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.