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.
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!"?