Does top talent only work for giant ad networks that thrive through undermining privacy (and hence, free speech) while manipulating public discourse to the point where these companies hardly have any defenders left? I suppose so, money will easily trump other considerations, especially among the naive, ignorant or just plain venal.
The sad fact is your comment exposes how difficult it is for anyone in the tech industry to hold a sincere conviction that free speech is a good thing, which until recently would've been astounding. It's a giant backwards step.
Twitter occasionally labels disputed/debunked political claims as such (but still lets them be published) and, after literally years of doing little more than that, finally took actions to ban a half-dozen high-profile accounts that kept pushing such claims after they arguably literally lead to an armed insurrection. Parler was literally designed with suppression of political viewpoints they disagree with in mind from the start. It should be crystal clear which of those networks "values free speech" to a higher degree.
So, no, your implicit claim that it's sad that top talent wouldn't work for Parler because that would demonstrate their commitment to free speech is silly at best and disingenuous at worst. Parler has demonstrably less commitment to free speech than Twitter does.
I'll be blunt: my sincere conviction is that "if you moderate anything it means you are not for free speech" is not a viable operational principle. It's a rhetorical device. Trolls -- alt-right or otherwise -- have always claimed that moderation suppresses their free speech. If you listen to them, you are running a forum for trolls, whether or not that is your intent. It is not Parler's publicly claimed intent to be doing so, but -- even based on the content on their site, let alone their ideologically-driven moderation which, again, goes far beyond anything Twitter, Facebook, et. al, have actually done -- it is painfully obvious it is their actual intent.
"We're a community town square, an open town square, with no censorship... If you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler."
That's a quote from the CEO I just grabbed from CNBC[1] and there are others floating around about the lack of censorship.
How does that lead to suppression of opposing political viewpoints?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/27/parler-ceo-wants-liberal-to-...
If you can't construct a proper response don't denigrate mine, thanks.
> You can scroll up to the head of the thread
Again, if it's too much effort for you to construct proper responses then you shouldn't respond at all.
> see how the platform was designed to censor in order to maintain a certain ideology
That is not what the tweets show. They show that there are moderation tools. There is no proof that any view was censored, you, along with the tweeter, have inferred that. If you have a statement sent out to mods about what should be allowed, or you have something that shows certain types of speech were suppressed then you can make the claim. "Social network has moderation tools and mods" does not cut it.
Now, if you're going to reply again I'd ask that you try harder to maintain some civility and up the quality, probably through greater effort.
Free speech is a good thing. And if algorithmic ranking weren't involved, I would probably still hold to the notion that the appropriate cure for bad speech is usually more speech.
But I've come to understand that even when some of a thing is good, more of it is not always better.
By all means we need vigorous debate and principled stances arguing about where the line should be drawn, and what are the appropriate consequences for stepping over it, but "fire in a crowded theater" is just the obvious case when we have people nattering on about how it's stupid to prevent people from walking around with spare cans of cans of gasoline, just in case and ... "hey, did you know that if the fuel-to-air mixture is rich enough, gasoline actually won't catch fire? Here is your complimentary box of matches BTW."
We desperately need better models and mechanisms for regulating speech that don't require heavy handed censorship by the government or outright bans by private parties, and it would be great if these mechanisms can be meaningfully exercised at the edge of the network (or social graph) rather than centrally deployed, but I'm not sure how to get there from here without the various failure modes bringing everything crashing down around us anyway.
Great, let's stop interfering with speech, it leads to bad things.
It's a metaphor. Let me extend it a bit: Speech is the drought of repeated lies about the illegitimacy of an unwelcome outcome drying out the underbrush of widespread discontent.
Speech gathers the tinder of a crowd committed to "stop the steal".
Speech is the accelerant convincing those so predisposed that violence or the threat of violence is acceptable and even to be admired.
And speech is the match tossed offhandedly aiming the mob you primed and egged on at the target you want to intimidate (and that's the most charitable interpretation).
> you've placed the cause of this on algorithmic ranking as much as speech itself.
To be clear, I find algorithmic ranking to largely be the cause of mostly the 'widespread discontent based on repeated lies' part, although there are clearly also various 'automated radicalization' effects happening as well.
> Great, let's stop interfering with speech, it leads to bad things.
I don't think we get to unring that particular bell (especially since such ranking efforts predate both Twitter and Facebook). Applying ranking techniques to the prioritization and selection of a subset of items from a variety of sources is one of those ideas that was inevitable because it was obvious to a sufficiently large number of people, whether the result is a live feed, an automatically arranged 'front page', a playlist, or some other format. It doesn't even matter which specific techniques happened to be used, they were all going to be tried by a lot of folks until somebody got the results they wanted (more engagement / time on screen). Tech companies like Twitter and Facebook are going to continue to try to mitigate the toxic side effects on public discourse, but I don't think there is a way for them to back away from algorithmic ranking unless government regulation simply forbids it outright (which isn't too likely). For that matter, I'm not sure how useful HN itself would be if the front page wasn't being automatically ranked based on engagement+recency with editorial decisions being made to nuke certain types of posts/topics for being attractive nuisances.
Clearly, here's a better beginning:
“Let me extend the metaphor a bit".
> Speech is the drought of repeated lies about the illegitimacy of an unwelcome outcome drying out the underbrush of widespread discontent.
Did you mean hate speech? A drought is usually a negative. Sorry, I just can't make sense of that.
> And speech is the match tossed offhandedly aiming the mob you primed and egged on at the target you want to intimidate (and that's the most charitable interpretation).
All very poetic but, again, I'm sorry but I can't find any substance to it.
> I don't think we get to unring that particular bell
I wasn't the one suggesting we do. You presented two causes - algos and lies, the negative outcome of the latter being magnified by the former - and then chose to suppress one. I think that's a false choice as I can think of other possible ways to remedy the situation and would pursue them instead, but even if I only had the false choice then I wouldn't pick suppression of speech. I can manage with a chronological feed, I was on Twitter and Facebook pretty early, it wasn't bad enough for me to give up the foundation of liberal society. I even remember a time before the internet, it really wasn't that bad.
> I don't think there is a way for them to back away from algorithmic ranking unless government regulation simply forbids it outright (which isn't too likely)
What's likelihood got to do with it? You're just shrugging your shoulders and choosing to support the suppression of speech instead. It's not as if you've made the argument that you care about free speech but the alternatives are unlikely. I don't even see any evidence as to why it's unlikely. Making a decision based on the likelihood makes little sense, it's not a horse race.
> I'm not sure how useful HN itself would be if the front page wasn't being automatically ranked…
I agree. Why would legislation of algorithms mean no algorithms? It doesn't and it wouldn't. Here are some viable alternatives:
- Social media sites give users control over the algorithms that decide their feed - Users get access to the tools for blocking et al, and the scoring of users. Why can't I know that the person replying to me is likely to be a bot? Or has scored highly for trolling? Why can't I know my own score? Why can't I choose my own shadowbanning? No good reason other than the centralisation of power. - Companies over a certain size lose section 230 protections. This will encourage greater moderation on the large sites and foster competition from smaller ones.
I'm sure there are more.
Hiding some implementation details from bad actors isn't necessarily a bad idea, though of course you have to figure out whether you're doing the security equivalent of hiding a proprietary algorithm (bad idea) or hiding your secret key (good idea).
I think we have reached a good balance (for now). Government has to be hands off, and platforms can censor as they wish.
It’s hard to say whether this will work long term, though.
Which place has more violence as a result?
Going out onto the "dark corners" of the internet though, that would be equivalent, perhaps, to signing up for an equivalent email provider without a spam filter?
Nope, that doesn't work. Hard to tell what you could mean other than "my initial analogy didn't work so I'm going to move the goalposts".
Perhaps it would've been better for Twitter to support free speech then and they'd (the Parler users in question) have remained a fringe voice completely overwhelmed by opposition on a mainstream platform.
Even then, the main problem I see driving all of this is the lack of competition, so I fully support building "echo chambers" if that means competition for platforms like Twitter that are actively working to create echo chambers that they control.
Edit: clarity
That's a caricature. The actual principle is "equal justice before the law" (there are variations). Justice is an important part of the principle since otherwise "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread". Not to mention such evils as selective enforcement and prosecutorial discretion.
Few people these days would insist that equality of outcomes is a legitimate goal, though the extent to which disparity of outcomes is treated as a "code smell" at least potentially indicating a societal problem worth examining does vary fairly predictably across the US political spectrum. The appetite for instituting solutions when a systemic problem is demonstrably found also varies fairly predictably.
And online I think I read something about porn sites, who were working on large scale video streaming well before Youtube and Netflix (as streaming service) were a thing.
Seems like a pretty radical assumption and a pretty sad sign of the times if true.
Note: this message has nothing to do with Parler and being right or left. Just about the phrase “free speech” and what it now connotes.
Can't say for sure, but I think it's hazardous to assume we all prescribe to the exact same notion of the limits on free speech.
The way humans socially operate inherently restricts speech.
Each degree you move to an extreme has a fair impact on your ability to hire the best in a very competitive market. Even if you’re a movement conservative a prudent question is how something on your resume might affect your future earning potential.
Mark Zuckerberg: "Trump says Facebook is against him, liberals say we helped Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don’t like. That’s what running a platform for all ideas looks like.”
Matt Cutts: "We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up"
How much are they paying, again? If they pay on par with FAANG, I'm sure they would have no problem attracting top tier talent. If they are paying multiples of FAANG, they would attract top of the FAANG talent. Of course if they are paying a fraction of FAANG, they are going to get a very mediocre talent.
And even if you did want to work for such a company, the impact on your resume in the future along might be enough to deter you.
Its like being angry at Signal because their encryption allows terrorists communicate securely.
(There are lots of anecdotes of individual users who get temporary bans on Twitter for political speech, but I have heard those anecdotes across the political spectrum. I suspect conservatives grumpy at Twitter would be very surprised how much left-wing discourse there is about how Twitter protects TERFs, how they pay lip service to banning Nazis but don't really do it, how Jack Dorsey is probably a crypto-fascist, and so on. The parallel -- "I know of people who agree with me who have been moderated and people who disagree with me who have not, ergo Twitter is obviously biased in favor of The Other Side" -- is kind of fascinating.)
Most of it could also be posted on Twitter and Facebook, although there it might get labeled as misinformation.
It's actually fairly difficult for the overwhelming majority of people to get legitimately kicked off of most mainstream social media. By "legitimately" I mean by actually violating the site's published rules. At the scale of these sites there are occasional mistakes made where someone gets banned who shouldn't, and it can be difficult to get that reviewed, but nevertheless for most people those sites are "free speech social networks".
Because of this, when you start a site like Parler you get almost all of your initial membership from those people who got kicked off of Reddit, Twitter, etc., or who are having to work at not getting kicked off because they want to post calls to violence, etc.
That sets the tone for the site from then on. Hence, when a site is specifically selling itself as a "free speech social network" it almost always can correctly be interpreted as "a social network for <X> extremists who could not follow basic norms for civilized discourse" for some X.
Can you name a "free speech social network" that isn't overrun by white supremacists and Nazis?
It turns out that if you prioritize free speech, then the people who congregate on your site are mostly those with beliefs that are sufficiently repugnant that decent humans don't want to be associated with them.
Much like, for example, the gadsden flag.
"if a working interface is only for bad games, I fear what good games look like"
Good games have working interfaces too, but they have a lot more worth talking about.
One of the things that's incredibly unhelpful in our current political debates is that there exists a very noisy (at least) minority on both sides of every one of those debates that assumes all the people on the other side are idiots. In general this is not true[0] and so, yes, even though Parler was a social network explicitly for conservatives, they would still have been able to hire smart people.
I don't say that Parler was for extremists, although an extremist contingent was certainly present, but it's worth remembering that even those that are unequivocally and uncontroversially agreed to be extremists by the vast majority of people (Bin Laden, Stalin, Hitler[1], et al) were always able to "hire", or perhaps disciple, very smart people.
Being smart is not the same thing as being ethical, by which what I really mean in this context is sharing the same set of ethics that you or I have.
(On a tangentially related note to both my first and last paragraphs, Boeing employ a very large number of very smart people and yet, as the 737 Max debacle clearly illustrates, they were nursing some absolutely horrendous culturual issues that led to a situation where that airliner was certified and sold even though it contained systems that incorporated severe safety failings.)
[0] And the culture of endless cheap shots, snobbish intellectualism, and disrespectful dismissiveness that surrounds political debate these days is not a force for good in the world.
[1] At the risk of invoking Godwin's law.
A lot of people just want to lead normal lives with their friends and family. I envy them. Truly.