Yes, they passed the 1st Amendment, protecting the right to free press. But just a few years later, they also passed...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts
> [The Sedition Act] criminalized making 'false statements' critical of the federal government
And an example of prosecution of people through the Sedition Act is Mr. David Brown. Here's his story:
> In November 1798, David Brown led a group in Dedham, Massachusetts, including Benjamin Fairbanks, in setting up a liberty pole with the words, "No Stamp Act, No Sedition Act, No Alien Bills, No Land Tax, downfall to the Tyrants of America; peace and retirement to the President; Long Live the Vice President."[17][19][20] Brown was arrested in Andover, Massachusetts, but because he could not afford the $4,000 bail, he was taken to Salem for trial.[19] Brown was tried in June 1799.[17] Brown pleaded guilty, but Justice Samuel Chase asked him to name others who had assisted him.[17] Brown refused, was fined $480 (equivalent to $7,300 in 2020),[19][21] and sentenced to eighteen months in prison, the most severe sentence imposed under the Sedition Act.[17][19]
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Our 2rd President said at the time:
> “There has been more new error propagated by the press in the last ten years than in an hundred years before 1798”
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EDIT: It should be noted that Ben Franklin himself engaged in the creation of literal fake news, as a propaganda / negotiation tactic against the English Monarchy. Ben Franklin created a false story about Native Americans "Scalping" US Citizens on behalf of orders from the English Crown.
Our founding fathers were no strangers to propaganda, fake-news, and other techniques to rile up populations and/or control the dialog. Indeed, they themselves took advantage of it to successfully launch the Revolution!
The harder the test to get in, the better. Maybe even a non-refundable 50+$ fee. I would give a lot to have a single space on Earth where mere popularity is not the metric of correctness.
As for monetary fees - demographic skew aside, that would significantly reduce the overall user population the more you charge, so a malicious actor would need correspondingly fewer sock-puppets to create the appearance of X% of the population saying Y, limiting its effectiveness as a deterrent. Amplifying minority views by a large factor or seeding new claims/statements doesn't require that many unique accounts in the first place.
You lost me. If some context was in there (as in "the current fundamental problem on my known platforms"), then everything else you said would follow. But there must be a way to do better.
I can personally think of many tactics currently unused by any social platform -- all of which would need testing to verify their efficacy -- but they leave the question open none-the-less.
I'm much more interested in who the moderators of social media are and who pays them. Going after 'trolls' is to think we still live in 2011 when this was the way to astroturf.
Reddit for example, on average has none of the content users post on their site reach and stay on the front page: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditMinusMods/
HN is fairly straightforward in moderation: what dang doesn't like gets deleted, but the user flags have also been weaponised recently.
Twitter and FB I have no idea about. But I can't imagine it's hard to find out who the paid moderators are and pay them some more to delete content you disagree with and not delete content you agree with. The majority of them are paid peanuts to begin with.
Transformers and other recent models have enabled very nuanced classification of text, so we're going to see a confluence of economic factors - the quality to cost ratio of humans vs software at all levels of moderation and curation. Eventually the bots will be just barely good enough and cheap enough to run at scale that humans will be removed from the loop, from first pass sorting all the way up the chain. The humans will only set the parameters, and then we'll have a whole new bag of problems.
It'll be easier to manipulate software to trigger censorship than to manipulate humans following a set of guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23918763
Because of worker protections, minimum wage, and legal liabilities, it's better to find cheap multilingual offshore moderation farms than to hire in the US. It's a race to the bottom. The problem of moderation at global scale may prove to be intractable without human level ai.
One thing that frustrates me most is that even if people do reach the point of understanding the power these people have, it still won't matter much. We still trust online media such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and even this website, as being the fountain of the mythical phenomenon known as "public opinion".
I can see in real life that people are becoming fatigued by the uncertainty of our modern existence, but everyone is unsure of how to pinpoint and react to the source of their tension. My expectation/hope/fear is that the younger generation who grow up in this environment will eventually form a nu-luddite movement.
My bigger expectation/fear is that they won't