So now where are we?
https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr...
The tl;dr is that if you actually want to move toward a society of free and equal human beings and eliminate oppression, "free speech for all" is not how you go about it. One side of the political spectrum supports equality and emancipation, the other is opposed to it. Therefore the speech of one side must be tolerated and supported; the speech of the other must be squelched and restricted.
The internet has had its time to experiment with free speech for all, and now we have Nazis. Social media companies saw greater value in muzzling the Nazis than they did in hewing to outdated libertarian internet values.
This sounds like a distinction between say a friend and an enemy. Sounds like a political concept I have heard before.
Found the wannabe cultural revolutionary.
It would be like saying "a peaceful person would never punch someone in the nose". But what if you needed to punch someone in the nose because they were trying to kill you for no reason? That doesn't mean peaceful people don't exist, or that peaceful people need to let random people murder them. It just means that the determination of peacefulness is contextual.
it would be like saying, as the sibling comment did "a peaceful person would never punch someone in the nose" ... except that a society that aims for peace, and is beset with violent people, is going to have to quell that violence. This might involve reserving the right to punch the punchers.
Restrictions on free speech are much more dangerous than any hate speech. You won't get a new Hitler by blocking speech you don't like. It's the opposite: new Hitler will start with blocking free speech. That's what every authoritarian regime does first.
No, I am saying that they are "like" each other. It's a comparison not a conflation. Mr Popper is absolutely not conflating anything - his original formulation is very much about speech.
> blocking free speech. That's what every authoritarian regime does first.
You mean, after they become the regime, and get a lock on the power to block free speech; which in turn is after using the free speech ability to emit the divisive populist rhetoric that propels them to that power? There is no regime ever, that blocks free speech before it is voted into power. At that stage they're only to happy to use it. The shutting it down comes later.
So, not first at all then. That was Popper's point.
But there is, we've seen it just recently! Take the US presidential elections in 2020: big media companies, bigtech all were favouring one political party and have successfully suppressed crucial damaging information against their side and baselessly labelled it as 'fake news', which helped the favoured party take power. It immediately proceeded by shutting down the media accounts of the defeated opponent.
The ongoing hate-campaign against musk that started after him buying twitter can absolutely be interpreted as a reaction to breaking the monopoly on the flow of information.
Just because someone wrote in length that white is black, white does not become black. Likewise, intolerance does not become tolerance.
You do not tolerate something => you are not tolerant.
You oppose free speech only for really horrible people => you oppose free speech.
It's really binary, and wherever Popper wrote, it does not change this simple truth. But, of course, you can hypocritically pretend that it does.
Like more or less anything real, this is not a simple binary problem.
That's Popper.
Does that sound like "we can't let people speak"?
Or would that actually be more in the lines of "we should expose their followers to the arguments their leaders don't want them to see"?
They don't get doxxed, they can't be identified in a crowd, they can blend with whatever the majority is.
It is very easy to defend "free speech absolutism" when you're not the target of hate speech. When you're not the target of harassment. When no one is declaring that your rights should be removed, that violence against you or one of your group memberships should be acceptable.
"We just need to have good arguments" is something said by a person who's participation in the discourse is entirely voluntary, and who's stakes aren't "I have a right to make decisions about my own body", "I have a right to live unharassed in my private life", "I am equally entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
"Free speech absolutism" is something only ever advocated for by people who don't have to care about what that speech is advocating. Who have the privilege to turn a blind eye to stochastic terrorism, and will argue out one side of their mouth that "police have no duty to protect you from crime before it happens" while arguing out the other "well a few bad actors should be dealt with by the police".
Meanwhile, in the real world - bomb threats to children's hospitals[1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/31/boston-child...
Yet, I still would agree with a free speech absolutist much more so than with someone who thinks they know best about what speech is ok or not. And that's precisely because I'm a minority. I know that having a gatekeeper that decides what is or what isn't hate speech is never a good idea in the long run except if you belong to the majority who ultimately gets to decide what speech is ok or not.
It is also quite ironic to use "stochastic terrorism" (which is a dangerous term in and by itself) as a justification for your argument. It's a complete regurgitation of early 2000s talking points, especially to imply that those who disagree with you are turning a blind eye to some form of terrorism. In a way, it proves my point about being suspicious of any attempt to restrict free speech. Because it's the same exact tactic that was used to prop up islamophobia and justify human rights violations (I mean, who would want to turn a blind eye to terrorism, right?!).
What were you prevented from saying "because it was hate speech" with no extra deliberation? It's almost like the content matters.
Content does matter, in an ideal world. But in reality that type of "consideration" will be weaponised against minorities. You are arguing against yourself when you say that we just have to have "due consideration and a good decision making process" to decide what would be allowed. When said process will inherently be controlled and steered by the majority, in any democratic country. It's the type of argument that usually comes from privileged white people who have never experienced what "due consideration" means. It's a completely ridiculous premise, because it does not fit reality. Not the reality of most minorities at least.
You keep saying this, and I am asking you: what were you prevented from saying? What Muslim voices in the West were silenced unfairly?
You insist it happened, but in response to what? What were you not allowed to say that was just so unfair. And no, being criticized for saying it doesn't count.
Some of people here who take free speech for granted do not know its value. I live in a very authoritarian country, that once had free speech, and I have seen how restrictions on it creep in. And what I see happen in US and Europe follows a far too familiar path.
People say it like it's a damnation of the idea. Things in life are fuzzy, that's why it's literally called a paradox.
The most tolerant people in the world are not going to be ok with a 20 year-old having a sexual relationship with their 12 year old daughter because of the danger involved. That's the paradox of intolerance, that everyone has a limit, and if you have no limit, someone else will pick it for you and cause damage on their terms.
We don't generally tolerate violence in the west. Yes, it's an intolerance, but it's for the greater stability of society.
but I have absolutely seen people use the paradox of tolerance to argue for some shitty opinions, so it must still be dealt with care. You can imagine a KKK member using it to defend their choice of not allowing blacks to be free of lynching.
Also, do not equate actions and speech - and we're mostly arguing about free speech here, right?
> "paradox of tolerance" is a hypocrisy. If you are intolerant only to the intolerant you are not tolerant, it is as simple as that.
> It's ok to be intolerant at some things. What's not ok is to be intolerant and still claim to be tolerant. That's hypocrisy
(Don't hurt yourself, I understand it is an uncomfortable situation for you)
Furthermore, such black and white thinking is often a sign of mental illness.
But if you start framing things as "defending peace (by force)", you may quite possibly have your arguments taken over by the people attacking whatever you want to defend. Because they can use the argument just as well as you.
Hypocrisy: The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness. [0]
Paradox: A statement that seems to contradict itself but may nonetheless be true. [1]
Every time I see someone here mentioning someone the paradox of tolerance, it is to support restriction of speech for someone else. (someone really bad, of course - fascist, antivaxer, racist, you name it), and these people always hypocritically consider that they support free speech, just not for those bad people.
> Therefore the speech of one side must be tolerated and supported; the speech of the other must be squelched and restricted.
This is actually how you get Nazis. You know, the real ones that existed before the internet. Not 4chan weebs trolling boomers online, but the ones that would jail or kill you for having the wrong opinion or wrong affiliation.
Look at Joseph McCarthy and see a counter-example. He used the exact same logic: that to suppress Soviet-style totalitarian government in the US, we had to be intolerant of all far left views.
It destroyed many peoples' lives, most of who were not at all sympathetic to Soviet-style communism.
Similar to your example, we could also argue that McCarthy was indeed effective at preventing Soviet-style communism in America (since the US still has free speech and there has not been another holocaust). But in both cases we don't have convincing evidence that suppressing speech was actually helpful.
Those who validate dirty pool in pursuit of the greater good will always be enabling people like that.
The problem starts with how you define those two(or any political expression). Because by many definitions, they are contradictory.
Equal chances? Money gives people advantages, so all should have the same money? Even if all would have the same money, some are born smart and some are born dumb. Genetic equalisation?
Pretty much against the idea of "freedom" like I know it.
When people are free, some will party all day, some will work like a dog.
So some will get rich. Some will get by, some will starve.
Unless you mean strictly "equal in front of the law", which we supposedly have, but we all know that the one with the more expensive lawer (or any lawer at all) has a big edge. So de facto we are not even equal in front of the law.
The big question is, how and what would you change about it?
I would actually start with free speech, because when people cannot speak freely, they will start speaking in code. And this will just make the whole political discussions even harder, as it will blur the definitions even more. I think this is mainly what we have on the internet. Lots of talk and lots of people thinking they are right, but only little actual communication and adressing the core problems because people are mostly talking about different things.
"They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc."
That is, if you oppose the expansion of government you should have your right to free speech removed.
From : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse
Which shows the problem with idea of 'we must remove free speech for hate speech' because one of the originators of the idea intended that free speech should be withdrawn from people he disagreed with in ways that many or even most people in most Democratic states would find abhorrent.
Interestingly enough did you know that the original Nazis came about before the internet ever existed, way back in the 1930's, further did you know Nazis existed prior to the internet as well. It is true, in fact one may argue that there is no real correlation between the existence of Nazis and the internet, just their visibility.
But in a less sarcastic vein, I can only speak from my personal experience, but from what I see the more we try and suppress speech that some do not like, whether labeling it as hate speech, misinformation, or whatever else has produced in fact the exact opposite of the intended result, where more people are willing to tolerate actual Nazi's, question official information more readily and tolerate real racism more because the label became so broadly applied that it lost any meaningful effect.
Finally I also heard one interesting theory that part of the reason one side of the political spectrum is currently struggling so much is because the other side had even their moderate views censored from twitter, whereas another side was treated in a much more lenient fashion. The result was only the most reasonable and centerist voices of one side were shared, whereas the other side had many of their most radical and vocal members airing their views for all to see, which was a turn off to many, whereas the most extermist content on the other side was hidden and squelched.
FWIW this doesn't match my experience at all, but I've hardly made a study of it. What I mean by that is that the limited complaints I have heard are mostly about a) bad quality advertisement targeting and b) political targeting, also mostly bad quality.
"quality" here meaning accuracy of the targeting, not a comment on the content.
But public forums? No, I can't say I have. In fact, I remember witnessing a President giving a large speech in a public forum that was followed by a riot at the Capitol (whether said speech was causal to the riot is still a matter for the courts). Nobody challenged his right to give the speech until the question of whether it was "incitement to riot" came up, and that challenge is unrelated.
A letter to the editor of the New York Times has the potential to be seen by 343,000 households (a number down from 1.3 million). This never made the New York Times' letters page a public forum.
Twitter, for example, was at least previously accountable to shareholders. Now, it's very much a private forum.
There is no meaningful competition to what Twitter or Facebook does. If you stifle voices on that platform majority of the country won't hear them.
Them not being technically public is the problem in itself , they function like public forum for opinions but one that is manipulated by corporation.
> If you stifle voices on that platform majority of the country won't hear them
This is technically correct (the best kind of correct) but doesn't imply either a legal or moral responsibility on Twitter's part. Freedom of the press has never meant one is obliged to let others use one's press; in fact, it means the opposite.
If people want a channel more unbiased than Twitter [1], they should build it. The Musk purchase has shown how fragile the bird really is when the users lose confidence in it.
You note that them not technically being public is a problem. I think you raise an interesting question: what would a technically public forum look like and who would build it? If the government built it, do we imagine it would run the Post story, or would those in charge of it squelch it because the story is harmful to the active regime? It is, perhaps, best for the government to be out of the business of editorial work; leave that to the press.
(... and if one wants a government-subsidized communication channel that isn't edited by someone else: that's the Internet and we already have it. Then one's goal to combat Twitter becomes building a service as easy-to-use as Twitter that everyone can use; make the press itself as free as possible. I recommend supporting the Mastodon project if that's one's goal. Or put effort into making one of the many, many blogging software packages of the world ever more turnkey. The way to maximize freedom of the press is to maximize presses, not constrain how the freedom can be used).
[1] long experience suggests to me what you actually get when you try this experiment is a channel with different biases, but by all means.
KIIS-FM has a choir?
Downvotes imply a desire to quiet a signal (or at least, a belief the signal is uninteresting and should show up below other signals) and the site is designed to enhance interesting signals and suppress uninteresting ones.
Everything here is doing exactly what it says on the tin. The weird notion is that one should be able to just walk into a space like this, say whatever, and get it treated with the same reverence as any other statement.
There are other places on the internet that act like that, and they are not this place.
This doesn’t seem like a low-signal comment: it’s factually true and relevant to the context.
Rather, people are falsely marking it as low signal because they don’t like it and want to manipulate the discussion by hiding things they don’t like.
Which is classic censorship — and I think highlights a deeply anti-intellectual trend in this community.
this is factually true?
what exactly is a “coastal media type”?
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...
Pew has done a study recently on this as well:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/07/13/u-s-journal...
I'm sorry you don't think the definition is "honest" -- whatever can that possibly mean? It's the definition. You may not like the word, but even words you don't like have definitions. Even dishonest slurs have a meaning, they are not random sounds, even if you don't like the meaning.
I suspect you are feigning ignorance.
Eg, WarnerMedia who is the parent company of CNN — a news agency that’s undergone substantial cuts under a new CEO due to its bias.
My experience of WarnerMedia is that they have politics among their staff reflective of the cities they’re in, but which may not reflect the overall demographics of the US. Eg, their Seattle office had politics at place in Seattle — but those are far left of most US politics. That bias impacts the choices made about content.
This matches other peoples experience and apparent business decisions — eg, the other poster referring to this same bias and CNN experiencing a sharp drop in ratings followed by corporate restructuring under a new CEO.
expand on how this in any way shows that a "...chorus of coastal media types..." (again, still waiting for a definition of this) are somehow factually "...asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum"
I don’t believe you’re sincerely unaware of the calls to censor misinformation in media; and we literally just explained which media companies based in politically biased bubbles we were discussing.
Have a great evening!
the person i responded to said it was a fact that "a chorus of coastal media types" are "asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum"
the comment said this was a fact. and i still don't think thats a fact.
now in this comment you say they're sending "calls to censor misinformation in media"--then sure. are you implying that journalists should be forced to report misinformation? and if they choose _not_ to report misinformation, they're censoring?
> "calls to censor misinformation in media"[...] are you implying that journalists should be forced to report misinformation?
No, they weren't saying that.
> and if they choose _not_ to report misinformation, they're censoring?
Also no.
i asked specifically so we could remove subtext.
(This comment by me, for example, is definitely imbued with subtext.)
Separately, put some effort into your attempts to have a discussion, please. I.e., beyond the bare minimum that it takes to type one or two sentences and press "reply" without giving it much more thought.
> what do you think they were implying?
…because in the previous comment you felt confident enough to answer for them. you said:
> No, they weren't saying that.
is asking what you think they meant unreasonable?
“Oh, those calls I already knew about, but pretended not to?”
This is why I think you’re being disingenuous.
Your comment about misinformation ignores that what they call “misinformation” is merely information they don’t like — eg, when they censored the Hunter Biden story during an election, while calling for Republicans and news outlets (eg, NY Post) who told the truth to be deplatformed.
Your vapid replies pretending not to recognize that as censorship are as in poor faith as saying that North Korea can’t be an oppressive autocracy because “democratic republic” is in the name.
Twitter chose to block the Post's story as factually incorrect because they were skeptical of it. That's their choice, much as the Post can choose not to trust a source. Twitter were wrong, but media outlets are sometimes wrong (for example, https://nypost.com/tag/correction/).
The Post is right to criticize Twitter's error, but any claims that Twitter lacked the right to make that call is, well, chipping at the rights the Post itself enjoys of control over its own pages. The Post can't force Twitter to run their stories any more than anyone should have the right to force the Post itself to quash the laptop story; both editorial authorities stem from the same freedom of the press.
That’s my point: censorship invariably is these “mistakes” of censoring truth you dislike rather than any noble purpose. Indeed, the whole pretense of noble purpose is precisely so you can make these ignoble “mistakes” with a clear conscience — you were trying to protect the community! …why is everyone complaining the outcome was censoring your political rivals during an election?
You ignored me in the other thread:
People have been making these same arguments in favor of censorship for millennia; can you give a historic example (pre-1900) where people censoring were on the right side of history?
I don't know why you're constraining the time frame to pre-1900, but sure.
From 1899 prior, almost every time a newspaper decided not to report something that they believed was false. Because by and large, newspapers do a pretty good job of separating the wheat from the chaff and reporting stories that at least seem to be true. What they don't do is report, without editorial insight, everything they could. They don't publish every letter to the editor, they don't run every story a reporter chases, and they never have. Filtering is part of their job. We remember the errors in filtering (especially if it's a good newspaper because they will report a retraction or correction) but there isn't too terribly much evidence in black and white of the dozens of decisions editors make to not amplify the noise. Obviously, since it didn't end up in a paper.
There are people in the world who believe the Earth is flat. Nobody is under any obligation to spread that belief. I'm not saying Twitter should start censoring discussion of flat Earth, but it's up to them if they choose to.
I guess the result is it wouldn't be a very welcoming channel for discussion of flat Earth topics. Nothing really lost there, I guess someone will have to set up a forum for it.
I also wouldn’t be holding up 1880-1900 journalism as an example of accuracy — you’re describing the period of salacious Jack the Ripper stories. Is that your best example of censorship working out positively — that tabloid era in journalism?
I’m asking you where this has led to positive things; not contesting the rights of Twitter.
But actually, I think there is something lost when Twitter no longer hosts flat Earth debates: the ability to convincingly explain why the Earth isn’t flat requires practice and refinement; and to know that the Earth isn’t flat requires we allow the idea to be challenged.
You don’t seem able to think of a case that censors showed a clear benefit to society — but there’s several in the past few years where they haven’t:
- Hunter Biden story may as well have been election interference
- somehow, deaths are spiking beyond COVID — quite possibly as a result of COVID policies; we never had a genuine debate over what to do
- similarly, multiple countries have pulled COVID vaccines for kids due to the risk of myocarditis… which has been known all along, but was censored from discussion
I was hoping to see a convincing historic example, cut free from modern politics so I could assess it fairly — but there don’t seem to be any examples where censorship generated positives to offset the huge negatives I see happening at present.
Not under the rules you specified, no. I'm not a scholar of newspaper history.
After 1900, I can invoke the history of the FCC. By regulating access to the finite resource of bandwidth, they created an interesting circumstance: what you could say on television was regulated because your license could be revoked for failure to uphold a standard that protected the American living room. And for a long, long time: it worked! It worked quite well. There was a broad variety of television and radio available, it was broadly inoffensive, It generally reported the truth and / or was entertaining, and it had a certain national cohesion promotion effect that we've utterly lost in this era of unregulated mass communication. Speaking of, those regulations began to be undermined in the Reagan era, which is when Saturday morning cartoons became feature length commercials for toys. It's hard for me to claim that's an improvement over the previous regulations.
Could you get everything? Not from television. And that was fine. If somebody wanted to broadcast a message, they either needed a sympathetic ear in the media or they needed to own a station.
And that's the key thing, because when you use the term censorship, you're not talking about censorship. You've been consistently talking about who has control over broadcast. You've been consistently calling a private company's decision to not rebroadcast a signal sent to them "censorship" as if we should have any right to the resources of a private corporation. If anything, Twitter looks like a broadcast channel sitting on a non-finite resource. Since the resource is not finite, the government lacks the interest in regulating who uses it that it had for airwaves, which is fine. But those who demand some sort of fairness in how it chooses what it retransmits are asking for a massive prior restraint on its freedom to do with its service what it will that has no precedent. And the precedent it sets opens a huge can of worms.
If some government authority can mandate Twitter has to discuss flat earth, can they also mandate it has to give a platform to Nazis? That'll be incompatible with the law of several countries, for starters. It's also broadly incompatible with the American tradition of the press. You can't force NBC to platform Nazis. You can't force the New York times to give Nazis column inches. What the (US) government is restrained from doing is shutting down the Nazi newspaper and preventing the Nazi candidate from applying to the ballot using the same rules that every candidate does. Nowhere does the law require us to allow them to use our resources to promote their message. Not even a billboard operator is required to do business with them, no matter how green their money is... The law just prevents the government from restraining them from setting up their own billboard under the general rules of billboards.
Twitter belongs to Twitter and none of us have the right to force it to retransmit any damn thing we say. Their pipes, their storage, their servers, their rules. We should host a blog if we don't like it.
if an organization chooses not to use its voice to spread misinformation, thats not censorship.
is it censorship when my weather app _chooses_ not to say it’s snowing when it’s 103 out?
that’s absurd.
one of the links posted above said some americans believe that all sides should be reported equally. again that’s stupid. not just silly, it’s stupid. “all” sides? these muppets believe “all” sides deserve equal weight, always?
People used to, after midnight bury a toads leg under an oak tree on the third full moon believing it would cure cancer.
are people now arguing that medical journals should be required to include this next to all cancer research? that it should be covered equally with the same weight? that’s stupid.
is it censorship if a journal doesn’t include woo crazy nonsense? no, it’s an editorial choice.
you can attack me and call my posts vapid all you like, but i was asking for more clarification from vague posts making extraordinary vague claims about some vague “chorus of coastal media types”
Prognosticating the zeitgeist is a fraught enterprise, but in this case, I'd guess tone twanged a lot of nerves. The first two sentences of comment guidance [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html] are "Be kind. Don't be snarky." There's a vast Internet that lacks a rule like that and HN tries to do something other than be that.
That again is standard for censorship.
One could imagine a smart person can figure out how to phrase a thought in a way palatable to an audience, or at least respectful of the notion that different individuals have different life experience.
If failure to do so gets one's comment "censored" out of an intellectual discourse, perhaps that is a feature not a bug.
When I was younger, I used to believe "The pursuit of truth is so important that even truth coarsely spoken should not be quieted." As I've gotten older, I've come to observe that more often than not, people conflate coarse speaking with truth when the two are more likely to be divorced from each other than walking hand-in-hand. And the ability to smooth a harsh truth is a virtue... If for no other reason than most people read for entertainment, not truth-seeking, so the important facts are likelier to land in their minds and germinate if they aren't coated in a protein shell of personal attack language.
But again, prognosticating downvotes is a fraught enterprise (and also recommended against by the guidelines, so I shall say no more on the topic).
> One could imagine a smart person can figure out how to phrase a thought in a way palatable to an audience, or at least respectful of the notion that different individuals have different life experience
This is just an imagining — people say this when they’re upset that facts challenge dearly held delusions, eg the media is unbiased and informs you about the world, and then engage in ex post facto attacks on the form of your message to silence you and remove that cognitive annoyance. The anger is not at the phrasing, but in having your world view challenged at all.
I think you brought up that imagining because you need to reassure yourself that you’re calmly rational as a reader — and not lashing out with censorship due to emotions. That you’re not actually anti-intellectual, you just happen to be copying their mannerism — for good!
We’ve heard these arguments for millennia: can you name a historic (prior to 1900) example where those censoring in the name of decorum led to positive outcomes?
This means it hit a nerve, presumably for the exact demographic mentioned, whom then proceeded with (mild) censorship. That's perfect irony.
Just like it's irony when Singapore authorities banned any newspapers stating that the authorities are authoritarian. That's irony by its very definition.
I'm just saying it's irony. I don't care if one agrees with the statement or not, or what is allowed/popular to say on HN. I'm well aware this is a California forum. I now expect downvotes to confirm that it is.
And they aren't totally wrong? I have a qanon-er in my family; she's carefully curated her media sources to guarantee a pure, steady stream of nutjob garbage. The thing is, censoring twitter/facebook/youtube makes no difference - these people will find their fringe no matter how hard they have to look. At least on youtube there's a chance the algorithm will show some non-bullshit.
I don't know what "the answer" to any of this is, but I suspect we all need to be a bit more tolerant of online stupidity.
Also: If your social media feeds are showing you crappy content, you are to blame. It's incredibly easy to like/dislike/hide-like-this content. My feeds are fantastic. I suspect the people complaining about their feeds actually like garbage and even more so like to complain.
it’s much more likely that folks are concerned because the populism wishes to destroy pluralism.
This is likely true. Most of the discussion around "the algorithm" is mainly centered around whether there's something about the way the major online sharing channels are selecting what to present that acts as a funnel towards QAnon and other radical theories, not whether people already dedicated to finding such information can find it.
I had to click do not recommend this content on a ton of videos.
Hypothetically: all sorts of people are interested in the history of World War II... it's a big war, it defined politics for over half a century, and it's taught every year in the history classes of at least a hundred nations. So you're looking at a topic with hundreds of "also likes" connections but no strong winner.
Perhaps there is a 0.000001% chance that if you watch a WWII video, your next video will be one on modern Nazism (including recruitment videos). I wonder if YouTube's algorithm boosts that small fluctuation in a sea of noise into a single recommendation result (or even grabs the top 5, but the signal is so noisy that this one still shows up in that top 5)?
What I mean is, I don't care if someone reads a politician I hate. I care if they read a politician who enables the next pizzagate or worse. Or if they read state sponsored misinformation while thinking it's genuine opinions.
As do I, and you. I was pretty happy when all of those ISIS accounts that were spewing violence and hate got shut down. I'm sure you have your boundaries on what you'd want society to allow and restrict on public mediums.
The specific details of what those boundaries are will depend on your personal notion of what constitutes communication which can be considered abusive. As it will for any other person.
Copyright violations. Beheading videos. "Pornography" or pseudo-"pornography" involving minors. Direct threats of violence towards individuals or groups. Deepfakes generated without consent. Etc. Etc.
I guarantee you if we have a back and forth discussion we will discover where your boundaries lie across the myriad issues where people typically want to control public discourse.
If I want to press the ban/blacklist button on tag, account, group, or whatever social unit to not see it again that's my decision. Sure, some of them should be default (probably don't want people to get porn the second they sign up), but user should be in power to moderate and filter their own stream.
> Copyright violations. Beheading videos. "Pornography" or pseudo-"pornography" involving minors. Direct threats of violence towards individuals or groups. Deepfakes generated without consent. Etc. Etc.
3/4 of what you mentioned is illegal in most places in the first place so it isn't point of contention.
And that isn't really a problem. Site deciding this or that political view is now bad is.
You try to put removing the illegal/disturbing content in same category as worldview manipulation. The first is way more black and white than the second and should not be considered together, even if similar systems are used for them.
The wanker at the twitter office that was presumably appointed by twitter management to do that, yes? And some people want to appeal to that particular seat of power to influence and limit discourse along some dimension, within twitter.
And yet other appeals to higher powers, such as governments - control communication with deeper consequences across broader domains.
What's legal or illegal evolves with politics and culture. So there's no fundamental purchase there for the kind of moral conversation you were trying to elicit.
If in a few years the people you accuse of wanting to control other people's speech are able to get some laws passed making the speech they want controlled properly illegal, I'd venture you would resist accepting that as suddenly legitimate - even if those things would be "straight up illegal" at that point.
I guess I should have been more explicit in the first response - but what I'm suggesting is that this conversation is better had in less absolutist terms than what you proposed. There was the implication that the other person somehow inherently wanted to control communication in a qualitatively different way than you (or I did).
That's not to go down the path of sophistry - but just to suggest to orient the conversation around where the boundaries should be placed in practical terms, and discuss where the differences in boundaries lie and on an issue by issue basis evaluate that, rather than absolutist/ideological terms.
"You want to control speech (and I don't)" doesn't really lead anywhere in terms of discourse. It's a dead end.
> What's legal or illegal evolves with politics and culture. So there's no fundamental purchase there for the kind of moral conversation you were trying to elicit. If in a few years the people you accuse of wanting to control other people's speech are able to get some laws passed making the speech they want controlled properly illegal, I'd venture you would resist accepting that as suddenly legitimate - even if those things would be "straight up illegal" at that point.
The parent commenter was simply saying that the abhorrent examples you provided were not a point of contention, and not relevant to a conversation about free speech. They weren't attempting to put the word of the law onto a pedestal as you seem to suggest, they were simply pointing out that the things you mentioned are universally considered bad all around the planet, whereas freedom of speech is not.
The situation you've outlined in which one political party successfully silences their opponents through legal means is exactly why a "Site deciding this or that political view is now bad" is so dangerous.
> "Site deciding this or that political view is now bad" is so dangerous.
I'll admit again: I was quite happy when accounts supporting and promoting ISIS were banned from various social networks. I was more active on social media then (less so now), and it made me feel very uncomfortable to be on the same platform being leveraged to the ends of those radicals. They were just using it so _gleefully_.
I don't know if I'll be accused of wanting to control what people read, because that's what that is. But I think that falls into the political views most of us agree we don't mind if a social network purges. Violent revolutionary religious politics. It's somewhat natural that they'd have a business interest in maybe not hosting that stuff.
So is violent revolutionary religious politics the boundary? Companies should be free to police those political accounts, but less free to police others? Is it a sliding scale or a hard boundary? Who determines the degree of violence? Is implied violence included? If so how do we determine implied violence?
I'm not attempting to answer those questions. I'm saying those are the questions that a statement to the effect of "You want to control speech (and I don't)" is trying to avoid.
That said, those questions are hard, and maybe arguing about them and answering them actually requires a long time and a lot of consideration and doesn't fit neatly into a hacker news thread.
> None of those examples are "abhorrent" as much as "complicated".
Uhh, if you say so. They are your words after all, not mine.
> So is violent revolutionary religious politics the boundary?
I think the parent commenter's point was that you were both pretty much on the same page as far as being fine with illegal content being moderated, but the one thing they absolutely were not okay with is when powerful political entities (read: social networks) censor their political opponents in order to consolidate power for their own party.
Was there a particular reason you ignored the elaboration and re-quoted the original comment? And if there is something you want to express about it please do. This is kind of a meaningless retort.
> I think the parent commenter's point was that you were both pretty much on the same page as far as being fine with illegal content
I don't remember a due process being followed for most of those ISIS accounts being banned. I don't remember the social networks restricting their bans to those people that had been convicted of illegal communications.
And yet I supported that move. I understood that the network would not want that sort of crap on its airwaves, and that might see a business interest in not having its platform associated with that movement, and want to eliminate the ability of that movement to use their platforms to further their aims.
As much as one might want to reach for "illegality" is some clearcut dividing line, that simply doesn't apply here. Most of us supported accounts getting banned with no due process, no oversight, or anything - when it was violent revolutionary religious politics that we disagreed with.
> And yet I supported that move. I understood that the network would not want that sort of crap on its airwaves, and that might see a business interest in not having its platform associated with that movement, and want to eliminate the ability of that movement to use their platforms to further their aims.
Again, you're missing the point, blocking proven terrorists is not the same as the politic you don't like.
You're trying to excuse blocking benign stuff by desperately trying to group them with stuff most people would agree is probably borderline illegal and harmful
If you don't see distinction between posting pedophilia/beheadings and different political views that's entirely you problem.
"We don't allow what law doesn't allow, and moderate what is considering explicit by default, but you can opt out of that" I think is entirely fine line for platform to stand on. Anything above that is them fucking around with public opinion for their benefits.
>The wanker at the twitter office that was presumably appointed by twitter management to do that, yes? And some people want to appeal to that particular seat of power to influence and limit discourse along some dimension, within twitter.
> And yet other appeals to higher powers, such as governments - control communication with deeper consequences across broader domains.
Government is supposed to work toward interest of its people, not corporations, that's the difference here. And, well, the government is only entity that can tell corporation to behave. You can just not vote in the wankers to the office too.
Government (in first world countries) will only tell you to stop once you actually start to incite violence, not when you post some wrongthink on social media (except UK I guess...).
Are there governments worse than corporations ? Sure, but corpos can just not participate in their market. They will, for the money, and that's all there is to say about corporate goals.
> What's legal or illegal evolves with politics and culture. So there's no fundamental purchase there for the kind of moral conversation you were trying to elicit.
Sure, slavery was legal at some point. Doesn't really matter. That's not the point.
The point here that you are desperately trying to miss is that corporation should not have power to manipulate public opinion at will, because only target for corporation is to earn more money
And you can tell government to change the laws, that's how we got slavery banned, women getting rights to vote and minorities being not repressed. Can't do that to corporation. Of course you need to want government act in benefit of its people which US have hard time doing (the stuff your "lobbyists" are doing would get them arrested in EU...) but even that skewed system is still better than Zuck or Elon or other clown deciding what people should see or not see.
Most people do not like casually being exposed to such content, and so any sort of soft policy against it results in users self-selecting out of the social ecosystem. It's no longer just your decision, but one that affects the entire platform. And soon the entire platform becomes dedicated to that disturbing content because everyone else has left.
You could go to Parler or Gab or whatever site right now to see the results of your experiment in action and see why user self-moderation leads to the destruction of the site. This is why users offload that mental stress to the owners of the site who then hire people to manually filter the cruft themselves (often for the worse of the people doing said filtering, but that's a whole 'nother thing).
If you actually read my comment properly you'd notice that I explicitly said there should be a default ban list blocking that
> Either you yourself will have to watch the beheading video in order to know to ban it, or another group of users will need to tag it as 'disturbing' and you will need to ban 'disturbing' content'.
That's orthogonal problem; If you wanted to get rid of that entirely you'd have to pre-screen every content and that's just not feasible, nor any of the media does it aside from some automated filters on keywords.
Nor it is actual problem if you don't subscribe to people that post that; random nobody deciding to post that won't be featured in any feeds anyway because of how algorithms work so there is very little chance it will land on accident in someone's feed.
Of course someone could play the long con and get popular only to start publishing disturbing stuff, but none of current systems stop that and I'm not sure you even could.
Even if you don't subscribe to people that post that, there's still the issue of network effects. They subscribe to someone that subscribes to someone that subscribes to someone that posts a beheading video that gains popularity, and so the algorithm prioritizes that traffic because it's within your graph. You can easily notice these effects just on Twitter if you pay attention closely to what it decides to show you.
The printing press was seen as dangerous. Then the phone, then TV, and then the internet. And now it's social media.
Each time the arguments are the same. People worry that the "wrong people" will have the ability to share ideas to a broad audience.
And yet each time we've shown that more speech is correlated with an expansion of civil rights and liberal governance.
doesn’t the FCC heavily limit broadcast television and radio who and what behaviors are tolerated? like very heavily, no?
and aren’t there limitations on what you can and can’t do with a telephone?
It was definitely a step forward for humanity but it wasn't all unicorns and rainbows.
Yes and no. Youtube radicalisation / algorithmic extremism is a thing, because the engagement-maximising algorithm has a strong bias for rabbit-holes, kooks, con-artists and incendiary nonsense. The "funnel towards QAnon" that the sibling comment mentioned.
Unless you lean hard against it - which first requires awareness of the problem and the skills or knowledge to spot it - it will be in your feed. "you are to blame" is to an extent blaming the victims.
It took until 2021 for people to figure out that quote-tweeting politician hot takes to dunk on them, actually helped politicians' reach because Twitter counted it as engagement.
An increasing number, but still very low. And awareness in itself won't solve the issue entirely. This is why the "you are to blame" sentiment is to an extent blaming the victims.
Path dependence, it's a funny thing.
I'd imagine most people have reasonable assumption than YT will only show you more stuff that you like (as in press the like button), not that any engagement, even downvotes, will continue to put more shit into your stream.
Ever wondered why YTbers ask for comments and don't shy from saying "if you didn't like it, downvote and tell me in the comments"? That still drives engagement and that is all to algorithm.
Once you get it, it's easy to keep the shit you don't want in the stream, but not everyone is well versed in algorithmical ways so it's not that hard to get into algorithmics hole
Dislike button does nothing.
Hide because I don’t like this video option does nothing. It hides that video and keeps recommending competing channels on the same topic.
Don’t recommend channel button blocks the channel so that three more competing channels on the same topic take its place
But I think the reason they push against this is that is risks people losing interest as the sort of people I follow aren't strong/consistent content creators. They're just people I know personally and want to stay in touch with. Twitter wants to be a firehose of stuff that fires me up. Instagram wants to be endless TV channels of constant content. Whereas I like being able to get up to date on everything my friends have posted, and then go back to what I was doing.
I don't see any evidence for that
> In their view, they have the "correct opinions" ... the people that disagree with them are the ones being duped
This is getting very straw-man
> That's why there's a huge censorship movement right now in the US
Oh really, is there?
But the news media suffer from a huge punditry to hard facts ratio problem.
Today's first-screen news stories on major outlets that didn't begin as a press release or punditry:
* Fox: "Remains of missing toddler Quinton Simon found in landfill, mother charged"
* Washington Post: "Covid deaths skew older, reviving questions about ‘acceptable loss’"
* New York Times: "Antiwar Activists Who Flee Russia Find Detention, Not Freedom, in the U.S." "Exhumed Grave Near Kherson Shows Occupation’s Brutality"
* New York Post: nothing.
* Reuters: "Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano erupts for first time in nearly 40 years".
* The Times (of London): nothing, because they have such large ads and banners that the content is hidden.
* South China Morning Post: nothing, again mostly because of oversized banners.
* Le Monde: "The unflinching gaze of Ukrainian drones in Bakhmut"
* CNN: multiple stories, because the first screen has many headline links and small banners.
Some of this is optimizing the use of screen space for revenue, not information.
I have the completely un-researched and un-backed opinion that Twitter changing its prompt from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?" in 2009 has had an unappreciated, oversized negative affect on the world.
Similarly, a commenter from Reddit[2] writes:
> I haven’t personally met anyone active on Twitter for years. There are very specific types of people that want to be sharing things in that way and from my experience they are very narcissistic.
> Not that Reddit doesn’t have their share of asssholes, but I find that because it is anonymous it is also more tolerable. At least it was the case until a few years ago, now Reddit became very popular and the quality of the posts has declined immensely in almost all subs.
> Twitter is just a bunch of people self promoting themselves as more intelligent, more informed, more socially and environmentally conscious, etc. Basically IG for unattractive people.
Already implicit in the "What are you doing?" prompt is the hallmark of modern social media that focuses on positioning individual personality and punditry over common, for-the-greater-good, "kitchen table" discussion in service to a given topic—the focus is on you, the contributor, rather that taking backseat to whatever it is that you're supposed to be contributing to. I'm not sure that this can be rolled back at this point, though.
1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180315>
2. <https://old.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/z59ccj/annaka_on...>
Prior to that, I had not heard of Twitter. I was on Facebook and Digg and that was about it.
My timeline is pretty chill.
But when I look what's trending in my country, Twitter is a garbage fire.
I'm basing my opinion on:
- The experience of seeing people move to Mastodon and comment on how much more pleasant they find it (I do think this might be fleeting - more because they're seeing only early adopters than because there's intrinsic 'bitterness' missing on Mastodon, at least compared to 'old Twitter').
- My own experience of Twitter. It just makes me anxious and angry now. Every time. Yet I keep going back! It's transformed from a pleasant place to converse and browse to somewhere where everyone is angry at everyone else all the time. I'm fairly liberal in my opinions, so usually people I see are angry at either right wing folks or other left wing folks being liberal in slightly different ways - but I do also see the retweets of angry right wing tweets with the "hey, isn't this opinion SO WRONG" opinion. This is with the 'chronological' feed. With the 'algorithmic' feed, it's _even worse_: I now get more angry people I don't know on both sides of the spectrum, and I don't see the non-angry normal conversations or life updates from people I do follow (presumably because they're low-engagement).
- I _do_ think about how this affects others, you're right - and I imagine that those with more right wing opinions are in much the same state as me, but more 'opposite', and _even more angry_ because right wing accounts seem to be more likely to be aggressive than left wing ones. So, yes, I am concerned about what others see - but only in as much as I'm concerned about what everyone sees and how the current political climate is descending into an angry selfish madness where no-one is prepared to actually listen to anyone else. I do think this angry selfish madness is more prevalent on the right, especially in mainstream politics.
Maybe my experience is not the majority one, but I think you should take it into account.
yep. this is what many of these people just continually fail to understand.
it’s just not fun being around abusive, abrasive, anti-social people constantly.
its not complicated. it’s not scandalous. it’s not shocking. people don’t enjoy being around anti-social rude people.
when they’re given an alternative where the promise is less shitty behaviors (the current iteration seems to be mastodon) then people go there, and this drives a certain group of people crazy.
what we should be asking is why it bothers them so strongly when some people say “i’m personally going to move away from that rude abrasive person over there.”
why are they so insistent that we spend our free time around abrasive assholes? they’re adamant about this. why?
That's why I quit. I still log in from time to time to keep my handle alive and check out some crazies...
I don't know anyone who consistently looks at their own thoughts and opinions from a self-critical eye with the goal of probing their mental models for flaws in the structure for the express purpose of fixing their logical or factual errors, but surely we do gradually over time.
That is probably a very difficult thing to do all at once, although I suppose it does happen little by little. Surely, no matter how rarely or in what brilliant glimpses we get time chisels away our ignorance so long as our ignorance is more pliable than the steel of the chisel of our self-education.
I doubt many adults feel as though they have suddenly sprung fully formed from the womb of childhood, fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of perfection, and yet most of us feel that as of right now, our small flaws aside, we are as close to perfection as we have ever been or possibly ever will be.
In their view, they have the "correct opinions" and have not been biased by any algorithms or moderation. Meanwhile, the people that disagree with them are the ones being duped by algorithms, bad moderation, and bad actors.
That's why there's a huge censorship movement right now in the US. People aren't saying, "protect me from what I want" -- they are saying, "protect others from what they want, but leave me alone." Which is, of course, entirely hypocritical.