591–600 of 1001 posts
I have no idea what happened during the early 2010s. I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies. Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on. But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship that I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore.
I have no idea what happened during the early 2010s. I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies. Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on. But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship that I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore.
But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship I was born in the 1970s and I can tell you why I flipped. The (hopelessly naive) ideal many of us had was that, by breaking down communication barriers, we'd create an egalitarian "marketplace of ideas" and the best ideas would win. And by "best" ideas we generally meant principle…
Freedom of speech, as a concept, includes by extension the freedom to be wrong.
https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1316525307441147907...
And yet, there is information all over twitter about the presidents tax returns, which were illegally obtained.
Twitter did not censor the Ayatollah's tweets about genocide of Israeli people.
Twitter did not censor illegally leaked classified information in many instances.
The Steele Dossier was a collection of unvetted opposition research, which has since been shown to have no basis in reality. When will twitter block this misinformation?
So now, just before an election, we're supposed to believe that they're not acting in a partisan way?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its is not censorship. No censorship has taken place. The article still exists on the NY Post web site and their newspaper. Their audience is still sizable. Their article included personal information and was consistent with policies that have been in place for almost a year. Twitter is not a public utility in the way that phone services are. They were (rightly) criticized along with others for letting mis-informatio…
But that standard has never been used before and was manually engaged here. Trump's taxes were repeatedly shared and there are photos of the content (not to mention the content itself, which is far more private than an email address). This standard has never been applied like this, and you can still link to the Web Archive version without limitation - same content. It's also not "limitation of deliberate misinformati…
That (to me) is valid in itself. I do wonder, had they redacted things properly then this would all be a non-issue.
To your example; my understanding is that Trump's taxes did not in the same way (by this I mean things like Trump org address etc isn't a private address). I have not dug deep into those articles to say that with 100% certainty.
I have no idea what happened during the early 2010s. I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies. Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on. But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship that I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore.
What could go wrong from empowering biased corporations with the ability to control a national narrative of what constitutes misinformation and hyperbole? I'm noticing a wide spread lack of the ability to weigh the pros and cons of policy in order to arrive at a rational decision based on due consideration of legitimate data analysis. I guess we should've been concerned when today's young adults couldn't discern real…
If you would like to know "what could go wrong" you need simply take a look and see what is going wrong now.
I have no idea what happened during the early 2010s. I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies. Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on. But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship that I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore.
The problem with "some people only use facebook for news and so this means they are effectively censored" is "some people only use facebook for news". Fix that, don't try to force services to broadcast obvious harmful nonsense to people.
The idea of truly unfiltered free speech on a global scale is impossible, because you have to be heard and we can't let everyone broadcast to everyone: there is too much noise. Free speech does not—and has never meant—the right to every platform.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
New technologies brought new challenges. There was no social network in the 2000s and before. No retweet button, no "curated" timeline that showed you what you "like". YouTube did not try to push more videos like the ones you watched previously until the mid 2010s. Free speech does not have the same meaning as before. Before it just meant that you could say whatever you wanted. Now people use it implicitly to mean th…
You’re mischaracterizing how free speech was viewed in the recent past. “Free speech” (as a cultural value, I’m not talking about the first amendment) was about the marketplace of ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketplace_of_ideas . It meant a free market in ideas, where the dominant ideas arise from competition. What you call “amplification” is just something that makes the marketplace more efficient—it allow…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on At this rate it will be the hill that the civilization dies on. The whole "absolute free speech is a sacrosanct human rights for everyone" is an ideal that simply would not scale with the 21st century civilization. Most users around here grew up firmly believing that value, and it is further reinforced by American/Western exceptionalism, so I can see how thi…
I don't follow your argument. Free Speech doesn't mean that anyone has an obligation to listen. You can solve being saturated by noise on the listening side much better than on the sending side... much better because the listeners needs are diverse, because listeners must be robust against adversarial inputs (or otherwise the first madman with a random number generator floods you out), because the listeners time/sani…
Quite.
And those who have no obligation to listen include Facebook and Twitter. They are absolutely under no obligation to deliver any message you wish to send.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What twitter does has nothing to do with the NY Posts' free speech. Just as NYP is free to say whatever they want, Twitter is free to silence it on their platform . Freedom of speech and the first amendment is to restrain the federal government from prohibiting speech. That is the hill to die on, as it protects twitter's right to do what it wants to do with its platform. An orthogonal issue is social platform monopol…
They should also be taking responsibility for copyright infringement in that case, which to my understanding is what the section 230 changes are? If twitter wants to defer to users being responsible for their speech, the users should be having the rights to post what they want.
I have no idea what happened during the early 2010s. I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies. Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on. But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship that I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore.
1) Old school free speech advocate, changed positions since
2) Had to figure this out practically, so not just theory crafting.
Context: Part of a mod team for a forum, and we were torn between ideals of free speech and what was actually happening on the forum.
Important note, moderation may be the main service the internet/SM platforms sell - curation, removal of trolls, the cleaning and keeping viable an environment for exchange of ideas. Earlier ideas from 2000, web 2.0 etc assumed this would happen naturally. "The better ideas bubble to the top". The market place of ideas.
This metaphor doesn't work when someone is selling goods that destroy the market. If you have a vegetable market, and someone starts selling crack cocaine, then there really isn't something an egg plant vendor can do about getting people to buy the healthier vegetable/argument.
And thats what is happening. On our forum, people were introducing material that short circuits logic. Any long intelligent answer was displaced by an emotional outburst, or cat videos, or jokes, flame wars - on serious topics.
This makes the exchange of ideas moot, and replaces it with the exchange of emotions.
The market place of ideas does not work at the internet scale, even for web forums, unless someone is moderating.
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Additional random thoughts:
First, things are much worse than you feel, because the act of speaking is almost entirely the act of being online. Censorship means you don't get to be heard (although you can speak), so it is, in internet terms, pretty serious.
1) This worked when the network didnt have centralized forces (as value collects in a network, activity increases, and the network will create some version of filters who become gatekeepers.)