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Tech and Liberty

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Re: Tech and Liberty

#141

Post by raxxorrax »

smacktoward wrote: post #31
lordleft wrote: post #7

A powerful and provocative article. I love the quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes: "The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out." I am a bit of a libertarian when it comes to civil liberties -- I flinch at any circumscription of speech, even when it is noxious. Still, for a v…

You're describing Karl Popper's "paradox of tolerance": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance > I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force;…

Be aware that Popper stepped away from many of his earlier positions.

He particularly reminded people that there is a conflict between freedom and equality after he became wiser and that could be quite an interesting topic in todays time.

Without a doubt he would be opposed to those using this particularly paradox to curteil free speech. He probably would hand out spankings left and right just for that.

Re: Tech and Liberty

#142

Post by raxxorrax »

davidw wrote: post #13
lordleft wrote: post #7

A powerful and provocative article. I love the quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes: "The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out." I am a bit of a libertarian when it comes to civil liberties -- I flinch at any circumscription of speech, even when it is noxious. Still, for a v…

> There is a part of me that is afraid of a patently false but persuasive idea gaining currency in a liberal democracy, when it ought to have been quelled in the cradle somehow. Anti-vaxxers come to mind from some points of view, although on the face of it it's not as odious as something like actual Nazis. Anti-vaxxers are terrible though... they pile on social media to drown out opposing points of view. There is a l…

Anti-vaxxers are stupid but declaring them to be a large problem comes close. Some will always resist reason and sense, you will never be able to solve that. Instead of pointing fingers to satisfy yourself, you are free to advocate the advantages of vaccination.

Re: Tech and Liberty

#143

Post by mr__y »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #120
loudmax wrote: post #10

The fundamental problem is the near monopoly powers enjoyed by a select few social media and tech companies. If Facebook and Twitter's social networks were federated like email, it wouldn't matter whether they refuse to propagate one opinion or another. Unhappy users or anyone who feels silenced could simply switch to a different provider. The problem isn't that Facebook or Twitter are allowing or not allowing free s…

I consider myself pretty progressive, but I find the idea of forcing companies to "open up their networks" distasteful and problematic. I just doesn't seem piratical. I've said it a few times before, I don't think the problem is the carriers, its that there are no penalties for telling a lie on the internet. This is where we should start to fix this problem.

I see at least a few problems with penalizing lies:

1. Who is going to determine whether a given statement is a lie or not?

2. What about sarcasm and works of fiction? (And who (and how) determines whether a given post was intended to be sarcastic or not?)

3. What about a context? For instance, exactly the same wording of a message might carry a different meaning depending on the content of other posts in a thread. While I believe that this is somehow clear and obvious, what is not obvious is what makes a full context - is it just direct parent post, or whole thread or maybe even a larger part of a website? What if selection of context makes a difference (for example if I just use parent post as a context, the statement appears to be a lie, if I judge by the whole thread it possibly appears to be sarcastic). Now, who (and how) decides which context should be applied for analysis?

4. Transnational problems - which laws apply and how would you enforce it?

5. What problems would it actually fix? Lets say that from now on, I am not allowed to post on hackernews that Barack Obama visited my parents (he did not, it's a lie) - what problem it solves that I am not allowed to post that? (edit: formatting)

Re: Tech and Liberty

#144

Post by seanhunter »

stickfigure wrote: post #127
ryukafalz wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>preventing friends from oversharing "your" data. I don't think this is really what privacy advocates are typically after. At least I'm not, and I'd consider myself one of them. It's more about what data the provider has access to, not your friends. If you don't trust your friends, uh... get better friends?

Every privacy advocate I've met seems to be most incensed at Facebook over Cambridge Analtyica. To recap: CA built a quiz app that recorded data that your friends shared with you; many users installed this quiz app and accepted the "share your friends' data" permission. Facebook didn't share your data with Cambridge Analtyica; your friends did. Facebook was just the medium. With a distributed social network, there's…

> Facebook didn't share your data with Cambridge Analtyica; your friends did. Facebook was just the medium.

Facebook shared data that people had shared with their friends with Cambridge Analytica. That's not remotely in dispute - both Facebook and CA have admitted that. CA used Facebook's API and Facebook's servers gave CA the data.

People's friends didn't share that data with CA.

Re: Tech and Liberty

#145

Post by eej2ya1K »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #120
loudmax wrote: post #10

The fundamental problem is the near monopoly powers enjoyed by a select few social media and tech companies. If Facebook and Twitter's social networks were federated like email, it wouldn't matter whether they refuse to propagate one opinion or another. Unhappy users or anyone who feels silenced could simply switch to a different provider. The problem isn't that Facebook or Twitter are allowing or not allowing free s…

I consider myself pretty progressive, but I find the idea of forcing companies to "open up their networks" distasteful and problematic. I just doesn't seem piratical. I've said it a few times before, I don't think the problem is the carriers, its that there are no penalties for telling a lie on the internet. This is where we should start to fix this problem.

Oh sure, deciding what is and what isn't a lie is definitely practical. Not a recipe for a hellish dystopia at all.

Re: Tech and Liberty

#146

Post by GoblinSlayer »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #120
loudmax wrote: post #10

The fundamental problem is the near monopoly powers enjoyed by a select few social media and tech companies. If Facebook and Twitter's social networks were federated like email, it wouldn't matter whether they refuse to propagate one opinion or another. Unhappy users or anyone who feels silenced could simply switch to a different provider. The problem isn't that Facebook or Twitter are allowing or not allowing free s…

I consider myself pretty progressive, but I find the idea of forcing companies to "open up their networks" distasteful and problematic. I just doesn't seem piratical. I've said it a few times before, I don't think the problem is the carriers, its that there are no penalties for telling a lie on the internet. This is where we should start to fix this problem.

You don't need to lie to abuse a monopoly, the problem is the monopoly itself.

Re: Tech and Liberty

#147

Post by GoblinSlayer »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #132
dave_b wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By “public space,” I meant the predominant avenues for public discourse (maybe not the best choice of words). Mainstream media, tech platforms, and universities are the specific things I had in mind.

The mainstream media is overwhelmingly owned by the rich elite, with deep connections to conservative politics. The idea that the mainstream media is somehow overwhelmingly progressive is something conservatives like to parrot, but I've never found it to have any basis in truth. The "leftist" big media outlets are really centrist, at best.

As long as their politics is total control, their brand doesn't matter.

Re: Tech and Liberty

#148

Post by cjslep »

stickfigure wrote: post #86
loudmax wrote: post #10

The fundamental problem is the near monopoly powers enjoyed by a select few social media and tech companies. If Facebook and Twitter's social networks were federated like email, it wouldn't matter whether they refuse to propagate one opinion or another. Unhappy users or anyone who feels silenced could simply switch to a different provider. The problem isn't that Facebook or Twitter are allowing or not allowing free s…

open up their networks to interact with other services using an open protocol such as Mastadon or Matrix And here is where the two camps of Facebook-haters will go to war with each other: * The decentralization mavens want open protocols and distributed control. * The privacy mavens want to control information as it flows through the network, preventing friends from oversharing "your" data. These two camps are mortal…

FreeNet would disagree.

Plus, from ActivityPub / Fediverse land there's a handful of folks looking at doing both by clever use of OCAP, encryption, and content addressing routing to have both privacy and an open network (sneakernet compatible too).

There's a whole history of peer to peer networking that died in the late 90's and early 2000's that most software engineers in the valley are too hip to learn and care about.

Re: Tech and Liberty

#149

Post by HBKXNCUO »

concordDance wrote: post #140
HBKXNCUO wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some of these "dark" "evil" "bad ideas" you believe are infecting, festering, and mutating in minds thanks to the internet?

Given that the world-view commonly called "progressive" currently dominates, I'd expect the most "dark" views to be those which contradict (or seem to contradict) fundamental tenet of progressivism: the idea that everyone should be equally valued.

If that's the case, those ideas dominated humanity for virtually all of human existence and still dominate in many parts of the world, so it seems strange to suggest the internet is somehow responsible for them circulating today. Is the claim that absent the internet those ideas would have been wiped out by now?

Re: Tech and Liberty

#150

Post by widowlark »

SllX wrote: post #125
widowlark wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We cant have it both ways. On the one hand, Twitter, Facebook, et al. are "basically" town/public squares - they are also private companies. So we either regulate and minimize private companies ability to silence speech as they see fit, which is their right - or we allow them to exercise their own rights, thus bending to the masses and appealing to the lowest common denominator through censorship.

Or we move on. Mastodon and the like seem to show promise. Reddit is around for something in between Mastodon and Facebook/Twitter, although it is ultimately susceptible to the same problems as the latter. Snapchat isn’t nothing, and while TikTok has problems stemming from its country of origin, it also isn’t nothing. I would say we have a lot of choices of platforms. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn aren’t the end of…

What we have right now is due to a largely unregulated free market.
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