I remember an old New Yorker cartoon from the 90s that says 'On the internet, no one knows you're a dog'. Lying has been a fundamental feature of the medium since the beginning. Most of the history of the internet pre-smartphone is people trying to figure out how to combat trolls and spammers. It appears that we are having to learn the same lessons all over again.
There seems to be a kind of collective amnesia about the fact that the majority of content on the internet is written by people that are trying to sell you something, trying to get your attention for their own amusement, or are batshit insane. Frequently it's more than one of these things.
>From: Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo [A known military corporation of the High Beyond. If this is a masquerade, somebody is living dangerously.]
More examples here: https://hur.st/afutd.html (spoilers if you read more than the From lines)
If you only read reports of vaccine-related harms, it's easy to come to the conclusion that vaccines are a terrible mistake or even a conspiracy, because human brains aren't very good at prioritising the singular fact that vaccines have saved millions of lives over a constant stream of emotive stories. If you only read about the inconsistencies and errors in contemporary reports of the Holocaust, it's easy to come to the conclusion that the whole thing is exaggerated or an outright hoax, because it's just deeply unpleasant to think about six million corpses.
I don't need to lie to you or dictate what you believe, I just need to influence what you pay attention to; if I control your attention, I can guide you towards a conclusion and make you believe that you came to it of your own initiative.
FWIW I agree with your take, but practically speaking I use whatever “metadata” I can (is this a bot, is the writer a pseudoscientist, is this thread a flame war) to help deal with the fact that it’s so much cheaper to create bull%^*t than to critically evaluate an argument or idea.
And in that light I disagree with your “obvious consequence” that people will stop paying attention to forum posts, because we know that people do engage with trolls/bots on Twitter/Facebook/etc.
People are also fine watching cable TV for hours, which is content that is entirely designed by people whose intentions we do not know. What fundamental difference does it make whether candidate Doe’s agenda is pushed by bots on forums vs TV anchors paid to read off a teleprompter, when people are so eager to sit in front of it and engage with it?
Human attention is the new commodity, and the average person just does not have the means to fight the billions of dollars collectively poured into exploiting their eyeballs.
If you instead want your assumptions reinforced, you pay attention to whatever source does that.
Amusing to read.
This is such an interesting way to refer to an author.
We're all living in bubbles. It is why travelling is interesting - you get to be in a different bubble, come home and notice the peculiarities of your bubble that you never noticed before.
It is why movies are interesting - we jump into a different bubble, for the same purposes.
There is no problem here, because there is no 'truth' that gets obscured as a result. The human experience is not about uncovering truth, it's just an experience to be had and possibly enjoyed if the universe happens to align for you to do so :)
This is necessary for 2 reasons. First, it gives us confidence the people we are speaking to are (probably) not bots.
Second, it reduces the need for online censorship beyond what is required by law. So much of the hateful garbage posted online is only posted in the first place because of anonymity. Remove that, we probably don't get that posting in the first place so we can avoid the messy issue of enforced top down censorship.
I'll take my anonymity where I can get it, thanks. And as an aside, it's somewhat ironic you post this on a throwaway.
Mandated real names are just pre-doxing everyone so they can be censored by real world retaliation. If you're already powerful, this has no effect. If you're vulnerable, it's silencing.
You might be able to implement this in a small, affluent European country, but nowhere else. Consider the fact that in the USA, it is a standard talking point of the left that the right's continual push to ask for ID to _vote_ has been branded as a racist policy; it seems that we're simply to accept that large swathes of people will simply not have any ID, whether they're legally present in the country or not.
How do you suggest solving that problem, so as to have some actual decent ID on file with which to back the online ID upon?
And, once you've solved that, how are you going to scale it to impoverished countries that barely have the infrastructure to have any internet access at all, never mind vetting everyone's access to it?
Once you have this ID system, how are you going to mandate that all websites validate access against it? Enforce it at the ISP level? How are people going to offer wifi in coffee shops, etc? Force everything through a big proxy? The scale and expense of the infrastructure involved in doing this is immense. Government IT efforts seem to fail more often than not these days - witness the failures to improve the IRS, or the recent Canadian government payroll system implementation scandal with IBM.
> Second, it reduces the need for online censorship beyond what is required by law.
In America, you have absolute freedom of speech, save of course for speech that is treasonous (i.e. divulging classified information). There is no requirement to censor by law. If someone wants to issue speech you consider hateful, it is not illegal for them to do so. This is not true many other places, and unfortunately may change in the USA at some point in our lifetimes ending one of the greatest freedoms that anyone has ever possessed out of our fear that somehow freedom is going to be what leads to our oppression, and not the giving of too much power to the state. Ironic; even more ironic that the left is the group most siding with big corporations to push this narrative. Never thought I'd see that; not after Occupy Wall Street, but that spirit is thoroughly dead.
> So much of the hateful garbage posted online is only posted in the first place because of anonymity. Remove that, we probably don't get that posting in the first place so we can avoid the messy issue of enforced top down censorship.
Right, because self-imposed censorship where we all go through the day with a fake smile on our faces, only saying the right things, like as though the things we feel safe saying on LinkedIn is sufficient to cover all legitimate human dialogue. Say the wrong thing and disappear into a Kafka-esque nightmare, where you can never get the complete list of all the things you can't say because such a list would be even more dangerous than what you were planning to say in the first place...
No, friend. You're wrong.
Anonymity and free speech are the incredible power to bring light to darkness. They're what enables us to be more than the sum of our parts; what lets those unfortunate in appearance have equal footing to those who are attractive, what lets those who are disabled keep up with athletes. It's what lets us find corruption and root it out more effectively than ever before, and it is this spirit of taking down evil people that is going to be crushed by ideas like yours, not the actual evils that lurk within the hearts of men.
Well the obvious consequence is that you have to stop paying attention to random posts. You have to depend on something outside of the forum itself to find a list of people to pay attention to. That will be your friends and your family. And then it will be whatever media tells you to pay attention to.
Getting out of your filter bubble will be impossible because as soon as you step out you are faced by an onslaught of bots.
Maybe you could travel around IRL and acquire a diverse list of voices that way. But realistically only the elite could afford that.
Actually lets be even more cynical. Say you go traveling, meet someone. You add them on a social network. But it's not them it's a bot. And they get a few bucks for selling your eyeballs.
But then we can even further imagine that you follow them with a fake account too, and so the eyeballs were actually worthless.