Regulating private companies for the benefit of society? I didn't think that idea was still within the current Overton window at this point.
The phrase "hoist by their own petard" seems appropriate here.
Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies
221–230 of 261 posts
Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies
#222I have a wide view of what 'censorship' is, and I include spam filtering in the definition. For example, a while ago I saw an advert for some kind of erection-causing pill on a forum discussing C++. If the forum moderators remove such a post, they make the forum more efficient by saving other users (who are looking for C++ content) from themselves having to filter out irrelevant information / a sales pitch. I also se…
Agreed. Censorship is a simple concept - it's any time expression is suppressed. Those who say that _their_ removal of content _isn't_ censorship are simply avoiding negative word associations, or any inherent suggestion that their judgement could be subjective. Even the censorship of off-topic and spam comments is a subject to a high degree variability in judgement and opinion.
Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If any “platform” censors beyond removing illegal or copyrighted content, they should have their “platform” status revoked, and they should be considered a publisher. What about spam? And would this extend to marketplaces? If a company allows users to sell educational resources for kids, what would happen if they start removing items that clearly don't fit?
Spam can be solved by just making it easy for people to spot when something was classified as spam, e.g. as spam folders do.
Maybe I'm misreading this comment or the context (because I think the biggest single piece we're currently lacking in platform moderation is maximal transparency into what/who gets moderated and how)...
but how would this "solve" spam in any case where the ratio of spam-to-signal crosses whatever threshold it takes to start breaking a platform's network effects, reducing engagement, driving out existing users, warding off new ones, shifting how the community views what the platform is for, etc.?
Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a pragmatist on this matter, I believe the solution here is scale. The control I have over a phpBB forum is that if I don't like their spam policy, I can leave, and either join another or form my own. We're not talking about a phpBB forum or a little blog with a few thousand commenters. We're talking about single companies with very significant fractions of the total discourse flowing through them. If Facebook blo…
> We're not talking about a phpBB forum or a little blog with a few thousand commenters. I listed examples including "wikis" and "social media sites" which categorically contain the largest websites in the world. You'll find websites of all orders of magnitude from tens to millions of users -- where do you draw that line? But more importantly, are you under the impression that large-scale sites are somehow immune spa…
I don't see any point in engaging with someone working so hard to turn everything I say into something as absurd as possible. If you can't understand the basics of something like "scale matters" without immediately twisting it into "but why are you ignoring scale so hard?", there's no meeting of the minds to be had here.
Though for the benefits of others, I'd point out that a careful reading of my post reveals that I did write something that implied strongly that small forums have more freedom in their spam blocking than large ones do. The idea that I'm obligating websites to never filter anything is some bizarre idea klyrs has gotten a hold of and apparently doesn't plan on letting go of.
Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that there will always be an influx of new people; and that most people will not be familiar with previous discussions, I'm not convinced that most forums are being assaulted by bad actors. This seems to be more of a Eternal September problem. Of course bad actors can abuse this; though I've always felt it would be good for the derailing comments to be removed with a polite dm message explaining that the topic…
It's definitely an organized tactic among some groups. For example, there's a literal neo-Nazi handbook† that advises members of that group to disguise their sentiments in civility and/or 'jokes' in order to sneak it into mainstream discussion. † https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/19/neo-na...
Any movement can use those tactics. I wouldn’t be surprised if they also read rules for radicals too. Any group looking for influence is going to use tried and true methods.
So while many vile groups like the nazis and others seeking power, there are many other groups who hold unpopular opinions even unpopular and illegal outcomes (as presently held by the public), I’m not sure we want to suppress that. Much of what we have today as acceptable discourse and so on is because we allowed those voices which were considered degenerate or unacceptable one way or another.
We don’t need a new dogma telling us the way to think correct.
Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Conservative viewpoints are political ideals. Scams are scams. If you don't make that distinction, then Ponzi schemes become protected speech. There's also a clear (direct) profit motive, and it's depriving people of property. There's lots of ways this argument changes. When you censor political views, you're depriving people of their rights. Shutting out a swindler isn't even close to the same thing.
Are you really sure that is the distinction. A lot of conservative policies results in even the conservative voters being worse off as a result. And there IS a direct profit motive by those who fund conservative politicians (a.k.a. scammers)
Absolutely, I'm 100% sure. I'm not talking about indirect
"cui bono" desire to use politics to one's own advantage. Whether or not voters are worse off is subjective and debatable. Policy discussions are a form political participation. Selling a product isn't. There's a very clear distinction here. In my view, it's much less reasonable to make content distinctions based on "correct" political beliefs, vs. venders selling a product.
Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies
#227Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies
#228Know what else distorts the marketplace of ideas? Money. Money allows for buying advertisements, essentially allowing you to buy a platform to spread your ideas. Having money typically has a pretty clear bias: protecting the money of those who have it. This comes at the expense, many times, of those who do not. That typically equates to conservative policies. I'm not convinced that the market distortion caused by sup…
I think it's a difference of additive vs subtractive distortions. Censorship deletes things: it reduces the size of the marketplace of ideas. Money adds things: if I spend money tomorrow to buy some ads it doesn't affect you unless either (a) you're also spending money and trying to buy the same ad slots or (b) your views are very weakly held and you become convinced to change sides by my witty advert. The "get money…
Money adds things
No. What money does is redistribute limited attention.
Information may (or may not) be freee, and nonrivalrous. But its complements, attention, distribution, discoverability, access, reach, are all rivalrous. Time is the ultimate rival good: a second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade, lifetime, spent on one thing is that interval not spent on all else.
"Money doesn't talk, it swears." Bob Dylan.
Money is an amplifier, or at least, provides access to amplification. It can also be an eraser, a gate, a gate keeper, which determines who shall and shall not pass.
The more I read on the nature of monopoly, the more I'm convinced that the critical element of it is not prices or "consumer welfare", but of role as gatekeeper. The monopolist (or monopsonist) faces a constant queue of approaching supplicants. Each supplicant has the best alternative of ... no service. Or at best, extraordinarily reduced service (fewer capabilities, higher costs, most often both). The monopolist, particularly if already at or near capacity, though even at levels of service far beneath that, need only consider the next supplicant.
What people miss out on with money is scale.
The typical US household would be hard pressed to meet an emergency expense of $500. When Facebook purchased Instagram for $19 billion in cash and stock, it expressed a liquidity of nearly 40 million such households -- about the population of California. That is, a single corporate entity, and more significantly, the single individual effectively controlling that corporation, Mark Zuckerberg, has a greater effective voice than the entire rest of the state.
In a land dedicated to the principles of liberal democracy, that seems inimical to its very foundations.
As to the touted ineffectiveness of political advertising, the arguments would ring far truer if 1) the parties claiming such reflected the belief in their actions and 2) would not protest so loudly efforts to either curtail or 3) clearly identify those doing the advertising and spending.
Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If any “platform” censors beyond removing illegal or copyrighted content, they should have their “platform” status revoked, and they should be considered a publisher. What about spam? And would this extend to marketplaces? If a company allows users to sell educational resources for kids, what would happen if they start removing items that clearly don't fit?
They could have a checkbox "remove spam" that the moderators could turn on and off. There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue. I think the law should be "platforms should not tinker with their users' expressed preferences - you can't hide something that they 've chosen to subscribe to". > And would this extend to marketplaces? I believe these are already considered publishers ? In any case it…
Replying to your root comment but also addressing some points in subcomments.
Generally (and perhaps ideally), I like the idea of more visibility/transparency into what algorithms (and human moderators) do.
But I think it's worth noting that, pragmatically, there are at least a few minefields here...
- Providing full transparency into what gets flagged as spam is going to make it a lot easier for spammers to model, evade, and notice changes in the spam-identification code and practices.
- Perhaps you were imagining this being temporary, but the operational feasibility of keeping all of this spam in-platform ultimately depends on signal/noise ratio, scale, profitability, and time horizons. It's one thing to bear the burden of storing 1% of your plaintext post volume for one year--it's quite another to store 20 or 30% of your video upload volume in perpetuity.
- I'm having a hard time imagining the proceedings of the court-of-legal-vs-illegal-spam-filters. Without a lot of technical training (or a lot of reliance on expert testimony), the simplest way for an average person to grasp whether a spam filter is biased or not is going to be either looking "back" at what it did/didn't flag, or "testing" it with some sample corpus. In both cases, this process will be fraught with interpretation and sampling bias issues. This may hinge on a judge, panel, or jury being able to see through a bombastic argument that trots out the most respectable {ideology} opinions from the discard pile--they have to realize that nothing in the discard pile can be interpreted without a really good understanding of the input pile. (They'd have to be so good at this that they could spot someone who is trying to score political points and manipulate opinion by intentionally mounting an adversarial campaign that intentionally crafts seemingly innocuous ideological content that also gets flagged as spam).
- Likewise, there's probably no great way to make a litmus-test corpus. Spam looks very different in different contexts. A useful Amazon review or tweet may both look like spam if someone emails or DMs them to you. Even if you can create a set of corpora that cover the bases, they'll probably be useless if they don't evolve, and very vulnerable to political and ideological manipulation if they do.
- If there's a lot of legal fear around getting sued because your spam-filter has a taste for how {ideological subcommunity} likes to phrase its opinions, I'd expect spam filters to accumulate safe-words and rules that cause them to back off of charged topics. It'd only be a matter of time until legit spam/manipulation ops infer the existence of those rules and move to exploit them.
Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> IMO if you can't even try to use an alternative microblogging platform for fear of being labeled an extremist by "polite company" I downvoted you because this is a ridiculous claim. If you use a platform like Gab that embraces bigots and extremists perhaps, but that's not the only other platform.
Does Gab embrace bigots, or simply not remove any legally permissible content? I was under the impression that it was the latter. If it's the only place where unsavory content is not removed, then of course that stuff will be over-represented.
Uhh, they do embrace bigotry. The official Gab twitter feed has posted openly bigoted comments, not just quoted from their site.