[HN Gopher] Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate...
___________________________________________________________________
Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate or defend
democracy (2018)
Author : Jimmc414
Score : 267 points
Date : 2021-09-29 13:56 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| b215826 wrote:
| Ironic that this is from the EFF, who were happy to dogpile on
| RMS when he said some things that some people took offense to
| [1]. Just like private censorship, trying to cancel someone is
| not the best to fight hate.
|
| [1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/statement-re-
| election-...
| faet wrote:
| Banning hate communities does work though [0]. I assume that the
| results are similar for twitter and facebook. "Hateful" Reddit or
| FB communities also don't allow "free speech". The moderators
| will ban people who go against the grain. There is no free
| exchange of ideas or disputing as if you're going against the
| grain you'll just get banned from that community (but not the
| platform). As such, either the platforms allow the hateful
| communities to just exist in their 'safe space silo' or they de-
| platform them.
|
| [0] http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Define 'works'. This subject is an easy one in which to
| conflate goals. The goals of the platform are different than
| the goals of the public, lawmakers, etc. which is what the
| article is about.
|
| The goal of the platform is to pull in more users. Having less
| abusive language and users is a means to that end, as is
| appeasing general public outcries for more moderation.
|
| The goal of the public and lawmakers is, hopefully, more
| effective and meaningful discourse.
|
| The paper you link measure for the prior outcome, not the
| latter.
|
| Edit: Just to comment on the outcome you are referring to
| though, I don't believe the bans actually lead to more
| meaningful and effective discourse on Reddit. I don't even
| thing it lead to more civil discourse. You can click on
| literally any politically sensitive topic on the front page and
| you'll find that almost all the top comments both lean in a
| specific direction (diversity of discourse is terrible) and the
| deride anyone who disagrees. Maybe they use the 'F' word less,
| and no one is using the 'N' word anymore, but it is very
| obvious that it has become a strongly homogenized platform that
| doesn't welcome nuanced opinions.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I suspect that for reddit specifically, homogenous opinion
| and lack of meaningful discourse has more to do with the
| voting/karma system and its inability to scale well.
|
| Nuance gets crowded out because posts and comments presenting
| polarized opinions are much more likely to get acted on by
| readers than their more nuanced counterparts are. Posting and
| voting becomes more about the dopamine hit from the gained
| karma and sense of being correct than it is about discussion.
|
| This is why while it still isn't perfect, one can often see
| higher quality discussions in smaller niche subreddits where
| there's no critical mass to push dominant opinions. In those
| communities, posting extreme comments just makes one look
| like an attention seeking troll.
|
| So in my view, moderation or lack thereof is almost
| orthogonal to an online community's propensity for quality
| discourse. That seems more related to the designs of and
| incentives given by the software these communities run on.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| I agree with most of what you've said. I really only
| disagree with the last bit, as it ignores the network
| effects of moderation, and the fact that moderation applied
| by topic is _necessarily_ polarizing along the lines of
| that topic.
|
| I didn't intend to prove "bans cause homogenization", but
| rather cast doubt on "bans achieve the stated goal".
| majormajor wrote:
| "More effective discourse" is probably far too aspirational a
| goal for lawmakers/government. It's also probably too
| subjective.
|
| Less violence, on the other hand, is a clearer goal that
| aligns with existing laws against violence, so it has a
| firmer basis, in line with existing restrictions on speech.
| It also gives you a non-partisan measuring stick.
|
| Private platforms, on the other hand, will have more
| flexibility in trying to maintain, say, discussion quality as
| a goal (see HN's stated moderation goals vs Reddit's). Or
| disinformation, or language/profanity, or whatever else a
| private moderator may choose.
|
| The government telling those private parties that they _can
| 't_ set their own standards, though, seems like a
| particularly terrible direction to go.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| It's no more subjective than 'less violence' provided the
| interested parties define measures for success. I mean, if
| the government can set goals for employment, then surely
| they can set them for civic engagement and disinformation.
|
| Totally agree with your last two points.
| PerkinWarwick wrote:
| >"Hateful" Reddit or FB communities also don't allow "free
| speech". The moderators will ban people who go against the
| grain.
|
| Which is fine I think, but why have Reddit or FB do the
| censoring (aside from things that are outright illegal). I
| don't much care if a bunch of Nazis or tankies are busy
| planning world domination on Reddit while sharing recipes. Why
| do you care?
| fighterpilot wrote:
| > Why do you care?
|
| Because zero moderation beyond criminal content is 8chan,
| which arguably inspired mass shootings.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/04/three-m.
| ..
| PerkinWarwick wrote:
| Zero moderation beyond criminal content is/was basically
| Usenet alt groups. Somehow the world survived all those
| years.
|
| Listen, I understand the need to cordon off the wrongthink
| people so that they can't communicate with each other, I
| just don't agree with it.
| notchFilter54 wrote:
| And when you ban misinformation on your platform, that
| "anti-vaxxer" instead goes to 8chan where by your argument
| might inspire them to shoot people up.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Given the size of 8 Chan and the size is communities
| banned from Reddit, we know this to be untrue.
| notchFilter54 wrote:
| Given that Texas has greater population than Rhode
| Island, we know it is untrue that my uncle Bill and his
| friends upset with Texan policies moved from Dallas to
| Providence.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| But you want Reddit to literally adopt 8chan's moderation
| policy, meaning that Reddit now will become the place
| that inspires mass shooters instead of 8chan (which by
| the way, is no longer a place that inspires mass
| shootings, since it was killed by Cloudfare after the
| last one, and replaced with the impotent and unpopular
| 8kun).
| notchFilter54 wrote:
| >But you want Reddit to literally adopt 8chan's
| moderation policy,
|
| I want reddit to adopt the public square's policy of
| allowing any content that isn't illegal, which also
| happens to be pretty much synonymous with 8chan's policy.
|
| Do you consider the town square (which has the policy of
| allowing content that is not illegal) a center of
| inspiration for mass shootings? Could it be that the
| public square is not viewed as a place for inspiration of
| mass shooting, have anything to do with integration of
| many ideas and the fact that someone bringing bad ideas
| might actually be challenged in an environment where they
| are exposed to the general ideas of the community rather
| than an echo chamber of fellow nazis or whatever?
|
| The nazi hall may have the same moderation policy as the
| town square, that doesn't mean I expect the same
| inspirations to come out of the nazi hall. The issue with
| the nazi hall is the powder-keg full of people
| reinforcing bad ideas, whereas a nazi in a more "normal"
| place like the public square might have some chance of
| being shamed or convinced their anti-social ideas are
| undesirable (despite the nazi hall and public square
| having same moderation policy). I don't want to shove
| more people into the nazi hall by banning them from the
| public square (especially when they're only being banned
| from the square because they have unconventional views on
| vaccines.)
|
| ---------------
|
| In the censor's world, the people with undesirable ideas
| in the public square are kicked into 8chan where instead
| of their ideas being challenged they all end up in a self
| reinforcing chamber. The proportional amount of people
| wanting a mass shooting may be tenfold that in the public
| square, leading to more compressed exposure including by
| other people who were originally just anti-vax or
| whatever. And the people running the public square turn
| around and say "see, 8chan allows any ideas, and that's
| what happens when you do that!"
| fighterpilot wrote:
| "Do you consider the town square a centre of inspiration
| for mass shootings"
|
| Before the internet, yes, definitely. Maybe not mass
| shootings specifically because that seems to be a recent
| fashion trend after Columbine, but violent extremism in
| general. How do you think Hitler managed to secure over
| 40 percent of the democratic vote in the early 1930s? How
| did Osama Bin Laden recruit extremists who were willing
| to put a bomb into the WTC basement? Propaganda, speech.
|
| This idea that unfettered speech in the public town
| square, even if it isn't directly inciting violence,
| can't lead to pathological outcomes just doesn't hold up.
|
| This isn't even an argument for government censorship.
| It's merely me recognizing that these type of outcomes
| can come about.
|
| Nowadays almost all extremist speech is online, because
| that's where there is distribution and anonymity, so the
| analogy breaks down. "where they are
| exposed to the general ideas of the community rather than
| an echo chamber"
|
| This isn't a bad argument, but you have to balance it off
| with the knowledge that ideas are highly, highly
| contagious. On balance, I think giving such ideas
| distribution to a billion eyes is far more harmful than
| pushing a fringe into echo chambers which already existed
| before social media censorship began anyway (such as the
| Stormfront forum).
|
| Moreover you have to recognize that these isolated echo
| chambers would naturally self-segregate on Reddit if
| given free reign, and so in practice you haven't changed
| anything aside from giving these ideas more distribution.
| It's not like /r/88 or whatever would be interacting with
| the rest of Reddit thus helping their members
| deradicalize.
| notchFilter54 wrote:
| I appreciate your honesty in believing the public square
| is a center of inspiration for mass shootings.
|
| I believe quite the opposite. It has been a place for the
| public to plan self defense, both to organize themselves
| in defense from natural disaster, hostile forces,
| wildfires, and anyone who seeks to do them harm. It is a
| place for the public to engage in the marketplace of
| ideas and inspirations, which ultimately leads to the
| saving of lives, prosperity, security, and bonding of the
| populace. Harmful ideas can be shamed and those espousing
| bad ideas have a chance of learning the holes in their
| ideas. The mass shooter espousing violent ideas in the
| public square is as likely to have alerted his neighbor
| to be alert for any evidence of crime, as he is to
| convince the general populace of his nutjob ideas.
|
| I don't buy your hypothesis that Hitler came to power
| because of free speech, and quite frankly it is laughable
| to think banning Hitler from Reddit (were it to exist in
| his day) would have any effect whatsoever. You seem quite
| ignorant of the factors precipitating Naziism, including
| the economic situation of Germany at that time. It's also
| worth noting that Hitler was quick to stifle certain
| speech that went against his ideas, meaning he found free
| speech at odds or even dangerous to Naziism.
|
| ---------
|
| >How did Osama Bin Laden recruit extremists who were
| willing to put a bomb into the WTC basement? Propaganda,
| speech.
|
| Bin Laden attempted to blow up the WTC basement with
| bombs, not free speech. Bin Laden lived in Muslim nations
| with more limited speech regulations than Reddit.
|
| >Moreover you have to recognize that these isolated echo
| chambers would naturally self-segregate on Reddit if
| given free reign, and so in practice you haven't changed
| anything aside from giving these ideas more distribution.
| It's not like /r/88 or whatever would be interacting with
| the rest of Reddit thus helping their members
| deradicalize.
|
| Some may, some may not. I've stopped using reddit because
| I was banned because I simply said things like I didn't
| believe forcefully shutting down a restaurant is an
| appropriate way to deal with coronavirus. Now maybe that
| is a very wrong and bad idea, but I'm willing to debate
| with others on it and learn their perspectives. Instead
| these communities said fuck you, you're banned, and now
| you have to go to some echo-chamber where everyone agrees
| with it. I'm not interested in an echo chamber, I'm
| interested in engaging with others so my bad ideas can be
| brought to light and shown to be bad, or my good ideas
| can be integrated. Your argument sounds more like one
| against having subreddits.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Hitler convinced almost half the country to vote for him
| because of speech that drummed up resentments stemming
| from the Versailles Treaty and the depression, channeling
| and anthropomorphizing those resentments towards Jews,
| the lugenpresse, the military establishment, and so on.
| So you've missed my point, which is that _town square
| offline speech_ can directly cause pathological outcomes
| when it is weaponized by bad faith actors.
|
| The belief that sunlight is the best disinfectant is
| nothing more than empty sloganeering and it flies in the
| face of everything we know about social contagion and the
| willingness of humans to be led astray by tribal hatred.
|
| Town square offline speech didn't lead specifically to
| mass shootings historically only because this particular
| medium of terrorism is a modern fashion trend, so it
| follows that it's a phenomenon that's going to be
| motivated online more than offline in the modern context.
| notchFilter54 wrote:
| And your argument is that if the venues hosting Hitler's
| speeches had Reddit's moderation policies then Hitler
| would not have been elected?
| fighterpilot wrote:
| You're trying to draw analogies between modern technology
| and the old town square. You should stop doing that
| because instant distribution to a billion people isn't
| the same thing as a speech to a thousand.
|
| I provided examples of speech in the old town square
| leading to pathological outcomes, but we are in a very
| different regime now and analogizing too much isn't
| helpful.
| notchFilter54 wrote:
| So who should decide what moderation policies we have for
| the public? The general populace, who as you say would
| elect literally Hitler, or the government itself of which
| Hitler was once a part and used these very moderation
| mechanisms to suppress the Jews? The tyranny of a
| minority of special moderators like perhaps a nominally
| communist censor committee may have? We allow Naziist
| speech to exist precisely because we don't want the
| government or the tyranny of the majority or minority
| choosing what political speech is allowed, such as
| outlawing speech that doesn't promote Naziism.
|
| >You're trying to draw analogies between modern
| technology and the old town square.
|
| No I'm trying to find out how you want to apply
| moderation strategies to "reduce the likelihood" (my
| apologies if I misquoted your deleted comment) of
| democratic election of those who some censors decide have
| the wrong political views or speech.
|
| >You should stop doing that because instant distribution
| to a billion people isn't the same thing as a speech to a
| thousand.
|
| Are you also one of those that thinks the first amendment
| doesn't apply to the internet because the founders never
| imagined something that distributes so much faster than
| the printing press could exist? I know this is a straw
| man but I can't help but think this is where this is
| leading.
|
| >And your argument is that if the venues hosting Hitler's
| speeches had Reddit's moderation policies then Hitler
| would not have been elected?
|
| The fact that you didn't answer this question (well you
| did, but you deleted it) really is an damning answer of
| itself.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| > So who should decide what moderation policies we have
| for the public?
|
| There's three possibilities:
|
| (1) No moderation at all, beyond what's illegal.
|
| (2) Private voluntary self-regulation.
|
| (3) Government censorship.
|
| In my opinion, (2) is the lesser evil, which isn't to say
| that it doesn't have its own pitfalls. (1) is infeasible
| due to the 8chan experience, and our understanding of
| social contagion and human tribalism. (3) has a much
| bigger slippery slope risk.
|
| > The fact that you didn't answer this question
|
| I deleted my answer because these analogies are too
| tenuous. You're trying to compare modern social media
| with how information spread 90 years ago. How can I map
| "Reddit's moderation policies" onto 1920s beer halls and
| Der Sturmer and newspapers? You can't do it. We're in a
| new regime and we need to reason about this new regime
| from first principles.
| notchFilter54 wrote:
| We're in agreement, although I might add (2) is
| essentially the same as the censorship policy in the
| Weimar Republic under which Hitler was elected, where
| public censorship was nominally and constitutionally
| illegal [1] (except in narrow circumstances, such as
| anti-Semetic expression) and any censorship essentially
| relegated to private and/or voluntary regulation
|
| > How can I map "Reddit's moderation policies" onto 1920s
| beer halls and Der Sturmer and newspapers?
|
| The same way the first amendment is applied to both beer
| halls and the internet. There's not a single rule in
| Reddit's content policy that cannot be applied to a beer
| hall [0]. If you fail to find a way to apply these rules
| you're either not putting in any effort or you're a lot
| dumber than you sound (methinks the former).
|
| Given that what you advocate for is virtually identical
| to that under the Weimar Republic, I assert your chosen
| policies would have little to no effect on the election
| of Hitler.
|
| [0] https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy
|
| [1] Ritzheimer, Kara L (2016). 'Trash,' Censorship, and
| National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany.
| Cambridge University Press.
| [deleted]
| PerkinWarwick wrote:
| >Reddit now will become the place that inspires mass
| shooters instead of 8chan
|
| I can guarantee that there are plenty of evil doings on
| Reddit and Facebook.
|
| One argument, and a more honest one, that people can make
| is that (a) social media is toxic and (b) it should be
| made illegal generally. Bingo bango, no mass shootings I
| guess.
| [deleted]
| mlindner wrote:
| > Banning hate communities does work though
|
| According to a single study. In general I don't think it
| actually does. Making it harder to find is sufficient, banning
| it outright just proves their point and pulls additional
| moderates to their cause.
| quantumBerry wrote:
| If all "legitimate" platforms ban hate speech, then users
| wanting to engage in hate speech will all go to some platform
| that radically allows all speech with disproportionately this
| undesirable speech. They will intermingle disproportionately
| with those spreading sexual abuse images, drugs, insurgent
| propaganda and instructional material, and other undesirable
| material. Facebook likely makes the problem worse by forcing
| these "hate speech" and "disinformation users" to be completely
| surrounded by people with repulsive content, instead of having
| their repulsive content critiqued and shamed by other users.
|
| Having people with bad, hateful ideas out in the open I would
| argue is preferable to concentrating all these bad thoughts
| together with people that will reinforce that it is normal.
| N00bN00b wrote:
| I'm being censored on Reddit myself.
|
| I'm not really sure why exactly. I suspect it has to do with
| having a NSFW tag on my account (that I didn't put there) that
| I'm afraid to turn off, because of the warning that's next to
| that button and it doesn't explain what "swearing" is exactly
| and if I turn it off and write "fuck" I might get banned.
|
| My account provides a lot of help to other people, it's highly
| valued by the community, I have loads of karma, I've paid for
| quite a bit of server time by the rewards I've received.
|
| But you can't search on my username, it won't show up (not even
| if you have NSFW visibility turned on).
|
| I'm not about politics, or covid or _any_ hate stuff. I 'm just
| there to try and help people with depression, anxiety and other
| issues. And I'm being censored for some reason.
|
| So whatever they're doing, it's guaranteed to overreach and
| it's counter productive and who knows how much damage it does
| to society as a whole.
|
| It's just that no one knows the severity of the damage the
| censorship does.
| colpabar wrote:
| > I'm just there to try and help people with depression,
| anxiety and other issues.
|
| Then it's mostly like because those topics aren't "advertiser
| friendly." Youtube did something similar during what was
| called the "adpocalypse." Advertisers don't want their
| products to be associated with the things you talk about, and
| reddit cares more about selling ads than helping you help
| people.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Reddit's search is incredibly (purposefully?) broken. It
| won't give you nsfw results for _anything_. You have to go to
| old.Reddit.com and use that search system. It has a checkbox
| for "include nsfw results" that is missing from the new ui.
| Check that and see if it helps you find yourself.
| N00bN00b wrote:
| I don't really need to find myself, you know. I know where
| I am. The problem is more that others can't find me and
| don't even know that I'm missing. Maybe you're right about
| the reason, but even that's irrelevant.
|
| It's scary. I happen to know this was done to me. How many
| times have others made _you_ disappear without you knowing
| you were scrubbed without being given any notice?
|
| This isn't my first account on hackernews (not my second
| one either, though with one exception they are all in good
| standing).
|
| But my very first account, I was happily participating here
| for years, until someone kindly told me I had been
| shadowbanned and I don't how much of my voice was censored
| exactly and I don't know why.
|
| So the issue isn't reddit. And apparently it's not really
| about me. The problem is exactly what this article is
| about, private censorship. Web3 is supposed to address
| issues like this (though, I don't know how much of that is
| handwaving and make believe). As soon as I can, I'm going
| to move there.
|
| I just can't trust these corporate entities, they don't
| operate in good faith, aren't transparent and avoid
| accountability for their actions. The utopia that was
| promised to me has failed and is in full decay, the signs
| are everywhere. It's time to move on.
|
| It's sad that a "normal user" like me ended up with those
| beliefs.
|
| I just wanted to be left alone and allowed to voice my
| opinions, I don't want to have to deal with censorship, I
| don't want to have to tell others how I've been impacted by
| it, to make them aware of what's happening behind their
| backs. Instead, here I am having a discussion like this
| with others.
|
| Am I even allowed to say this? Will this be wiped as well?
| I don't know. I wish this was all a joke. What kind of
| dystopian future is this? It's ridiculous beyond belief.
| eigengrau5150 wrote:
| A friend of mine got permabanned from Reddit a couple of days
| ago for calling _himself_ a faggot. Apparently reclaiming a
| slur is hate speech over there.
| rjbwork wrote:
| I don't think I've ever seen an _account_ with an NSFW tag
| /flair. Posts? Yeah. Subreddits? Yup. Possibly a flair for
| your user on a particular subreddit added by a mod for some
| reason? Sure. But not accounts. Can you link to this tag?
| N00bN00b wrote:
| Oh yeah. Accounts have NSFW tags these days. Also impacts
| chat functionality. You'll get warnings there. They call it
| "profile" but your profile is 100% of your account
| activity.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/pfpw4y/any_way_to_re
| m...
|
| This link has pictures in it, showing you the NSFW tag:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/8qhay9/why_is
| _...
| Manuel_D wrote:
| To be clear, the study found that platforms banning topics
| succeeds in removing those topics _from the platform_ - not
| necessarily from society as a whole. The study did not conclude
| that banning hateful communities off of reddit actually made
| those users less hateful or curbed the spread of hateful
| content online. If each of those banned users subsequently
| posted twice as much hateful content on a different platform,
| that still comports with the conclusions of that study.
| [deleted]
| leetcrew wrote:
| there's at least one major reason to be skeptical of that
| result, and they mention it in their limitations section.
|
| what they did was create a lexicon of hate speech terms from
| two large subs that were banned. they then counted the
| frequency of those terms in other subs after the ban. they
| found that usage of those terms dropped substantially, and
| concluded that the bans were effective at reducing hate speech.
|
| if you're familiar with the dynamics of these sorts of subs,
| the problem with this approach should be fairly obvious. these
| subs tend to develop their own set of specific terms/memes
| (hate-related or otherwise). it may be the case that the bans
| were effective at reducing hate speech across the whole site.
| but it's also possible that the same people are still posting
| the same stuff coded differently. this study is far from the
| final word on the matter.
| detcader wrote:
| Neither of your assertions are related to what is being
| discussed. Nuclear bombs "work" and bad people would do
| horrible things with them, but that doesn't say anything about
| if we _should_ use them.
| hartator wrote:
| > http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
|
| This paper is trash. On defining hate speech, "we focus on
| textual content that is distinctively characteristic of these
| forums", so, yes, banning specific subreddits resulted in less
| of that content in the overall Reddit. Did it make Reddit a
| more friendly place? Probably not as tensions have never been
| higher.
| Pils wrote:
| > _Did it make Reddit a more friendly place? Probably not as
| tensions have never been higher._
|
| Did allowing hate speech make 8chan/Voat friendlier? There
| are plenty of unfriendly communities that lack overt
| racism/fatphobia, but I can't think of any friendly ones that
| do.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Yes. People weren't trying to censor each other so they
| were less pissed off.
| Darmody wrote:
| Then r/politics should be banned but it's one of the biggest
| subreddits instead.
| naasking wrote:
| Sure it worked at reducing hate speech _on reddit_ , but is
| that the right objective? It's not implausible to think that
| the resentment from such local measures could cause hate to
| increase in a more global sense. Kind of like entropy in
| thermodynamics: local work can reduce local entropy, but at the
| expense of causing a global increase in entropy.
|
| If the _real_ objective should be a global decrease in hate,
| then maybe local suppression /exile might not be the right
| mechanism.
| gremloni wrote:
| The hate is in part generated by a continuous bubbled
| feedback loop. Cutting out the source(s) usually doesn't lead
| to a redirection and rather has a chilling effect.
| naasking wrote:
| A plausible hypothesis, but needs data.
| gremloni wrote:
| Pretty much how it played out with r/fatpeoplehate.
| Anecdotal yes, but there are quite a few more examples on
| Reddit alone.
| chmsky00 wrote:
| The goal is to reduce network effects.
|
| As poetic as free speech is, the 1700s were a different time.
| Hard to SWAT a rando a town away let alone a country. Now a
| nation state can instigate localized terrorism.
|
| Thomas Jefferson understood laws and constitutions must
| change in step with human discovery.
|
| Scalia wrote laws are not open ended, and up for public
| romantic interpretation.
|
| To paraphrase both. Indeed many Founders wrote of the need
| for free speech in official political proceedings, never
| considering the privilege extending to the public. In public
| people were welcome to get a beating if they prefer to
| violate local order.
|
| Humans are biological animals first. Gentile by training.
| simonh wrote:
| I suppose to the extent these channels of communication
| recruit and radicalise, if they are shut down they will not
| be able to recruit and radicalise. The act of shutting them
| down might infuriate regular users of these channels, but
| they're already radicalised anyway.
| burnafter182 wrote:
| What you end up with _is_ recruitment. If the user remains
| on Reddit or Twitter they 're exposed to the gamut of human
| thought. However extreme they may be, they're still
| attached, there may exist some sort of analogue for a
| cleavage furrow, but nonetheless the cell remains. It's
| only at the point where you've so alienated and shorn their
| attachment to the whole that they become a fully
| independent entity, and that they become truly radicalized.
| And having observed this, I can say with sincerity that
| they move deeper into the domain of extremity.
| gremloni wrote:
| The point someone is "recruited" is subjective. Either
| ways cutting out new recruits is a great solution.
| naasking wrote:
| There is little evidence that radicalization happens online
| [1]. It seems to require in-person contact to really take
| root.
|
| [1] https://www.rand.org/randeurope/research/projects/inter
| net-a...
| JasonCannon wrote:
| I promise you from personal experience, radicalization
| does happen online too.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| This "study" has been proven to be obviously and
| demonstrably incorrect in the years since it was
| published. The authors should retract.
| fallingknife wrote:
| source?
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Have you read the conclusions of the study? Do they
| comport with events of the past 5 years? Not at all
| thereddaikon wrote:
| If you are going to claim a study is bunk then link
| another study proving it. empty statements like that
| prove nothing. that's not science.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| This study was not really science. They interviewed a few
| people and then applied their own qualitative analysis to
| conclude that people cannot be self radicalized fully
| online. Since they published the study, there have been
| several major terrorist attacks perpetrated by
| individuals fully radicalized online.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I see. Your source is moral panicking in the news and
| journalists psychic ability to determine that dangerous
| radicalism is on the rise without ever bothering with any
| sort of data collection. Who could argue with that?
| Cd00d wrote:
| I'd like to recommend this podcast about online
| radicalization, produced by the NYTimes:
| https://www.nytimes.com/column/rabbit-hole
| Pils wrote:
| That research was published by a libertarian think tank
| in 2013. Since then, there have been numerous examples of
| lone wolf terrorist attacks where the perpetrators
| appeared to have no offline contacts with extremist
| groups. See: New Zealand shooting, Pittsburgh shooting,
| etc.
| fallingknife wrote:
| There were also lone wolf mass shootings before the
| internet, so what does this prove?
| blitzar wrote:
| That radicalisation does not exclusively happen face to
| face and that it can be conducted on line, by newsletter,
| by book, by carrier pigeon.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| If ISIS can recruit in person by talking to vulnerable
| people in the right mosques, surely other extremists have
| backup channels as well.
| gremloni wrote:
| The more someone has to rely on backup channels and then
| backups of the back channel, the less likely you enroll
| new members.
| simonh wrote:
| But surely fewer channels means fewer recruits?
| Ultimately it's about what kind of content these
| platforms want to publish though.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It might also mean "higher quality recruits".
| gremloni wrote:
| And that's okay. Fewer "higher quality" recruits are
| easier to go after individually.
| kongin wrote:
| I can say that the local subreddit is one of the most heavily
| policed with the result that during the covid pandemic a
| large fraction of the casual posters were banned because they
| couldn't keep track of what new rule was introduced in what
| day.
|
| A lot of people moved over to telegram channels because you
| could actually ask questions without getting banned for
| concern trolling, misinformation or incitement - e.g. asking
| where protests were happening which is what got me banned
| finally. Ironically I was asking where they were happening so
| I could avoid them.
|
| The result of that policing is that I now have a telegram
| account and regularly scan a dozen right wing channels so I
| know if I can buy groceries without getting tear gassed.
|
| If this is what winning looks like for the left we don't need
| help in losing.
| londgine wrote:
| > Banning hate communities does work though ...
|
| The sentence is incomplete. Banning X communities does work to
| achieve the goal of people not talking about X. I don't think
| that your linked study is really necessary, the Chinese
| cultural revolution worked really well (to achieve the goal of
| "preserving Chinese communism") [0]. Imagine if 30 years ago
| large digital monopolies banned what was considered
| unmentionable back then. I doubt gay marriage would have been
| legalised in America. All of the progress that we have in
| making marijuana more legal would have been terminated by the
| companies wanting to prevent people advocating illegal drug
| usage.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
| monocasa wrote:
| > the Chinese cultural revolution worked really well
|
| Given that the lineage in power now (the Dengists) were
| imprisoned under Mao during the cultural revolution, and only
| after Mao's death were able to perform a coup, arrest the
| rest of the leaders of the cultural revolution, and let the
| Dengists out of jail, I'm not sure that's the case.
| da_chicken wrote:
| Chinese censorship is backed by the threat of arbitrary
| imprisonment or violence. In that case, it's not really the
| banning of the topic that's working, it's policing for
| compliance and de facto criminalization of defiance.
| majormajor wrote:
| Homosexuality in general _was_ effectively banned by dominant
| platforms in the US for quite some time! It was a BIG DEAL to
| people when gay characters started becoming more common in
| mass media.
|
| But note the order it happened. The privately-set standards
| moved with the times much faster than the government ones
| did!
|
| Writers/tv execs/etc heard both the pro-equality arguments as
| well as the anti-homosexuality arguments and made their own
| choices as they were persuaded to. Many states, on the other
| hand, never legalized gay marriage before the court decision
| overruled their laws.
|
| So that seems to show that we should empower private parties
| to have control over what their platform shows, over either
| the government or just the loudest mobs (there were MANY
| protests/boycott threats/etc from religious groups over
| this). The market gives this the advantage over the
| government here: the private publisher can test what sells,
| and over time is going to be increasingly forced to move with
| societal changes, while the government is much more likely to
| be captive to small-but-loud contingencies (especially in a
| gerrymandered world).
| Clubber wrote:
| >Banning X communities does work to achieve the goal of
| people not talking about X.
|
| Honestly I'm not sure that is even accurate, I would imagine
| it does the opposite. People are drawn to what's not allowed,
| it's even one of the morals of the Adam and Eve story. Pretty
| old but still relevant idea of human nature.
|
| Here's an interesting story about Goldberger who defended the
| Neo Nazis in Skokie.
|
| https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-
| protesters/sk...
| inglor_cz wrote:
| From a former Communist country: whatever was banned (jokes
| about the Party or the Soviet Union, various conspiracies
| or whatever correct-but-undesirable information out there,
| such as the Chernobyl accident in the first days), spread
| like wildfire by "whispering channels".
|
| People are really drawn to forbidden fruit.
| kongin wrote:
| You need to understand that the people who are saying we
| must ban misinformation are the party apparatchiks,
| trying to argue in good faith with them is pointless. The
| only reason to engage is to show the silent majority that
| they aren't crazy for disagreeing with those in power.
| majormajor wrote:
| Yes, reforming users who already want to engage in hate speech
| is not the goal; isolation is. Look at the pre-internet times,
| certain forms of radicalization were far less common than they
| are today because they aren't very present in the in-person
| community (while those that WERE geographically concentrated,
| like racism in certain American communities, were still spread
| in those places).
|
| When the status quo is bad, "maybe that won't work" is _not_ an
| effective argument against taking action anyway if you don 't
| have a better idea. If we don't take action, we already know
| we're going to (continue to) have a bad result!
| fallingknife wrote:
| Also important to note that Reddit doesn't ban hate. They ban
| unpopular opinions. If you want to see hate, go to r/politics.
| bedhead wrote:
| Yup. These platforms are all perfectly 100% fine with hatred
| as long as it's the right kind.
| [deleted]
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| They're measuring success based on referencing the community
| they just banned people from, aren't they?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Banning hate communities does work though [0]
|
| That's like saying banning smoking in the park reduces smoking
| because nobody's smoking in the park any more.
| bearcobra wrote:
| I mean location based smoking bans definitely do reduce
| smoking rates.
| icyfox wrote:
| These things do help. Most members of these communities get
| radicalized by virtue of other content they're already
| browsing. If you remove the communities and force individuals
| to leap from Facebook to some no-name forum, they're far less
| likely to engage.
|
| This phenomenon is mirrored elsewhere as well where small
| interventions can lead to big impacts: see suicide rates in
| Britain after removing carbon monoxide in their house gas.
| Initial friction (or means reduction in that research) can
| drive change.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I'm not convinced we should think it's acceptable for you
| or I to decide who does and does not get exposed to
| information that will 'radicalize' them because you and I
| may have wildly different opinions of what constitutes a
| radical opinion. Humans sometimes develop stupid opinions,
| and that is OK. They're allowed to do that. They aren't
| allowed to _act_ on those opinions in a way that
| constitutes a crime, which is why we go through the trouble
| of defining crimes in the first place. 'Precrime' thought
| policing seems like a pretty dangerous road to go down and
| one that is full of unintended consequences.
| icyfox wrote:
| I define a radical group to be some collection that seems
| to be consistently peddling false material for their own
| ends, with an overly provoking tilt that makes it easy to
| go viral. Some specifics out of the past year would be
| vaccine misinformation, prejudice that incites racial
| violence in Myanmar, organizing an occupation to the
| capital in the US. Shouldn't we put a stop to these
| communities if they sway people to start peddling this
| information themselves?
|
| At least in the US, free speech is most free within
| public forums. But even then we already define some
| speech that is too dangerous if it's known to lead to
| poor outcomes. You can't yell fire in a crowded room, not
| because yelling fire is inherently a crime, but because
| it's going to incite people to a detrimental ends.
|
| Plus social networks don't have a constitutional
| obligation to be town squares where free speech can
| spread unfettered. You have to draw a line somewhere. And
| as the people who write the algorithms that can amplify
| or bury content on these networks, I think it _is_ our
| obligation to at least set parameters on what constitutes
| good/healthy content interactions on these social
| platforms and what doesn't. The ML algorithms have to
| optimize over some loss function.
| throwaway946513 wrote:
| Not that I disagree with you - but "can't yell fire in a
| crowded room" is slightly misconstrued. As those aren't
| the original words from the U.S. Supreme Court case. [0]
|
| Additionally, the idea of 'clear and present danger' has
| been modified within the past 100 years since the said
| court case. The Supreme court since then has stated: "The
| government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that
| speech is 'directed to inciting or producing imminent
| lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such
| action'". Said definition has changed and depends upon
| situations, where some action is imminent or "at some
| ambiguous future date".[1]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crow
| ded_the... [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
| majormajor wrote:
| A lot fewer people smoke now in the US than several decades
| ago.
|
| So let's do it. Let's isolate and restrict the hateful, the
| angry, the irrational EXACTLY like we did smoking.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| This seems like a decent idea until someone in power
| decides that you are hateful, angry, or irrational.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| You could use the same reasoning like
|
| > Making bad things illegal seems like a decent idea
| until they make something you like doing illegal
|
| Therefore just have no laws, I guess?
|
| Sometimes an imperfect, abusable system is better than no
| system. In fact, I'd wager that's usually the case.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > Therefore just have no laws, I guess?
|
| No. But have a system where some single powerful person
| can't just make up laws on a whim.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Well, they generally can't: laws are written and passed
| by a legislature.
|
| You could make this sort of argument for executive
| orders, though.
| [deleted]
| babypuncher wrote:
| Maybe, but it does make the park a more pleasant space for
| everyone else to spend time in.
| nyx_land wrote:
| The irony of private platforms censoring hate groups (for their
| own PR I might add; let's not forget that YouTube's algorithm
| famously favors alt-right content because weirdly enough
| algorithms that favor "engagement" tend to end up favoring lowest
| common denominator populist reactionary politics) is that it 1).
| Legitimizes the claims of groups that otherwise might sound like
| delusional paranoid conspiracy theorists, and 2). Forces these
| groups to adopt decentralized alternatives that make them even
| harder to do anything about. Tech companies engaging in
| performative content moderation is really just creating selection
| pressure that will ultimately create more resilient, technically
| competent hate groups that will also have an increasingly
| legitimate case to make for being persecuted by powerful
| organizations.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Harmful speech and misinformation should not have a platform.
| gorwell wrote:
| Define `harmful` and `misinformation`.
| cratermoon wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28698642
| chroem- wrote:
| It's all fun and games until the Ministry of Truth refers your
| case to the Ministry of Love.
| cratermoon wrote:
| - Performative Hate Speech Acts. Perlocutionary and
| Illocutionary Understandings in International Human Rights
| Law: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334199177_PERFO
| RMAT...
|
| - Oppressive Speech: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.
| 1080/000484008023703...
|
| - Why We Should Ban Oppressive Speech Acts:
| https://publicseminar.org/essays/why-we-should-outlaw-
| oppres...
| chroem- wrote:
| The speech in your post is oppressing me right now. Cease
| and desist your verbal oppression or else I will use state-
| sponsored violence to end your oppressively free speech.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater has never been
| protected speech.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| In the US? Yes it is. You realize you are quoting a 1919
| supreme court case (that used the "fire in a theater"
| argument to make protesting against the draft illegal)...
| which has been overturned 50 years ago, right?
| detcader wrote:
| For a while now it's been understood that the "'fire' in
| a crowded theater" thing is a misinformed meme
|
| https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-
| critique-...
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| There is a platform. In private, where that sort of talk has
| always existed.
|
| When it's limited to private, it's obvious to the speaker that
| holding those opinions is a personal choice, not a publicly
| acceptable opinion.
| drooby wrote:
| Who defines what speech is harmful or wrong?
|
| Democracy is a system in which _your_ party loses elections.
| And when they lose, do you want them dictating what you can and
| can't say?
|
| No one has a monopoly on the truth.
|
| In fact, our greatest scientific discoveries (the closest thing
| we have to Truth) have been forged by "offensive speech". The
| ability to offend actually helps minimize misinformation.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > Who defines what speech is harmful or wrong?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28698642
| detcader wrote:
| Let's trust the billionaire execs at Google, Facebook,
| Amazon and Twitter to listen to the correct academics
| rather than responding to the incentives of capital. When
| faced with calls to ban pro-Palestinian rights activism on
| their platforms, they've never caved before
| rscoots wrote:
| I notice those lists do not include the exact same
| materials.
|
| So you've proven the point that there is debate to be had
| on these matters.
| djoldman wrote:
| Interesting document linked to from the article:
|
| https://manilaprinciples.org/
| supernintendo wrote:
| Some of the comments in this thread seem intentionally bad-faith
| or ignorant to how much hate and abuse actually exists on these
| platforms. The Internet fucking sucks. I stopped using social
| media because I'm trans and I don't feel like there's a place for
| me online anymore. No matter where I go, including large
| platforms like Reddit and Twitter, I'm inevitably subjected to
| someone expressing their grievances about trans people or the
| LGBTQ community. There's a part of me that wants to reply and
| give my perspective, but it's like I can't even have a voice
| online without the fear of people belittling and harassing me,
| sending me abusive messages, trying to doxx me, telling me to
| kill myself or scouring through my profile to try to find
| whatever they can add to their "cringe compilation" or Kiwifarms
| thread about how degenerate and disgusting trans people are. My
| mental health is more important than participating in the
| shitfest that is online discourse so I just avoid it. I post on
| Hacker News and a few other places where people are generally
| respectful, but other than that I've given up on having
| conversations with strangers online.
|
| I'm an artist and a software dev, I have a lot that I want to
| share with the world but I don't think I'll ever get the chance
| to. This world is cruel and these online platforms and social
| media algorithms amplify that to the point where it feels like
| the only way to win the game is to not play. Personally, I don't
| feel one way or the other about online censorship at this point.
| I think social media has ironically ushered in a culture of anti-
| social behavior and maybe it's time to move on to something else.
| duxup wrote:
| I am wary of the situation developing.
|
| But I'm also wary of this idea that "well you just give the
| people tools to sort it out".
|
| Mostly because:
|
| 1. It seems unrealistic as expecting people to peruse their own
| source code... That's a huge pain in the ass for most folks and
| they're just as likely to pick a bad filter or service to do that
| for them anyway.
|
| 2. Did that change anything about how a situation where GoDaddy
| and Google refused to manage the domain registration for the
| Daily Stormer?
|
| I don't think it did....
|
| Aren't we back at the start with these suggestions?
| tytso wrote:
| It's not so simple as whether or not a platform allows content of
| a certain type from certain authors to be published on their
| platform. It's also about whether the platform is pushing that
| content to others, using automated tools which have been tuned to
| improve "engagement". That's some of the Facebook research which
| was suppressed until the Wall Street Journal published the leaks
| from that research. Facebook apparently knew that changes they
| made were allowing posts that made people more angry to get
| surfaced more, because angry people were more likely to comment
| on the posts, thus improving "engagement". No matter if it caused
| disinformation to be spread, or if it made people more angry, or
| negatively impacted the mental health of teenagers. It improved
| "enagement" and thus $$$ to Facebook shareholders.
|
| This is also why there may be a problem with the truism "the best
| way to counter bad speech is by allowing more speech". Well, what
| if the engagement algorithsm cause the bad speech to get
| amplified 1000x more than the speech which has objectively
| verifiable truth claims? Free speach assumes that truth and lies
| would be treated more or less equally --- but that's not
| necessarily true on modern platforms.
|
| So it's not only a question of whether people have the "right" to
| publish whatever they want on a platform. Sure, you can stand on
| a public street corner and rant and rave about whatever you want,
| including "stop the steal", or "the world is about to end". But
| you don't have the right to do that with an amplifier which
| causes your speech to blare out at 100 decibels. Similarly,
| platforms might want to _not_ amplify certain pieces of content
| that are killing people by spreading misinformation, or
| destroying democracy, or encouraging genocide. And that might
| very well be the best thing platforms can do.
|
| But now we have the problem that content can be shared across
| platforms. So even if one platform doesn't cause information
| about vaccines causing swollen testicles from showing up on
| millions and millions of News Feeds --- what if that same
| information, posted on one platform, is shared on _another_
| platform which is much less scrupulous?
|
| So for example, suppose platform Y decided not to amplify videos
| that they decided was scientifically incorrect, because they
| didn't want to have the moral stain of aiding and betting people
| from killing themselves by not being vaccinated, or not allowing
| their children from being vaccinated. But another platform,
| platform F, which had done the research indicating this would
| happen, but actively decided that $$$ was more important than
| silly things like ethics or destroying democracy, might promote
| content that by linking to videos being posted on Platform Y.
| Maybe the best thing Platform Y could do would be to remove those
| videos from their platform, since even though _they_ were no
| longer amplifying that information, it was being amplified by
| another platform?
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| 2020-2021 has shown me that _most_ people happen to be 'fair
| weather fans' of civil rights. Everyone claims to love free
| speech but when suppression of speech opposing their own
| worldview comes into play, they suddenly dither and fall back on
| other rationalizations to justify the censorship.
|
| Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'hate
| speech'. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's
| 'misinformation'. Well, it's not free speech being violated when
| it's a private company doing the censorship. Et cetera. I'm sure
| you've seen you're own examples of this.
|
| It's pretty disheartening, but enlightening nonetheless. I have a
| much better understanding of historical moral panics and cessions
| of freedoms. Whereas I used to wonder how some societies ever
| gave into such pressures, I now realize it's not that hard to
| persuade the average citizen into accepting such things.
| frellus wrote:
| 100% of everything you said I agree with. We're in a downright
| recession on freedoms.
|
| "I now realize it's not that hard to persuade the average
| citizen into accepting such things."
|
| Yes, and worse I feel it's not even that people are all too
| willing to go along with these things from on high, they want
| it, they propagate it. I'm starting to see the same behavior
| and mentality I imagine was common in East German where
| citizens police other citizens. It's not a good direction we're
| in at all.
| BongoMcCat wrote:
| As a European, I mostly just find it interesting that americans
| have such an extremely black/white view of free speech.
| jaywalk wrote:
| As an American, I find it interesting that Europeans seem so
| eager to have government restrict speech.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| As a European who likes the American First Amendment,
| people everywhere generally gravitate to status quo.
|
| But youngish generations across the pond seem to favor
| government restrictions on speech in much higher numbers
| than before:
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-
| mille...
|
| I am afraid that the U.S. might one day flip too.
| exporectomy wrote:
| Yep. Every western country I know of except America, has only a
| token gesture of human rights and they're only rights that
| happened to match the culture at the time with no longer term
| vision at all.
|
| New Zealand, for example has its Bill of Rights Act which says
| no forced medical procedures. Somebody was recently fired for
| refusing a Covid vaccine and went to court arguing that right.
| The judge said, yea, there is that right, but also the
| government can revoke it whenever they feel like for any reason
| they want, and they have, so no luck.
|
| Discrimination based on race or sex? Certainly not! Oh, except
| for hiring domestic workers, selecting flatmates, decency,
| safety, sports, etc, etc. In other words, all the places where
| people were already doing discrimination.
|
| The UN's ambitiously named "Universal Declaration of Human
| Rights" has 28 rights for people, and a 29th right of
| governments to deny any of those rights for reasons of
| morality, public order, general welfare of democratic society.
| In other words, any reason whatsoever.
|
| Remember freedom of internal travel? China used to be a human
| rights violator for restricting that. Now every country and its
| dog is doing the same. But this time it's "us" not "them", so
| it's all OK.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Should YouTube censor ISIS propaganda or not?
|
| If yes, how is this not a violation of the principles you've
| laid out?
| farias0 wrote:
| Although I don't fundamentally disagree with your point, I
| don't think you're framing the issue fairly. It's not a matter
| of most people being enemies of free speech, it's just that
| this is an inherently difficult problem. Everyone draws the
| line differently on what's acceptable and what isn't, and every
| platform is trying to foster a different kind of community.
| frellus wrote:
| The moment that any large number of people start pushing the
| point that ideas or speech they disagree with is actual
| violence, we're all a bit doomed.
| foobarian wrote:
| I wonder if we would be better served with a NPR-like
| publicly funded platform for video hosting that puts a lot
| more resources into content moderation. The private platforms
| get away with the bare minimum by throwing black box AI at
| the problem which leads to problems like the anti-vax
| censorship chilling effects etc. There should be an easily
| reached human in the loop with transparent decisions, and
| levels of appeal which is much more expensive. Kinda like the
| court system with the jury-of-your-peers litmus test.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Sadly, NPR is a bad example because they are _hardly_
| publicly funded and their content is _pretty_ biased (I 'm
| a moderate liberal and NPR definitely feels like it's left
| of me, even if they're typically _more civil_ than other
| media outlets).
| LudvigVanHassen wrote:
| Agreed. NPR it VERY left biased and it's damn evident.
| godshatter wrote:
| If the state's going to host it, then their bar should be
| whether it's legal or not. If they want to put scary
| warnings around certain content or lock some of it behind
| age restriction, sure, fine. But if they are going to use
| public funds to host a government run publicly available
| video sharing platform, they should be very cautious about
| removing any content that doesn't violate actual laws. Free
| speech and all that, if anyone still remembers the concept.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| Doesn't the state already ban nudity/language on public
| broadcast, film, and radio?
| retrac wrote:
| Specifics depend on the country. In the USA, over the air
| broadcast is restricted in content on the premise that
| broadcast spectrum is a limited public resource, and that
| you don't have much choice with what you see when you
| tune in. That argument gets pretty weak with point-to-
| point networks with nearly unlimited bandwidth, as I see
| it. An analogy might be the difference between ads with
| nudity on billboards (I believe that can be prohibited in
| the USA?) and ads with nudity in a print magazine going
| to a subscribership expecting such ads (protected by the
| 1A, including for mailing through the USPS).
|
| Public libraries are perhaps another source of analogy.
| My local library system has some of the most vile and
| objectionable works ever printed on the shelves due to
| popular demand. Many public libraries in Canada and the
| USA are quite absolute about that with regards to free
| expression. For example:
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/porn-library-
| ottawa-po... "Library patrons allowed to surf porn,
| Ottawa mom discovers"
| foobarian wrote:
| Yes, exactly. And deciding legality should be done better
| than current automatic moderations that punish innocent
| content without a working appeals process.
| cyberge99 wrote:
| The USA used to have a Fairness Doctrine. It required
| political viewpoints to have equal air time.
|
| It made politics much more boring.
|
| As it should be.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Er, politics in the period of 1949-1985 was not,
| generally, "more boring" than 1985 to present. The last
| few years _maybe_ have achieved the undesirable level of
| not-boring that was generally the case through most of
| the 1950s, 1960s, and much of the 1970s, but certainly
| overall the post-Fairness Doctrine period was more boring
| than the Fairness Doctrine period. (The Neoliberal
| Consensus is probably a bigger factor than the FD on
| that, though; it's pretty hard to attribute much of
| anything about the overall tenor of politics to the FD.)
| bdamm wrote:
| Requiring that content be sourced from actual humans in
| good faith, and identifying people violating terms of
| service by spamming with puppet bots would be a good
| start. If the service is being operated by a national
| government, then you could require posters to prove
| residence or citizenship. But would anyone really want to
| use such a service? Could it possibly be even produced or
| operated efficiently? Once you put strict legal
| requirements on the operating entity it will get very
| slow, expensive, and user unfriendly.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| NPR censored coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop claiming
| it was not newsworthy. All platforms with any moderation
| will be censorious platforms by definition. You can always
| tweak the degree of censorship though with moderation.
| jaywalk wrote:
| > It's not a matter of most people being enemies of free
| speech
|
| I disagree. If you believe in censoring opinions and ideas,
| you do not believe in free speech. Period.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| What makes something an opinion or an idea versus a threat
| or an obscenity?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Intent. If your speech is intended to compel someone
| (compulsion != persuasion), then it's a threat. Of
| course, accurately assessing intent is difficult because
| threats are often implied rather than explicit (precisely
| because the one issuing the threat wants to avoid the
| consequences of issuing a threat).
| jaywalk wrote:
| "Someone should kill (some public figure)" - opinion/idea
|
| "I'm going to kill (some public figure) tomorrow at (some
| event)" - threat
| b3morales wrote:
| But then cf. "Will no one rid me of this turbulent
| priest?"[0]
|
| [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_t
| his_tur...
| jaywalk wrote:
| Not sure how that has anything to do with free speech.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I don't think people are enemies, adversaries, or even
| detractors of free speech, but rather, they won't actually
| defend the kinds of speech that the ideal of free speech is
| meant to protect. Especially when the censorship happens to
| be affecting their partisan opposite. I do, though, recognize
| the difficulty in allowing some things and not others
| depending on the forum.
|
| Please excuse the shortcoming I have for explaining this, but
| I have to fall back on "I know it when it see it" when it
| comes to what counts as violations of the principle of free
| speech vs content moderation. In the current zeitgeist
| though, I absolutely see this as censorship rather than
| content moderation. This is because I absolutely sense
| partisan motivations for content take-downs and topic-wide
| bans on such large platforms as YouTube, Twitter, Reddit,
| etc.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > 2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair
| weather fans' of civil rights.
|
| This is always how it's worked. The idea that protecting the
| rights of your enemies can be salutary relies on too many
| complex concepts for the majority of people to have any hope of
| grasping it: burning the commons, collective action, norm
| evolution, meta-level thinking[1], modeling counterfactual
| worlds (eg one a future where your favored ideology is not
| dominant and is in need of the protections you are currently
| burning down).
|
| The average person is nowhere near smart enough to be able to
| put these pieces together into a coherent worldview, let alone
| one that they find more convincing than "they're the enemy,
| crush them". The periods where liberalism has been resurgent
| are not ones where the masses are suddenly enlightened, but
| ones in which they either have little power or are pacified by
| unrelated conditions. This is not unlike the conditions in
| which dictatorships are stable, as the common thread is simply
| "the masses can't or don't care in detail about the
| fundamentals of the way they're governed". It's not a
| coincidence that the global illiberalism surge coincides with
| the rise of universal connectivity: On top of the social and
| economic upheaval that it induced, suddenly large amounts of
| people can coordinate epistemically, through hashtags and
| reshares, without making their way through distribution
| chokepoints controlled by elites.
|
| [1] I couldn't think of a concise way to phrase this, but I'm
| referring to the tendency to claim that a big chunk of your
| beliefs/preferences are incontrovertible and fundamental tenets
| of society while others' are simply their beliefs and
| preferences.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I'm not sure people can't grasp it. But it certainly can't be
| taken for granted.
|
| Perhaps we need to continuously keep making versions of this?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 ("Don't be a
| sucker" 1945)
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Yea, I hear you, that's certainly possible. But I'm not
| reasoning top-down from liberalism's unpopularity, but
| rather bottom-up from the inability most people have to
| grasp the components I mentioned. Some of them are much
| simpler concepts than liberalism, and are applicable in
| many cases that people have more direct stakes in. And yet,
| in my experience, vanishingly few people are capable of
| grasping them to any reasonable degree.
|
| > Perhaps we need to continuously keep making versions of
| this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 ("Don't
| be a sucker" 1945)
|
| We're drowning in anti-racist and anti-fascist material. I
| don't think it's particularly relevant: clearly it's not
| difficult to nominally support these beliefs while still
| being extremely illiberal.
|
| That's what's so insidious about illiberalism. It can (and
| does) poison any ideology, even "good ones", because once a
| sufficient number of people are bought into it, it hardens
| into dogma and leads easily to "why should we protect those
| that disagree with our holy belief system?".
|
| To use an example that we have no trouble recognizing as
| illiberal, from our modern perspective: Christianity on
| paper is a very liberal tradition, full of exhortations to
| love thy enemy and spread peace and love. I don't doubt
| that this deeply resonated with many early converts. But
| after a thousand years of spreading to the masses and
| ossifying into institutions, the medieval Church resembled
| every other illiberal institution: here's the dogma, and if
| you don't like it, well then you'll love my torture
| dungeon.
| censorshipirony wrote:
| There's great irony to posting this on HackerNews. It's one of
| the most gung ho pro-censorship sites on the internet. The mods
| will pull anything that doesn't align with their politics or
| YC's profit motive. They'll claim it's under the guise of
| "intelligent discussion", which is an even weaker justification
| than that offered pretty much everywhere else. This site has a
| lot of discussion about free speech but what's allowed here is
| a very narrow and pro-YC subset of conversation.
| mcguire wrote:
| Yeah, most people tend to get squidgy about abstracts like
| "free speech" when the crazies come out of the woodwork and
| start calling for treason, mass deaths, and so on.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| >I have a much better understanding of historical moral panics
| and cessions of freedoms. Whereas I used to wonder how some
| societies ever gave into such pressures, I now realize it's not
| that hard to persuade the average citizen into accepting such
| things.
|
| Me too. I've always wonders what drives people into the arms of
| fascists and other such overtly unpleasant belief systems and
| the simple answer is fear. Fear for yourself, your family, and
| your future will apparently cause people to abandon all sorts
| of supposedly cherished beliefs.
|
| This is why I think here in the UK SAGE's SPI-B group using
| behavioural psychology to increase the perception of personal
| threat as part of the anti-coronavirus measures was such a
| dangerous and short-sighted policy. Using fear might be a
| convenient way to convince people into doing what you want for
| a while, but fear also drives people into the welcoming arms of
| all kinds of nasty ideologies. That cat's out of the bag now
| too, I suspect using fear to "nudge" the public into doing what
| the government of the day wants will become a much more common
| feature of liberal democracies in the future now. We've done a
| deal with the devil and he always collects in the end.
| Clubber wrote:
| >Fear for yourself, your family, and your future will
| apparently cause people to abandon all sorts of supposedly
| cherished beliefs.
|
| And we (the US) must realize we've been put under a constant
| state of fear by news / advertisers for the last 30+ years.
| We don't really even realize that we aren't in a "neutral"
| mental state because we've been constantly bombarded by fear
| mongering. The constant fear is "normal" here. It wasn't
| always like this. This is why the "for the children," is so
| effective at infringing on our rights, we are afraid for the
| wellbeing our kids, more so than ourselves. It's nefarious to
| use our fear for our children to pass controversial
| legislation. I mean stop to think about how evil that is.
|
| What would our country look like if we weren't being
| constantly being programmed to be afraid?
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| >It's nefarious to use our fear for our children to pass
| controversial legislation. I mean stop to think about how
| evil that is.
|
| It's absolutely contemptible, yet as Western societies we
| spend so much time criticising our neighbours and blaming
| them for our problems rather than criticising the people
| amping up the fear on us. If I could change just one thing
| about society I'd introduce some sort of "immune system"
| against those who try and use fear to manipulate people,
| the correct response to fearmongering is contempt towards
| those responsible for it in my opinion.
|
| >What would our country look like if we weren't being
| constantly being programmed to be afraid?
|
| I'm not American, but here in the UK we face exactly the
| same issue. I think both of our countries would be
| unrecognisable and probably a lot better than they are
| today. How much avoidable inequality exists because the
| fear of Russian-style Bolshevism harmed moderate left-wing
| policies in the 20th century? How much avoidable
| authoritarianism would we have if the War on Terror hadn't
| itself become an intense source of domestic fear in the
| 21st? Fear is the fountain from which all tyranny and
| bigotry springs in my opinion.
|
| It's not just politics that would be affected, every aspect
| of society would be changed for the better I think. Maybe
| that's the form a modern Enlightenment would take, an
| active rejection of fear and promotion of courage and
| tolerance for dissent in its place.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Disinformation is doing more harm to society than encrypted
| terrorist emails ever could. The "Disinformation vs. free
| speech" will be a defining balance of the next decade, even
| more fraught than "privacy vs. security" in cyberspace.
|
| I'm not censoring someone because they want low taxes, high
| taxes, disbanding the department of education, or giving every
| poor person a new car.
|
| There _is_ a line to be drawn, somewhere, one when speech
| crosses from the expression of political thought and free
| thinking, and into the willful (or the amplification of
| willful), factually incorrect statements generated by
| sophisticated trolls and adversary nation-states.
|
| My personal take: The Internet is a vital tool for free
| expression, and as such, a "floor" of free expression should be
| permitted. Ensure that DNS and ISP connectivity cannot be
| removed from someone based on the legal expression of thought.
| Those are infrastructure.
|
| Youtube, Facebook, and other amplification platforms? In the
| short term, I don't see how we force them to host actively
| harmful content without recategorizing their role in society.
|
| edit to respond to iosono88 (since HN is throttling my ability
| to rebut): I'll keep my response simple: I also don't like
| payment processors being used as control mechanisms for legal
| activities.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > In the short term, I don't see how we force them to host
| actively harmful content without recategorizing their role in
| society.
|
| This recent flip from "Facebook et al aren't doing enough,
| put the screws on them" to "we can't force Facebook not to
| censor" is quite disingenuous. These companies and their
| founders are famously liberal, and were dragged kicking and
| screaming into ever more heavy-handed moderation, by both
| public opinion and veiled threats of regulation from
| politicians. There's plenty of statements on the record of eg
| Zuckerberg saying what was obvious to most of us: nobody,
| including Facebook, wants them in the position of deciding
| what is true and what is false.
|
| Leaving aside whether content moderation is a good thing,
| let's not pretend that the situation here is that Facebook
| really wanted to become the arbiter of truth and
| misinformation and we can't stop them from being so.
| y4mi wrote:
| They already were at that point, regardless of what people
| claim.
|
| Facebook had the ability to paint whatever picture they
| wanted as truth by controlling what their users saw at what
| time. And they utilized it proudly long before COVID to
| increase engagement.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Sure, and long before Covid, that was a valid (and much-
| expressed) criticism of them, as well as a general
| criticism of using non-federated platforms.
|
| But expanding explicitly into deciding what users are
| allowed to see and express to each other is a million
| times worse than the type of banal malevolence that
| arises from "show people what they like to see".
| unethical_ban wrote:
| There's the fundamental difference! I love finding the
| "fundamental difference". The crux, the place where
| philosophies diverge, where the understandings break
| down.
|
| I fundamentally disagree with the premise that "keeping
| harmful, intentional disinformation away from people" is
| worse than "letting people unknowingly subscribe to
| disinformation".
|
| I would argue, perhaps, that there should be open
| policies on what topics are off-limits. That Facebook,
| et. al. should have to document to the public what
| "viewpoints" and disinformation they limit - and
| furthermore, that more of these content-display
| algorithms should be auditable, competitive secrecy be
| damned.
|
| I wouldn't call hundreds or thousands of people dying due
| to disinformation-backed vaccine skepticism "banal",
| either.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > "keeping harmful, intentional disinformation away from
| people"
|
| This is begging the question though. It's assuming that
| "harmful, intentional disinformation" is 1) well-defined
| and 2) always going to be determined by those with your
| best interests at heart. It relies on a blind faith in
| the fundamental and eternal moral purity of Facebook and
| other mega-corporations. I wholeheartedly disagree that
| they fit this mold.
|
| This is true even if you turn your religious passion
| towards government institutions instead of Facebook. Do
| you similarly agree that criminal trials and due process
| are unnecessary? After all, the same pre-hoc confidence
| in your ability to categorize without rigor leads to "Why
| would we want criminals going free due to technicalities
| and lawyer's tricks?". I assume you don't agree with this
| statement, because in that context, you've internalized
| the idea that institutions are both corruptible and
| flawed even when uncorrupted, and it behooves us as a
| society to have some epistemic humility instead of
| pretending that Truth is carved onto clay tablets and
| handed down from God.
|
| If you've paid any attention to the pandemic, you'd know
| that even a situation where government is in full control
| of defining "misinformation" can be consistently and
| significantly misleading. "Mask truther" used to mean
| someone who thought wearing masks was a good idea for
| preventing spread, discussing the lab leak hypothesis was
| "misinformation", the vaccines were "rushed and unsafe"
| until Trump was out of office, etc etc etc. It's hard to
| pick a topic where it wasn't trivial to front-run
| official advice by several months, repeatedly, over the
| entire pandemic.
|
| It's a bit of a paradox: The very certainty and
| (illusory) Truth-with-a-capital-T that you take for
| granted is forged through a process of skepticism,
| second-guessing, and constant poking at beliefs.
| Hamstringing that process is like killing the golden
| goose to make more room for all the eggs you plan to
| have.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Your entire paragraph of "if you've paid any attention"
| are questionable.
|
| I never heard people get mocked at any point for wearing
| a mask during the pandemic, even in the beginning when
| the CDC said it wasn't necessary.
|
| In my PERSONAL opinion, the "lab leak" theory was never
| misinformation, but uninformation: Discussion pushed
| forward by right-wing outlets to generate an enemy, a
| "they" to blame. They used it as a cudgel without
| evidence against Anthony Fauci, and they beat the shit
| out of Asians because of it. Most importantly, it was
| completely irrelevant to the extent of us debating it,
| when the focus was on containing a disease for which
| there was no cure or vaccine.
|
| And while there was some public skepticism about the pace
| of the vaccine process, I likewise don't think there was
| a "switch-flip" of trust in it like you suggest. When it
| came time to take it, everyone who wasn't a vaccine
| skeptic already went to get it when they could, and
| clearly the Trump admin was in charge through the
| development of the vaccine.
|
| ---
|
| There is also a difference between someone posting "I do
| not trust the government not to be incompetent, or not to
| run a mass trial on people" (though I think those people
| are nuts re: the vaccine), and someone saying "I know
| that Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci put microchips into a
| bone-melting serum that will activate in a year!"
|
| It's a huge, multi-faceted issue. In the end, the problem
| to TRY to solve in coming years will be sifting between
| legitimate skepticism and good-faith debate, and nation-
| states/Fox-News lies that intend to manipulate you into
| anger and division, and whether private entities have the
| obligation to allow harmful information across their
| channels.
| iosono88 wrote:
| Youve added an addendum to protect DNS and ISP both of which
| have been used to censor citizens. Thoughts on pulling
| payment processing via very generalized Chokepoint?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
| kgwxd wrote:
| IMO, if the government isn't using the extraordinary power's
| granted to them (search, seizure, arrests, fines, imprisonment,
| etc) against it's citizens strictly for the words they say or
| write, "free speech" hasn't been violated and it would be
| incorrect to use the term in that context.
|
| I think even a government hosted forum could filter content
| without violating even the spirit of "free speech", and I'm
| pretty sure it wouldn't legally be considered a violation of
| the first amendment, even if that filtering reached blatant
| censorship levels.
|
| Censorship, government or private, is a separate concern from
| freedom of speech, and using one to make arguments about the
| other doesn't make any sense to me.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > IMO, if the government isn't using the extraordinary
| power's granted to them (search, seizure, arrests, fines,
| imprisonment, etc) against it's citizens strictly for the
| words they say or write, "free speech" hasn't been violated
| and it would be incorrect to use the term in that context.
|
| "Free speech" is overloaded. There's the abstract concept of
| "free speech" and then there's the first amendment which
| specifically limits what the US government is allowed to
| censor.
| ggggtez wrote:
| How can you support free speech but prevent a company from
| exerting that speech?
|
| YouTube banning antivax content _is speech_.
|
| You want the government to start mandating that a company can't
| take a stance on important issues of healthcare? Churches spend
| all day every day taking stances on abortion. You want to the
| government to tell them they can't take a side?
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _How can you support free speech but prevent a company
| from exerting that speech?_ "
|
| Corporations are not humans (regardless of the "corporate
| personhood" doctrine) and thus should not be entitled to the
| full rights of humans. Semi-monopolies like Youtube are
| _especially_ not entitled to use their dominance to
| manipulate public opinion, given how easily it can be abused.
|
| Ask yourself, if YouTube were pushing conspiracy content and
| suppressing pro-vaccination content instead would the parent
| poster and those like them still be saying what they are
| saying? Fair-weather friends indeed.
|
| > " _You want to the government to tell them they can 't take
| a side?_"
|
| The United States government already can and has in the past;
| see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine .
| joshuamorton wrote:
| > Corporations are not humans (regardless of the "corporate
| personhood" doctrine) and thus should not be entitled to
| the full rights of humans.
|
| True, but corporations are just connections of people with
| shared goals. Should groups of people lose "fundamental"
| rights when they organize?
|
| > Fair-weather friends indeed.
|
| Yes, I fully support the rights of platforms to do stupid
| things. Use rumble or whatever if you want. I'll mock those
| platforms, but I don't think the government should ban
| them.
|
| > Semi-monopolies like Youtube are especially not entitled
| to use their dominance to manipulate public opinion, given
| how easily it can be abused.
|
| So, you think that we should circumstantially limit
| constitutionally protected rights, for the greater good?
| Fair weather friends indeed.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > So, you think that we should circumstantially limit
| constitutionally protected rights
|
| According to your logic, you should think that common
| carrier laws should be repealed entirely.
|
| Think, the telephone company blocking certain political
| groups, or the only water company in town, refusing to
| deliver water to certain people who say things that they
| don't like.
|
| It is pretty similar, philosophically. Common carrier
| laws are pretty uncontroversial.
|
| So it feels weird for you to be making these types of
| arguments, when it is already established, that there are
| major counter examples.
|
| So you'd have to either recognize the contradiction, or
| admit that your position is at odds with other
| established, and uncontroversial laws.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| I didn't take any particular position, I pointed out the
| incongruence in the one they espoused.
|
| I'm admittedly mixed on common carrier laws, I think that
| they are "impure" in a sense, but I also think the
| benefits are greater than the costs, even taking into
| account the potential theoretical erosion of our rights.
|
| I absolutely agree that there are major counterexamples,
| and I'm overall _fine with that_ , but I'll also freely
| admit that I'm not a free speech absolutist of any form.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _So, you think that we should circumstantially limit
| constitutionally protected rights, for the greater good?_
| "
|
| Why, yes, I do. Ask yourself: what was the various civil
| rights victories and legislation for minorities, women,
| LGBTQ other than saying " _We are circumscribing your
| rights, including ones formerly interpreted as
| constitutionally protected, so that these protected
| classes may be treated equally, for the greater good_ "?
| Sounds like you'd argue against that.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| I mean, yes. I think that's fine. But that goes in both
| directions: if you're willing to sacrifice the speech of
| some for the speech of others, clearly either you aren't
| a free speech maximalist, or there is some inherent
| contradiction in what free speech is. Because if my free
| speech requires limiting yours, well...how do we decide
| whose speech is more important?
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Youtube is a monopoly, and monopolies should be limited in
| the same way the government is, and for the same reason. This
| also applies to groups of otherwise independent businesses
| that operate in concert.
|
| That, and adding political beliefs to the list of protected
| classes, is what is necessary to start the US healing
| processes. Until there is no other option but to talk with
| the people you despise, neither side will start doing it.
| londgine wrote:
| I like the free market. If a store who also likes the free
| market decided to raise their price significantly because
| they claim to be better than everyone else then I will still
| think that is their right in the free market. However, since
| I value the free market so much I won't buy from them.
| Similarly, if YouTube wants to exercise their right of
| freedom of expression to censor content then I, as someone
| who values freedom of expression will use them less.
| Unfortunately, while in the first example many people would
| behave like me and cause the store to lower their price, not
| that many people value freedom of expression for YouTube to
| care about loosing those people.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I think discussions of the free market need to include
| scale. Scale absolutely matters when it comes to "voting
| with your wallet", or I suppose, in this case, your usage
| of a platform.
|
| I think our notions on the merits of a free market, and
| indeed, the very understanding of a free market itself,
| come from a time _before_ the network effect and the de-
| facto digital monopolies we see today.
| Covzire wrote:
| No church has a monopoly on the public square that is being
| exploited by one political party or corporate interest.
| zionic wrote:
| >How can you support free speech but prevent a company from
| exerting that speech?
|
| Because these "platforms" are in fact utilities.
|
| We have allowed corporations to own and control the common
| square and bypass rights our forefathers fought wars to
| establish.
|
| The gov has been all too lenient enforcing laws against these
| giants because it allows them to censor-by-proxy.
|
| For the left-leaning among, please recall that the definition
| of fascism is "the merger of state and corporate power".
| Supermancho wrote:
| As Thiel says, (in whatever form it ultimately takes) the
| free market is a selector for monopolies. At peak
| capitalism, you still have start ups competing with an
| increasingly low chance of success excepting
| scandals...which are inevitable in large organizations.
|
| The biggest companies are basically utilities and that will
| not change anytime soon. The market has resulted in this
| condition. The government has to play catchup, as usual.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > You want the government to start mandating that a company
| can't take a stance . . .
|
| I, for one, want less monopolistic media so that the people
| can exert viewership pressure; they can get their media
| elsewhere and the ad money will follow. The content being
| stopped is not the only loss of people's voices happening
| here.
| leetcrew wrote:
| > How can you support free speech but prevent a company from
| exerting that speech?
|
| I can be deeply disappointed by youtube's moderation
| decisions without suggesting that the company be _compelled_
| to allow certain content. as an aside, I find it frustrating
| to see people constantly swapping between "free speech" as a
| legal concept and "free speech" as an abstract ideal in these
| threads. we talk past each other the same way every time the
| debate comes up. just because the law is written the way it
| is doesn't mean that's necessarily the way it should be. and
| even if we can't write the law "just right", we can still
| advocate for higher principles to be followed.
|
| anyways, I generally agree with the "companies can manage
| their properties as they see fit" line of thought. but it
| becomes problematic when our public spaces are increasingly
| controlled by a small number of huge companies that mostly
| share the same politics. I'm not really sure what the
| solution is, but it sucks to watch it unfold.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The problem is that Youtube is big enough, and carries enough
| of the global conversation, that we think it should be a
| common carrier. (Think of the phone company back in the day.
| They didn't care if you were literally the Nazi Party of
| America, they carried your phone calls just like everybody
| else's.) People kind of think of Youtube that way, even
| though, legally, Youtube isn't playing by those rules.
|
| But there's also this two-faced evaluation of Youtube. When
| Youtube blocks the other side, people say "private company,
| First Amendment, they can carry what they want". But when
| Youtube blocks _their_ side, people at least feel the
| violation of the "common carrier" expectation, and get
| upset.
|
| So maybe it's time for us as a society to decide: Has Youtube
| (and Facebook, and Twitter, and Google) gotten big enough and
| important enough that they should be regulated into some kind
| of "common carrier" status? Or do we want them to continue as
| they are?
| stale2002 wrote:
| > You want the government to start mandating that a company
|
| There is already an established history of requiring certain
| large communication platforms, to act a certain way.
|
| They are called common carrier laws, and already apply to
| things like the telephone network.
|
| Sure, they don't currently apply to other things, but the law
| could be updated, so that they do.
|
| Philosophically, common carrier laws are uncontroversial, and
| already apply to major communication platforms, so you don't
| get to pretend like this is unprecedented.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| I had the same realism about secularism when a catholic became
| head of the big secularist-leaning party in my then county of
| residence. People were sure interested in his private feelings
| about sinfulness, or said that they would never vote for a
| party with a religious leader. The party angled itself as
| secularist, but that particular kerfuffle revealed it to be a
| highly contingent value of the membership (and of people
| generally).
|
| It's good to know what people really care about, and what
| beliefs are negotiable.
| iammisc wrote:
| I'm confused.. isn't a secularist party in favor of not
| involving personal religious beliefs in Civic issues? In that
| light, what's wrong with someone with personal religious
| beliefs from participating? Others made his religion
| important not him, from what you describe
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| I'm sorry, but: Wouldn't it be important to make sure the
| person _actually_ wants secular values in politics when
| parts of their religion doesn 't think the same way?
|
| I mean, if he doesn't personally think folks should be
| using birth control or that same sex marriage is bad (as
| the Catholic Church does), isn't it important to ask how
| they deal with this? Does it come out in votes or does the
| person think that they should live up to a stricter moral
| code than what law dictates?
|
| If you don't find this stuff out, you might wind up in a
| position where the law reflects religious values rather
| than broader secular ones. You don't have to have an
| official religion for this to happen, merely enough
| religious folks in office that vote with their religion.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Hey, I think your comment is interesting and raises a
| number of valid points, and I basically agree with you. I
| spent about 40 minutes drafting and redrafting more
| detailed replies, but everything I could think of saying
| read like kicking off a very rote/standard internet
| discussion about politics and religion, and I wouldn't
| wish that upon either of us.
| naasking wrote:
| Exactly, it's like the unfortunately common belief that
| religious people can't be scientists. Let their actions
| speak for themselves; if they are unreasonably biased, it
| will show.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| That's the whole point I think
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Right, that was the surprise. It should be what you said,
| but in practice it became the tribe-of-choice for people
| who wanted not just religion out of government but also
| religious people.
| LudvigVanHassen wrote:
| And it's a damning realization at that. Nevertheless, it seems
| to be true.
|
| How do we maintain the emphasis on free speech with our higher
| fragmented population who have WIDELY varying beliefs and
| little shared culture?
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > How do we maintain the emphasis on free speech with our
| higher fragmented population who have WIDELY varying beliefs
| and little shared culture?
|
| We cannot. Diversity, Freedom, Centralization. Pick two.
|
| What has kinda worked in some countries is splitting up into
| different areas and letting them run their own affairs --
| e.g. swiss style cantons.
|
| But that type of arrangement is very fragile given the
| organizational advantages of centralization and countries
| like Switzerland are notable because of their exceptionality.
| mardoz wrote:
| What free speech advocates ignore here is that even they
| generally draw a line somewhere. Death threats, defamation,
| pedophilia, sharing bomb making materials etc are usually
| accepted by everyone to not be acceptable.
|
| 'But those are different' is usually the argument here. But why
| though? Because they cause harm? Doesn't inciting racial hatred
| cause harm?
|
| Once we stop arguing over the issue being black/white but
| instead discuss _where exactly_ we draw the line then I think
| we are finally having a far more honest discussion. Just
| because some speech is illegal and other speech isn't illegal
| shouldn't be the deciding factor on whether someone (or some
| company) needs to platform that view. That's then leaving it to
| governments to decide what is ok and what isn't, instead leave
| it to society to choose not to propogate hateful and
| distasteful messages.
|
| I also find it frustrating that some armchair psychologists
| have decided that people like me with more nuanced views simply
| want to repress and censor things that we disagree with which
| is not what it's about at all.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| >I also find it frustrating that some armchair psychologists
| have decided that people like me with more nuanced views
| simply want to repress and censor things that we disagree
| with which is not what it's about at all.
|
| Well, you've got to draw the line somewhere, right? /s
|
| But seriously, I think one can be a free speech advocate
| without being a free speech absolutist, _and_ believe that we
| are heading in the wrong direction. In fact I think it 's
| wrong to think of 'where to draw the line' at all, because
| what is acceptable discourse is not, and should not, be
| thought of as static.
|
| I think a much better question is how 'the line' is shifting,
| as the amount of things we can't talk about is both a lagging
| indicator of institutional health (because being able to have
| uncomfortable conversations is a sign of emotional maturity),
| and a leading one (because public discourse is necessary to
| solving problems we don't understand or would rather not
| acknowledge).
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| > _What free speech advocates ignore here is that even they
| generally draw a line somewhere._
|
| The issue isn't where the line is drawn. The issue is that no
| singular entity can be trusted to draw that line.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| >What free speech advocates ignore here is that even they
| generally draw a line somewhere.
|
| Yes, that is a problem of some discussion in government. To
| solve this problem researchers have created so-called
| 'crimes', which are violations of 'laws' which define the
| things we may and may not do, and people become subject to
| 'punishments' if disobeyed.
|
| Leading thinkers have suggested that the way to make things
| 'illegal' is to pass 'laws' restricting them.
| dude187 wrote:
| Nobody is bound to that stance. Some people, myself included,
| believe that there is no line. You have the right to say
| anything.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| I agree with this line of reasoning, but then we have to
| ask the question: are platforms obligated to host all
| speech that is not illegal (in whatever jurisdiction they
| reside in)? Should they be obligated? If I as a private
| citizen decide to create a platform to host discourse, do I
| have the freedom to decide what is permitted there?
|
| If the answers to the followup questions are "yes", then we
| arrive to the status quo, where most of the big platforms
| heavily censor the content. This means that if you want to
| say something that'd be censored, you have the right to do
| so, but you don't have the means. I suppose you can walk
| out into the street and say to the people there, but
| there's a certain lack of reach in that approach :)
|
| So there's also a practical aspect, where you may have full
| freedom of speech by law, and yet in reality you have no
| freedom because nobody will give you the possibility to
| actually communicate what you want to say. You may try to
| build your own platform, but then you run into second order
| problems where you'll find that no service provider will
| want to host your servers.
|
| At one point, you may hit a barrier where you have no
| monetary means to build all the infrastructure necessary to
| be able to provide a truly free speech shelter.
| poszlem wrote:
| The reason why platforms are expected to host even the
| speech they don't agree with is the same why some bakers
| are forced to make cakes for homosexual weddings. If you
| compel to the latter, you should also compel to the
| former and vice-versa.
| dude187 wrote:
| I believe that common carrier applies to platforms, not
| just the infrastructure of wires. These platforms could
| not exist without the large privilege given to them I'm
| immunity to the illegal content they serve up.
|
| The problem is that these platforms have it both ways.
| They can censor entire political parties, yet play dumb
| and cry immunity "we're just a platform" when there's
| literal illegal content that makes it's way to their
| public hosting.
|
| Once they censor based on content, they should lose all
| until and be considered a publisher of that content.
| They're no longer a passthrough, they're now actively
| working to manipulate opinions
| readams wrote:
| US law defines the line as speech that incites imminent
| lawless action. The speech must not only be encouraging such
| action, it must be imminent and likely. This is in practice a
| pretty good line.
|
| If you think that private companies should censor much more
| heavily, then you obviously don't really believe in free
| speech. There's no obvious reason why it's more acceptable
| because all the dominant communication platforms censor
| speech vs the government doing it.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| If someone replies to my comment and says "I'm going to
| kill you" how do I determine how imminent or likely it is?
| Should that be protected under free speech? I find this
| incredibly hard to navigate.
| dzader wrote:
| you're forced to follow laws, you aren't forced to post
| memes on twitter.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > What free speech advocates ignore here is that even they
| generally draw a line somewhere. Death threats, defamation,
| pedophilia, sharing bomb making materials etc are usually
| accepted by everyone to not be acceptable.
|
| Assuming we're talking about the abstract concept of free
| speech (as opposed to 1A, which dictates what the US
| government is allowed to censor), the "line" is around
| expression of ideas. A death threat isn't "expressing an
| idea", it's coercing someone with violence. Similarly
| "harassment" which you didn't mention, falls out of bounds of
| speech because it violates another's right of association
| (you have the right to speak, but you can't force me to
| listen). Pedophilia obviously isn't an expression of an idea,
| although pedophilic advocacy, while repugnant, is still in
| bounds of free speech by definition.
|
| Whether platforms are obliged to adhere to a "free speech"
| standard is a different question. Personally, I think so much
| of our speech is flowing through a handful of these large
| platforms that they are the _de facto_ public square, and
| should be regulated accordingly or broken up. Even if they
| could articulate a clear moderation policy and enforce it
| fairly, simply having that much power to determine who sees
| what content for so many citizens is concerning. Even if you
| 're a liberal or progressive and thus largely enjoy the
| alleged bias in platforms' moderation policies/enforcement,
| recall that in 2016-2017 we were _virtually certain_ that
| Russia was manipulating Twitter to influence the US
| presidential election--if you believe Russia can _indirectly_
| influence our elections via Twitter, then it necessarily
| follows that Twitter can _directly_ influence our elections
| and surely that 's too much power to give to a _corporation_.
|
| > 'But those are different' is usually the argument here. But
| why though? Because they cause harm? Doesn't inciting racial
| hatred cause harm?
|
| I think the issue is that many don't trust platforms to
| enforce their own policies consistently. On Twitter for
| example, one gets the impression that it's okay to incite
| racial hatred toward whites, Asians, Jews, and even
| "ideologically diverse" blacks/etc, which is to say that the
| policy is neutral but the enforcement is biased--and that
| biased enforcement constitutes harm. Of course, a racist
| might respond "Good, we _should_ punish whites, Asians, and
| Jews for their race because historically other whites,
| Asians, and Jews _have enjoyed_ various advantages because of
| their race ", but presumably the goal is to minimize racism.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Compare:
|
| "My followers, I order you to go out and kill this man"
|
| vs
|
| "I wonder if the world would be a better place if this man
| did not exist"
|
| However you define free speech, anyone can order someone
| killed while being acceptable to your rules.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Defining free speech is easy, adjudicating it is
| sometimes hard. In this case, a threat requires the
| intent to compel (note that compulsion != persuasion).
| Determining whether "I wonder if the world would be a
| better place if this man did not exist" is intended to
| compel or not is harder.
|
| But most free speech absolutists will be pretty content
| if we get to a point where the thrust of the free speech
| debate concerns itself with outlier cases like this one
| (rather than "is it 'hate speech' to criticize woke
| excesses?" or "to use a Chinese word that sounds vaguely
| like an English racial slur?").
| jancsika wrote:
| > But most free speech absolutists will be pretty content
| if we get to a point where the thrust of the free speech
| debate concerns itself with outlier cases like this one
| (rather than "is it 'hate speech' to criticize woke
| excesses?" or "to use a Chinese word that sounds vaguely
| like an English racial slur?").
|
| In your absolutist world how do you stop the trolls on
| the current incarnation of social media from flooding the
| medium with references to these outlier cases until it
| triggers censorship?
|
| When those same trolls continue pentesting the medium
| until they trigger censorship on less direct references,
| you're going to be left with examples functionally
| equivalent to the ones you are comparing to above.
| bitwize wrote:
| New Zealand has a Censorship Office and an official called the
| Chief Censor. The government has the power to declare that
| certain communications are illegal and prosecute people for
| making those communications. They recently, famously did this
| with footage from the Christchurch shootings as well as the
| shooter's manifesto.
|
| Yet New Zealand consistently tops Cato Institute's freedom
| index.
|
| Maybe, just maybe, an absolutist reading of free speech that
| favors spreading of hate and misinformation, as we have in the
| USA ever since _Brandenburg v. Ohio_ in 1969[0] is not a
| necessary condition for freedom. Maybe restricting speech
| actually has a public benefit and can increase the freedom and
| well-being of individuals with no hateful or dishonest intent.
|
| [0] Note that the plaintiff was a KKK member, so yes, the
| current bedrock court ruling for free speech in the USA was
| crafted specifically to protect hate speech.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| >Yet New Zealand consistently tops Cato Institute's freedom
| index.
|
| Well I'm sure those who got arrested for sharing the
| Christchurch footage (footage that was, btw, widely available
| and shared worldwide) will be happy to hear that. They may be
| in jail but at least the Cato institute declared that they
| were still living in a country that tops their index. An
| index that hasn't even changed or taken in consideration the
| extreme drift towards authoritarianism that we have seen in
| the 2020.
| Jiro wrote:
| If you can ban something for being hate speech, calling
| something hate speech becomes a weapon. I absolutely don't
| trust any of the people banning "hate speech" to not have
| double standards that make it easy to call anything
| politically disagreeing with them "hate speech".
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| From a personal perspective, I don't want to have to wade
| through everyone else's "free expression", for the same
| reason that I don't want to have to wade through every
| company's advertisements. Experientially, I am less free when
| everyone can interrupt my brain space with what they want to
| shove at me. I want limited amounts of high-quality,
| interesting communication, not the noise of everybody's
| everything. (Think in terms of Shannon information theory.)
|
| So I kind of see your point. Filtering out the garbage is no
| loss to me. It make me freer rather than less free. And
| yet...
|
| The failure mode of the New Zealand approach is to have
| someone who is partisan hold the office of Chief Censor.
| Worse, someone who is a dedicate partisan might see the value
| of holding that position, and might deliberately,
| systematically seek it, hiding their partisan-ness until they
| obtained it. Sooner or later, someone's going to at least
| try.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"Yet New Zealand consistently tops Cato Institute's freedom
| index."
|
| Good for them, but that that index is meaningless to me.
| Truthfully, I have no respect for arguments that twist acts
| of suppressing freedom into acts seen as enhancing or
| preserving freedom.
| [deleted]
| nonameiguess wrote:
| What changed in 2020? Do you not remember the Dixie Chicks
| getting blacklisted for speaking against George Bush, Janet
| Jackson being deplatformed from record labels for showing a
| nipple on television, the LA DNC in 2000 cordoning off
| protesters into "free speech zones" 4 blocks away from the
| convention, gangsta rap and heavy metal being censored in the
| 80s and 90s, pushes for civil rights being met with dogs and
| firehoses in the 60s, Lenny Bruce being imprisoned for stand up
| comedy, interracial marriage being illegal, teachers being
| fired for being gay, American citizens having all of their
| property confiscated because they were ethnically Japanese? We
| had anti-sedition laws passed within 22 years of the
| Constitution being ratified.
|
| Most of these things that aren't a matter of private freedom of
| association for platform owners tend to eventually get struck
| down because the Supreme Court can somewhat reliably be counted
| on to eventually respect the Constitution, but the general
| public and elected politicians have never supported free speech
| or free anything. I would say almost the exact opposite of what
| you said. People only claim to love free speech when something
| they want to say is unpopular or suppressed. Almost nobody just
| supports it generally. The ACLU used to be pretty reliable
| about this, i.e. defending the KKK and Nazis, but I'm not even
| really sure where they stand any more.
|
| The average citizen doesn't give a crap about any abstract
| ideals at all. They just want to live their lives and possibly
| raise a family in an atmosphere not dissonant with their own
| cultural traditions and beliefs. Allowing people with other
| traditions and beliefs to spread those via public advocacy,
| art, or any other means that may lead to them being mainstream
| or even dominant is antithetical to that.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| > What changed in 2020?
|
| Liberals started doing it.
| adamrezich wrote:
| you're going to continue to be downvoted but it's the
| truth. when Jon Stewart was going against the grain of the
| widely-accepted political narrative of the Bush
| administration, it was easy to agree with him calling out
| bullshit. when the political pendulum swung the other way,
| however...
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _Liberals started doing it._ "
|
| Let's be precise; the _left_ started doing it. We are
| literally discussing how big parts of the political left in
| the US is moving away from the liberal ideals and
| philosophy that it once embraced and championed.
| jessaustin wrote:
| There should be a term for this, when conservatives in
| USA have so little exposure to actual leftists that they
| confuse MSNBC, the Democratic Party, and censorious
| anklebiters with "the Left". Here's a hint: actual
| leftists aren't cheering on the persecution of Assange,
| like everyone on MSNBC is.
| [deleted]
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| No true Leftist, hmm? Okay, I'll humor you, what should
| we call "MSNBC, the Democratic Party, and censorious
| anklebiters*" (sic) and the rest of the broad coalition
| to the left of the American center, if not the left?
|
| Aside from that, if you're suggesting I'm a conservative
| (no worries, it's a common mistake; it's tough being
| politically homeless), I'm a liberal unhappy with the
| broad coalition that used to be called the left. If that
| makes me a "conservative" in your eyes, well, there
| probably should be a term for that too.
| gremIin wrote:
| The term exists and it is called the Overton Window. It
| has been an intentional tactic and it is happening across
| several political spectra. For example, being against
| illegal immigration now gets you labelled anti-
| immigration. Wanting the police to be held accountable
| for their actions is now considered leftist instead of
| normal. Being anti-vax is considered a personal choice
| worthy of consideration instead of a fringe/lunatic view.
|
| I would be very happy if I were Russia/China.
| CheezeIt wrote:
| Tipper Gore and FDR weren't liberal?
| api wrote:
| I have to be honest and say that my faith in the capacity of
| people to think in a free speech totally open environment was
| severely tested over the past 5-10 years. Things like Qanon,
| flat Earth, antivax hysteria, the meme-driven return of both
| "right" and "left" totalitarian ideologies from the early 20th
| century that should be completely discredited, and so on have
| made me wonder if most people simply can't handle exposure to
| unregulated content as they lack the ability to think
| critically. I've actually wondered if most people might not
| need to be protected from unregulated content in the same way
| that people need to be protected from exposure to lead, radon
| gas, etc.
|
| The human brain simply didn't evolve in this environment.
| Throughout 99.9% of human history a person's ideas came from
| the tribe or neighborhood and came with the context of culture,
| social relationships, and physical body language cues. The
| brain did not evolve to process a context-free meme stream
| connected to an algorithm trying to keep you "engaged."
|
| If only a few people had fallen for this nonsense that would be
| one thing, but I witnessed _mass conversions_ of millions of
| people to ideas that are more absurd than the craziest
| conspiracy bullshit I read on Usenet in the 1990s. This is
| stuff the people who are crazy think is crazy.
|
| It goes beyond shockingly bad ideas too. I've seen an alarming
| rise of discourse that resembles word salad spewed out by a
| primitive Markov chain text generator. It's terrifying. It
| almost looks like exposure to open discourse is causing brain
| damage in some susceptible fraction of the population. Some
| subset of people seem to have lost the ability to process or
| generate a coherent narrative or structured system of ideas.
| They just spew memes in random order. It's less coherent than
| classic new age babble or Orwellian "newspeak."
|
| I still lean in the free speech direction pretty hard, but my
| faith is shaken to the core. I honestly and non-hyperbolically
| wonder if the right carefully crafted AI-powered social media
| boosted propaganda campaign couldn't convert double digit
| percentages of the population into homicidal maniacs or cause a
| mass suicide wave killing millions.
|
| BTW this and not "Skynet" is the scary thing about AI. The most
| terrifying AI scenario I can think of is AI-assisted
| demagoguery or mass stochastic terrorism powered by big data.
| Think "adversarial attacks against the human neocortex."
|
| Attacks only get better.
| gedy wrote:
| Flat Earth folks these days mostly seem to just delight in
| being contrarian/trolls. I'm sure there's some unstable folks
| in there like any belief system/group though.
| mLuby wrote:
| > I've actually wondered if most people might not need to be
| protected from unregulated content in the same way that
| people need to be protected from exposure to lead, radon gas,
| etc.
|
| Yes, but that means deciding _which_ content is harmful, and
| that 's where we are now. Figuratively, you end up with lead-
| lickers coming out of the woodwork saying that their way of
| life is being stifled by regulation/moderation.
|
| Chasing user "engagement" has been pushing conversations from
| the mundane middle toward the fringes. Thus, people make
| understandable but hasty generalization[0] that what they're
| seeing is more common than average.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization#Indu
| ctiv...
|
| In the past, I think this drift was counteracted by codes of
| morality (whether internalized, reinforced by people you
| know, or promulgated by regulatory bodies) as well as the
| limited means of disseminating information (few newspaper
| editors/radio announcers/news anchors to many
| readers/listeners/viewers). Though I'm sure there were plenty
| of wild pamphlets spreading chaos in the centuries between
| Gutenberg and Zuckerberg.
|
| Even though most of those morality codes are downright
| oppressive by today's standards, and the many-to-many
| distribution enabled by the Internet has many benefits, we
| haven't found a substitute, so there's a gap in our armor.
|
| Side note: Believing conspiracies and yearning totalitarian
| are two different failures in thinking. I say that because
| only the latter had strong support in the 20th century--even
| earlier if you count monarchies. Someone supporting Flat
| Earthers isn't harming me (except by undermining science in
| general); someone supporting Stalin 2.0 is an indirect direct
| threat to me.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| >Yes, but that means deciding which content is harmful, and
| that's where we are now. Figuratively, you end up with
| lead-lickers coming out of the woodwork saying that their
| way of life is being stifled by regulation/moderation.
|
| There might be something to be said for instead of limiting
| speech, increasing the 'reporting requirements'. This isn't
| a fully formed position of mine but rules along the lines
| of no anonynomous speech[0] and stricter fraud[1][2] rules
| are imo compatible with free speech and its ideals while
| helping to manage fraud and propaganda.
|
| [0] So if an AI wrote a blog spam post, it should be at
| minimum illegal to not have the AI in the byline, with e.g.
| a unique identifier.
|
| [1] Say loudly and publicly that there is a pedophile ring
| in the basement of a pizzeria, with no evidence, go to
| jail.
|
| [2] Not that such rules can't/haven't been abused before
| though.
| nescioquid wrote:
| Chris Hedges sometimes remarks that he finds people turn
| towards superstitious, religious, or conspiratorial world
| views when they find they have no control over their lives. I
| suspect that if the US somehow changed so that economic
| security were increased for most people, there would be much
| less unreason and general discourse wouldn't be so mean.
| PerkinWarwick wrote:
| That's an interesting theory, although I doubt that 19th
| century US farmers, among the most self-sufficient people
| in history, were lacking in religion, superstition, or
| conspiracies.
| nescioquid wrote:
| In fairness, it is trivial to point to any number of
| counter-examples throughout history if you just want to
| dismiss the observation. Hedges is a journalist and was
| referring to the changes he saw in the squeezed middle
| and lower classes through his career, and probably wasn't
| making a sweeping historic claim.
|
| I mentioned it as contrast to the parent comment who
| simply concluded people are incapable of rational
| thought, and meant to suggest there are mediating
| influences.
| PerkinWarwick wrote:
| > if you just want to dismiss the observation.
|
| I'm not and I'm willing to give it a chance. I'm just not
| seeing a strong correlation.
|
| What I do see people doing when they lack control is to
| attempt to gain control. Put together a group, grab some
| of that sweet power through mass. The more ambitious ones
| fight their way up the power structure. Special bonus
| points if you can take over an existing seat of power.
| nescioquid wrote:
| > What I do see people doing when they lack control is to
| attempt to gain control.
|
| One way in which people gain (the feeling of) control is
| to imagine the world differently (superstition,
| conspiracy, religion) in a way that makes them virtuous
| or special and others not (i.e. essentially Nietzsche's
| idea of ressentiment). If you haven't the power to take
| part in a real struggle, this is not so surprising to me.
| PerkinWarwick wrote:
| That's a good point.
|
| Perhaps the temptation is to choose philosophies that
| have the appearance of power. Sticking pins in a voodoo
| doll of your boss, Mr. Scrooge for example.
|
| Some acquaintances of mine did that at their job once and
| it worked a charm. The boss was permanently off on sick
| leave within a month. Maybe there's something to it.
| PerkinWarwick wrote:
| I usually go a hundred or so and then change up.
|
| Honestly Mr. Dang, I'll probably just bail. HN is 50%
| non-technical, it's easy to get drawn into that, nothing
| of real value is said by anyone (including me).
|
| Add that in with the downvote system, which is incredibly
| irritating, and you simply have a Reddit knock-off.
|
| It isn't like 'hackers' and 'startups' do much of value
| anymore given the move in concentration from workstation
| software and complex devices to moar and moar internet
| software components and surveillance marketing companies.
|
| Seriously, have a wonderful rest of the week, but make an
| effort to do things of real value.
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop creating accounts for every few
| comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is
| in the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to
| be a community, users need some identity for other users
| to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames
| and no community, and that would be a different kind of
| forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&
| type=comme...
| mullingitover wrote:
| Farmers through all of history and to this day are
| absolutely never self-sufficient. They are at the mercy
| of 'the gods', aka the weather, at all times. One bad
| flood, one freeze, one week of ill-timed rain, and they
| are destitute. That's the perfect environment to breed
| superstition.
| jessaustin wrote:
| _19th century US farmers_
|
| They were self-sufficient in the sense that there was no
| one coming to help in case of emergency. That doesn't
| mean they ever felt secure. Entire families regularly
| died for one or more of dozens of causes: starvation,
| freezing weather, tornadoes, human sickness, livestock
| sickness, crop failure, drought, dangerous animals,
| Indian attack, crime, etc. Some of them might have
| pretended at a "control over their lives", but few modern
| Americans would trade places with them.
| notchFilter54 wrote:
| You merely have to look at what's happened to the second
| amendment to see what could happen to the first (felons rights
| gone, including anybody caught with a wrong sized lobster or
| anybody who has lied to a federal agent. Regulated to oblivion
| in places like Hawaii).
|
| The tyranny of the majority has already decided it's OK to
| require a license to exercise a right, in many US
| jurisdictions.
| greg7gkb wrote:
| I'm super tired of people conflating civil rights + first
| amendment protections with the idea that speech anywhere, by
| anyone, on any platform, deserves to be protected.
|
| The goal of the first amendment is to protect the citizens of
| America from laws created by congress / government in limiting
| speech. That is nowhere near what we are talking about when
| we're talking about _any_ speech conducted on a private
| platform.
|
| In fact, it's interesting to me that the argument has recently
| been spun around such that some politicians are claiming that
| social platforms are violating their first amendment rights by
| blocking or banning. This has nothing to do with the intent or
| language of the first amendment.
|
| In my mind, you can be the most fervent civil rights advocate
| _and still_ believe that Twitter /Facebook/etc can ban anyone
| they want for any reason. Even more so if you believe in free
| enterprise and the rights of a business to act in the way that
| they best see fit.
|
| I understand that platform bans have more implications and
| repercussions than I'm outlining here in simple terms but still
| the conflation is frustrating to me.
| klyrs wrote:
| > 2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair
| weather fans' of civil rights.
|
| A close read of the constitution itself shows that this has
| been the case since the very founding of the united states.
|
| > The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be
| suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the
| public Safety may require it.
| jaywalk wrote:
| So because the Constitution defines some rather extreme
| circumstances where Habeas Corpus is allowed to be suspended,
| the Constitution is "fair weather" when it comes to civil
| rights?
| klyrs wrote:
| Yes, rights are clearly revoked when the "weather" gets bad
| enough. Today's argument is about where that "fair weather"
| line is drawn.
| dhanna wrote:
| Do you have any familiarity with case law? The courts major
| job is to deal with the shades of grey that's our reality.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Yes? I understand what courts do, my only point was that
| setting out two extreme situations where a certain right
| may be suspended doesn't constitute "fair weather" in my
| eyes.
| klyrs wrote:
| The founders allowed for rights to be revoked when the
| "weather" got extremely bad: agree or disagree?
| jaywalk wrote:
| Agree.
| klyrs wrote:
| I said earlier, the debate here is over what constitutes
| "fair weather". Glad we agree.
| quantumBerry wrote:
| >2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair
| weather fans' of civil rights
|
| All you need to do is examine firearm rights, which have been
| removed from felons and regulated into oblivion in places like
| Hawaii to see what can happen to free speech. Both those
| amendments are right next to each other and should apply to
| everyone (who is not in jail for a crime), including Hawaiian
| felons singing "somewhere under the rainbow" while smoking a
| big fat blunt with a machine gun on their back. But the tyranny
| of the majority has gotten away with putting their fears above
| the civil rights of others.
| clairity wrote:
| the lesson here should be that we're not really much different
| from our ancestors of 5-50k years ago and because of that,
| concentrations of power (and by extension, influence) are
| inherently dangerous. leaders with too much power will
| inevitably make mistakes, and keeping institutions limited and
| focused means the harms from those mistakes are limited in
| scope.
|
| in government, that means extending federalism: smaller
| governing bodies loosely federated (primarily for mutual
| protection and interrelational fairness). in business, it means
| truly competitive (and fair) markets with diverse participants,
| not oligarcal ones (like these platforms).
| alex_c wrote:
| The last few years have shown me how many people are willing to
| believe utterly stupid things, and how easy it is to make
| people turn against each other. I knew this in the abstract,
| but watching it happen in real time is something else.
|
| The human mind (myself included) has some serious bugs, and
| "we" as a society - with help from technology - are getting
| better and better at exploiting these bugs at scale. I don't
| think censorship is a solution, but I don't know what IS a
| solution.
|
| Incidentally, what happened to FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt)?
| I miss that term, and I think it's much more descriptive of
| what we're seeing these days than the more vague
| "misinformation".
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| News companies have known for centuries that Fear Uncertainty
| and Doubt are profitable. They've shrouded the FUD behind
| claims of professionalism and legitimacy.
|
| The internet has made it instantly and continuously
| accessible, and just as dangerously, largely fabricated. Even
| news about things that actually happened can have its
| comments astroturfed by bad faith arguments or straight up
| lies.
|
| Censorship doesn't solve the FUD; that will never go away
| while there's a profit motive (IE, increase clicks).
|
| Censorship can't distinguish between truth and lies, that's a
| problem journalism used to solve when it was profitable.
|
| Censorship does solve brainwashing. Is the tradeoff worth it?
| Hard to say.
|
| All I know is all platforms legally need to censor illegal
| content, so it becomes a hammer looking for a nail.
| tzs wrote:
| > The last few years have shown me how many people are
| willing to believe utterly stupid things, and how easy it is
| to make people turn against each other. I knew this in the
| abstract, but watching it happen in real time is something
| else.
|
| If anyone wants some good examples of this, go to Reddit and
| read the posts /r/HermanCainAward that are marked "Awarded".
| No need to read the comments there--they are often rather
| mean. Just take a look at the submissions themselves.
|
| For those not familiar with /r/HermanCainAward, the typical
| submission is a gallery of screenshots of someone's social
| media posts, usually full of memes about why they are not
| masking/distancing/getting vaccinated and invariably ending
| with them getting COVID, asking for prayers, and then someone
| else announcing that the person has died and often asking for
| donations to help their widow and/or children get buy
| (because apparently the kind of person who feels that they
| should get get all their COVID advice from stupid memes and
| conspiracy theories is also the kind of person who does't
| believe in life insurance...).
|
| > The human mind (myself included) has some serious bugs, and
| "we" as a society - with help from technology - are getting
| better and better at exploiting these bugs at scale. I don't
| think censorship is a solution, but I don't know what IS a
| solution.
|
| This too is illustrated nicely on /r/HermanCainAward. Before
| all this I would have thought that if I needed to convince a
| lot of people to make the kind of mistakes that the HCA
| winners do I would need to carefully craft an individual plan
| for each one of them. I would have never guessed that just
| making a dozen or so memes would be enough.
| beardyw wrote:
| > Anonymity and pseudonymity have played important roles
| throughout history, from secret ballots in ancient Greece to 18th
| century English literature and early American satire.
|
| Sorry, I think anonymity is valuable in the world we find
| ourselves, but to suggest it was prevalent more than a few
| decades ago is really stretching things. Yes there are examples,
| but ordinary people just wouldn't do it. Now, to have say an
| email which is your actual name is a rarity even if you wanted
| it.
| newbamboo wrote:
| The cia wants big tech monopolies because we are in direct
| competition with China. Mimetic desire to be dominant great
| power. But the problem is monopolies suck. They stifle innovation
| and make the culture sluggish and less dynamic. Where do we go
| from here? Probably some new great power emerges that allows true
| freedom and fosters bottom up innovation. I just wonder where
| that will come from.
| reedjosh wrote:
| Decentralized and or federated social and value sharing
| systems.
| droptablemain wrote:
| Anyone notice that liberal democracy seems to have a strong
| reliance on illiberalism to maintain its stronghold?
| seph-reed wrote:
| Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter all _suggest_ this content to
| people.
|
| Anything they do passed this point is just them trying to cover
| up the fact that they pushed extremism onto the world.
| sebow wrote:
| You don't have to force YT,FB,etc to host anything that "violates
| their TOS",given that: you make the clear distinction in the
| legislature:do american rights apply in the online space?If yes,
| and you also consider YT,FB,etc. public places[which has already
| been done by the courts], what's not to say that you MUST enforce
| people's right on these platforms?That's the current debate and
| it should either conclude in: yes those privately-owned places
| are not public places thus they can do whatever they want, or
| they are, in which case rights must be applied, to the letter.The
| latter sounds more scary to non-US citizens because they might
| see offensive material, but to make the distinction clear in the
| law, a "bill of rights" should be made that states the rights
| apply to this 'new' digital information medium aswell. This is
| not "right to internet" as a "public-utility", because that's
| mostly non-sense created for political gain amongst the young.The
| long-term effects of current censorship will eventually set
| things naturally: people will create off-grid mesh networks,
| plugged into the mainstream internet,to fight off censorship, and
| it will be out of some dystopian movie.This won't really be the
| "web 3.0", because you're still relying on "centralized
| pipelines" that tie everything together.
|
| By the way, this will inevitably also go into property/copyrights
| issue, and the law is shaky there aswell(arguably even more
| so,compared to freedom of expression).The "i store these bits on
| my machine but i don't own copyright of it" is a big issue and
| frankly something disturbing.I would rather see copyrights
| holders enforce streaming(where you don't "store" their content
| entirely at any given time) rather than continue with this DRM
| mess and everything that comes with it.
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