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The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation

nytimes.com

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Re: The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation

#111

Post by asimpletune »

The core issue is actually by allowing companies to harvest hyper individualized information about you, so then they can then design algorithms to maximize engagement by exploiting our psychology, and thus harvest our attention and clicks...

Literally if we just started to pay for stuff we’d see this problem improved. The consequences of the current model is that the internet has become the modern equivalent of a welfare state, in the sense that our experiences are sponsored by our wealthy corporate benefactors. Clearly not a good recipe for civic engagement.

So, as consumers we should pay for things if we want to have nice stuff, and also businesses simply shouldn’t be able to follow literally every person in the world around, as they stroll around the internet, and write down and share what they’re looking at. That could be done by creating liability around data collection/protection, as in the case if HIPPA, or outright banning the technology that enables ad tech at scale. I’m sure people here have much better ideas than this, I’m just offering an ethos.

Also the internet itself should be treated as a public utility. The sad thing is by not paying, we’re still paying, just in less direct ways, since the ad tech that sponsors our internet lives still has to get money from somewhere...

Edited for clarity

Re: The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation

#112

Post by betwixthewires »

taxicab wrote: post #11
ColanR wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the argument you've highlighted is a good idea, or a particularly dangerous one. Maybe we should discuss it and find out. Or maybe we should call what you're saying 'propaganda' and ban it outright, since it might call for 'radical' and 'potentially destabilizing' 'changes to our democracy'. It would be too bad if you could only present it as an opinion, in limited arenas far away from anyone who might di…

Since the point clearly went over your head or you just decided to give that snotty reply to a strawman you came up with: parent was saying good ideas don't win if demagogues can hold a monopoly on the marketplace of ideas in the same way that, say, the ISP industry can hold broadly anti-consumer policies that customers don't do anything about because it is locally not a free market. To expand it further, I would arg…

There's no straw man in the argument you're replying to. All that was said was "maybe the idea that things should be censored is a bad idea and should be censored." It is a very clever way to demonstrate the danger of what you're potentially prepared to embrace, and how it can be used against you.

Nobody can hold a monopoly on the marketplace of ideas. Nobody. That genie is out of the bottle.

Re: The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation

#113

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

l33tbro wrote: post #105
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #81

I come from a country where a free speech was never really a thing, and I tell you, americans, this: you don't value it enough. Restrictions on free speech inevitably lead to some form of censorship, and any form of censorship inevitably leads to the population being subjected to some 'official' version of 'truth'. This 'truth', however, is carefully curated to coerce the population to act in a certain way. So when T…

Artists in the soviet era had to employ all kinds of allegories and humor to communicate their experience without being reprimanded by KGB censors. I'll take free speech over assigning any group the power to arbitrate what is considered "disinformation".

Exactly. So every time I see news of twitter/fb 'fact-checking', it reeks to me with a far too familiar KGB / STASI odor.

Going down this path will not end well.

Re: The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation

#114

Post by msla »

cycloptic wrote: post #110
remarkEon wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it very interesting (but understandable) that tech people, obsessed with data and informed decision-making, are essentially stating that "this time will be different" when arguing for speech restrictions. Despite all the decades of history of these sorts of things going sideways, somehow we're still optimistic that this time we'll get it right.

I find all the pearl-clutching on HN about "free speech" to be rather boring when these have always been heavily moderated platforms run by for-profit businesses that have always given special treatment to whatever advertisers were willing to pay the most. Nobody bats an eye when they're the ones profiting off of it. I'm sorry if that's dismissive but it's extremely frustrating hearing these kinds of things in the co…

> I find all the pearl-clutching on HN about "free speech" to be rather boring when these have always been heavily moderated platforms run by for-profit businesses that have always given special treatment to whatever advertisers were willing to pay the most. Nobody bats an eye when they're the ones profiting off of it.

"You say you're in favor of free speech, yet when I run into your house screaming obscenities you try to kick me out. Interesting."

HN isn't the only discussion site. Reddit isn't the only discussion site. The big social media companies don't own the Internet, and iHeartMedia doesn't own radio. It's vital we have alternatives, and laws to ensure those alternatives exist can be discussed, but saying that people don't really value free speech when they prefer moderated discussion spaces doesn't track. It's trying to equate unlike things, and create a contradiction where there is none.

Re: The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation

#115

Post by pessimizer »

015UUZn8aEvW wrote: post #26

It's ironic that Emily Bazelon, the author of this essay, is the granddaughter of the late influential federal judge David Bazelon. Judge Bazelon was a well-known progressive and a well-known free speech proponent. Although his granddaughter shares his broadly progressive worldview, her position on this issue is different. The evolution from David to Emily reflects that of the US left as a whole. Most people like to…

No part of the 60s New Left occupies the commanding heights outside of a few Ramparts Magazine born-again Catholic neocons. This is a fantasy of right-wingers who try to roll the US black civil rights struggle and working-class socialism into a big ball of University Judeo-Bolshevism.

edit: That gay people, black people, and women have to be considered now is not left-wing politics, which are about class. That people other than white men have a voice is a rational, liberal outgrowth of the civil rights movement. Other than that, mainstream politics moved aggressively to the right until the bottom fell out of the capitalist utopian theory in 2008.

Re: The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation

#116

Post by belorn »

If we look at the issue from the other side, the problem with censorship is the central idea of a civilizing mission on the belief that government and only government can really artfully determine who ought to speak to the masses in the interest of the expansion of knowledge.

The misguided belief in the superiority of government wisdom about who should speak to many has happened before. With radio it was unlicensed radio stations that corrupted youths with rebellious thoughts and strange music. With TV and movies it was commercial publisher corrupting youths with violence and nudity. Now with the Internet it is bubbles that corrupt youths with disinformation and falsehoods.

The enthusiasm for radio censorship is dead. TV censorship died relative recently. Internet censorship however is starting to gain popularity, but I strongly suspect it will crash in a few decades just like radio and TV did. Future people will look back on the misguided belief in the superiority of a handful companies and wonder how it ever could gain popularity.

Re: The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation

#117

Post by msla »

acituan wrote: post #71
UncleOxidant wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except truth is hardly an out there objectivity Except truth by definition is objective. Opinions and beliefs are subjective. The earth is spherically shaped - this is not a subjective opinion, it is objective truth. > including utopian ideas of its attainability with likes of “fact checks” Aren't "fact checks" part of the free discussion? If a leader is spewing lots of falsehoods then it's up to the 4th estate to…

> Except truth by definition is objective Except metaphysics of truth has been discussed for centuries and things are more complicated than that. Truth on matters most interesting to us is mostly transjective (neither objective nor subjective but depends on the interaction between the agent and the arena), because which truth you pursue is as important as what the thing is in itself, and the information we could seek…

> “Earth is spherically shaped” is not an “objective truth” if you are calculating the response time of your radio transmission of your satellite over a ground station up north, you need to get more precise than a “sphere”.

https://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.ht...

> The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.

> My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

"Truth is hard, let's go Postmodern!" isn't a valid conclusion. It's an escape hatch, a refusal to make a best effort and, when it's about something that matters, a horribly dangerous practice which essentially cedes the field to the idiots who have no such scruples. "VACCINES BAD! VACCINES AUTISM!" is idiocy, it's dangerous, and it must be countered, not implicitly allowed to pass because what is "Facts" anyway, man?

Re: The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation

#118

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

krapp wrote: post #99
orangecat wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair response. I do get a bit excitable on this issue, because I consider the ability to express unpopular opinions to be one of the greatest sources of progress in history, from "what if the earth goes around the sun?" to "what if owning people is actually bad?" Yes, that means a lot of bad ideas are going to be out there, which is a price I firmly believe we should be willing to pay. And I think the point…

>Yes, that means a lot of bad ideas are going to be out there, which is a price I firmly believe we should be willing to pay. This is an easy out, as it assumes bad ideas are just "out there" like a noble gas, not interacting with anything around them. But speech doesn't exist in a vacuum, it always has consequences, and very often exists explicitly to enact change or call to action. Do you believe the effect of the…

> "Do you believe the effect of the spread and adoption of bad ideas is a price we should always be willing to pay?"

You mean like freedom of religion and religious tolerance, including for atheism? A few centuries ago, effectively 100% of the population was religious and such beliefs were anathema. Should society have suppressed the spread and adoption of that "bad idea" and remained religion-bound instead of becoming secular?

To endorse suppression of "bad ideas" is conservatism in a nutshell: The ideas we have today are surely right; anything that differs from them is dangerous and needs to be suppressed.

Re: The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation

#120

Post by betwixthewires »

dagmx wrote: post #3

This is a pretty good read and fairly nuanced. IMHO free speech needs accountability and massive increases in education resources to be effective. Without accountability, the loudest voices can set what is true to many. This congregates power into the already powerful, until new means of information dissemination are created to allow new voices. However those too will need the same accountability or will fall to the…

"Free speech" cannot be held to account for anything, only people can be held to account for speaking. Accountability to whom?

Every "whom" has an interest. Any way for any entity to hold any other to any artificial consequence for saying anything at all will assuredly be perverted. This is why free speech is held as an absolutist value. Any compromise will inevitably lead to abuse. There can be no legitimate mechanism to enforce this. There can be no criteria required to say whatever you want or learn whatever you want. Anything less than everyone having the right to say anything for any reason is an unacceptable compromise. You as a free individual cannot allow the normalization of speech policing to occur. If you do so you will inevitably be victimized.

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