Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media

#71

Post by jewelthief91 » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 10:59 PM UTC

mattigames wrote: post #44

jewelthief91 wrote: post #6

I doubt this would help. Judging by my Facebook feed Americans are perfectly capable of vicious, polarized discourse without foreign influence. In fact this may backfire as it would allow the hateful in society to have more of a right to preach on these platforms as no one would be able to accuse them of being foreign trolls. Its probable that this level of discourse is here to stay and that the previous elevated, co…

It is probably a job for the next generation rather than this one; this generation wasn't ready for this boom of communication we are living in; all these social platforms where created for the economical benefit of their creators (FB, twitter) and not any sort of societal benefit; so yeah I think that the solution must start from early school years where children should be taught to doubt all sources of information…

Ideally the "nazi" kid will be guided towards the light but I get what you're saying.

Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media

#72

Post by crazynick4 » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 11:03 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #65

maxxxxx wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First stop blaming the Russians and then tell your parties to work for the country and for themselves. I think best would be if people stopped calling themselves "Republicans" or "Democrats" and stopped identifying with a party.

> First stop blaming the Russians No, not going to stop blaming the guilty, including the Russians. > and then tell your parties to work for the country and for themselves. I've found that politicians in both major parties have the second part down pretty pat, so I’m more concerned with the first. > I think best would be if people stopped calling themselves "Republicans" or "Democrats" and stopped identifying with a…

It would be more accurate to say 'the Russian government and affiliated parties' (or just 'Russian government', if you're into the whole brevity thing).

Most Russians don't care what happens with American politics. We don't blame 'the Arabs' for 9/11, right?

Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media

#73

Post by slg » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 11:04 PM UTC

kodablah wrote: post #30

Ug, never proposals for education, grants for preferred alternative implementations, publicly funded communication platforms, recognition that the status quo is people's preference, data transparency encouragement (not user transparency...not "who", but "what" wrt internal analytics), enforcement of existing advertisement/fraud/collusion statutes, etc. The first step always has to be more legislation, very sad. I'd a…

>recognition that the status quo is people's preference...I'd argue in the scheme of things, it's not really that broken

Continuing the status quo means the people in power stay in power. It therefore isn't surprising that the people in power prefer preserving the status quo. It also isn't surprising that the people who believe the system is broken and are most against the status quo are those that belong to historically oppressed groups. If you really think the system isn't broken, I suggest you look through the Twitter mentions of politically active famous women, POC, or LGBTQ members. The harassment they receive on a regular basis wouldn't be allowed in the physical world. Why do we allow it in the digital world?

Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media

#74

Post by jewelthief91 » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 11:04 PM UTC

sykhic wrote: post #27

jewelthief91 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still hopeful that the hand wringing about social media is overblown. Flat earthers for example I believe are in two camps: the genuine loonies that have always been with us in small numbers and the large number of people who just want to pretend to have whacky beliefs for the entertainment value of holding them (think people who believe in crystal healing and such). As dissatisfying as it is, freaking out about…

It seems to me that the problem now versus 30 years ago is one of scale. It's much easier sequester oneself from sources of information we don't like for political reasons. It's easier in terms of time and money to get masses of people to believe easily disprovable claims. The adage in politics has been, "All politics is local." Is that true anymore? Will it be true in 10 years? With demographic and economic changes…

I'm thinking that a lot of this perceived difference is that taking a political stance is much more natural on social media than previously in real life. Before you would have to care enough to find some place to set your soap box or buy a printing press. The crazies definitely were there but there were also a large segment of the population that would have gladly espoused whacky beliefs but didn't have the motivation and/or resources to do so. Now, proclaiming that the earth is flat takes about 10 minutes of account setup online. I'm just not convinced that it really matters as much as people think it does.

Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media

#75

Post by crazynick4 » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 11:13 PM UTC

I would agree with labeling automated bots but I think stopping anonymous accounts is going too far. What is wrong with anonymity? You can label the account as being intentionally anonymous but I don't think we need to go past that.

If people failed to see past the trolls this past election cycle, hopefully it will be a lesson learned. Most people here probably learned to spot/ignore trolls when they were 14 but a lot of voters are still new arrivals to the digital landscape.

If we need our government to confirm the information we use to make a decision, is it still a democracy? I still think that if you want a population that is responsible, you have to allow them the responsibility of figuring out what is true and what is not on their own.

Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media

#76

Post by cwkoss » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 11:14 PM UTC

wesleytodd wrote: post #59

cwkoss wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a cool layer on top of this would be to create a P2P network where you can 'friend' certain peers and produce a reddit-like aggregation of new content from various sources. - Friend another user by adding their key and IP to a trust group. - When your client boots up, it connects to friend nodes and downloads their recent DHT. - DHTs from all friends are summed to sort the hashes by descending frequency, perh…

Check out beaker browser and fritter: https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://github.com/beakerbrowser/fritter Built on top of dat, it is basically this kind of architecture.

Cool, I'll have to look into this more, thanks.

Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media

#77

Post by cwkoss » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 11:15 PM UTC

kodablah wrote: post #67

cwkoss wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a cool layer on top of this would be to create a P2P network where you can 'friend' certain peers and produce a reddit-like aggregation of new content from various sources. - Friend another user by adding their key and IP to a trust group. - When your client boots up, it connects to friend nodes and downloads their recent DHT. - DHTs from all friends are summed to sort the hashes by descending frequency, perh…

You and I must have like minds. I have even created an anon DHT PoC [0], conceptualized how the messaging might work [1], made a lib to use Tor easier since it's the best anon nat buster these days [2], began toying with a superset of reddit/slack/forums/etc (some grpc files at [3] and some impl in that same repo), and a bunch of other small things in order to arrive at this final destination. 0 - https://github.com/…

Very cool! I'll have to dig into this a bit more thanks!

Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media

#78

Post by forapurpose » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 11:17 PM UTC

tcbawo wrote: post #55

The financial industry created self-regulatory organizations (SROs) to police themselves (in theory) more effectively than the government. They set up rules of ethics and policies and have the power to fine companies and bar individuals. Agencies like the SEC let them take the lead, but will step in to investigate fraud and crimes. The industry may need to mature, but this would probably be the most sensible solution…

The financial industry collapses and needs to be rescued every ~10 years (S&L crisis in the 80s, Long Term Capital Management in the 90s, Great Recession in the 00's). Last time they crippled the world economy. Massive fraud is commonplace, based only on the fines they pay. I don't see them as a model of success!

Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media

#79

Post by rossdavidh » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 11:28 PM UTC

niij wrote: post #26

1001101 wrote: post #4

This is what it looks like when the public square is on private property.

How would it help having the government run a social media network? Or am I misunderstanding your comment?

When content got posted by people on their own servers, and you just linked to other people's web pages instead of commenting on them, it was more of a public square. When it's a social media site, it's easier for everyone non-technical to use, but it's now run by a private company.

Re: Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media

#80

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 11:29 PM UTC

crazynick4 wrote: post #72

dragonwriter wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First stop blaming the Russians No, not going to stop blaming the guilty, including the Russians. > and then tell your parties to work for the country and for themselves. I've found that politicians in both major parties have the second part down pretty pat, so I’m more concerned with the first. > I think best would be if people stopped calling themselves "Republicans" or "Democrats" and stopped identifying with a…

It would be more accurate to say 'the Russian government and affiliated parties' (or just 'Russian government', if you're into the whole brevity thing). Most Russians don't care what happens with American politics. We don't blame 'the Arabs' for 9/11, right?

> It would be more accurate to say 'the Russian government and affiliated parties' (or just 'Russian government', if you're into the whole brevity thing).

I was taking, based on what seemed to me to be exquisitely clear contextual clues, “the Russians” in the post I was responding to as “the Russians to whom blame has widely been attached”, who, yes, are the Russian government and certain regime-linked business figures.

“Stop blaming the Russians”, it seems to me, makes clear that the focus is those Russians who are currently being blamed, which is not the Russian population in general.