If I convince millions of people that Example companies widgets kills kittens, when I have no reason to believe that to be the case, I would be held liable for the damage to the brand.
But the pseudo-anonymous nature of the internet and most platforms, and even trying to avoid problems like the Streisand effect allow damaging speech to avoid consequence.
I'm not advocating for any approach to fix the problem, this is just a curiosity of mine as of late.
It depends what you meant. The law doesn't give carte blanche to say whatever you want, however you want, either. Your example above is what libel and slander laws are about. People make (probably millions) of false claims about companies daily and none of them rise to the level of a credible accusation largely because they're done anonymously. Someone who could actually "convince millions of people" probably has at least SOMETHING damning, and if they don't, the backpressure from everyone else is going to be pretty intense. That's actually _normal_. Desirable.
_Some_ speech _does_ require freedom from damage because otherwise the direct effect is the chilling effect. Political speech is specifically one type of such speech. The internet really has forced us to look carefully at what kinds of speech warrant that protection and which don't and we clearly haven't figured it out yet.
But certainly giving that power to private companies - and removing it from the hands of the people, the government, the law, the courts, and posterity -- is _definitively not_ the right way to do it.
I think the really difficult part about all of it is, the areas that don't require protections, aren't because the speech isn't damaging, it's that an uneven application of the rules can lead to worse problems. Or issues where it's impossible to find objective neutral parties (a jury) to decide on issues central to politics.
You don't need to unplug the bullhorn if there is no bullhorn.
It shouldn't be up to absolutely obviously partisan corporations to decide which October surprise info dump is misinformation deserving of censorship, and which is the aok rough and tumble of presidential electioneering.
Finally, on the facts, the Steele dossier was far more obviously fraudulent than pictures of hunter smoking a crack pipe in the bathtub...
They are trying to claim control only when it suits them and not when there may be liability. Can't have it both ways.
Why? I pick up a piece of rubbish from the ground, so I'm responsible for everything that anyone litters? It doesn't make any sense.
Twitter isn't claiming they prevent every type of bad on their platform, they're just trying to prevent one type of bad for now
And the network can make that happen on its own, without an algorithm reordering content - if someone I follow is retweeting something that someone they follow retweeted.
I guess the line is so blurred because often these aren't "people" but often institutions, governments and those intending to shape public opinion, even bots in some cases.
You're talking about it like Twitter is censoring someone specifically but it's so much more complicated and nuanced than that.
It's exactly what they were saying at the invention of the printing press. Amplification becoming too cheap. Maybe being on the side of censorship is always being on the wrong side of history no matter the issue. Can you remember one time in history where we now like "thanks god they censor these thoughts!"?
But you can probably find a sketchy, low-audience journal that would.
Well it's the same thing, a well known community was banned from Reddit to prevent them from using Reddit's amplification mechanism (/r/all etc), but they now have their own clone of it, with a smaller audience, that you are free to consult.
Eventually people with power figured out how to mostly control the printing press and so created the heavily gate-kept institutions you describe. The transitions our society is facing now echo these past struggles.
We cannot simply hand-wave some of them away as "the struggles every new medium faces."
Printed materials were still pretty gate-kept. Sure, anybody could spend a modest sum and get a bunch of roughly-printed pamphlets printed up. You could walk around London and hand them out. People did, and I suppose some of these ideas got traction. And some of those ideas were even good.
That was still a lot of money and effort, and it was still a lot of work to establish some kind of credibility so that your ideas might actually gain acceptance. Otherwise you were just a crazy person handing out pamphlets along with all of the other crazy people.
Today, you can post insane and dangerous COVID-19 falsehoods to half of the freaking world via YouTube or Facebook and your message is indistinguishable from ideas presented by people who actually know what they're talking about.
The gatekeeping America used to have was... not great. Network television's self-censorship was often stodgy, at best. But you didn't have absolute fucking lunatics screaming about chemtrails and Bill Gate's 5G microchip mind-control scheme racking up literally millions of followers. That is a PROBLEM.
If you say to me that the ideal solution is to simply have a more educated populace, I wouldn't disagree. However, that doesn't solve things now. We need long-term solutions (education) as well as short-term ones (so we don't have the loonies electing other loonies who actually get to steer the most powerful militaries on the planet)
This article is about blocking a story by the NY Post. It may be true or may be false, but it already passed the traditional gatekeepers.
This article is about blocking a story by the NY Post.
It may be true or may be false, but it already passed
the traditional gatekeepers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post#Style
It represents roughly the midpoint between a serious journalistic operation and the National Enquirer.
Should factually accurate information that matters to people be rejected or hidden because of style? Who gets to decide the correct style? Would you apply the same standards to alternately aligned publications of questionable style, like WaPo/HuffPo?
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart-2...
The National Enquirier is NOT a reputable journalistic outlet.
Bu that argument doesn't apply here for two reasons:
1. The NY Post has existed in some form for 200 years, and has built its own reader base.
2. Twitter blocked even direct messages.
I completely fail to see how their rights are somehow being impinged here. They have their own mini-media empire and are part of a larger media empire.
How... exactly are they being stifled and why is Twitter obligated to amplify their voice?
I would certainly agree that this does fall afoul of Section 230, which I think was a great foundation but could use some serious rethinking.
But I don't think Section 230 is adequate to the task.
You realize, of course, that even HN is strongly moderated? The mods kill a lot of stories here. And HN is a better place for it.
By your logic, HN should now be liable for anything that anybody posts. Is that what you want? Does that seem like it's in anybody's best interests?
and even their reporters didn't want to publish it
https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-nw-nyt-hunter...
> The New York Post’s front-page article about Hunter Biden on Wednesday was written mostly by a staff reporter who refused to put his name on it, two Post employees said.
> Bruce Golding, a reporter at the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid since 2007, did not allow his byline to be used because he had concerns over the article’s credibility, the two Post employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
...
> Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents, said five people with knowledge of the tabloid’s inner workings. Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.
I bet the response of the Catholic clergy to the printing press was probably pretty similar to this statement. And the ideas of the reformation were certainly far more dangerous than any chemtrail conspiracy.
Chemtrail conspiracy theories are... pretty insignficant. If your goal is to eradicate all conspiratorial wrongthink of this magnitude or greater, you are going to run into ~a lot~ of problems. Epstein memes are very popular.
One, nobody is taking away your right to say or think things. This is about Twitter's obligation (or lack thereof) to broadcast your thoughts to others.
They are not burning you at the stake like a vengeful Catholic church during the Inquisition or outlawing your thoughts like "wrongthink" in 1984.
Two, the printing press analogy is highly flawed. Twitter is like the owner of one specific printing press, not some entity that controls all printing presses. If you owned a printing press, would you want to be obligated to print things you find factually and harmful?
I assume you'd certainly want the freedom to turn down printing jobs. Or do only certain freedoms matter?
Even in the long term, how are you going to produce this more educated populace? Or rather, who are you going to entrust with the task? The same educational establishment that produced the current populace?
But even if you can produce your more educated populace, you still have the problem that the Russian trolls aren't going to stand still. They're going to be better, too, by then.
Or rather, who are you going to entrust with the task?
The same educational establishment that produced the
current populace?T
Education, obviously, often falls short of this ideal and you don't necessarily need formal education to be a critical thinker.
I do think that's pretty achievable. When I went through school in the 80s and 90s we weren't exactly devoid of this sort of thing.
Absurd ideas like chemtrails and flat-eartherism don't last very long in the face of the slightest hint of critical thinking.
But even if you can produce your more educated populace,
you still have the problem that the Russian trolls aren't
going to stand still. They're going to be better, too, by
then.
Yes, them, but with adequate funding and a return of Civics and Home Ec required for all students.
Then, money you spend on education will get a ROI instead of being skimmed off the top.
Kind of an awkward take... this conversation is literally taking place on social media.
Do you have a concrete proposal for how to accomplish that goal?
As for concrete proposals .. it's a massive topic, and full of interdependent systems and feedback loops and it might be hubris if anyone says 'heres a single concrete proposal to address it all'.. but here's some thoughts more on identifying issues to address in the context of schools, and aligning the results of schooling to learning.
A natural process of learning, especially for children, is to copy an image/role model/idol and learn through imagining themselves as that role model.
What are the social aspirations, or role models, that children usually idolise in our current schools and society? Film stars, sports stars, super models, instagram 'influences' which are usually just models ..
Common themes amongst these: glamourous lives, big money, social capital.
Another common theme is accomplishment in those fields does not have a linear relationship to hard work, to learning, and to the cultivation of knowledge.
Instead it's about coolness, social gaming, and largely about genetic lottery of beauty or sporting ability - yes some hard work but that's not going to get you far without these other pre-requisites.
It's also about luck, so rewards are not linearly related to effort, thus the payoff for effort is very uncertain.
Actually accomplishment in those fields is mostly a winner takes all market environment, so most people can never find success, and the majority of people who realise that they can't ever succeed to their aspirations give up putting in effort, it's a cause of apathy.
So the mainstream kids who idolise mainstream 'stars' aren't incentivised to learn and apply themselves mentally, they are incentivised to try to be cool, play social games, preen themselves for physical beauty, and hope to heck they are lucky .. and the vast majority has to face the unhappy reality they will never be stars.
That's a problem. What if their role models were Einstein who had a talent for imagining and discovering interesting things about the world, even as he worked a mundane job as a clerk (in the patent office). What if social capital for the mainstream classes was accrued to people who worked hard and made sensible decisions and created useful things, instead of to playing social gaming and trying to look beautiful/rich/make other people jealous and 'influence'.
So I don't have a concrete proposal, or the 'answers', but (I think) at least this is asking some of the right questions!
If you don't like certain ideas being distributed then who made you the boss of ideas?
Without a free exchange of ideas, you can not have a educated population, you only get programmed automotons.
These things are not true about Twitter. You can go post on your own Mastodon instance or the Daily Stormer or the Fox News comment section if Twitter is too restrictive for your liking.
Also, do you recognize the irony/insanity of complaining about this on Hacker News, a strongly-moderated platform? HN's centralized moderation is far more stringent.
You don't need to look very far to find other examples.
That's not why Twitter "censored" the news story. They removed links to a story that violated their published policies.
I am not sure that it matters 'why they censored'.
Put it another way, I do not think it matters if they applied their own ToS rules correctly, incorrectly, selectively or whatever.
I am not sure that their terms of service, allow them to claim protection under 47.230 [1]
I am sure that the position that the fed government investigators will take.
If Twitter folks (or their crowd-sourced moderators, or committees) gray-out/remove/comment on/hide/edit content that Twitter claims 'is not theirs' -- then it is hard to imaging they are compliant with the 'non-publisher' protections of section 47.230.
Imagine if one is a for-profit business, claiming tax code for a non-profit organization.
Their Terms Of Service mentions: 'Making the world better and being charitable. We do not do business with bad clients'.
Does that make that business less criminally liable for claiming taxes of a non-profit?
To me it does not.
Literally, wars were started because of this. Similar to today's information age propaganda wars and disinformation, physical media was used in a similar way. There are some valid comparisons here.
However, relative to the days of broadsides, the barrier to entry for dissemination of ideas has decreased by orders of magnitude and the potential reach of such ideas has increased by orders of magnitude.
It's like comparing slingshots and nuclear weapons. Yes, they're both things that let you hurt people from a distance.
Interestingly, the Catholic church was very concerned about the ability to mass produce literature and wanted to have control over what could be published. They didn't want just anyone to be able to publish a book. Imagine giving people a platform to speak out against the Church!
There is an excellent hard core history podcast that somewhat relates to the topic.
It's a good episode. History is pretty gruesome.
The main difference is that people buy a newspaper for the information it publishes while people join a social network because their friends are there. A social network starting to editorialize content is therefore a problem since there is really no alternative ways to keep in touch with friends as effectively, meaning these social networks gets to force their opinions on people.
Who is forcing a private organization to adopt any stance? "Leaving alone" is not the same as "actively promoting." Twitter leaving alone a story does not mean Twitter is promoting that story, that is exactly what section 230 is about.
> not to force the existing ones to promote what we believe is right.
I guess they don't need to pay taxes either, or take a stand against violence, or racism, or....? They still exist within the society in which they function and that means both social and legal rules bind them, same as you or me. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, their status as a corporation doesn't somehow entitle them to a more special or louder voice than any one else's.
"It is really complicated" is the conclusion that early modern historians of information come to.
Well, the honest answer to the "can you remember" question is going to be misleading. By the nature of the thing we're talking about, the historical things like that are things that people aren't going to remember.
If you believe in "to the victor go the spoils" on the information front, then successful censorship (and more generally propaganda) is always on the right side of history.
But I can think of a number of examples of censorship that history has not judged poorly:
- Libel and slander. If I say "I used to work with 'hartator and they brought in KKK flags every morning and broke the build every evening, you don't want to hire them," it's generally considered reasonable for you to get the government to force me to stop and also force other people not to repeat what I said.
- Planning crimes. If I say "Hey, let's get together tomorrow evening and murder some strangers for fun," and we start talking about how to do it, it's generally considered reasonable for the government to consider that a crime.
- Trademark infringement and other fair competition laws. If I say "These headphones are recommended by Apple" and they're not, or I say "These apples are organic" and they're not, or I say "This is an all-beef sausage" and it contains pork, it's generally considered reasonable for the government to say that I can't keep saying that if I want to keep selling the things I'm saying them about.
- Employment agreements. If I say "Hey, new employer, here's a list of my old employer's customers and here's some of their source code," it's generally considered reasonable for the old employer to object.
(There are a number of cases of compelled action that are currently not considered unreasonable - prison labor, military drafts, etc. - but I think those stand a much higher chance of being on the wrong side of history, in the long term, than any of the above.)
Absolutely, of course. Hate speech and Holocaust denial are censored in Europe generally, and a majority of people in those countries today do say support these bans (i.e. they say "thank god"). Because they saw the kind of hateful thinking that led to WWII, and how shockingly easy it is for people to be convinced of revisionist history, and don't want that to be repeated.
Similarly, libel laws function effectively as censorship, but are widely supported. I think most of us are happy that newspapers can't maliciously print lies about common citizens.
(Edit: love that I'm being downvoted for this -- apparently people don't like these objective facts?)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_and_antisemiti...
Nazism in Germany, post-WW2. And I'm okay with that.
Whenever the market idea is mentioned, it's always to invoked the principles of unregulated exchange, and not to remind readers of things like legislation about quality control for products to enter the market. And it is always argued that this market should have a constant and unceasing exchange (and more to the point that their particular idea should be given more space), so this isn't a market that works toward a consensus but rather a site that needs to be maintained in constant conflict.
[0] https://amp.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/528u9w/teachers_o...
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/time.com/longform/teaching-in-a...
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/teacher-pay...
[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/u-s-schools-struggle-to-hire...
[2] https://www.bestplaces.net/cost_of_living/city/new_york/new_...
[3] https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/teaching-hours.htm
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/9m1d7k/why_do_ame...
As other have mentioned, I think however plausible that conception of speech was then, it's utterly ignorant of the problems we're facing today, where ideas spread for reasons that have nothing to do with merit. If anything, I would think you would want to agree with the person you are replying to that the spread of ideas is not due to good ones rising to the top in a marketplace that is selecting for quality.
I think it is the exact opposite. Maybe I have read too many dystopian novels like fahrenheit 451, or 1984, or read too much about Chinese govt's control of its population, but I feel that modern technology has allowed too much censorship power in hands of not just the govt, but a few corporations. And it is extremely important that we do not compromise on free speech now.
The net effect is that there much more misinformation than there has ever been before. Despite the best efforts of twitter, facebook & youtube they appear to have been virtually powerless to halt the spread.
The problem of social media CEOs having too much power is real, and has wrought real damage: Zuckerberg's naive ideas on speech have lead to far too much harm, and now that he's recovering from his free speech trutherism and implementing reforms it's too little, too late.
Lastly I would say that if you are looking at this state of affairs and seeing 1984 or fahrenheit 451, you're seeing things wrong. There are fair examples of that, e.g. Hong Kong, mainland China. But the western internet doesn't fit that at all.
It seems like there's a lot more going on than just faster dissemination, and the way information travels these days might have introduced new asymmetries and inefficiencies.
We’re still figuring out how to find the pearls but giving carte blanche to a handful of tech monopolies is definitely not going to work.
America used to be about quality. Sure, quantity was still a thing but the "shining city on the hill" image of America was about quality.
We've lost our way.
America has never been about quality. Quality is a result of vigorous and excessive competition.
I think we’re overestimating the effect of social media. A certain group of highly educated urban liberals is shocked by Trump. (And I don’t say this pejoratively. My college educated friends were literally despondent after he was elected.) And they’re looking for an explanation. And it so happened that social media became a major force around the same time. But I think that’s mostly, though not completely, a coincidence.
Social media didn’t create Trump. Right wing populism is happening all over the world, in Europe, India, etc. Its a reaction to liberalism and globalism that’s been brewing for decades. And social media didn’t create Trump’s audience. My mom, a 70-year old Bangladeshi woman who has voted straight ticket Democrat since she was naturalized, thinks Trump is too unpolished, but loves his “energy” and “vigor.” She thinks he would be a “great President” if he could “implement his ideas.” My mom doesn’t have a Twitter account. (I think she’d love Boris Johnson, i.e. Trump with a bit more polish and competent.) She didn’t get this from Breitbart. She watches CNN in a loop all day.
Social media isn’t not a factor, but I think folks overestimate how much of a factor.
Social media is happening all over the world.
> A certain group of highly educated urban liberals is shocked by Trump.
3 million more people voted for Hillary than Trump. Biden is polling 10 points ahead of Trump.
> 3 million more people voted for Hillary than Trump.
As I said, I’m not using this as a pejorative. I’m not just talking about folks who voted for Hillary, but ones who were despondent when Trump won. I worked late on election night and got home to an election watching party with DC yuppies and when I walked in the door I thought someone had died. These are the folks who were so stunned the started looking around for an explanation. And social media just happened to be rising at the same time.
Not all Hillary voters reacted that way. My mom and dad voted for Hillary. But they weren’t shocked by the existence of Trump. They didn’t see it as an indictment of the system. They didn’t go on the whole Russia collusion ride like all of my friends. (Not coincidentally, they supported Biden from the start. Meanwhile, I was shocked when Warren and Harris did so poorly, when it came to voting, because that’s who all my grad-school educated urban friends supported.)
And don’t get me wrong, he’s not fit for office, but the idea that there is anything “radical” about his agenda, before or after the election, is pure gaslighting.
He actually ran on a moderate Republican platform. He committed to protecting Social Security and Medicare off the bat. (Remember Bush and Gore fighting over the “lock box?” Even fricking Sweden has partislly privatized their social security.) Even though it was right after Obergefell he said pretty much nothing about same-sex marriage. He criticized Clinton for her past criminal justice stances. Bluster aside, even his immigration platform wasn’t nuts. Liberal darling Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand became prime minister by campaigning on cutting legal immigration by half. Trump didn’t even do that. He focused on stopping illegal immigration, which 60% of Americans worry about: https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro....
His agenda also hasn’t been “radical.” What has he done? He has banned refugees and immigrants from certain countries—all ones you would expect given the political status, such as North Korea and Yemen. The only one on the current list that looks odd is Nigeria, but Trump instituted that ban at the same as the EU imposed Visa restrictions on Nigeria (February 2020): https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/eu-plans-to-impose-vis...
He had a corporate tax cut, which is consistent with what the UK and Sweden had been doing, and Merkel suggested Germany follow suit: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-merkel-tax-...
He repealed a bunch of unpopular environmental regulations Obama pushed through in the last couple of years of his final term. This was after his 2012 campaign, where Obama criticized Romney for standing in front of a coal plant and saying “this kills.” https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/oct/16/barack-oba...
> Governor, when you were governor of Massachusetts, you stood in front of a coal plant and pointed at it and said, ‘This plant kills,’ and took great pride in shutting it down. And now suddenly you're a big champion of coal," Obama said.
See also: https://apnews.com/article/5dfbc1aa17701ae219239caad0bfefb2
> You wouldn’t always know it ,but it went up every year I was president,” he said to applause. “That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas that was me, people.”
So yeah, Obama waited until the last couple of years of his term to push through some unpopular environments rules such as changes to that would require farmers to get federal permits to drain ponds in their land, and things like that. And Trump repealed them just as easily. That’s what happens between administrations.
Then you had the First Step Act, which was a progressive step.
He appointed three justices who were prominent in conservative legal circles long before Trump came in the scene.
So what exactly about his agenda was “radical?” Even if he had succeeded in things like repealing the ACA, that would have taken us back to 2008? (And Trump genuinely didn’t want the total repeal option without any replacement. He was the one who crafted the repeal and replace idea, while previously republicans had just wanted to repeal.)
Hm so, building a wall with a neighbor and having the neighbor _pay for this wall_ is a moderate position? Or is this bluster?
Only big thing you forgot was not starting any new wars and getting two more Arab states to formalize peace with Israel.
- increased military spending to Iraq war levels during peace time - trillion dollar deficits during boom times - fired dozens of cabinet members and other top officials whenever they didn't display dictator levels of obsequience to him - got impeached for using US diplomacy for personal political gains - tried to kick millions off of SNAP - had DOJ help states kick people off voter roles - reduced confidence in the election process - changed DOJ's long standing definition of civil rights to instead protect religious people and white and asian discrimination - pulled out of major international agreements with little notice including the Paris Agreement and the Iran deal - attacked european allieas and weakened NATO - cut legal immigration in a bunch of ways including cut refugee by 80% and cut H1B. And implemented draconian inhumane policies on illegal immigrants. - appointed hundreds of extremely ideological judges
(hopefully d ang doesn't slap us down for discussing politics)
> - increased military spending to Iraq war levels during peace time
The defense budget is significantly smaller as a percentage of GDP than under Obama: https://www.factcheck.org/2018/07/trumps-defense-spending-ex...
> - trillion dollar deficits during boom times
Bad, but not radical.
> - fired dozens of cabinet members and other top officials whenever they didn't display dictator levels of obsequience to him
> - got impeached for using US diplomacy for personal political gains
Bad, but not radical.
> - tried to kick millions off of SNAP
Clinton did way more welfare reform than Trump.
> - had DOJ help states kick people off voter roles
Cleaning up voter rolls is required by federal law.
> - reduced confidence in the election process
Bad, but not radical.
> - changed DOJ's long standing definition of civil rights to instead protect religious people and white and asian discrimination
Not radical. In Evanston, Illinois, Asian kids are now being held back from returning to in-class instruction: https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-school-be-antiracist-a-new-.... We can debate the merits of this, but it's not radical to suggest that discrimination against asians is a violation of civil rights laws.
> - pulled out of major international agreements with little notice including the Paris Agreement and the Iran deal
It's not "radical" to pull out of an agreement we had been part of for less than a year since its effective date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement
Presidents change course on foreign policy all the time. Trump's foreign policy has been relatively successful.
> - attacked european allieas and weakened NATO
Are you talking about a concrete policy?
> - cut legal immigration in a bunch of ways including cut refugee by 80% and cut H1B.
Not radical. European countries have done the same thing recently, after realizing their 2015 actions on refugees were ill-advised. Calling a cut to H1B "radical" is hard to credit. Is every small shift to the right from a Republican President "radical?"
> And implemented draconian inhumane policies on illegal immigrants.
Very bad, maybe radical.
> - appointed hundreds of extremely ideological judges
No, just normal conservative judges. The "extremely ideological judges" are ones that think you can look at a 230-year old document and find new things in it that nobody realized were there before. We have normalized that gaslighting, but taking a view that the words on the page mean what they say isn't "radical."
Switching to a popular vote could lessen the current extremism.
That’s absolutely ridiculous. Apparently you’ve never been to Wyoming, population 550,000. Pennsylvania has 12.8 million.
Thank you for affirming my belief that a popular vote system is just as ridiculous for America.
With stickier ideas, the marketplace becomes worse, because nothing ever gets pruned out of it. Too much energy is spent on limiting the growth of bad ideas than can be spent on refining the better ideas.
Have you ever entertained the idea that perhaps you're wrong and they're right? I mean it's at least possible that you've been lead to the wrong conclusion by systemic errors that have yet to be identified, and perhaps wont be for many years into the future.
I'm not sure what anything else in your post has to do with the quality of ideas being better. You claim that right wing populism is a reaction to liberalism and globalism, and that ideas are getting better. This leads me to connect the dots and think that your claim is that right wing populism is a good idea.
We know now, in hindsight, that the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression led directly to the circumstances that led to the rise of Hitler. And indeed, Hitler was not alone. Fascist dictators rose throughout this time period. Was the discourse worse then? Was it better then?
This feels disingenuous. "Ideas are getting better." "Fascism is a natural reaction." Please, if you are trying to make a political point, say it. Don't tiptoe around it.
> Reading a dry article on police brutality (which let’s face it, people just skipped over in the past) is a lot less impactful than seeing something shared by a friend.
Attitudes towards for example LGBT people and on racial issues are have advanced significantly since 2000, and I think social media has a lot to do with that. (One of the major issues cited by people for why they switched their opinion on same-sex marriage was knowing people in committed same-sex relationships. Social media makes those things more visible.)
As to right-wing populism: it is not fascism, any more than left-wing populism is Jacobinism or anarchy. I don't think it's a "good thing" necessarily, but predictable and possibly necessary. I think Boris Johnson, for example, is absolutely what the U.K. needed, before it got swallowed up by the EU.
>> Reading a dry article on police brutality (which let’s face it, people just skipped over in the past) is a lot less impactful than seeing something shared by a friend.
> Attitudes towards for example LGBT people and on racial issues are have advanced significantly since 2000, and I think social media has a lot to do with that. (One of the major issues cited by people for why they switched their opinion on same-sex marriage was knowing people in committed same-sex relationships. Social media makes those things more visible.)
Fair enough. I disagree. I think social media has also helped radicalize folks, though I feel that nothing has really changed (not a positive change either). The press was, after all, hopelessly partisan and sensational for most of the West's history. We just had a brief respite. But fair enough and thanks for clarifying.
> As to right-wing populism: it is not fascism, any more than left-wing populism is Jacobinism or anarchy.
What's the difference really? I'm not talking about the boogeyman "literally fascist" thing. Fascist regimes themselves frequently started out as right wing populist representative regimes. Hitler is a fantastic example of that transformation ad absurdum, but there are several other simpler ones, like Franco. And these fascist regimes often started out quite popular.
And likewise with left populism. Stalin and Napoleon are left populism ad absurdum, but we have several more "mundane" examples, such as Tito or Hoxa. I think extremism is bad because of its tendency to flout the rule of law. I see that happening around the world all over again.
Most efficient in generating engagement for selling banners, not in lifting up the most correct or useful ideas. Was it is, it's pure marketplace manipulation.
Turns out the most popular things will be the most inane -- by definition, because they appeal to most people. And so we amplify beige slurry.
Can you cite empirical research showing that the process works the way you believe it does?
Actually this is an interesting problem to think about; what, then, did these people believe before they could get access to crazier ideas?
I think you'll find the answer was still, "what they were told to believe". The answer hasn't changed from then to now, we're simply far more aware of being upset at the answer. In a way the problem that was always there has been revealed and some people don't like the loss of control over these people's opinions.
Me personally I'm an advocate of "let go, stop controlling, see how things turn out" and then fix the real problems that appear, rather than creating worse problems by squeezing the play doh too tightly. It has the upside of being morally defensible rather than having the air of "I destroyed your life for your own good."
In this instance, the solution has already reached beyond the realm of "don't allow certain things to be amplified". You literally cannot share this information even in a private 1-on-1 chat.
> we go back to uncurated things
Yeah. The more I reflect on things the more I think social networks are just a thing that shouldn't exist. Although, of course, here we are on hacker news talking about it. So IDK. Maybe you just can't unring that bell and we're just screwed.
I keep ending up there too honestly.
We'll always build something "like" socializing online. Humans don't stop "humaning" if you get my meaning.
We really do need to figure it out though... either mostly agree it's a bad idea, or figure out how to do it without it being as destructive as it is.
In today's world these folks get to have a strong influence over how people are influenced.
Handling this well is very important. If people misuse that position than they can and will cause people to be influenced certain ways because of it.
I get that you're asking this question rhetorically, but the "obvious" answer is the correct one: the people that own and operate the amplification system as their business model get to pick. Why should it be otherwise?
I don't want to be a pawn of the wealthy, or of governments, or powerful people in general. I don't trust my own government to do what's in my best interests, let alone foreign governments. I certainly don't trust the wealthy, either. That's why I think it should be otherwise.
Then don't. It's your choice to get all your news from facebook or twitter. You're here on HN, so I believe you already understand that the contents of facebook and twitter shouldn't determine the contents of your thoughts.
Yet very many of these people will continue to use Facebook and Twitter for news, rather than changing to an alternative. So your solution to the problem fails.
It's not up to you. People can visit whatever websites they want, your subjective judgements about the nature of the content on the website isn't relevant. If they have a problem with the website they are free to visit another one.
> Very many people will continue to use Facebook and Twitter for news.
That's their choice. Very many people will continue to use pornhub and there is nothing the church can do about it... yet.
Is up to me to stop it? No. Of course not. Obviously not. In fact, even if I had the power to single-handedly, unilaterally, stop Facebook from doing these things, I wouldn't. Because I don't believe that might makes right (that's my wider point, after all).
What I want is a popular, democratic movement to regulate the websites that people use, in the way that the informed population think they should be regulated.
Allowing countless to be made pawns of in the name of liberty seems foolish.
Too late. People are too easy to manipulate when you can amplify whatever you want.
yeah - this is the same sentiment out founding fathers had (in US obv.)
> I don't trust my own government to do what's in my best interests...
That's why we vote. The system created relieves us of worrying about being manipulated by powerful people, by letting the people run the government.
The truth is, your opinion only counts as much as your vote. That's how it should be. Your fringe opinions shouldn't count more than the rest of the people's opinions. So go vote. And let that be that.
The "particular values, agendas and biases" you're referring to are just advertising revenue, not some political bias installed by the developer. If you WANT to believe there are such developers working at those companies, I can't stop you. But the evidence isn't really there. Make some friends who work at those companies and see what you can find out from the people who actually develop the tools you're accusing of having such political bias in.
Now, if we are talking about political bias in these platforms' policies, you might have something.
A lot of the people yelling about the power of social media giants now are yelling because they represent the old status quo, not because they want democratisation of thought.
That's been happening for some time now, by algorithms that are optimized for outrage, engagement, clicks, etc.
Every form of media has that power, social media is not at all special in this respect. A post getting banned from twitter makes no difference to someone that gets their news from Fox News and talk radio. It's up to the people to manage their own thoughts, same as it ever was.
So let them read what you don't want them to. If it isn't illegal or incitement of violence, it doesn't need to be removed.
But it can be removed, because its one of many millions of privately owned websites on the internet... This is the great thing about the internet, anyone can create a website and run it however they want and users are free to visit whichever sites they like the most. This is a win-win for everyone except for those who want to control what site owners do with their own websites.
It's still an option to just leave it alone. What is this obsession our culture recently has that says "Just because I CAN do something, I MUST do something"?
Your argument somewhat makes sense for FB, depending on the details. But Twitter outright censored this content.
I saw an interesting comparison the other day. If this was a message board from the early 2000s, and the moderator was deleting posts, you move on, not throw a giant fit about free speech using some one else server.
Insofar as they're monopolies, they should be managed by the people as if they were a public space.
This would be similar to the central area of a mall or when companies provided housing to workers to prevent unionization efforts. Both places were upheld as places where the First Amendment must be upheld, despite private ownership.
A lot of people look at this issue and see two groups fighting over it. There are (at least) three groups though: for, against, and undecided. This is really a fight about how to convince the undecided, so solutions like "go make your own platform" aren't desirable; undecideds aren't going to know about the new platform, and won't automatically appear en masse on it, so it actually makes reaching them more difficult.
> You're still free to send a text, write a letter, call
Exactly. This is why free college and free medical care are not necessary.
You can learn from public libraries and go to the forest and apply herbs when you are sick.
Though tbh I'm not totally sure what point you're trying to make.
If I follow @NYPost then I want to hear what they tweet. Twitter may have every right to censure them, but it’s the wrong thing to do, and people are rightly incensed about it.
If I want to retweet a @NYPost article to my followers that is my business. And my followers can gladly listen or unfollow.
Twitter’s faux rationale about “hacked materials” sticks coming just days after NYTime’s story on Trump tax returns.
If these monopolistic social networks want to interfere in public & private messages on their platform to the benefit of particular political candidates they shouldn’t be doing it with the benefit of Section 230 immunity and/or should be scrutinized for making campaign contributions in-kind, like how National Inquirer got hit with charges for their buy&bury on Trump’s affair.
In regards to section 230, the whole point of it was to allow platforms to selectively restrict content from third parties. Before 230 some courts had ruled that if they restricted content from any third party, then they shared in liability for any third party content they did not restrict. So if I deleted spam for boner pills from my chess BBS, but did not delete someone’s accusation that a particular chess book was plagiarized I might be sued by the book author for libel. To ensure I would not be liable for that kind of thing, I would have to let the boner pill spam stay, along with anything else that was not illegal.
Use another platform if you don't like it. If you can't do that because all of the content producers and your friends have decided that twitter's level of censorship is ok, then you're just out of step with the rest of society.
It's like complaining that Coca Cola is an evil company and you hate them. If everyone else but you still likes Coke then your view on their practices, however valid it may be, won't be relevant
I think it goes against the stated purpose and core mission of their platform. So perhaps they are lying to their users, and even to themselves.
> The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve – and do not detract from – a free and global conversation.
It also may be an illegal campaign contribution in some cases.
I'm curious, how do you think twitter becoming a publisher would help you to accomplish your stated goals?
This seems to suggest a larger solution -- that these platforms do actually have within their power to implement.
Stop helping those two bickering ninnies by taking sides, and instead use the huge bullhorn society has handed them by screaming, "Shut up the both of you, stop bickering and maybe help the people you were elected to help!"
Who is right and about what are always less important than simply helping people. There is SO MUCH that is being left undone because we endlessly want to debate single issues for literally DECADES while people die in the streets.
Leadership was abandoned long ago and these gigantic bully pulpits could right the ship and instead they are being used as game pieces by their partisan owners. It's... sad to watch.
Those editorial boards you speak of get things wrong constantly. Limiting who can respond to them in front of an (at least) equally large audience is dangerous and a disservice to all, especially minorities.
Limiting who can publish and the size of their audience is categorically a violation of free speech. There is no daylight there.
How would you determine what can fit on your mobile screen? What sorting algorithm would you choose?
If you sort based off of what the most recent submissions, you might not ever see things that interest you and you might leave the platform.
If you sort based off of most recent or the most comments, then the most controversial posts would be amplified above more moderate and well thought out posts.
You can think of any type of sorting algorithm you want, you can even provide options/combinations. However it is impossible to give all content the same access to free amplification.
Yes we can. You could make a transparent algorithm in which eg. 15 out of 15 posts in my FB feed are from my friends in chronological order, at most two per friend. Likes etc. are just graphics and a reply from a friend bumps the post.
And something similar for Twitter.
It is not rocked science if you don't want to make the site so bad you possibly can to make visitors stay longer and see more ads when they wade through the irrelevant crap to see the post they want to see.
Won't posts that encourage quick responses (clickbait, memes, controversial posts, etc) be bumped up much more frequently, thus making sure they are amplified more than other postings (while burying other posts)? Sure this might not be much of a problem on a site where you only are following a small number of people, but I find it hard to imagine it could translate to a larger site that inherently isn't just you following a few friends (i.e. Reddit).
Ye well one friend could spam alot and almost always show up in his two slots in the feed. But aslong as you have a finit number of annoying friends you could deal with that by maybe muting them from the feed or just live with it. It might be a problem since many Facebook users have 100s of "friends", but I see that as an user error. You could have a "favorite" bar with friends you easily could click on and see what they have posted. Ie. actively looking instead of a feed if the feed gets too spammy by 100s of friends.
Having absolutely equal and fair exposure would need some kind of normalized random selection of posts since last login but that would probably just get messy and confusing.
"Won't posts that encourage quick responses (clickbait, memes, controversial posts, etc) be bumped up much more frequently, thus making sure they are amplified more than other postings (while burying other posts)?"
Ye but atleast its deterministic, your friends find it interesting enough to talk about and the conversation can continue till it is done instead of disapearing in the feed. There could be a big cross to click to mute it.
I have no hope of having an algorithm decide what I want to see. That is my main point.
A lot of people I know use twitter DMs as a primary communication method for people in their own families, even inside the same household. Twitter filtering communication between family members in your home is ... well ... a perfect excuse for me to strongly encourage them to stop using twitter.
Not only do the social networks allow you to amplify your opinion, they also nudge users further and further into bubbles where voices amplify even more.
Before social networks, if you got a pro-environment newspaper, the bias of that paper still had a bound on it. But imagine if the paper was constantly changing based on what you read. Were you interested in the article yesterday? Here is an even more biased article. Read it again? Try this article even more biased. Soon, the original paper would be so moderate that it would almost appear anti-environment.
The number of conspiracy theories floating around right now is alarming. And I blame a lot of it on the algorithms that these social networks are using to promote content people seem interested in. You get into rabbit holes and eventually land up reading extremist/fringe theories.
The infinite scrolling, sound-biteized, dopamine hit farming, engagement (and outrage) maximized social media is more like this: https://www3.pictures.zimbio.com/mp/7aRQwqq77srl.jpg
Key to this is that the objective isn't interest, it's "engagement", addictive behaviour and advertising consumption. It may be content that you hate, or-- better-- content that depresses you: Sapped of initiative you just keep scrolling and clicking, and some studies have show that depressed people are easier to influence and more vulnerable to advertising.
It is a completely unavoidable artifact of our attention span and mortality, with no possible workaround. Hence why curation and bias becomes the value propositions.
I think people should be the judge for who they trust and/or want to listen to.
I don’t see the “but now we can’t control what they see” objection kindly.
If I had to choose between advertising and free speech, I’d be happy to utterly abolish advertising. Even though that means completely tearing down the current media industry.
Obviously there’s middle ground to be found, but censorship is just treating the symptoms and in the dumbest possible way.
We’re just digging the hole deeper and deeper.
When television came we also had a few early decades where everything were great. There existed one or two stations, and that was it. Then suddenly a flood of people and companies started to use this new technology and harmful video nasty with violent and nude content started to hit society and people cried out once again for government to start censoring and determining whom aught to be allowed to speak to the masses. Several decades again and the enthusiasm for TV and movie censoring lost it charm.
Then Internet came and everything was fine the first few decades with only a few major websites like yahoo and myspace. Then 4chan and 8chan was created and quickly people want censoring again, but this time its not the government who should determine who aught to be allowed to speak to the masses but rather a handful of companies in charge of social networks and cloud services. This is where we are now. In a few decades, I predict the enthusiasm for Internet censorship will drop a bit as it done for all previous technologies that enables unregulated amplification of speech.
I think your phrasing of this new problem for our society is very clear and objective.
By the power invested in me as a computer possessor with an internet connection, I declare this to be a good idea, worthy of amplification!
Twitter is blocking this story in Direct Messages (equivalent to a private email). How is that amplification?
Also, Twitter could de-prioritize tweets with the link on a global feed, while still showing them to people who follow the specific person.
And that too is not amplification - you asked to see messages from that person, you should be able to see them.
Currently we have systems which make misinformation more dangerous (primarily via amplification) and a bunch of people conflating free speech with the freedom to say whatever you want. I think what we still need to explore is whether or not there is a responsibility on individuals to be factually accurate when engaged in amplified speech. What does that even mean? Do you simply need to believe what you are saying at the time? Or is the standard higher? Is this responsibility shifted if you provide a citation (where the responsibility of the cited source shoulders some of the responsibility for your derivative thoughts)?
It's a particularly thorny issue. One that isn't necessarily new, but is particularly acute in contemporary times. I am against censorship, but I also recognize certain trends which seem to be deepening divides and strengthening conspiracy theories in our society.
What a well written response, my friend. Hats off. Perhaps EdgeRank truly was a pandora's box we should have left well enough alone. Who knew how much havoc a simple matrix determinant could cause?
This thought is the exact reason the first amendment separately mentions freedom of "speech" (hard to accomplish much with it) and "the press" (much more effective).
But people are lazy. Why write a post when you "share" some crap that came through your feed with one click.
We will get to self hosted distributed social media when it becomes easier than Facebook or Twitter.
- Attention is a zero-sum game. In the past, we'd get more of our news from local papers, radio stations or lunch break gossip, resulting in a natural diversity of viewpoints. Nowadays, it's all the same social media outlets and handful of national newspapers (whose staff generally spend all day and form their opinions on Twitter, which thus winds up being upstream anyway) for everyone. Compared to what we had before, one side winds up getting free amplification anyway.
- I don't think free speech as a positive right for the speaker is necessarily the correct framing; at least, it neglects half of the issue at hand. I consider it at least equally important that "free speech" protects my right as an information consumer to get exposed to as many viewpoints as possible on a matter. Right now, my sense is that national newspapers all echo the Twitterati consensus, Facebook has developed in such a way that social and increasingly technological pressure would not allow even those people on my friend list who I suspect had interesting and generally well-thought-out non-mainstream opinions to share them with me, and the rest is all conspiracy websites that are unusable as a source because they've largely been cut off from the means of establishing credibility and separating wheat from chaff via social proof.
If I were a US voter (I'm not), I'd want to know whether Biden was involved in corrupt dealings. As it stands, it seems that if there were a compelling case that he was (and, well, I don't know if there is one!), the media and its allies would be working overtime to prevent me from learning about it.
When I log in to Twitter right now I get a message that Ariana Grande has a new album. I don't follow her, I don't care about her, but Twitter decided I needed to see that.
I have notifications disabled but I can only imagine what it pushes out.
On top of that pushing of unsolicited information, the social networks purposely push controversial topics to gain your attention. After a while those controversial and outlandish posts are legitimized and normalized.
How many AOL users were there, total, in the 90s? Now, how many Twitter users are there, today? It's not even a fair fight.
That's only one metric, another would be trust, and clout, and others. The president tweeting is different from a random AOL user posting to a message board. Totally different beasts.
In addition, you have social media boosting other social medias, Facebook, Reddit, this place, each with their own individual brand of shenanigans. You didn't have that way back when (mostly because the alternatives were just as sparse)
Also, I'm not comparing to just the USA twitter users either! It's a global platform. That matters. Retweets are not region-locked!
Global users, of course, Twitter trumps it in count, no doubt. I only assumed US users because the post was about US politics.
How is this any different to “you are free to speak but you’ll be murdered after you do”. You’re still free to “speak”, you’ll just die after. Freedom of speech right?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
This isn't really true though. Social networks have existed since the earliest days of humanity:
communication is between two or more people.
You seem to be misguided as to what Free Speech means.
Why? So that poor people can't be heard?
More important to you. Wanna guess what's more important to YouTube?
Those are all good points.
I didn't understand GP to be claiming that ML algorithms trump free speech, which may explain why we're actually in violent agreement WRT YouTube's recommendation algorithms.
I'd note that I avoid the big social media sites like the plague, and not even primarily for the toxic atmosphere. Rather, I find the business model to be inherently cynical, exploitative and destructive of communities (cf. sites like nextdoor.com).
As long as the incentives (maximization of advertising dollars) favor pushing for ever higher engagement, the cycle that creates increasingly fine-tuned filter bubbles and "targeted" advertising, we're going to see less focus on free expression from large corporations, because their primary goal is to maximize profit.
I believe that this model will eventually collapse and be replaced (with something better or worse, I don't know) with a different one. My concern is in the damage that this will do to our discourse and societal cohesion in the meantime.
Which points to larger problems with our economic model. Maximizing short-term profit is fetishized as all-important, regardless of potential downsides[0]. That focus legitimizes predatory behavior based on the (incorrect) idea that captialism is necessarily a zero-sum game.
This distorts the economy and the culture, pitting us against each other in surprising (and very destructive) ways.
I am most certainly not advocating that we abandon capitalism, as its had a largely positive effect on health, wealth, technological advancement and a host of other areas.
Rather, I believe we need to change the incentives around markets to encourage a broader, fairer capitalism that creates increased prosperity for everyone, rather than those already at the top.
[0] From a long-term perspective, focusing primarily on short-term extraction of value from the economy is self-defeating. Primarily because our economy's success is based on consumer spending (~70% of the US' GDP is consumer spending). Through wage suppression, rent-seeking and (a good thing) automation, we're reducing the ability of larger and larger segments of the population to contribute to that 2/3+ of the economy. If unchecked, we'll eventually get to the point where wealth and income are so concentrated that we won't be able to sustain that model and everyone will lose.
Because there are only so many pairs of jeans, lava lamps, snow globes, raisins, cars, houses or pizza pies that any one individual or household can use.
This argues for a much broader distribution of economic resources (wages, access to capital, safety nets, infrastructure, etc., etc., etc.) than we have now. This could provide enormous benefits to those who have the least and, in the long-term, those who have the most.
Beyond that, it can create a stronger, more resilient economy for everyone.
This is so abusable. Even the best of intentions won't stop it from being abused horribly. I value twitter much less. The same thing is happening there that happened to the declining legacy media.
This amplification isn't magic. You can't build an audience on YouTube (or anywhere) unless people actually care about what you have to say. And doing that is hard work.
Free speech does not have the same meaning as before. Before it just meant that you could say whatever you wanted. Now people use it implicitly to mean that they can say whatever they want, but also that they are entitled to have their thoughts broadcasted at large using the amplification mechanisms I mentioned above.
While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible.
If you think about it, before social networks, amplification was done through TV and newspapers, and those have editorial boards that filters the content they share. If a newspaper's staff is pro-environment, they can prevent any columnist writing anything that denies climate change, and it's not controversial.
However the problem is how do we decide who can get free amplification and who can't? Based on what? My preference would be that no one is, and we go back to uncurated things and to an internet where you have to look for the things you want to read/watch, versus getting content pushed onto you.