So, facebook employees are mad they're not allowed to censor things they disagree with that people post on facebook? I don't understand how facebook came to be responsible for policing political opinions anyway. In fact, I don't understand why employees at tech companies believe they have the right to police people's opinions period. I see it amongst commenters here too. What gives any of these people the right to po…
Mark in the Middle
371–380 of 603 posts
Re: Mark in the Middle
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me put is this way - of the top 30 stories as of right now (24 Sep 20) on /r/politics, regardless of source: - 20 are anti-Trump articles - 6 are pro-Biden articles - 1 is anti-Police - 1 is anti-Barrett - 2 are misc. politics (covid, etc.) Compare to the most popular articles shared on facebook mentioned by GP and you can see /r/politics is the polar opposite of facebook.
Pro-human, Pro-democracy, Pro-equality. Not anti-Trump but I can see how it might appear like that. :)
I can't reconcile the first three statements with the fourth.
Re: Mark in the Middle
#373Re: Mark in the Middle
#374I will never understand the extreme intellectual fragility of cancel culture. A lot of kids must have grown up never facing and learning to to deal with disagreement or what is it that have created such a thin skinned generation of seemingly well educated people?
Re: Mark in the Middle
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very nuanced analysis! Fantastic. In the past, the effects of freedom of speech were bounded by the cost of communication. Very few people could afford a soapbox with which to reach the world, so only certain messages were broadcast widely. Now everyone can send (and even amplify) messages quickly and easily. Previously celebrities, politicians, the media, and advertisers had a wide channel. Now interest groups, stat…
>My biggest fear is that state actors will inject information designed to polarize us, and that we'll respond exactly as they want. Are you being facetious with this? This has been a long documented behavior of Russia. The future you fear is already here.
Re: Mark in the Middle
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don't get it and I can't get away from 'printing press' analogies. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" resulted in countless deaths but who owns that responsibly besides whoever wrote it, read it, and acted on the information within? You could blame it's publishers but that seems pretty off-track. Also every company I've ever worked at has angry, self-righteous employees who disagree with upper management.…
Hypothesize a machine that allows you to change people's emotions directly, one that has seen mass adoption. Sure, people opt-in to using it, but once plugged in, it works as advertised: send the right commands to it, and people's emotions shift. You could do a lot of good with one of those! The ultimate anti-anxiety treatment, the ultimate in letting people become the cooler heads they need to be for good ideas to p…
There absolutely are such machines and we call them computers.
> Should people be allowed to install it?
Communication is the powerful 'technology' that changes people's emotions directly. The mode of communication is a side-note. Tear down FB and none of this goes away - not because something rises from FB's ashes but because communication is a central facet of humanity.
Re: Mark in the Middle
#377So, facebook employees are mad they're not allowed to censor things they disagree with that people post on facebook? I don't understand how facebook came to be responsible for policing political opinions anyway. In fact, I don't understand why employees at tech companies believe they have the right to police people's opinions period. I see it amongst commenters here too. What gives any of these people the right to po…
Of course they have the right to. Any website can make whatever rules they want about what's allowed. HN has rules too.
Re: Mark in the Middle
#378So, facebook employees are mad they're not allowed to censor things they disagree with that people post on facebook? I don't understand how facebook came to be responsible for policing political opinions anyway. In fact, I don't understand why employees at tech companies believe they have the right to police people's opinions period. I see it amongst commenters here too. What gives any of these people the right to po…
Re: Mark in the Middle
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people want to complain about censorship, then totally ignore the consequences of malevolent propaganda.
And often the line of "malevolent propaganda" is variable and moves depends on who is interpreting that.
Re: Mark in the Middle
#380So, facebook employees are mad they're not allowed to censor things they disagree with that people post on facebook? I don't understand how facebook came to be responsible for policing political opinions anyway. In fact, I don't understand why employees at tech companies believe they have the right to police people's opinions period. I see it amongst commenters here too. What gives any of these people the right to po…
It's pretty simple, although it may not be obvious. There are 2 different views about "what freedom/democracy is" that are presently doing battle in america, at least among inteligentsia One, the worldview embedded into your comment, is that freedom is about the limits of discourse. Under this system, limiting discourse is inherently undemocratic, so if facebook "censor(s) things they disagree with" this is bad and w…
This worldview has been called the "liberal consensus". What it holds is that the power to determine a discourse is inherently against freedom is corrupting, and by allowing an authority to determine that, it will inevitably be used as a weapon.
Goalposts will shift. We will, hmm, go from suspending accounts which promote the theory that COVID-19 is caused by 5G towers, to suspending the account of a virologist who issued a preprint suggesting that gain-of-function mutations in SARS2 point to a laboratory origin.
Look, both of those things might be false, but surely we can agree that if so they are false in a different way.
There were many experiments with official truth in the 20th century. The general consensus was that they were unpleasant to live under and did a poor job of actually separating truth from falsehood. Many of us don't care to repeat those experiments, the effect size was large.
If we had an oracle of truth, then censorship of falsehood would be easy and practical. We also wouldn't need democracy at all, we could just ask the oracle of truth what to do, and do it. But we don't have any such creature.