Comment by shortrounddev2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shortrounddev2 | Hacker News Reader

We are approaching Marky Mark and the Zucky bunch completely wrong. The rhetoric we use is as if he was running a government department (freedom of speech) and not the largest publisher in human history. On some level, I feel like our regulatory or philosophical model for how to approach Facebook is based on cable TV news, where people often argue for a return to the fairness doctrine.

Facebook is completely different from cable news. Nothing in history has encompassed marshall mcluhan's idea of the global village quite like modern social media has. The grip that Facebook has on our central nervous system is unparalleled and we talk about it in terms of "fairness" and "representing viewpoints" and not "biologically, neurologically, how is this technology fundamentally changing what it means to be a human being".

I don't know how to pass legislation to do so, but I believe it's in our best interests, as a society, if the maximum natural size of a website is like, 100k users, MAX. With the diversity of communities available, fairness of moderation will no longer be as important because you have more alternatives than the billionaire consensus factory

That's an interesting take, AND it is enforceable.

It's very difficult to serve immense numbers of people with social media. Scaling takes resources and technical expertise and lots of energy. You could treat it like trying to catch pot growers by watching their electric bills. I don't think there's a way around that, technically: to do the monoculture (and control it) absolutely requires intention, resources and concentration of effort in an obvious way.

Yeah, you can secretly administer multiple internet social communities and pretend it's not you, but that already happens too, and it's less effective than the monoculture, plus if you're doing that it smells funny, makes people ask 'why are we being governed to think this way through secret avenues' which is something people strangely don't ask about the monoculture.

Whether you can get society to sign on to this 'central control can get this big and no bigger' is much like asserting 'rich men can get this rich and no richer'.

>largest publisher in human history

You are of course correct, as far as scale, but I can't help feeling skeptical about how equivalent its effects are when compared to old media. On VJ day, practically every American read the headline in one of a handful of the nation's biggest newspapers. Today, we'd find this news from a post by our favorite influencer, with a built-in twist to boost engagement. There's no doubt social media has blanketed our society in its influence. but the signal has been completely scattered, lost in the sea of noise. In terms of simply learning new things, it's in one ear and out the other. You can learn all kinds of things through social media, but it requires a great deal of effort to weed out the torrent of irrelevant, useless junk data.

Not a linear scale, really.

We shouldn't need any new laws since it's so fundamentally and blatantly explained in the first amendment that no government official shall tell anyone what they can or can't say. SCOTUS has carved out certain language about credible threats of incitement of violence and the like and I'm ok with that.

Where it gets muddy though is during COVID+Social Media, we found a new threat against speech, e.g. the suppression of "reach" which accomplishes the exact same goal as suppressing speech, but it's legality is clouded by semantics.

So we desperately need new laws clarifying that government officials may not suppress 'reach' just because they don't like what a person or persons are saying, and most importantly we need it crystal clear that this applies even in the face of a pandemic, so that the government's embedded rent seekers can't once again force a lying narrative on the people that nobody can find their way out of, save for those who engage in 'conspiracy theories' and listen to 'conspiracy theorists'.

The problem with this is that if you allow people to spread big enough lies you end up with things like the Rohingya massacre, or the resurgence of measles. You will of course reply "I don't care, my free speech is worth any number of lives of other humans", but other humans may take a different view.

History repeatedly shows the collective intelligence of the masses is superior to government bureaucrats. Every, single, time. I specifically mentioned COVID because everything we take for granted now as basic truths were revealed very early on in the pandemic, but got suppressed by bureaucrats who thought they knew better (or were paid not to know better).

> Every, single, time

No, it really doesn't.

The wisdom of the crowds has some domains where it's good, and others where it's bad.

Bandwagons, groupthink, whatever you want to call it, that effect is also real. If I pick a random person and ask them what they think the "basic truths" of COVID are, 20-40% of the stuff they will say will still be false today — it just doesn't matter any more that they're wrong.

I feel this should be easy to spot by having two large populations that hold mutually incompatible beliefs, such as the way Americans love the 2nd amendment while the UK bans not only guns but also knives in pubic without good reason.

Government officials are permitted to issue recommendations to private entities. Private entities are permitted to follow or disregard those recommendations. For an example presumably compatible with your world view, a government official recommending a private company remove their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) program; a company may choose to follow or disregard this advice.

If there is evidence of improper coersion by government employees, for example threatening to withhold public funding or permitting based on political views, that would likely be illegal and indeed should be handled by the judicial branch.

> We shouldn't need any new laws since it's so fundamentally and blatantly explained in the first amendment that no government official shall tell anyone what they can or can't say.

That's neither what the First Amendment says explicitly nor how it is applied by the courts (though the way each of those differs from your description is quite distinct.)

I think public health officials should be able to make content moderation recommendations to publishers. In fact, I think they have a responsibility to do so. If someone is knowingly publishing false information which could harm people, public health officials have a responsibility to at least offer counter-guidance to the publisher and make objections clear. They obviously don't have the right to silence them, but they don't do that already.

To me, we should be less concerned with how a platform is moderated and more concerned with the fact that the most successful, influential, and devious publishing empire in human history is essentially the personal property of one man.

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