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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

#261

Post by gonational »

zozbot234 wrote: post #27
crazygringo wrote: post #2

Given how much the issue of free speech comes up here on HN -- especially regarding Twitter, Facebook, and politics -- I think this is a really important article for people to read. It's long, but is extremely nuanced and shows that the issue is far more complex than just "the solution to offensive speech is more speech". One key takeaway is in the middle: > [Free speech is] a fundamentally optimistic vision: Good id…

> [Free speech is] a fundamentally optimistic vision: Good ideas win. The better argument will prove persuasive. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Free speech is pessimistic as heck. It's saying that good ideas don't necessarily win, but if you allow authoritarians to engage in arbitrary censorship then bad ideas will always win. Censoring free speech is not just a "crude authoritarian's" move; it's what all authoritarians do whe…

Everything you said is 100% true.

Anyone who tries to take this right, or any other right, away from you is planning to, in the long run, kill you. History tells us this very clearly.

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

#262

Post by dragonwriter »

dimator wrote: post #260
thayne wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what kind of business model would incentivize providing accurate, balanced information over spectacle and divisiveness.

None. That's the problem. We've reached a point where the very engine of humanity's growth, capitalism, has revealed a huge vulnerability in its design.

That flaw was apparent generations ago; yellow journalism isn't a product of the internet age.

Capitalism also isn't the fundamental engine of hunanity’s growth, just a fairly recent stage in the development of economic systems that is likely as transitional as all the past stages.

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

#263

Post by giancarlostoro »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #203
Animats wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. It should be attaching a fact-based reply. This is not too hard, because the number of different bogus memes seen in bulk is not that large.

But who will fact-check the fact-checkers? Also, who will ensure that fact-checking rules are consistently applied to everyone?

Agreed. Who snopes the snopes? Did you know Snopes has been shown to be biased since it is ran by people who lean one direction, who stops them from misinforming the public. What about when politicians are exposed and the media shields them are we just going to blindly trust a biased media source?

We need to allow the people to review all evidence and form conclusions from said evidence. I cant tell you how many times I have followed up on media articles only to find that the media just spat anything out for ads. Without all the facts it is bias and speculation.

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

#264

Post by pdonis »

josquindesprez wrote: post #198
pdonis wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looking only at people as individuals limits you to seeing first-order effects. Where did I say "looking only at people as individuals"? My point was precisely the opposite: that people are not just individuals, that an individual person's failure to exercise common sense and critical thinking skills, making them susceptible to manipulation, when aggregated over a large enough segment of society, has higher order e…

> In a free society, you penalize the people who can't act like responsible adults, not the people who can. If the ills of social media are, as you say, (and I also believe), caused by the higher-order effects of many individuals "failing to exercise common sense and critical thinking," then who are we to punish? A phenomenon like QAnon might have been started by a single nefarious person, and amplified by a small gr…

> who are we to punish?

I didn't say "punish", I said "penalize". Responsible adults should not have to have their society ruined because irresponsible people are manipulating and other irresponsible people are being manipulated.

> it's only because of social media's leverage

But what causes the leverage? It isn't just social media; if a billion people read on Facebook that they should drink nail polish to immunize themselves against COVID-19 (to concoct a fictional, as far as I know, example), and they do it, they suffer the consequences, not me.

What causes the leverage is that we have continued to hand more and more power to governments in the name of "fixing" problems that governments cannot fix. The result is that capturing that government power is worth so much that nefarious people are willing to spend billions to do it. Social media gives those people more leverage, yes, but if that big gob of centralized power wasn't there in the first place, it wouldn't matter.

Your proposed solution doesn't fix that problem; it makes it worse, by giving government even more power. And that just means responsible people get more penalized for the behavior of irresponsible people, because you're giving the government more power to ban tools that responsible people can make responsible use of.

> the system is designed to maximize ordinary people's ability to create self-sustaining societal doom loops

No, the system is designed to maximize the amount of power that nefarious people can capture, by centralizing that power. The solution is to de-centralize that power so it isn't there to capture. Stop depending on government fiat to fix problems.

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

#265

Post by jimkleiber »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #127
throwaway13337 wrote: post #95

Society is misdiagnosing the issue here. It's not unchecked free speech. Instead, it's unchecked curation by media and social media companies with the goal of engagement. As long as media companies get the most benefit from people engaging with content, they will continue to promote information that is damaging to society. It may even be true information but when the goal is engagement, it's purpose will be to enrage…

Netflix doesn't sell ads (and doesn't rely on user-generated content, so they can't really threaten democracy), but if you read interviews with executives, they also seem to be optimizing for maximum time spent on the service. Apple, too, reportedly told developers it's increasingly looking for Apple Arcade games that will "keep users hooked" over a long period. [1] Consequently, I'm not convinced removing ad-support…

I think the underlying challenge here might be that the most "successful" businesses often make us the most addicted. I'm curious how many of the very large companies, if any, don't rely on a business model of (borderline) addiction to their products.

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

#266

Post by adamsea »

pdonis wrote: post #186
josquindesprez wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd honestly have a hard time making a case that Fox News is less net bad for society than Facebook as of today. But Fox News feels like the "end-stage" version of whatever you'd call that particular flavor of classic corruption and human-brain-hijacking, whereas Facebook has been visibly improving its algorithmic behavior control abilities, has already invented new flavors of human-brain-hijacking, and seems to be g…

> I'd honestly have a hard time making a case that Fox News is less net bad for society than Facebook as of today. If you were to put "any media outlet" in place of "Fox News", I would agree with you. Part of the problem is that so many people think it's only the media outlets that say things they disagree with that are the problem. It isn't. It's all of them, no matter what side they're on or what point of view they…

> They will all lie and manipulate when it suits them.

Absolutely. At the same time I think it makes sense to single out Fox News at this current moment. For several years now they have they been a straight-up propaganda mouthpiece. They’re noticeably worse.

I’d call myself a Progressive, but FWIW as a habit I don’t watch any television news regularly - I read.

Point being I think it’s reasonable to say that you can’t say with a straight face that Fox News is - at this particular moment - equivalent to other networks.

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

#267

Post by DenisM »

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…

I came here to express the same sentiment, but you did it first and you did it better. Thank you.

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

#268

Post by vimy »

ironman1478 wrote: post #161
betwixthewires wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen some names you've named, and I don't like or follow those individuals, but I assume you don't like what they have to say. So as a thought experiment, ask yourself, is there anyone you like and follow that you believe is feeding you misinformation? Or are you the only person that is not basing your worldview on misleading information (or, maybe not alone, but others very much like you)? If the answer is no (…

I don't like what they have to say because its inherently not fact based. I am totally susceptible to bias and I do not claim to be otherwise, but there are certain ground rules we can set. Rush Limbaugh always starts off his rants and problematic messages with straight up incorrect statements. As in statements that are verifiably false. He then constructs arguments around these false ideas. The issue is, to the aver…

> We even have a president who dog whistled a terror plot against the governor of Michigan. Trump is a white supremacist and white supremacism is inherently a non fact based ideological stance, yet it leads to stuff like the terror plot.

It wasn’t a white supremacist plot. It was a bunch of anarchists (notice the flag in the background) who think Trump is a tyrant[1], who hate the police and everything related to the government and one of them even attended a blm rally.

> One of alleged plotters, 23-year-old Daniel Harris, attended a Black Lives Matter protest in June, telling the Oakland County Times he was upset about the killing of George Floyd and police violence." [2]

A good example of how every side has its disinformation.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/robbystarbuck/status/131432655350... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/kidnap-plot...

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

#269

Post by webmaven »

jseliger wrote: post #164
throwaway13337 wrote: post #95

Society is misdiagnosing the issue here. It's not unchecked free speech. Instead, it's unchecked curation by media and social media companies with the goal of engagement. As long as media companies get the most benefit from people engaging with content, they will continue to promote information that is damaging to society. It may even be true information but when the goal is engagement, it's purpose will be to enrage…

It's not unchecked free speech. Instead, it's unchecked curation by media and social media companies with the goal of engagement. Try teaching non-elite undergrads sometime, and particularly assignments that require some sense of epistemology, and you'll discover that the vast majority of people have pretty poor personal epistemic hygiene—it's not much required in most people, most of the time, in most jobs. We evolv…

> Try teaching non-elite undergrads sometime, and particularly assignments that require some sense of epistemology, and you'll discover that the vast majority of people have pretty poor personal epistemic hygiene—it's not much required in most people, most of the time, in most jobs.

I'm not sure what you mean by "non-elite undergrads" here.

Is it "undergrads from non-elite universities", or "undergrads from non-elite backgrounds", "B-student undergrads", or perhaps something else?

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

#270

Post by strawberrypuree »

cortesoft wrote: post #170
strawberrypuree wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No lucid assessment of “free speech” entertains a definition that includes “the use of machine learning to target messages to individuals in order to make money.” In the same way me sitting outside your house watching when you come and go to determine the best time to place a political flier on your door so you’ll see it when I want you to, surveillance capitalism it not free speech.

So you can't use machine learning.... can you use psychology to craft your message? Can you do surveys and gather demographic data to choose where to target? You obviously think there is a line where you can no longer use tools to craft your message, but I am not sure where you would draw it. I feel like any argument you make against machine learning is going to be able to also be used against something like the prin…

> but I am not sure where you would draw it.

I am sure where to draw it: at using machine learning. How did I draw this line? I saw the disparate impact machine learning has vs traditional media, by sheer measurement of friction. Traditional media requires intentionality on the part of the target: picking up a newspaper, turning on a television and tuning to a station. ML on social media exploits key weaknesses in human psychology combined with unprecedented data collection to nudge individuals to read/believe/buy. This is wrong, it’s clearly wrong, and should be illegal.

The sort of slippery-slope arguments are necessary and important but should not paralyze us from taking action against it.

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