The mass media is going nuts about not controlling the narrative anymore, that's why they want to bury big tech. They will lose in the end, so I don't know if it's worth it to fight.

Big tech also wants to control the narrative. Due to the nature of their platforms, it's much more difficult to do but that hasn't stopped them from making a mess trying.

Big tech just want to suck in money in peace. They only suppress content to ensure that peace.

They cut out sexual content first because it's biggest nono in the US where they come from. Bigger than nazis or racists. But then people got railed up about other things. Nazis, racists, transphobes, mysogynists, political lies.

Peaceful harvest becomes harder and harder.

No wonder they want to outsource all that noise. They want to be given clear direction which part of the field is safe and which is the part of shifting sands of public outrage.

Zuckerberg is literally just begging to be censored. Censor will set up clear boundaries of safe field current companies can share and keep the status quo since new player won't be able to attack them from the direction of fuzzy boundary because there won't be any.

I think each time Big Tech tries to control the narrative more and more is a step in a direction that is short sighted.

I get wanting to pull down literal Nazis and I mostly agree. But scope creep on who is a Nazi and the ever vaguer "hate speech" will spell true trouble as they get even more unclear.

The reason this is happening is becoming more clear. Despite what tech types like us believe and echo to each other on forums like HN, there is the reality of an apathetic environment in which most people live.

Most people, most content creators, most content consumers, most people in general, really don't give 2 mosquito dicks about any of the issues I think are important.

Privacy from the government? Nope. If you're not a crook, you've got nothing to fear.

Tech companies having too much info about you that they will share with the government? Ditto.

Nazis can't get free speech? Who cares. In fact, GOOD, I don't want that crap popping up on my kids' recommended list anyway. Good job YouTube!

Lately I have been beginning to understand the magnitude of the problem. Apathy is far more powerful than any government.

And the worst part of all? The only thing they have to do to fuel apathy is keep the trains running on time and keep the walmart/grocery store shelves stocked. That's all.

I'm becoming convinced that this problem is being attacked wrong. We need to stop talking about Nazis and politicians and start talking about some group that is actually respectable that may be shut out. I don't know off hand what that content would resemble. But I do know that almost no one likes politicians, nazis, and pedophiles. So it's making me believe that continuing to have those groups attaching themselves to our arguments is counterproductive at this point.

Surely there should be something disconcerting about being massively disagreed with, and finding that you can't imagine any cause more respectable than pedophiles and fascists?

I agree with you that these things are important, but why do you think so if you can't formulate a good argument for them that doesn't rely on peoples' sympathy for Nazis?

Because I'm of the opinion that Free Speech is important to protect speech that most people do not like. Not really to protect speech that most people have no problem with in any case.

Why do you think it's important if not to protect speech that most people do not like? I mean, if it's speech or behavior that no one has a problem with, why does it need your protection?

I think that line of reasoning is wrong, because it implies that social media has resulted in some kind of "pulling back the curtain". What it's really shown is that, while the media might be able to spin lies people believe, the only thing that kept that power in their hands exclusively was infrastructure. What happens instead when "nobody controls the narrative" is that people go pick their own narrative, and not in a way that's necessarily any closer to the truth.

I don't think it's about pulling back the curtain, I think it's about there being another curtain.

The internet, even "big tech" platforms with 1000 different ML algorithms for downranking and banning things, is just a different medium than broadcast media altogether, so there's bound to be tension between tech companies and broadcast media, even ignoring the whole ad money thing. There's so much going on at the same time and there's just no presumption that any particular piece of content is authoritative or popular like there is on TV or in a newspaper.

To put it another way, it seems like it's not just about the difference between the framing of the "big story" on the NBC evening news and on TruthS33k3r_42's channel; it seems more about the difference between having or caring about a single story at all, and perhaps just chatting on Discord/forums/Twitter/Messenger about something completely separate.

Murdoch and sons seem to have figured it out. They take the false narratives spun out of social media and rebrand it. In fact their job is probably easier these days since the work of coming up with the spin has been outsourced complete with A/B testing, so they just need to editorialize.

Sadly, I think you’re right. Traditional media is hemming and hawing about this mostly because now there is someone else who is doing what they did for so long which was to set narratives with little pushback.

Now they’re losing grip on relevance and they don’t like it one bit.

For a lesson, see their reaction to Richard Jewell vs All The Presidents Men. They like being seen as heroes, even if the facts are stretched, but if they are shown less gloriously, they complain about the fictionalization aspect...

"Print media" are news organizations though, right?

Facebook and Google are platforms, analogous to a printing house. They let anybody publish their opinions, without endorsement.

You wouldn't go nuts at HaperCollins for printing Mein Kampf, or a bookstore/library for distributing it.

And yet, the experience of a social media feed is much closer to a newspaper than a publisher's catalog... Why do publishers and news papers have different sets of responsibilities, by the way?

Not really. You can quite selectively choose which authors you want to read and which you don't.

That's nothing at all like a newspaper, where everyone gets the same issue.

> Why do publishers and news papers have different sets of responsibilities, by the way?

Because that's how the world works: different people have different jobs.

The newsstand/ISP delivers information which was put in readable form by the printer/website platform syndicated by the news agency/subreddit and authored by the reporter/person.

> "arbiter of truth"

They should just call it Ministry of Truth or even Minitrue as a nod to the Orwell.

"Regulatory farming" is a great concept. There is a very similar concept called "regulatory shopping", where institutions can choose the (existing) regulatory agency that they want to be regulated by.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulator_shopping

Why not just go Twitter's route and ban political advertisements? Then you can still sell the money-making sugar and diet pills without the poison of politics.

It's not a bad idea, I'd actually favour it myself because "screw all this noise", you know?

But there are a few issues.

First, practically, you now have to decide what is "political". Is an ad for abortion services political? What about the NRAs latest membership campaign? Or a gun safety campaign? Lots of things are political to at least someone. So who decides what's political? You're still in something of a mess. And you technically have to ban ads that are entirely factually true now!

Similarly, even if you can stop the ad next to a celeb tweet being political, can you stop the same buyers paying celebs to Tweet fake news directly or Russian bots creating 10,000 accounts and tweeting fake news? Will you go through @Potus tweets and cut out the fake news? Suddenly the Liberal media is eating trump babies.

Second, it doesn't solve your core problem: traditional media, from the guardian to fox, will now attack you for being anti free speech (AND for every time an ad gets through your filter, that looks like it shouldn't). They don't actually care about whether you publish fake news. They publish it. They just want you to die. Plus now you've offended your freedom loving users, and alienated the politicos relating you. Maybe under the 1st amendment US politicians can't FORCE firms to take their ads. But they can audit them, drag them I front of Congress, cut net neutrality so ISPs eat their profits etc.

Ultimately, its down to users to filter their media and fact check it. It always has been. There was never a golden age where newspapers reported facts in order of importance and politicians were honest and policy fact driven. But no one wants to admit that. Facebook made that mistake, it was reported as "Facebook will publish fake news, eat babies, fuck your wife"

Fwiw, the US has rules on foreign contributions to political campaigns which have already explored these questions in courts, up through the Supremes...

While this is irony at its finest, I actually think this is a good idea.

We expect FB and Google to exercise editorial control but they can't for two reasons. The first is the narrative we have subscribed to as a society is that to avoid legal liability because they are "platforms" aka common carriers of other peoples content.. Clearly they didn't make it. Yet, FB and Google can clearly do content regulation when the law requires it (exhibit a.. Nazi propaganda in Germany or illicit images) and even where the law does not (exhibit b.. posts or YouTube content with background music being muted due to copyright claims). Cable TV providers clearly censor ads and content as well. Some of that is upstream of the local cable tv delivery service but in essence they all operate in "cahoots"

The second is the slippery slope is that enforcement in the case of Google and FB is the threat of anti-trust investigations This is the "the Sword of Damocles" that hangs over them. So setting up an independent tribunal is a way to maintain a suspension of disbelief.