

And there's more ways to be unfriendly than using "bad words" like "idiot", such as not actually reading the post before commenting (frustratingly common), being excessively pedantic, very aggressive but without actually using insults, etc. I remember one guy who for some reason really had it in for me and did a line-by-line "rebuttal" on several posts, picking on the tiniest thing, resulting in some comments that were longer than the article article than he was responding to, but usually never really addressing the core point. Odd person shrug.

HN has been a bit better overall, though not perfect either.

reddit is pretty bad now, I didn't realize when I was there regularly but after a break it's really shocking.

I went there last night to read any first person accounts of the streamer riot yesterday in New York's Union Square. Instead there was a lot of racism and hate.

It really depends on the sub. "Reddit" isn't really one big forum, but more like a hosting platform for lots of mostly independent forums. Some are moderated quite reasonably, some are moderated very strictly, and some barely at all.

As a rough rule of thumb, the larger the sub, the worse it is. This holds true for communities in general in my experience – humanity doesn't really scale well to large groups.

It's permeating into HN too, since so many people starting abandoning reddit. I've noticed a distinct shift during the last few months, that very distinctly started in mid June. It's gradually becoming a less positive place, and "antiwoke" posts in particular are becoming commonplace where they used to be unheard of.

Yeah agreed. It's pretty depressing, to be honest. So many people who are really nasty and hateful.

But what about the legality?

You don't need people to sign a release form if you're a photojournalist or anything considered to be an editorial source.

But as professional filmmakers know, you absolutely do need a release form if you're producing anything commercial (for sale). Or if you're pushing the boundaries of this like they do when filming Law & Order, to at least put up prominent signs so Manhattan pedestrians know they might wind up on the show if they walk down a particular patch of sidewalk that day.

Isn't there a strong argument to be made that posting on social media without consent is therefore illegal? Because while you're not explicitly selling the video, you and/or the site is monetizing it via ads, which these days is the same thing.

Has this been tested in court?

AFAIK, there is no requirement to gather release forms from someone you happen to film in public. It is simply something done to reduce exposure to possible civil liability on commercial shoots.

Avoiding lawsuits is the point of those forms, not winning them.

> there is no requirement to gather release forms from someone you happen to film in public.

It probably depends on where you are. France and Germany for instance have stricter rules on the subject of photographing people in public places.

Yes, sorry -- I'm only talking about a US legal context here.

> there is no requirement to gather release forms from someone you happen to film in public

Right, the filming is fine -- it's the commercial distribution that's the problem. And I'm assuming those civil suits have existing and succeeded in the past?

So my question is still whether social media ought to be considered commercial distribution, since it's generally ad-supported. I mean, broadcast TV is entirely ad-supported too.

E.g. posting on Mastodon is fine because there are no ads, but posting on Facebook/YouTube is not, because they're monetized with ads.

Hmm... can a not for profit use content involving a party without waiver/contract?

I don't think profit is the key issue is it?

Not a lawyer so I'm not sure, just seems like the issue has always been an individuals "right to privacy" and "right of publicity" and whether or not the work is journalistic, for private use, etc.

What I'm saying is I don't think it's a simple as "if you are distributing your film product commercially, you must get permission".

What is established as illegal is if you are filming something like an ad, you need permission to use a likeness, because otherwise one could reasonably take the use of that likeness as implying an endorsement of the product being advertised.

But on the other side of the spectrum, if you are filming a documentary or a news broadcast, you don't need permission to use someone's likeness, as they were there in public at that time and you are allowed to film in public.

Other commercial projects, like Hollywood films, fall somewhere in between. "Ad-supported" is most definitely not the same as "is an actual ad", but sometimes it's not quite so clear-cut (product placements etc).

My point is many of these instances could probably be successfully litigated in court, however it is cheaper to just avoid the litigation altogether by getting permission from people beforehand, even if it is not necessarily illegal to proceed without that permission.

So I guess we can start seeing lots of lawsuits against people who didn’t take these steps to avoid this risk.

I wonder if class action suits against YouTube, TikTok will make it. And against specific big streamers.

I think it’s reasonable to ask for at least all revenue from a video, if not treble damages as these video producers aren’t even attempting to get consent before commercializing.

I don’t care too much, but anything that puts a damper on social media is good in my book. Kind of like I thought the reason Facebook got a bad rap in 2016 was dumb but was still happy because it harmed Facebook.

I personally DO think it should be illegal for another human’s identifying features to be present in a digital photo without their consent, especially if it is shared online & doubly so if any money is made on it (including advertising)

Unless I’m misunderstanding you you’ve basically just made it illegal to take holiday photos, pictures of popular landmarks, or just generally any photos outside of your house.

> Still, a blanket law against posting strangers without their consent would be draconian and unworkable. There are too many variables, too many circumstances, and simply too many cases.

There’s lots of revenge porn laws now and they seem to be helping to reduce the number of sites willing to post. And revenge porn is usually sent consensually but the victim doesn’t consent to the type of sharing. Obviously the harm is greater, I think, but there is a precedent for how a law could be structured.

It would also be quite easy to set up a “$100 statutory damages if you’re in someone’s video without consent” and watch the AI firms make a zillion dollars on recouping damages.

> Still, a blanket law against posting strangers without their consent would be draconian and unworkable. There are too many variables, too many circumstances, and simply too many cases.

I disagree. If someone (who is a non public figure) is the subject of a photo/video and has their likeness used without consent by a third party, the third party should be liable. There should be legal recourse for the victim to sue and force the third party to take it down (plus compensate for legal fees)

Courts already deal with situations where there are "too many variables", the law isn't black and white for everything. The way that the author just brushes any legal solution aside seems like a cop-out

Such a law would create the perfect environment for police brutality.

recording a video of someone ≠ posting a video of them

It seems like existing laws could already cover some of these scenarios if judged correctly.

E.g. if a TikTok'er uploads a video lying about you, isn't that slander? The size of their audience and known effect of internet mobs makes it very clear to a reasonable observer that harm to the victim is expected/intended.

And gaslighting children or abusing the elderly is already illegal, right?

>TikTok'er uploads a video lying about you

This is quite rare and any lawsuit is hard and likely not worth it.

>And gaslighting children or abusing the elderly is already illegal, right?

Depends. And then again, what are you going to do about it?

This is actually what I’ve been waiting for for years. Should only take a couple of successful ones to stop it.

“Lying” is not really all that illegal in the United States because of that pesky first amendment that people love to apply (and ignore) when it suits them.

No, most countries don't have very aggressive libel laws.

EFF has a post about online defamation laws and one of the examples they go into is Vogel v Felice where the claim was about videos that used titles like "Top 10 Dumbasses" among other things. They got away with it because they couldn't prove actual malice and because despite nobody being want to be publicly known as a "dumbass" it's not a statement that can be proven true or untrue.

They also go into how private and public figures are viewed differently. It's all very interesting and worth reading. Also I had no idea insurance was now covering online libel claims for small businesses/bloggers. https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/defamati...

> In reality we already practice social media consent; it is not unusual to ask a friend if they’re alright with having a picture posted

Is this common practice? The author keeps insisting it is. I don’t think it is, I think the author is just a member of a particularly inclined friend group. It would be a nice consideration but I can honestly say I have never asked nor been asked.

I’ve certainly asked after the fact to have particularly unflattering pictures I’ve been tagged in taken down and friends have always apologetically complied.

I don’t generally post many pictures of people outside my direct family, and can only think of one occasion where my sister had me take a photo down.

I've been asked to remove photos the other person thought was too unflattering (which I found pretty petty), but yeah, no one has ever asked me my permission to post pictures including me, and I've never asked that of others myself.

We should. Understand it’s ok that we’re learning for a period when all this was new, but the time has passed and now clear we should.

This would be about 90% of Reddit's front page.

Just look at /r/tinder: people just casually posting screenshots of ostensibly private conversations with the person's face & first name visible. It's frankly ridiculous.

I stay away from the kind of content the article refers to however I think there are cases where it's important to highlight the behaviour of those who would prefer you didn't such as recording the bad behaviour of public workers.

Popular 1st Amendment auditor Long Island Audit has highlighted much of this and shown how many police officers lack knowledge of laws they are supposed to be upholding.

Here's a video that went viral[0] and a recent follow up[1] where things went kind of differently i'm assuming because of the exposure in the first.

[0] https://yewtu.be/watch?v=AsxNf54ep1Q

[1] https://yewtu.be/watch?v=CZtgVrYC4f0

Social media truly is the opioid of today's society.

While browsing /r/all, I ran across a post from a very popular sub which had an airport worker stripping in the airport, flailing on the floor, etc. No one knows why, could have been drugs, could have been a mental defect.

Yet many of the thousands of responses were laughing because they could see the man's flaccid penis.

While we don't know what caused the man to do this, imagine your next mental breakdown being posted to an insanely popular sub for everyone to gawk and laugh at.

Oh, and of course Reddit found that the post didn't violate the "no non-consentual nudity" which according to the guidelines does cover non-consentual public nudity.

https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004351341...

I often think this about Ring / permanent surveillance that exists now. Nobody can even be free in front of their own house without the threat of something ludicrous happening to you and then it being on public record until the end of the internet. It's absolutely wild to me.

Like it or not, this is just the beginning.

Fairly soon, all human life will be recorded.

There should be a right to be forgotten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

HN/YCombinator does not honor this correctly from a EU law perspective. They don't allow you to delete your content. What they do offer is renaming your account.

I'm salivating for this monster lawsuit once they they have enough EU exposure. It will probably be based in Germany.

@switch007: They are investing in European companies. That's exposure.

@walthamstow: Look up the "Right to erasure" aspect of the GDPR.

(Why am I adding these things as edits? - I was rate-limited by HN/Ycombinator so I can't reply to your individual comments. When trying to post a reply I get the message "please slow down".)

Does HN have an EU company? If not, why should EU law apply?

I’m mostly pro EU but I’m against countries/unions enforcing their laws beyond their borders.

I don't know EU regulations well enough but isn't the ability to change your email address and scrub your about section enough? That would break any traceable links to you.

I live in a GDPR country and I don't really see the problem with HN's approach. They own the information you typed into their website, you own the privacy of your name. Why should they delete information you gave them, rather than just help you anonymise it?

> They own the information you typed into their website

Not a lawyer, but is this actually the case? I thought the core of section 230 was about exactly that - that a site operator does not constitute a "publisher" for everything that is written on their site, if the site is just a "dumb" software that displays content written by the site's users - and therefore can't be made liable for anything written in user-generated content in the way they would be for editoral content.

That would imply to me that the site operator does not own the user-generated content. Otherwise, you'd have a weird "have your cake and eat it too" situation where a site gets all the rights of ownership but none of the responsibilities.

(... this doesn't even touch on the situation where that content violates intellectual property or contains PII.)

> Not a lawyer, but is this actually the case?

Generally, no, they have a license, generally a broad, perpetual, non-exclusive license per the conditions attached to use of the site. not ownership. OTOH:

> I thought the core of section 230 was about exactly that - that a site operator does not constitute a "publisher" for everything that is written on their site, if the site is just a "dumb" software that displays content written by the site's users - and therefore can't be made liable for anything written in user-generated content in the way they would be for editoral content.

This is wrong on multiple levels; it specifically does not require that it be ”dumb” (neutral) software, which would have made them a distributor not a publisher under the law without Section 230; it specifically is to allow site operators (and other users) to do things that shape which content is presented without being subject to liability as a publisher.

But that's about liability, not ownership.

> (... this doesn't even touch on the situation where that content contains intellectual property or PII.)

If its not IP, no one has ownership ; ownership of content only applies to IP of some kind.

Thanks a lot for that clarification. That actually changed my understanding of section 230: I always thought that the "shaping" of content was some sort of loophole that the section might have more or less accidentally enabled - I wasn't aware that this was its main purpose.

Considering that we increasingly understand how much power lies in that ability to "shape" distribution of UGC, and how much platforms actively abuse that power, the people wanting to reform/repeal the section just got a whole lot more sympathetic in my view.

> If its not IP, no one has ownership ; ownership of content only applies to IP of some kind.

(I edited the GP before I saw the reply)

My point was more who is responsible for violations of other IP in UGC - i.e. the classic case of someone uploading a blockbuster movie to YouTube. Would the liability fall on YouTube or the individual user who uploaded the content.

Or, in a similar vein, you post your address/phone number/real name/whatever to a platform, then later want to delete the post again, but the platform doesn't let you. Can you (legally) force the platform to delete the post or not?

However, the fact that both scenarios resulted in years-long, (and still ongoing) debates and in the end, new laws had to be passed to handle them (DMCA and GDPR), shows to me that the whole area seems to be extremely messy and not completely well-defined.

But yeah, the other question is also interesting: If I uploaded some personal project to YouTube (which would constitute IP I believe) and suddenly it goes viral, could Google steal the video and publish it as their own? Good to know here that they can't.

> Considering that we increasingly understand how much power lies in that ability to "shape" distribution of UGC, and how much platforms actively abuse that power, the people wanting to reform/repeal the section just got a whole lot more sympathetic in my view.

I’m curious who you’re referring to as the people wanting to reform/repeal. Most of the discussion on section 230 that I’ve seen in recent years can pretty much be summarized as “I allege that you’re shaping content to reflect a particular political/cultural preference. Therefore you should not be shielded from responsibility for illegal content”—which is a total non-sequitur. But maybe there’s also bee more thoughtful discussion that I’ve missed since I was never really paying that close attention to it.

Really, those people weren’t even looking for reform. They wanted to apply their interpretation of the existing law such that it would lead to a punitive outcome for the sake of retribution.

Yeah, that's the point. Create a negative outcome for companies that perform politically biased censorship, as many do. It gained a ton of popularity during covid because so many were against the government banning public assembly. Yet the only remaining avenues for broad speech censored views that went against the CDC's demands

> [have the government] Create a negative outcome for companies that perform politically biased censorship

Let’s not leave out an important few words.

No, the government does not create the negative outcome. It is simply an act of removing broad protections granted to a social media company from hosting illegal content. When it's clear that the assumption they have little control over the overall content are not true, because the act to censor to politically slant said content.

The risk comes completely from their members and the ones who may sue them

Why has the focus been purely on instances of perceived political bias if this isn’t just a pretext for punishing the wrong type of perceived political bias? Shouldn’t any demonstration of content control cause the same loss of protection (and cause the same fervent calls for loss of protection)? This would include removing illegal content. Removing illegal content, under your theory, should cause a platform to lose protection from hosting illegal content.

Well that's a bit of a chicken and egg. You only get "protection" from accidentally hosting illegal content if you never host any illegal content in the first place?

The idea is that if you have time to shape the slant of your community, you have no excuse for letting illegal content faster

I agree that overexposure is a problem, but I can't support censorship of truthful information.

We need a privacy bill of rights.

Until then, based on how it’s going, the EU will lead on this for the foreseeable future so let’s hope they nail it.

American intelligence agencies are complaining and lobbying hard about even the possibility of restriction in buying unlimited amounts of warrantless location tracking data on all their citizens at the moment as if it’s their God given right and without a thought to the monstrosity that could create… so… yea.

That's the exact reason I just ordered a locally recording doorbell and am finally replaced the last cloud based "smart" device in my home. I found myself actually changing my behavior and not saying certain things to my wife in front of it. The thought that every time I passed my own front door a stranger, that I placed there, was recording me was nauseating.

I had a ring for about one week before I ripped it out and sent it back.

I can’t understand how almost no one realized we went far worse than UK or Singapore’s surveillance state and did it on our own dollar voluntarily.

What's really scary about this, is that it can be edited by anyone before being posted online to make you either look like a victim or an instigator. It's then picked up by the media (which apparently are just influencers or Redditors now). People will always view that initial video as fact, even after the full evidence is posted. This can ruin the rest of your life, the damage has been done.

While editing videos has always been an issue, it wasn't possible to gain notoriety, make money, or instigate racial/class/political/whatever warfare as easily as it is now. You just need to post an edited video and whatever side you want to instigate, you can.

Those ring cameras are actually crazy. The fact that they are so normalized in the BA is kind of disturbing

This lady just moved in next to me. Drives a leased luxury car. Doesn't interact with anyone, she just put up a ring camera (on an apartment door) and doesn't go outside

I absolutely can't stand people who put up all of this cringey privacy invading IOT shit, in a relatively nice area on top of that

In Switzerland those cameras are illegal, since there is a right to privacy for all persons. Security cameras can exist on private land or where the need is deemed to be absolutely necessary (eg, high security or high value areas where it is in the public interest to have a camera) - but filming the street from your house fails these tests. Same for dashcams.

People like to make this "oh but you're in public so why can't I film you" argument and it's so strange to me that this is something people actively want - to not be allowed privacy from other peoples pictures and recordings.

> People like to make this "oh but you're in public so why can't I film you" argument and it's so strange to me that this is something people actively want - to not be allowed privacy from other peoples pictures and recordings.

I don’t find it at all surprising that there’s disagreement about this. You have two entirely reasonable and important principles that are butting up against each other. Personal freedom is important and so is personal privacy. Of course there’s going to be controversy and differences from place to place and culture to culture on where the dividing line should exist.

> You have two entirely reasonable and important principles that are butting up against each other

How exactly is being allowed to record someone else in public without their consent an "important principle"? Especially if the non-consenting person is the subject of the recording?

Why should I need your consent in public? Especially, if it’s incidental. If I follow you around all day, I see a problem. If you’re in the background of a video or photo I took of something else, I can’t see an issue.

The important principle is that people should be generally free to do what they want in public if it’s not harming others. It’s natural that it becomes more difficult to decide how to apply that principle when you begin talking about vague notions of harm, or potential harm, or harm that’s dependent on the personality or opinions of the person potentially being harmed.

Edit: I meant for this to be a reply to the parent comment.

There are degrees to this, going up to some random person and photographing their face is more egregious than photographing a friend with the random person in the background

Ring cameras are wired and you can set them up to only turn on when you aren't home. Thats what I do. I also don't have neighbors and live in the woods.

I know I'm not saying anything new here, but I'm always shocked by just how vicious the Reddit community is, especially from a group who considers themselves highly intelligent (compared to those "other" people). Videos like you describe are there every time I visit, along with fight videos and comments making up a back story as to what the victim did to deserve it, etc.

Sometimes I wonder why things like vigilanteism and other bad behaviors were so prevalent in the past, but then you go to these communities and realize it hasn't gone away, it's just moved online. Which, I guess is progress of a sort (less violence) and a big step backwards when you think about how in the past you could have moved away from a mistake or embarrassing encounter, but not anymore if it becomes viral enough.

Groups which consider themselves as very intellectual can commit the worst atrocities. Just look at communists.

It has little to do with education or intellect.

The disease of righteousness is available to all.

Being able to reflect and examine one’s own thoughts and beliefs is harder than fitting in and being righteous.

Smarter people are better at rationalizing away their bad behavior, though.

You need certain cognitive capacity in order to engage in sophistry.

Fair, there's plenty of extremely cognitive and smart "uneducated by higher education" people.

I don't know if that makes it less worse, or worse.

Enabling righteousness, where others are wrong, or missing the details, or thinking there can't be any understanding in something they don't understand or disagree with is a big problem.

Lots of people whack others over the head to externally validate their beliefs. I think Evangelism might even fall under that category by some definitions, no offence.

Communists were quite anti-intellectual. Literally against intelligentsia

> I'm always shocked by just how vicious the Reddit community is

Eventually you won't be shocked.

It's anonymous and you can say (almost) anything you like. Moderation of large subs is a joke, even before the strike. Just like the reddit "Trust and Safety" team, the mods of this particular subreddit, even though the post violated a sub rule along with the site rule, stayed up, unlocked.

> but not anymore if it becomes viral enough.

Not everyone wants to be a celebrity. But just read _this_ thread. You have at least one individual justifying this behavior.

Reddit has always been hostile/tribal, I would say it's slightly less so than in the past.

Absolutely not, in the beginning it was a super welcoming community, that openly accepted all types of people with open arms, where you could have friendly debates with people you'd probably punch in the face in real life.

But it quickly changed as reddit became a more mainstream 4chan alternative rather than the welcoming community it was in beginning.

Have you ever been to the php subreddit... toxic since day one.

Reddit has grown large enough to lose any identity it once had. It used to be tech literate, now it is really just the average population.

Here's the ironic part: Where are all the actually smart people?

If the person is actually smart in a field, they probably have jobs in that field. A job that is often extremely mentally or physically involved, leaving little time for revisiting that job over recreational periods (no time to hang out arguing with strangers, life's tough enough). There might also be NDAs involved, or concerns from higher-ups that the user might post anything that might embarrass the company, etc. It is also completely common for the smartest people in a field to have not an inkling on how to set up a website or join social media (because they are generally... on the older side).

The result is that Reddit, and social media, are mostly people who have studied those fields and didn't get in. The results are self-evident. I like to think of the uncle from Napoleon Dynamite who is constantly bragging to everyone about how he could have been an excellent NFL player.

Edit: It is also for this reason that I suspect that StackOverflow and Reddit moderators do it for what some have called “productivity porn.” “Look at me - I’m such a great person in this field that I even get to moderate the forums!” Even though they often probably couldn’t hold a midlevel job.

Intelligence is not a spectrum you can place people along and then point to a dot and say "this is where stupid comments stop"

It shouldn't surprise you that online communities are a reflection of human nature. The behaviors we see are the effects of groupthink taken to its extreme. Even in "civilized" forums such as this one, you'll notice people conforming with the group mentality, and deleting their posts if they get downvoted. When there is little to no moderation, and viciousness is acceptable within the group, this behavior will spiral out of control, as individuals try to one-up each other, leading to vigilantism, manufactured outrage, cancel culture, racism, and all sort of abhorrent behavior an individual wouldn't do in isolation. We all seek validation in our ideas, after all.

All of this still exists offline, BTW. This is how riots happen. What the internet does is make it more possible by connecting more people than we traditionally could communicate with, and providing a safe space for any kind of discussion to happen. It's a tool our tribal monkey brains aren't ready for.

I think you're largely right, but IMO the difference between what happens online and what happens offline is that you have to look people in the eye offline and you may encounter them randomly in person. There's a moderating function that generally (not always) keeps the heat down.

Same for pile-ons. I'm not so naive to think that they never happen offline, but there's a higher cost to doing them than there is when all you have to do is write 140 characters to dunk on someone you won't even remember in two weeks.

People that write on the internet are probably just on the average less sane. There are prevalent types on the interwebs that I just never meet outside.

Are they a different set of people online and off, or a just a different set of behaviors for the same people?

Reddit is far worse than human nature, I believe. The upvote and downvote system favours people that are authoritarian (as a personality trait). There is this sect like wibe nowadays on Reddit.

I don't think voting is related. There are some subreddits that do have quality content, but this requires a substantial moderation effort. The *chan sites are even worse than Reddit, and there's no user voting AFAIK. Slashdot had a voting system before Reddit, and the discussion there is mostly civilized. Usenet didn't have a voting system, and the discussions were civilized before Eternal September, when users generally followed a netiquette. HN itself has limited voting and civilized discussion, but the site could get overrun at any point if the userbase grows rapidly, and new users decide not to follow the rules. There have been Reddit-type comments here for a few years now, and it seems to be increasing.

So it's a matter of community morals and values, and laborious moderation efforts to sustain it. Once the community grows large enough, moderating content becomes unmanageable. All large social media sites struggle with this, as they literally can't keep up with the amount of content. This is a scale problem that is unique to the internet.

Reddit is arguably worse than 4chan on this front. I don't know about altchans.

Imageboards push actually contrarianism to some degree as it gets more replies (the only metric equivalent to a voting system)

No I think the upvote and downvote system gives psychotic vibes. The normal disagreement does not exist (outside some niche subs maybe).

I dunno but Slashdot but you can have a voting system if users are not using it to silence those they disagree with. Not showing the score goes a long way of keeping it sane, like HN.

The backstory ones are amazing.

It's like an LLM were set free.

"He probably stalked her from the age of 12 and waited till she was 19 before he bought her an ice cream of the flavour her mum liked before she died. All so that she'd invite him to this party where he could fight this other guy.

Imagine you think this guy is a friend and he only became your friend because he hated someone else.

As someone with trauma because of my parents dying when I was young, finding out that the one guy who was your friend is not would be devastating."

It actually reads like modern TV. Soaps, and teen drama.

Part of the problem is, we tend to ignore age. That sort of post could have been made by a 9 year old.

Your first paragraph is true but also, what do you expect when politics is exactly the same.

You're given and us Vs them narrative and if you fall on the wrong classification by whoever decides they want to apply a label, any harm you can come to is delightful and cherished. Violence is justified too. "Words are violence" so violence can be used to "defend" against it.

I think it goes well beyond Reddit and has all to do with creating a context of righteousness and dehumanization to be able to justify mob behaviour and, ultimately, violence. Power, in one word.

> Sometimes I wonder why things like vigilanteism and other bad behaviors were so prevalent in the past,

For vigilanteism it seems simple to me: it was the original counterforce against anti-social sociopathic and predatory behavior such as murder - predating law enforcement, predating law, predating humanity. Even animals arguably engage in "vigilanteism" when retaliating against another pack's attack, or when pack leaders are overly cruel and tyranical. The deterence of "don't hurt us - or we'll hurt you".

We rightfully look down on vigilanteism now as it tends to short circuit things like the due process of an assumed-to-be effective, functional, and ethical legal system... but those are some pretty big assumptions, and I have several bridges to sell you if you think they're always true, or if you think everyone agrees on which legal systems rise to that level. Vigilanteism is merely the default form of "justice" that we sometimes rise above, given the right circumstances.

Circumstances which are often lacking online.

I kind of wish that some billionaire would just get mad, buy reddit, and run it into the ground. The world would be a much better place

Or better yet, round the redditors up and send them to Siberia

Be careful what you wish for, this has already happened to The Social Network Formerly Known As Twitter.

I wonder if anyone who wished doom upon X in the past years is finally getting the satisfaction they wanted from watching its steady demise. Personally I don't see anything stopping someone from just making Twitter: The Sequel and starting the whole cycle all over again. There's nothing that outlaws the creation of an internet cesspool.

There was little of lasting value on Twitter. It was great for breaking news or timely discussion but I’ve rarely had the need to go back and reread old tweets. Reddit, at least in the right subs, is often a StackExchange with a much broader scope and less pedantic moderation. I probably refer to old Reddit posts multiple times a week.

I don’t miss Twitter. I would absolutely miss Reddit.

For some reason, this reminded me of the Bansky quote:

“The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.”

How many millions of people post on Reddit?

Reddit is just made of everyone, and it turns out that everyone is a bunch of jerks.

Reddit is a cesspool. There are people actively using it for radicalization. It takes them far too long to shut down subreddits dedicated to far-right eugenicist delusions, if they do so at all.

My man… if you think the problem with Reddit is “far right” that is just how far your perspective is skewed.

There are a lot of accusations to make at Reddit; that is by far not even close to reality.

Reddit has a far everything. From tankies in denial to straight up Nazis, Admins do nothing with both sides. I used to like the libertarian approach (except the borderline/straight up cp subs...) but it is evident that they dont do anything except punishing their own community and censoring what they dont like because of being understaffed and underqualified rather than sacrificing on advertising revenue for the sake of liberty and pulling users that way.

I agree reddit is a cesspool. I disagree that rightwing groups are the cause. Leftwing groups, Rightwing, groups in the middle, groups around programming languages are all filled with toxic people showing toxic behaviour that the same people would complain about on other mediums.

Any examples of that? That sounds pretty far fetched

I saw the same video on r/publicfreakout and I didn't see a single comment laughing at the guy. Most were expressing concern. Many were saying it shouldn't have been uploaded.

Different subreddits will have different reactions. Also, moderation and up/down voting will swing the tone over time. One of you may have seen the post early and the other later and you could both be right in your impressions.

As time goes on, I find myself avoiding posts like these on purpose. I just don't find them funny or entertaining and I find the comments to generally be quite heartless and judgmental. We're collectively laughing at these people like they're caricatures. They're people like you and me, but they're treated like subhumans. I saw that post of the airport video and briefly considered watching but, honestly, I don't want to participate anymore in the collective ridicule of somebody whose personal situation I don't know and can't judge fairly.

There was a post the other day by a wife who briefly saw messages between her husband and some 16 year old. They seemed 'intimate'. All the comments condemned him as a vile pedophile. A day later, she writes that it turned out the girl was her husband's daughter. That he'd only recently found out about her.

We judge as if we're any better than these people. We're not.

The week Facebook released a feature that allowed people to be tagged in photos by other people is when I deleted my account. 2008 or so? The writing was on the wall by that point: in these platforms, your identity is as much controlled by other people as by yourself. Not good, very bad, get me out of here.

> Another law being considered in France would make parents responsible for their children’s privacy rights. Le Monde cites, as an example of fame-seeking behavior that France is hoping to discourage, TikTokkers scaring their children by pretending to call the police on them, and an Instagrammer who smeared chocolate on her 4-year-old and convinced them they were covered in feces.

It's a depressing state of affairs that any country has to consider passing laws for this kind of behavior. Shouldn't we, as a society, have enough shame to prevent this, or at least prevent it from becoming trendy?

I worry about how these laws could be bent to authoritarian ends. "You can't record me without my consent" laws have worrisome implications for police encounters. I think (well, honestly, I hope) the populace has the capacity to prevent fame-seeking behavior by shaming it out of existence, rather than leaning on government to punish people for an activity that we would be doing little else to disincentivise.

I truly believe the solution is to not engage with malicious fame-seeking content in any way. Avoid platforms where it is regularly shared. Vocally villify it. It can't be shamed out of existence until we start shaming it.

Off topic but reading articles on mobile is a goddamn nightmare these days. Reader mode is the only thing saving it.

While I agree, humans are immoral, and will always be immoral. We're inherently flawed and self-serving (speaking collectively, not individually as a rule).

This is why cryptocurrency is at its core a very good idea (I personally found the Satoshi whitepaper very beautiful), yet in practice is completely and utterly abused and useless to society - it failed to take into account that humans will do anything and everything to abuse a system for a dopamine hit or for status, etc.

As soon as technology catches up to this reality, we'll start to see change there. I don't think regulators will ever catch on to this, honestly. I think we need to stop thinking they will.

I don't know the solutions here, but this is my pessimistic take. It makes the problems harder (but IMO not unsolvable).

But this has beauty too. Hideous crimes go punished, for the world is watching. Surveillance by the many for the many prevents warcrimes, prevents police brutality, chills a uncivilized humanity, idealized by to many into a civilized humanity. If you aspire to see a unwatched world goto den Haag, travel to auschwitz, to Xinjiang and the Archipel gulag. When the world is not watching and authority story reigns supreme, monsters walk the earth. The cybernetic augmentation of society, the leviathan-cybernetics is a great societal achievement.

Living in Germany I always appreciated their privacy laws related to being filmed/photographed in public. The US should do something similar.

Part of the power of social media, is that powerful people acting badly in public finally might face some public backlash or justice.

Banning this, will certainly protect the powerful, and will likely continue to be unenforced for the average person.

Meh I've never liked this argument. It becomes a question of who is "blessed" and "unblessed" enough for you, subjectively.

Whenever this argument comes up I think of what happened to Logan Paul and Justine Sacco. One desecrated what was effectively a burial site and faced few consequences, the other told a dumb joke and had their life destroyed over it. The powerful continue to thrive while the weak suffer.

We need more forgiveness in this world

Justine Sacco is such a sad story, but she is doing better now thankfully. Last I heard she was rehired by the company who fired her when she made the tweet.

This argument doesn't hold up in practice, because currently, the powerful are already protected. Look at how many cops got away with abuse, how many high profile celebrities got away with heinous things, so many examples of the powerful (in their respective realm) never facing consequences.

So what actually ends up happening is most of this "public backlash" only affects people already easily accessible. Whether or not they actually did "act badly" which is important to bring up because people too easily buy into narratives online that are very one-sided. These easily accessible people could have been talked to 1 on 1 to solve the problem, that's how accessible they are.

I don't think banning this is the solution, but we absolutely do need to check this behavior and evaluate the incentives in place because right now they're terrible. The fact that people can profit off these kind of videos/posts on social media (two times btw: by the platform itself and if the story picks up by news orgs who pay for rights to display the content), especially during a time when people feel financial unease, is a recipe for disaster. Logically with these incentives in place, it makes far more sense to just be a bystander and film, rather than stepping in and helping or looking for help.

"This argument doesn't hold up in practice, because currently, the powerful are already protected"

Not on social media. Anyone can post a video or article attacking powerful people and groups, and thus "we" need new laws that will protect people on social media.

I am blocked by my local elected representative on Twitter. I was able to get better constituency service publicly on Twitter than I can via email or voicemail. But if I can be blocked, no problem.

Censorship and safety tools on social media need to be very carefully designed because at scale they get abused.

There's a big difference between filming a public servant on duty misbehaving, and I random person having a bad day.

> Part of the power of social media, is that powerful people acting badly in public finally might face some public backlash or justice.

Who are the powerful people in your opinion? Does it depend on their skin color? Their gender? Their perceived wealth? Their looks?

Try hard enough, you can find any kind of hook that will justify public shaming because this person has privilege and so it isn't punching down. Of course, nevermind that, what use is it for someone in Seattle to join the shaming of someone in London, nevermind Atlanta?

> Who are the powerful people in your opinion? Does it depend on their skin color? Their gender? Their perceived wealth? Their looks?

One use of recording is if you hire someone to do a job and they don’t do it - a recording can be used as evidence in court

Like of you hire a police officer to enforce traffic laws and they choke someone on the sidewalk

The video evidence clearly shows the officer detaining the pedestrian to prevent them from wandering out into traffic.

Cop 100% doing his job. With Qualified Immunity when that ped dies.

There is no reasonable expectation of privacy when in public. While it's certainly polite not to take photos of strangers and post them without asking if it's ok, you shouldn't morally or legally need permission. They're in public. Their actions can be seen by anyone else in public who crosses paths with them, whether online or off. There are cameras everywhere, and a random person with their smartphone should not be held to a higher standard than a surveillance company or security camera. I recently had someone give me a hard time because I had posted a selfie where someone else was in the background smoking a cigarette. The person was recognizable but far from being the focus of the photo. It was a complete coincidence that they were in the background, but a friend of theirs recognized them was angry that I had posted a photo of them without consent doing something that they didn't want shared on social media. Well, I'm sorry, but if you don't want people to see you doing something, don't do it in public. I chose to immediately remove the photo out of politeness and to avoid drama, but in my opinion, people have no right to be upset if a photo of them doing something in public goes viral.

I think it's actually pretty reasonable to have an expectation of relative privacy even while in public. As in I'm obviously expecting to be seen by the people in my immediate vicinity but not by people who aren't nearby. For the entirety of human existence until it very slowly started changing with cameras, but that rate of change has accelerated exponentially in the last ~15 years with ubiquitous camera phones and social media.

> As in I'm obviously expecting to be seen by the people in my immediate vicinity but not by people who aren't nearby.

If you're in a forest, maybe that's reasonable. But it would really be interesting to see some statistics about how many security cameras the average person is recorded on in a day, with the images broadcasted to servers around the world. I'd wager a guess that in modern cosmopolitan cities, it's probably upwards of 100 cameras a day. Meanwhile we're completely unaware of this fact and get upset when a stranger points a smartphone at us.

The important difference though is that most security camera's aren't publicly posting the footage. I'd expect most people to be upset if a shop started live streaming everyone that went by the street.

That would just be a webcam, and there are tons of them out there that don't (to my knowledge) get any blowback.

Example I saw in person a couple years ago (Estes Park, CO): https://originaltaffyshop.com/taffy-cam.php

They had a sign out front saying something like "tell your mom to visit this website so you can wave to her". Nobody seemed to mind. Maybe the difference here is that it is clearly marked?

I think you’re confusing legal duty with moral duty. I have no reasonable expectation conversational counterparts aren’t lying through their teeth, but I have the moral expectation that they’re telling the truth. Similarly, you have no expectation of privacy when browsing the internet, but I think you would still feel an invasion of your privacy should I post your browsing history, along with your real name, publicly.

Ultimately, moral codes are about creating a functioning society. Having people feel comfortable in public is an important aspect of that.

> you have no expectation of privacy when browsing the internet

Uh, yes I do. And a very reasonable one!

Why? When you’re browsing the internet, you’re connecting to servers owned by others and agreeing to their terms of service. You’re also using a service provider to provide your internet service, which is, again, privately owned. From where to you derive your expectation of privacy?

And when I'm showering in my apartment, I'm on privately owned property agreeing to my rental contract. That doesn't give my landlord a moral right to place a camera in the shower and post the photos online. Privacy in private is a right.

I hate to break it to you, but a sever in Google’s data center is not a private place. And if you shower in a public shower? For instance at the gym or pool?

I believe you’re beginning to see that you have certain expectations of privacy in public too.

There's a reason I don't use Google products and block Google IP addresses.

And I still expect that videos of me showering and the gym would not be posted online. It's not about who owns the property, it's about whether I'm in a place where I can be seen by the public.

Anyone is free to sign up to the gym and go to the showers. And it’s not about Google specifically. Any server is located out in what is essentially public. When you connect over the internet, you’re essentially leaving your house to go to that server.

Let’s say you used radio waves to operate a robot on a public street. Would it be invasive for those nearby to look at the robot? According to you, yes it would be because you’re controlling the robot from the privacy of your home. Or if you control the robot into someone’s yard. Wouldn’t they have a right to look at it? I’m not sure how you physically sitting at home changes things.

Your arguments aren't really rational.

Ok... I'm just taking your arguments (that you have no expectation of privacy in public) and showing you all the ways that you, personally, have an expectation of privacy in public.

You have an expectation in a public shower. You have an expectation of privacy when your bits are in public. Why not in other situations?

You're switching the definition of public from publicly observable to publicly owned. Those are not the same thing.

It’s actually you who are making the distinction. The article doesn’t mention whether or not the filmed people were “in public” or whether they were only “publicly observable” (whatever that means). One of the videos I know for a fact occurred in a shopping mall, which is private property that is open to the public. I assume this means “publicly observable” in your definition.

But in either case, in regards to your original comment, how did you determine these people were "in public" instead of "publicly observable"?

It is illegal to record anyone without their consent in places where there is an expectation of privacy.

A shower may fall under that provided you have not been given notice that recording will take place. But people can takes photos of you at the gym working out and post thek online for others to laugh at.

If your apartment manager tells you they are filming or a sign is visible at the gym they can film you.

Connecting to the internet and requesting a resource means you are in public.

You're coming at it from a legal perspective where the platforms do not have their own rules on what is allowed or not allowed.

In the example I gave in this thread, yes the man was in public, nude, however the platform (reddit) has a rule against posting this type of content. That reddit itself doesn't follow.

> I recently had someone give me a hard time because I had posted a selfie where someone else was in the background smoking a cigarette.

Why didn't you blur/crop/etc. them out, instead?

While you're not legally nor technically in the wrong and you're welcome to argue until you're blue in the face of 'public!', (the royal) you can ask those who are in the picture if you can post it, being a kind, thoughtful, and respectful human being, or you can go "it's in public! the law says I can!". And then the rest of us can make comments about morality and respect.

And if you don't know the people in the picture, ask yourself, do I really need to post this? (hint: no)

> Why didn't you blur/crop/etc. them out, instead?

Because they weren't the focus of the photo and I really didn't even notice them there. And I don't believe that it matters one bit if someone is caught doing something embarrassing in public on camera. They could have been the focus of the photo and I still think it would have been morally acceptable to post it. Whether it is acceptable according to the rules of the platform it's posted on, or according to social etiquette, is a completely different question.

> They could have been the focus of the photo and I still think it would have been morally acceptable to post it.

No. No it wouldn't have been.

You have absolutely zero need to post any picture online. It is a choice; a choice to further humliate the individual, possibly even causing them greater distress.

People who post pictures with justification like yours have caused those who are the target of the cruelty to commit suicide.

You do not need to post anything on social media. You choose to do so. And by choosing to post an embarrassing moment, you are the problem and you are morally in the wrong.

> No it wouldn't have been.

What if I catch an off duty cop on camera assaulting a person of color? Is it immoral to post that online? Where do you draw the line about which public acts should be moral to show in public?

You've moved the goal posts from embarrassing behavior (smoking) to an illegal act.

Try again.

The goal post was "doing something that they didn't want shared on social media". I didn't move anything.

Where in Western society do we consider an embarrassing act the same as an illegal act that may also be embarrassing?

My reaction to someone smoking is going to be "gross". My reaction to someone getting a DUI is going far, far beyond that, despite how embarrassing it is for the individual who received the DUI.

"And if you personally cannot draw a perfectly sharp line assigning every event to one of two groups, then no line exists and everything must be in one or the other!"

If you are so against posting on social platforms, why are you posting here? You don’t need to post anything.

>> There is no reasonable expectation of privacy when in public <<

this is the most incorrect statement i have seen today. you should experience what happens if you walk up to a woman with a purse and start rummaging through it. clothes would be unreasonable as well, you should look under peoples garments and tell them about how unreasonable they are being .

Rummaging though someone's personal belongings is not the same as observing and reporting what they do in public. I am not making that argument, and you are being disingenuous to imply that I am.

well i am making that argument and im not implying any thing.

>> observing and reporting what they do in public.<< try this for real, you wont like what the observed response is.

What do you think journalists and reporters do? Is their work immoral?

why do you think journalists, and reporters are so safety conscious ? why do they use pseudonyms?

Is the answer you're expecting that journalists are doing something that is immoral? Because that's not it.

the answer im expecting [TIC] is your answer., regarding : why do you think journalists, and reporters are so safety conscious ? why do they use pseudonyms?

im actually expecting you to duck the question, with non-interrogative questions

If you did that you could be charged with any number of charges, let's go with trespassing for starters, we can move to assault later.

If the purse was open and you looked no problem.

If someone frontdoor is open you can look in from a public spot but cannot walk-in.

yes thats probably right in most jurisdictions.

you are illustrating culturally, and legally accepted signals regarding expectation, or lack thereof, of privacy while in public purview.

THNX for your support BTW

> They're in public. Their actions can be seen by anyone else in public who crosses paths with them

Yes, in public in that same instant - were public is constrained to be the people present there

Once it’s recorded it can be copied and transmitted to far off places and preserved in time

There’s a gulf between the lack of expectation of privacy and that information pushed into a social media platform.

Sure, I don’t have an expectation of privacy. But I do have an expectation of not being made into content for anyone to consume.

I don't think that's a realistic expectation, and hasn't been since at least the middle of the last century. Public acts have been in the media for a long long time.

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