But Facebook and Twitter inject extremely harmful falsehoods into reams of fluff and corporate posts. This gives them far more legitimacy, weight and exposure than they would otherwise have. And since those two have made agitating posts part of their business model, regardless of historic levels of societal harm, the problem is not fixed.
I would be appalled if anything I built were used to do such harm, I would use every ounce of my being to stop it. If necessary I would shut the whole thing down rather than have my name remembered forever as such a facilitator. Obviously Zuckerberg has a different mindset and is clearly no Alfred Nobel.
Historically, US free speech has been "crazy rant" = okay, "fire!" (in a crowded room) = not okay.
And that worked, when distribution was relatively centralized with respect to network size.
However, now I think we have a third category, somewhere between the previous two: "fire!" (on a widely- and easily-disseminated medium).
The sheer scale of social networks makes the effect fundamentally unlike prior scenarios.
I really wish people could find a different expression to convey what they mean by this, because what they/you mean by this is probably worlds apart from what this phrase actually meant when it was formulated.
> ""Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a popular metaphor for speech or actions made for the principal purpose of creating panic. The phrase is a paraphrasing of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution."
I think we can all agree that protesting the draft should be protected by the first amendment.
> I really wish people could find a different expression to convey what they mean by this, because what they/you mean by this is probably worlds apart from what this phrase actually meant when it was formulated.
A bit yeah, right on Wikipedia [0]:
> The paraphrasing differs from Holmes's original wording in that it typically does not include the word falsely, while also adding the word "crowded" to describe the theatre. The original wording used in Holmes's opinion ("falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic") highlights that speech that is dangerous and false is not protected, as opposed to speech that is dangerous but also true.
Additionally:
> The First Amendment holding in Schenck was later partially overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which limited the scope of banned speech to that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
Maybe that's not as dramatic as "yelling fire in a crowded theater", but I think that's actually a good thing.
That is exactly what happened when this phrase was first used (it was used when a person was prosecuted for speaking against the war under the guise that he's "hurting the war effort" - you can see how this trick works) - and it has been used many times after to validate persecution of speech that hurt nobody but that you could construe a byzantine logical way it could in theory hurt somebody is you really really want to believe it. And that's exactly the problem.
Is this even true? There are a billion people on Facebook, but it's not like a given post ever gets seen by more than a small fraction of them. Nearly the entire human race has been reachable by postal mail for over a hundred years; the size of the network really has nothing to do with anything.
What has changed isn't the size of the network, it's the culture. The CDC and a thousand independent doctors say that vaccines don't cause autism, but too many people don't believe them over the mother of a kid who both has autism and was vaccinated, even if that mother has no real evidence that one caused the other.
The problem there isn't that someone is saying something which is wrong, it's that other people are too credulous of unverified claims. Nobody should believe outrageous claims from some random stranger with no domain knowledge and who is contradicted by multiple domain experts, unless they're stricken with enough curiosity to actually replicate the experiment themselves. And even then they shouldn't believe based on the word of the stranger but rather their own observations or those of someone they themselves find trustworthy.
The solution isn't censorship, it's to teach people how to properly evaluate evidence instead of being credulous and easily manipulated fools.
When communication was expensive you could only talk to people in your physical vicinity. If they had stupid ideas, you had stupid ideas. A town even a few dozen miles away would have an entirely different set of stupid ideas.
What's different now is that the clusters aren't based on geography, so there is more overlap and you encounter people whose set of stupid ideas are different than yours. That's actually a good thing -- it's how a lot of them get stamped out because they're so obviously bad that they can only survive when no one is even attempting to challenge them.
The problem now is, instead of there being a third world village full of people who think crazy things and whose children die of preventable causes but nobody else has reason to care that they exist, now there's a few of those people in every town getting infected with measles and then showing up to school with your kid. So now we have to care more about idiots being wrong because said idiots live closer to home than they did before.
But the way to fix wrongness isn't censorship. That's how you make wrongness increase, because as soon as you erroneously censor something true, nobody can say it in order to argue that it shouldn't be censored.
The way to fix wrongness is education and debate. Which is real and continuous work instead of a switch you can flip and make the problem go away. Sorry.
Using the postal reference, something may have taken a week to transmit to 100 people. Now, it takes 5 seconds.
That's a fundamentally different situation, and it requires different tradeoffs in society.
Hate speech is abhorrent and its purveyors should be ostracized from decent society. But you can deal with the crazy screamer on the streetcorner. The organizational facet is not merely distasteful but threatening. These are places to air doxxed information. They're places to gin up raids. Remember "4chan is not your personal army"? It isn't real anymore, if it ever was. For the last five years, 8chan in particular (largely because 4chan has an ownership group that maybe-just-maybe is scared of real consequences, which tells me that real consequences work) has been the personal army of a lot of sadsacks who, just to name one facet, really really really want to make the lives of women who have the temerity to make or talk about video games really horrible.
These places are literally-not-figuratively hives for fascists to radicalize the clueless, and that is a threat at a societal level.
That people get radicalized going there seems like a poor argument. If I understand you correctly, the principle is the following:
1. Someone holds acceptable views.
2. They visit 8chan.
3. They now hold abhorrent views.
Why should 8chan be blamed for this, or rather, what did they do wrong here? Don't you agree that people have the right to hold opinions without interference, and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers?
I haven't heard it used that way. Wikipedia, abbreviated:
> Radicalization is a process by which an individual comes to adopt increasingly radical political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that reject or undermine the status quo or contemporary ideas and expressions of the nation.
As in, adopting extreme views. And that raises the question: if you have 100'000 people and tell them all to go read Mein Kampf, then some of them will undeniably go, "yeah that Hitler guy seems like a pretty smart fellow". What is the solution? It can't be to say that extremist speech should be banned. If so, we have to burn most of Western philosophy.
And it seems like "it is morally justifiable to use violence to achieve political means" is just another political belief, correlating strongly with the strength of your political views. So all you are saying is that some political views should be banned. I don't like this.
> And that the management is shockingly hands-off about letting them do it and have been for years now?
The management did nothing wrong. Each site has a different vibe. In the case of imageboards, it's usually 'anything which isn't explicitly prohibited by law'. It's worth noting that 4chan bans the behavior which you describe.
Even if they didn't, it raises an important question: where should the line be drawn?
It seems easy to think of 4chan or 8chan as a discrete entity, which should be shut down. But say that we had some physical entity, like a pub, which for some reason attracted an extremely racist clientele who liked to go have a few drinks and then beat up the immigrants.
Should the pub be held liable for this? What about serverless mailing lists, where I manually put everyone on the list in the "reply to" field, or Usenet? Should that be 'shut down' too?
The thing I don't like about this is that both counterparties are willing. If you're spamming someone, you have person A who sends to person B, but person B doesn't want to hear from person A.
With an imageboard, you have person A who sends to B, C, and D, but B, C, and D all want to hear from A. Should they be stopped in this endeavor?
In practice, you see this as well. There's a lot of people posting on the Internet about how they're going to do this and that, but in practice most of them are just blowing off steam.
I get why a site like Facebook which wants to have community standards would like to enforce it, but it should be up to the proprietor.
Yes, that's kind of the point.
What are you referring to when you say this? Because if you're referring to Gamergate then that's quite a mischaracterization. I'm not saying that bad things weren't done during it, but it wasn't about hating on women in video games.
And aren't most swatting incidents unrelated to chans? Mostly it seems to have been about people getting angry at one another playing video games or related to streamers of video games. Does that make Twitch complicit?
Are you saying it was about integrity in video games journalism?
I wish I could express a figurative glance over the top of my reading glasses without an image macro.
Maybe I'm lucky, but I find it really easy to just disasociate with online comments. Whenever I read something hurtful or mean directed to me on the internet, I can very easily just shrug it off as "some internet person" and move on, although admittedly I've never been target harassed like some people have, which I'm sure is distressing. I think part of this was growing up I was always told: "Don't use your real name online! Don't give out your personal info!", and so for me, being online was always about being someone else, a different persona if you will. These days that seems completely out of the window, everyone uses their real names everywhere, uploads actual pictures of themselves and generally their real life seems directly integrated into their online life, which is just unthinkable for me. This probably makes online abuse just that much more personal for them?
I suppose another big change of course is that all the small forums that used to make up the internet are now exceedingly being consolidated into just one or two sites. Again, back when I was a child trawling the internet, if you didn't like one forum, you just hopped to another, and there were always plenty more (sidenot: remember the 'affiliate' tags on sites? I miss those. Made the internet feel more like a big group of communities, but I digress). Of course now, if someone is being harassed on twitter or facebook or something, well, they're not going to go somewhere else because a lot of the competition no longer exists anymore.
I don't really know where I'm going with this comment honestly, I'm just ranbling. What I do know is that regulating the internet is, and always has been, completely futile. So long as someone, somewhere, can spin up a forum on a VPS or on a computer at home, and people can connect to it, there's going to be sites hosting every kind of content imaginable. If they can't even bring down the Pirate Bay with the music industries power and money, they'll never stop people saying nasty things.
“I hate x and wish they had never been born”
Is not
“I am coming to your house tomorrow with a weapon”
Yet people treat them similarly.
From there it just becomes “anything that scares me is a threat.”
Then, it becomes obvious that people are in general scared of cultures and attitudes very different from their own.
And so there’s no tolerant chaos anymore.
It’s a Motte and Bailey argument.
Very few people support doxxing and/or incitements to violence.
But it is amazing how much censorship happens in the pursuit of curbing such threats.
But that concept is thrown out the window when it comes to Twitter/Facebook/etc.
I can't count how many times I've read "I'm literally shaking now" used as an indictment against someone else's perceived transgression. I think out of all the twitter cliches, that one makes me roll my eyes the most.
If it were a credible threat of physical harm (it rarely is), then I'd make a police report and be more vigilant with my self-defence preparation and tell my loved ones to be accordingly.
Attempting to censor the information would be pointless at best, and could easily make it worse.
I believe a lot of the internet of that era changed with Facebook: it was the first prominent social media that encouraged (mandated even) you to use your real name and information and a lot of people went with it. Myspace, MSN or similar before that were all aliases even if you knew the people in real life. This removed a level of privacy and made attacks more personal.
I normally don't argue for censorship but I will throw out that if you believe the following things:
1. There exist thoughts and beliefs which are dangerous to (my) society
2. These thoughts and beliefs are normally tempered through social pressure in the dominant culture
3. Through the internet you can create your own subculture which reinforces your thoughts and beliefs to become the new normal
Then it makes sense to try to stamp out any places where you can form these groups, since you (the dominant culture) want to maintain the status quo.
This isn't necessarily unique to the present day politics, there was a time when civil/economic rights were a radical faction in a broader culture which would want it stamped out too.
The way to reduce bad beliefs is to, IMHO:
1. Ingratiate and investigate. Respect the people, become their friend, listen to their full arguments (don't imagine straw men), understand their motivations. You might even discover the belief isn't so bad. If you don't, continue on to:
2. Suggest alternate ways of viewing the situation. People will always argue their point and appear to not accept your view. But I've found they almost always actually move slightly towards your point, oftentimes after the conversation, even if they won't admit it. It takes time for a worldview to shift.
Arguing makes no sense prior to ingratiating yourself, because if you are an enemy your view will not be appreciated.
This isn't something that you can really do online, but it is something that can be done in real life and should probably done more. Friends are a powerful force.
One example is subreddits: over time they start to develop a subculture and the mechanics of downvoting and upvoting means that people with more moderate beliefs can end up leaving after awhile, leaving the subreddit to become more and more polarized over time.
This makes it hard to have these types of empathetic conversations.
You do.
On a separate note:
1. From a technical point of view it's poorly-designed software for 2020. For example: you can't measure how many of "we" are refrigerators. You apparently don't reflect about how that may open up exploits to a wide variety of attackers in "their own space" for the "anything goes" crowd. (Same for HN for that matter.)
2. From a practical point of view this type of software serves as a poor entry point for a persuasive free speech argument. I much prefer using E2EE messaging apps as the entry point for a strong defense of free speech in the digital era. We know bad actors have used them and will likely use them in the future. Nonetheless, the rest of us use them and will fight to continue to do so on principle (e.g., for security in a weaponized internet, for privacy, for research purposes, etc.). Those principles are at the forefront, as is the fear that will be used in the counter-argument and which we must resist. We know the value, we know the cost, and we can argue the point clearly.
If we instead start the argument with poorly designed, buggy software that requires a birds-eye view of the network in order to properly assess when and how it's being exploited we're going to be fighting on two fronts. (As well as ignoring the risks of the design as I believe your comment does.)
Also, if you ask for (legal) spaces for "anything goes" content, you need to campaign not just against "hate speech" laws, but all the other laws that prohibit various kinds of information.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
The claim isn't that we should denounce those who hold opinions we find abhorrent as intolerant and fail to tolerate them; it's more specific than that, it says that we may need to physically fight those whose 'opinions' are backed by force or the credible threat of it.
I don't think vile, anonymous Internet racists rise to this measure. Your mileage may vary. Most of the Interneterati who invoke the paradox of tolerance are saying that, e.g., being intolerant of the LGBTQ, or racially chauvinist, or less than enthusiastically feminist, is grounds for censorship and deplatforming.
I don't agree, and don't get the impression Karl Popper would either.
"Internet radicals" have come to life in the real world, and organized such that they threaten violence, either racist ("race war now") or anti-semitic. Popper's point specifically talks about "rational argument", of which the pure rhetoric (as pointed out by Sartre) is the only tool anti-semites have at their disposal. They do not argue with rational argument.
If my mileage does vary, what then?
Marcuse wrote about the requirement of "rational argument" in 1965:
"Now in recalling John Stuart Mill's passage, I drew attention to the premise hidden in this assumption: free and equal discussion can fulfill the function attributed to it only if it is rational expression and development of independent thinking, free from indoctrination, manipulation, extraneous authority. The notion of pluralism and countervailing powers is no substitute for this requirement. One might in theory construct a state in which a multitude of different pressures, interests, and authorities balance each other out and result in a truly general and rational interest. However, such a construction badly fits a society in which powers are and remain unequal and even increase their unequal weight when they run their own course. It fits even worse when the variety of pressures unifies and coagulates into an overwhelming whole, integrating the particular countervailing powers by virtue of an increasing standard of living and an increasing concentration of power."
But the criterion you're proposing applies just as well to Antifa as it does to the Three Percenters, unless you add in a heaping helping of "has opinions I don't like".
Which I'm unwilling to do, because there are people who don't like my opinions, and this kind of thinking gives them ground to persecute me when it's my turn.
So where do I draw the line? Somewhere between the Patriot Prayer crowd and Atomwaffen, basically. The Proud Boys are skirting right along that line, and catching lengthy prison sentences for their trouble. So I think the system we have is working, and don't feel a need to give it more teeth.
I think the kids who show up in black and start street fights are a gift to the far right. I wish they'd hang it up; their hearts are mostly in the right place, but it's strategically stupid.
If someone hangs out and shitposts on a marginal forum, what is the responsibility of the other people on that forum for their criminal actions? If they're co-conspirators, that's one thing, but making shitty memes and shooting up a synagogue are very different things.
I've noticed that every single one of the recent mass murderers from the white supremacist camp has a Facebook account, but no one seems to want to shut down Facebook, just 8chan or whatever.
You mentioned truck attacks; someone recently drove a van through a tent full of people canvassing for Trump in Florida. Do we deplatform wherever he was hanging out online, or is it just the combination of "did a terrible thing" and "has opinions that we don't like" that justifies censorship?
I don't know what the line is, exactly, only that a lot of people are really eager to draw it way before the point I'm prepared to.
This would make the paradox of tolerance laughably restricted - it would require that we think only on the level of individual action, and that there would need to be nothing short of completely unanimous support for an action. This misses out on the idea of stochastic terrorism. From another angle, let's say there were a society of Nazis in the real world. Most, but not all of the group argue that the Jews should be murdered. One of the group murders a Jew. By your metric, we would only be allowed to revoke tolerance of the group if every member murders a Jew. Isn't that a very high price to pay? Would we only be justified in revoking tolerance from a child porn forum if every member has abused a child?
Absolutely you need to elaborate.
I think your comment implies a misunderstanding of populism and the kinds of things that go on in this world. By that I mean, because we actually do live in a world with a lot of rules, I suggest most people don't realize just how bad it can get.
"Anything goes" means ISIS showing beheadings of civilians in order to recruit more young men to the cause which works very well as a recruiting tool.
I'd encourage you to look into the Rwandan genocide - it was done through media. Radio broadcasters on either side were lamenting the others as 'cockroaches' 'vile creatures' who needed to be 'exterminated' passing lies and false information and then, at one point, calling for outright murder. The 'war' was not between armies, it was a lot of regular people, taking to the streets, massacring each other with machetes en masse. Like a 'zombie' film come to life.
And of course, the idiot teaching people to make sarin gas in their basement for fun, or to make sure that those 'cockroaches in group XYZ' can be slaughtered'.
This is what 'anything goes' means.
The moniker 'hate speech' can surely be over-applied, for example, in Quebec a comedian was fined $30K for making a joke about a person in a wheelchair. Sometimes uncomfortable arguments are labeled 'hate'. This is ridiculous obviously.
But - there's absolutely no doubt that 'hate speech' exists and can foment particularly young minds into some really devious world views.
Particularly in the context of 'fake information' the Holocaust, for example, could be 'erased' as a legit element of history.
Some of the stuff that is 'normalized' among some kids is pretty shocking, even just some casual use of language.
The 'internet' is now the commons, like any other commons, and though we need to err very much in the side of freedom of expression there - will be limited.
I see at least two thresholds, 1) the civil commons, like most areas where you can't go around screaming about this or that, like a private office or even a public square where you can't harass people. And 2) more private spaces, people should be able to almost anything they want (i.e. 'almost anything goes) and the threshold should be really high, but true 'hate speech calling for violence' for example should be a problem. ISIS beheading videos should be taken down. People calling for the mass murder of 'some group' can be taken down. If you're trying to teach people to make sarin gas in their basements, this can be taken down. Etc..
> Lastly, to make sites like 8chan out to have no value other than content some might find deplorable is, frankly, as close minded as those who the author apparently fears.
It's nice that someone actually came out and said this.
1) How do we deal with the fact that an Internet mob can horribly damage a random individual?
This is a really serious issue. Even a single stalker can cause a nightmare for a person and they will have difficulty fighting back. An Internet mob can be completely devastating. There needs to be some way for an individual to cost effectively fight back against online "assault"--especially when it's a mob.
2) How do we deal with the whole "stochastic terrorism" problem?
Stirring up a bunch of people until finally one of them does something horrific and then sitting back and saying "But I didn't say to go shoot them, I only posted their picture and name with cross-hairs." needs to have some penalty. We didn't used to care about this because only the truly powerful could say "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" and have grievous harm come about. Now, with the Internet, you can be much less powerful and have your words reach far more people--some of whom will be sufficiently disturbed to carry things out.
3) Facebook and Google are effectively monopolies. How do we deal with that?
We have historically dealt with monopoly by forcing breakups. The lack of monopoly actions in the last several decades has brought us to where these behemoths have no fear.
2. There isn't one. If I say something, there are some insane people who will hear it, and some of them might kill someone. Too bad, but it doesn't make me a terrorist.
3. Facebook and Google are natural monopolies, and they should be regulated like telecom carriers.
Malarkey. If Facebook was a natural monopoly they wouldn't have to keep buying competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp because the barrier from the natural monopoly would prevent the then-competitors from gaining significant market share to begin with. The failure there was on the part of antitrust in allowing Facebook to buy them, and even that isn't fatal as long as they don't continue to do it. Social networks only have a popular lifespan of a decade or two and exist in parallel to multiple other competitors. That is unless one company is allowed to buy them all, and keep buying them as newer ones become popular.
And Google doesn't even have network effects. All they have is a better search engine than anybody else, which only lasts until that stops being the case. It's hard to complain about it as long as they're giving the results you actually want -- especially when competing search engines do exist and can easily be used by anyone who wants to.
Hogwash. We have harassment, stalking, libel, defamation, and slander laws in meatspace for a reason. The fact that doing it on the Internet exempts you from these laws because enforcement isn't "cost effective" is a problem.
The Libertarian Internet(tm) was tried and failed. People suck; groups of people suck worse; individuals need to be protected at some level.
The question at this point is whether we put laws in place such that individuals can seek cost-effective justice, or whether we wait until so many people get burned that they start clamoring for the government to step on the Internet with jackboots.
All those are illegal online too. But if I go to the pub and discuss some harassment with my friends that I'm going to do later, the pub clearly isn't held liable for this. Why? Because even if he owns it, the pub owner has no responsibility for what is said inside of the tavern walls.
So, what is taking place on these forums is rarely illegal.
> The question at this point is whether we put laws in place such that individuals can seek cost-effective justice, or whether we wait until so many people get burned that they start clamoring for the government to step on the Internet with jackboots.
And then they move to mailing lists, or FMS. Then what? You going to shut down Tor as well?
My opinion is this: people should grow thicker skin. Those who fail to do so pose a threat to society, insofar as they call for further censorship. Therefore, anyone who is harmed by these people can post-hoc be considered to have deserved it.
It used to be the case that people were recommended to not use their real name on the Internet for basic safety reasons. Now they are encouraged to do so, and whoever doesn't is branded a 'troll'. Who is really at fault here?
A motivated harasser or mob can basically force you completely offline. You cannot answer that with "grow thicker skin".
The problem is especially acute if your harasser or mob is in a different state, for example.
> It used to be the case that people were recommended to not use their real name on the Internet for basic safety reasons.
And what about if your business is online? Most states require that your public business filing include your real name.
Your glib solutions betray your lack of experience with the problem.
If they have observed proper precautions, the psychological issues are the only factor that remains. Those are solved by growing a thicker skin.
> And what about if your business is online? Most states require that your public business filing include your real name.
If so, they should vote with their feet and observe proper precautions, such as incorporating in a jurisdiction with strong privacy laws, or not incorporating at all (Bitcoin). Examples of the former include New Mexico, Wyoming, Nevada, Seychelles, British Virgin Islands, and more.
> Your glib solutions betray your lack of experience with the problem.
No, your glib solutions betray your lack of experience with the problem. Censorship is never an answer as it is, unto itself, a moral failure.
With that in mind, I'd also argue that there should be spaces for "anything goes" content. If people are going to do it anyway, why not give them their own space? Let it be an outlet for those who choose to partake in such content. If we arent willing to accept certain kinds of content everywhere, lets at least allow it somewhere. It will still exist regardless of what we do, but at least if it has its own space we can separate oursepves if we so desire.
Lastly, to make sites like 8chan out to have no value other than content some might find deplorable is, frankly, as close minded as those who the author apparently fears. If you hadn't geussed already I use 4chan regularlly and its brought much more positive value to my life than negative. The technology board is what got me into programming in the first place. Its through them that I learned about Linux, the benifits of FOSS, the history of computing, and skills that have lead me to be succesful in my life. They are even the ones who lead me to hacker news. Maybe the messages they gave me were worded in a way that some deem undesirable. But when looking at the message itself and not the envelope its wrapped in there is value to be found in these spaces. If the culture is not for you, thats fine! I understand. But please, don't see that as a reason to condemn those of us who do use these sites. We have a right to exist too.