151–160 of 192 posts
"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
I think it would be interesting if online personas worked a little bit like video game characters. For instance, in an RPG, no one would believe a character could be equally effective at wielding heavy weapons and casting spells, or other tasks: you generally have to pick one or two key areas of expertise and be “OK at best” when anything else comes along. Yet somehow, in the world of online discourse, everyone’s an…
1. Who would determine any given person's area of expertise. This is a difficult and potentially difficult thing to do.
2. People who are ostensibly experts in a topic, even if they have a lot of experience with it, often have incredibly uninformed opinions. As a simple example, most people I know have a lot of experience with dating/relationships, parenting, and politics, but their knowledge of these topics is based on a bizarre and woefully incomplete combination of old wives'tales, anecdotes, and just-so stories. They fully believe they are experts and often have some paper evidence to back this up. Somethin similar can be said of programmers. There are plenty of people who can write a program that works, but are they experts? To a non-technologist, maybe (and maybe not). To the grande dame or grand homme of a field of programming, probably not. The range of defining an "expert" is huge.
Do you have any ideas to address this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Constitutional guarantee of free speech mandates the behavior of the government to not interfere with the rights of private actors . When a private actor (such as Facebook) chooses to publish or suppress content from a third party, that is a voluntary exercise of Constitutionally protected speech . Social media services have neither a moral nor legal obligation to publish hate speech.
This is so true and something that is confused all the time by “free speech advocates”. It’s quite frustrating actually. I’m not happy about the amplification of speech that social networks offer, but l’m even more unhappy about the attitude of “smart” techies who shrug their shoulders and say “free speech - cant do anything about that”. We can do something about that, but that would mean solving hard problems and no…
im not asking you to give a full implementation, but i am genuinely curious what your vision for the internet would look like for a day to day user.
It's gotta feel bad for the local reporters that are literally risking their lives reporting news in Cambodia, to then have their views go down 80%. Because Facebook decided to experiment and implement the Timeline feature. Facebook is barely even tied to the fate or all that concerned, since it's only 18million users.
So do you think that once a service has a certain number of users it should cease all changes?
Move Fast and Break Stuff, is ethically and morally unsound when the end result is making it easier to silence, jail, and execute the press.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Constitutional guarantee of free speech mandates the behavior of the government to not interfere with the rights of private actors . When a private actor (such as Facebook) chooses to publish or suppress content from a third party, that is a voluntary exercise of Constitutionally protected speech . Social media services have neither a moral nor legal obligation to publish hate speech.
>> the kind of free speech enshrined in the U.S. Constitution > The Constitutional guarantee of free speech mandates the behavior of the government to not interfere with the rights of private actors Free speech is an ethical concept that is (imo) fundamental to open societies. The US Constitution enshrines this ethical ideal by creating a prohibition against government interference in free speech. GP is lamenting tha…
I think it would be interesting if online personas worked a little bit like video game characters. For instance, in an RPG, no one would believe a character could be equally effective at wielding heavy weapons and casting spells, or other tasks: you generally have to pick one or two key areas of expertise and be “OK at best” when anything else comes along. Yet somehow, in the world of online discourse, everyone’s an…
That's an interesting idea, but it's also probably one that would be impossible to implement effectively. For example: 1. Who would determine any given person's area of expertise. This is a difficult and potentially difficult thing to do. 2. People who are ostensibly experts in a topic, even if they have a lot of experience with it, often have incredibly uninformed opinions. As a simple example, most people I know ha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Constitutional guarantee of free speech mandates the behavior of the government to not interfere with the rights of private actors . When a private actor (such as Facebook) chooses to publish or suppress content from a third party, that is a voluntary exercise of Constitutionally protected speech . Social media services have neither a moral nor legal obligation to publish hate speech.
When people's lives depend on your actions and policies, you have some moral obligations no matter who you are - a government, a corporation or just an abusive lone parent.
Does anybody seriously think that any responsibility we demand from a actor like a government would go away if we'd write "limited liability company" on the door of the white house or congress?
The de-facto power relations are what matters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm afraid it won't work well without extra regulation laws. Even if Facebook is broken, it has shown the way. Before, it was MySpace (although it was never so popular). If someone breaks FB, the strongest competitor living in its shadow will step up. I think it is the nature of certain services to centralize. Search engines, social networks. Unless someone forces them to inter-operate, it's winner takes all.
The US government should take possession of all Facebook shares and use the profits to fund universal basic income. I don't think anyone would complain... Except a tiny percent of the population who owned Facebook shares but who cares, they're evil/morally bankrupt anyway.
>Facebook can no longer deny its moral responsibility to try to understand how cyberspace, law, and politics collide in each of the countries where it operates, nor its responsibility to do something about it. That sentence doesn't make sense. Do something about what? How those things collide? It's very unclear what the author thinks Facebook is supposed to do, or what he thinks Facebook is actually responsible for.…
He talks about how falsehoods and doctored photos are being spread on Facebook, and that government officials are posted them on their pages. In the absence of Facebook, _only_ those government officials would have a platform. Why on earth would that be better?
He even pays lip service to the fact that this communications platform has enabled positive forms of communication as well (ie human rights organizing), and then quickly switches back to a complaint that Facebook didn't remain optimal for the specific workflow that Cambodian human rights workers employed.
His argument is fundamentally "don't give the unwashed masses a platform", but he doesn't have the courage/intellectual honesty/self-awareness to say so. I can imagine a contemporary counterpart of this idiot writing the same article about the printing press or the telephone.
I've got a very low opinion of Facebook as a company, but these complaints literally boil down to "allowing people to communicate more effectively". Newsflash! People are shitty. They do shitty things with whatever technology they get their hands on. The idea that the pre-Facebook world would be more or less likely to have the norms you like only makes sense inasmuch as the norms you like are oriented around limited communication options for the masses.
I think it would be interesting if online personas worked a little bit like video game characters. For instance, in an RPG, no one would believe a character could be equally effective at wielding heavy weapons and casting spells, or other tasks: you generally have to pick one or two key areas of expertise and be “OK at best” when anything else comes along. Yet somehow, in the world of online discourse, everyone’s an…
That's an interesting idea, but it's also probably one that would be impossible to implement effectively. For example: 1. Who would determine any given person's area of expertise. This is a difficult and potentially difficult thing to do. 2. People who are ostensibly experts in a topic, even if they have a lot of experience with it, often have incredibly uninformed opinions. As a simple example, most people I know ha…
Part of the problem of expertise would be solved by the natural upper limit on how much expertise is reasonable for one person to have. No one should be able to claim strong experience in more areas than they could have conceivably spent time learning/practicing. Therefore, if you’re going to make your profile claim expertise in something you know nothing about, you’d definitely be wasting your limited opportunity to comment and you wouldn’t be able to do that for everything. Also, if comments/votes/etc. on something are only permitted for people in related fields, an uninformed person’s ramblings might still be drowned out by the only other people commenting.
Determining how to limit a profile is tricky. Some restrictions would be easy, e.g. a 14-year-old can’t claim 30 years experience in an industry. Some would be harder, perhaps enabled by webs of trust (e.g. as a side effect of employment, your employer adds credibility to your profile somehow in a particular area of expertise).