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Did the early internet activists blow it?

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Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#21

Post by incompatible »

v7x wrote: post #10

I agree with most of the article, but the author faltered in the area I predicted he would before I began to read. He expresses fear that without some restraint that sites might become "like 8chan". To which I have to ask, why is that a problem? Because its a hotbed for hate speech? What is hate speech? I'm sure I dont need to elaborate further on what I see wrong with that. What people seem to forget/ignore is that…

Is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance relevant here?

Also, if you ask for (legal) spaces for "anything goes" content, you need to campaign not just against "hate speech" laws, but all the other laws that prohibit various kinds of information.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#23

Post by Craighead »

bitwize wrote: post #19
eropple wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There certainly are anodyne parts of 4chan--but they're obviously, to the point where your post comes off as disingenous, not the problem. Hell, they could migrate back to Something Awful, like a lot of us who grew up ended up doing. (Which, just recently, torpedoed FYAD, the last vestige of the edgelord era. The FYAD types seem to have fucked off to 4chan and elsewhere. Nobody was surprised.) Hate speech is abhorren…

How dare people go through Zoe Quinn's tweets and discover that she was in a consensual relationship with the man she claims raped her at the time said rape was supposed to have occurred! The people who did this have no other motive than to punish her for being involved in video games while having a vagina! Such hate speech, and all institutions complicit in its spread, needs to be blotted from existence immediately!

This is a rather poor quality post. This is HN, not KIA.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#24

Post by ivanhoe »

roenxi wrote: post #11

The internet does need regulation; what I'd like to see (but don't expect to) is a regime where platforms have to be transparent about their moderating systems. I have no objection to Facebook, Twitter, Google/Youtube, Hacker News or WeChat aggressively moderating their platform, or even running social engineering programs. Their platform, their problem, humans have lived with that sort of thing for centuries. My iss…

I agree with you, but I don't see that as "regulating the Internet" (which is the idea I don't like at all), because:

1) you're really just aiming to regulate the selective censorship (which is in a direct relation to the existing monopoly laws)

2) why limit it on the Internet? TV and newspapers played exactly the same game for decades and they still do on some subjects. And when no major newspapers mentions a certain story, it's pretty much to the same effect as if google's removed it from the index. You need to first hear about something to know what to google for, and if it's not on a few mainstream media sites for most of people it just didn't happen.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#25

Post by CapitalistCartr »

Freedom is the right to be wrong. If I am free as long as I only do it "The Right Way", I'm not free. People need to try different things, make mistakes, be foolish. Without that freedom, we become a(n at least metaphoric) theocracy.

Society's disapproval cannot be incorporated into law in a free society.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#26

Post by chillacy »

v7x wrote: post #10

I agree with most of the article, but the author faltered in the area I predicted he would before I began to read. He expresses fear that without some restraint that sites might become "like 8chan". To which I have to ask, why is that a problem? Because its a hotbed for hate speech? What is hate speech? I'm sure I dont need to elaborate further on what I see wrong with that. What people seem to forget/ignore is that…

> Let it be an outlet for those who choose to partake in such content

I normally don't argue for censorship but I will throw out that if you believe the following things:

1. There exist thoughts and beliefs which are dangerous to (my) society

2. These thoughts and beliefs are normally tempered through social pressure in the dominant culture

3. Through the internet you can create your own subculture which reinforces your thoughts and beliefs to become the new normal

Then it makes sense to try to stamp out any places where you can form these groups, since you (the dominant culture) want to maintain the status quo.

This isn't necessarily unique to the present day politics, there was a time when civil/economic rights were a radical faction in a broader culture which would want it stamped out too.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#27

Post by makomk »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #22

One thing that I find amusing is that the same people worried about the government becoming too authoritarian, want to give the government the power to stifle “hate” speech, which can easily be defined to mean what the government wants it to mean.

It's almost like, on some level, they don't actually believe that they're the downtrodden ones sticking it to those with power. Like this is just a talking point that's used to justify the actions they're trying to take with the power they claim not to have, and to dismiss any concerns about the morality and consequences of those actions as concern trolling - after all, if you really cared you'd be worrying about what the people with power were doing, not trying to police the powerless - and then thrown aside when it's not useful.

What makes this particular approach really dangerous, of course, is that the easiest - and perhaps only - way to enact this censorship is if the people demanding it actually do have power within the existing system and aren't particularly oppressed. There's some truth to the oft-repeated argument that this can't be oppressive because of power structures - if, say, a bunch of woman of colour who're prominent for their activism within their community think this way, that affects no-one. If a chunk of the existing white male political establishment latches onto this for their own goals (like, say, defeating the Republicans), on the other hand...

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#28

Post by passwordreset »

carapace wrote: post #6

> But the reality is that no matter how much money and manpower (plus less-than-perfect “artificial intelligence”) Facebook throws at curating hateful or illegal content on its services, and no matter how well-meaning Facebook’s intentions are, a user base edging toward 3 billion people is always going to generate hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of false positives every year. In re: FB, there was an FB e…

TLDR: $6.25M is all it would cost to implement Orwellian censorship across Facebook.

TFA says there are "hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of false positives every year." Let us assume there are a million false positives that require human intervention every year. There are 50 work weeks in the year, so to resolve 1,000,000 false positives over 50 weeks requires humans to resolve an average of 20000 per week, or 4000 per day, or 500 per hour, or 125 every 15 minutes.

Therefore, a team of 125 people could theoretically solve this problem by resolving 1 false positive every 15 minutes. At $50,000 US dollar pay scale, Facebook would need to pay out $6.25 million dollars to solve this.

Therefore, given "a user base edging toward 3 billion people is always going to generate hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of false positives every year," it would cost FB ~$6.25M to hire a team of 125 people to resolve the issue, per million false positives.

That seems economical for a multi-billion dollar company.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#29

Post by heartbeats »

eropple wrote: post #17
v7x wrote: post #10

I agree with most of the article, but the author faltered in the area I predicted he would before I began to read. He expresses fear that without some restraint that sites might become "like 8chan". To which I have to ask, why is that a problem? Because its a hotbed for hate speech? What is hate speech? I'm sure I dont need to elaborate further on what I see wrong with that. What people seem to forget/ignore is that…

There certainly are anodyne parts of 4chan--but they're obviously, to the point where your post comes off as disingenous, not the problem. Hell, they could migrate back to Something Awful, like a lot of us who grew up ended up doing. (Which, just recently, torpedoed FYAD, the last vestige of the edgelord era. The FYAD types seem to have fucked off to 4chan and elsewhere. Nobody was surprised.) Hate speech is abhorren…

But they already are. The crazy screamer on the street corner causes an actual harm to you. To avoid 8chan is trivial; just don't go there.

That people get radicalized going there seems like a poor argument. If I understand you correctly, the principle is the following:

1. Someone holds acceptable views.

2. They visit 8chan.

3. They now hold abhorrent views.

Why should 8chan be blamed for this, or rather, what did they do wrong here? Don't you agree that people have the right to hold opinions without interference, and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers?

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#30

Post by hnthrowaway4938 »

v7x wrote: post #10

I agree with most of the article, but the author faltered in the area I predicted he would before I began to read. He expresses fear that without some restraint that sites might become "like 8chan". To which I have to ask, why is that a problem? Because its a hotbed for hate speech? What is hate speech? I'm sure I dont need to elaborate further on what I see wrong with that. What people seem to forget/ignore is that…

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