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Did the early internet activists blow it?

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Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#31

Post by ethbro »

TomMckenny wrote: post #16
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…

As you say, the problem is not 8chan or "the daily stormer" for that matter. But it _is_ Facebook. Anything goes sites like 8chan have so much reality free and bizarre content that they have only the tiniest impact. Yet they provide insight into those mindsets and their trends. But Facebook and Twitter inject extremely harmful falsehoods into reams of fluff and corporate posts. This gives them far more legitimacy, we…

I think this is a balanced appraisal of the situation.

Historically, US free speech has been "crazy rant" = okay, "fire!" (in a crowded room) = not okay.

And that worked, when distribution was relatively centralized with respect to network size.

However, now I think we have a third category, somewhere between the previous two: "fire!" (on a widely- and easily-disseminated medium).

The sheer scale of social networks makes the effect fundamentally unlike prior scenarios.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#32

Post by heartbeats »

bsder wrote: post #15
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 are multiple problems: 1) How do we deal with the fact that an Internet mob can horribly damage a random individual? This is a really serious issue. Even a single stalker can cause a nightmare for a person and they will have difficulty fighting back. An Internet mob can be completely devastating. There needs to be some way for an individual to cost effectively fight back against online "assault"-- especially wh…

1. No, there should not. People should have the freedom to congregate and to discuss. If people are hurt by this, too bad. There is no solution.

2. There isn't one. If I say something, there are some insane people who will hear it, and some of them might kill someone. Too bad, but it doesn't make me a terrorist.

3. Facebook and Google are natural monopolies, and they should be regulated like telecom carriers.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#33

Post by worble »

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…

Having been on the internet since a young age, I've always found it strange the internet is, well, so "srs business" these days. The internet has never, and as you say, will never be a harmonious place where everyone will be nice to each other. We can't even achieve this in physical spaces which can actually enforce these kinds of rules!

Maybe I'm lucky, but I find it really easy to just disasociate with online comments. Whenever I read something hurtful or mean directed to me on the internet, I can very easily just shrug it off as "some internet person" and move on, although admittedly I've never been target harassed like some people have, which I'm sure is distressing. I think part of this was growing up I was always told: "Don't use your real name online! Don't give out your personal info!", and so for me, being online was always about being someone else, a different persona if you will. These days that seems completely out of the window, everyone uses their real names everywhere, uploads actual pictures of themselves and generally their real life seems directly integrated into their online life, which is just unthinkable for me. This probably makes online abuse just that much more personal for them?

I suppose another big change of course is that all the small forums that used to make up the internet are now exceedingly being consolidated into just one or two sites. Again, back when I was a child trawling the internet, if you didn't like one forum, you just hopped to another, and there were always plenty more (sidenot: remember the 'affiliate' tags on sites? I miss those. Made the internet feel more like a big group of communities, but I digress). Of course now, if someone is being harassed on twitter or facebook or something, well, they're not going to go somewhere else because a lot of the competition no longer exists anymore.

I don't really know where I'm going with this comment honestly, I'm just ranbling. What I do know is that regulating the internet is, and always has been, completely futile. So long as someone, somewhere, can spin up a forum on a VPS or on a computer at home, and people can connect to it, there's going to be sites hosting every kind of content imaginable. If they can't even bring down the Pirate Bay with the music industries power and money, they'll never stop people saying nasty things.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#34

Post by dang »

hnthrowaway4938 wrote: post #30
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…

[flagged]

Ok, but please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It's against the site guidelines because it takes discussion away from curiosity and into smiting enemies. Also, it's repetitive and therefore tedious and therefore off topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#35

Post by makomk »

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…

One of the more, ah, interesting things about this is that a lot of they key activists who've been pushing for this crackdown on online speech literally are the Something Awful edgelords. If I recall rightly, at least one of them is now on the NYT editoral board making sure that the proper SA-social-justice ideas are disseminated from its pages. There's a good few journalists out there who graduated from SA too.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#36

Post by roenxi »

ivanhoe wrote: post #24
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 certai…

It isn't that (2) is a bad idea on the face of it, just that a further legislative push seems unnecessary as the tools are already in place. I assume the libraries have an index of newspaper articles dating back a few decades that can be used to chart out what stories get mentioned. A similar index of TV programming is probably already available. If it isn't it should be.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#37

Post by mjcohen »

worble wrote: post #33
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…

Having been on the internet since a young age, I've always found it strange the internet is, well, so "srs business" these days. The internet has never, and as you say, will never be a harmonious place where everyone will be nice to each other. We can't even achieve this in physical spaces which can actually enforce these kinds of rules! Maybe I'm lucky, but I find it really easy to just disasociate with online comme…

What would your reaction if information about you or your loved ones was posted and people were encouraged to do nasty things to you or them?

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#38

Post by cthor »

mjcohen wrote: post #37
worble wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having been on the internet since a young age, I've always found it strange the internet is, well, so "srs business" these days. The internet has never, and as you say, will never be a harmonious place where everyone will be nice to each other. We can't even achieve this in physical spaces which can actually enforce these kinds of rules! Maybe I'm lucky, but I find it really easy to just disasociate with online comme…

What would your reaction if information about you or your loved ones was posted and people were encouraged to do nasty things to you or them?

Ignore it.

If it were a credible threat of physical harm (it rarely is), then I'd make a police report and be more vigilant with my self-defence preparation and tell my loved ones to be accordingly.

Attempting to censor the information would be pointless at best, and could easily make it worse.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#39

Post by makomk »

passwordreset wrote: post #28
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 we…

A lot of those false positives are going to be things that look very much like a true positive to an underpaid, overworked moderator. I don't think 15 minutes would cut it. Actually, I'm not convinced that any amount of time would, because there are too many occasions when the distinction between hate speech that must be banned and social justice speech that only a bigot would ban rests entirely on the social standing of the person making it within the appropriate circles.

Also, I strongly suspect that Google, Facebook, etc are already applying this kind of manual scrutiny to potential false positives behind the scenes - as you say, it's relatively cheap - and this explains a lot of the problems people have been having with their moderation decisions and why appealing decisions so rarely works out.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#40

Post by Barrin92 »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #25

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.

>. If I am free as long as I only do it "The Right Way", I'm not free

This is a shallow definition of freedom, the sort of idea of freedom that children instinctively have when they're told to go to bed and start throwing a tantrum and it is largely what the internet was built on, maybe not accidentally by people who in many ways were juvenile adults.

There's a deeper version of freedom, a more adult one, that recognises not only ones capacity to do what one wants, but responsibility for the social good at large. Freedom doesn't just consist of running against the current, it also consists of maintaining enough order so that authentic expression of freedom is possible. A society where everyone is at the danger of being robbed while crossing the street is not free, it's just in chaos.

Likewise an internet without hierarchies, without controls and without enforcement of social taboos, be that by law, by gatekeepers or through exclusion incentivizes the very worst actors to run amok. Social approval should be incorporated into law, (either literal or culturally) because places that don't do it become uninhabitable. (as the current public internet increasingly is).

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