Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 421 posts

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

#341

Post by mcadenhe »

riverlong wrote: post #332

I'm worried that this situation is going to get a great deal worse. A flurry of disinformation and online noise is somewhat manageable so long as it is coming from humans, who may be paid by a state or an enterprise to drive engagement with controversial topics. It's going to get a million times worse when this gets automated. Right now the quantity of disinformation is practically limited by the human capacity to po…

Interesting essay Jay. The top comment in this thread is by throwaway13337. You see this when people have a hot take they want to post but aren't ready to own it in front of their peers. I'd bet on average comments from accounts with identifiable personal info are much more tame and civil. But if everyone is too scared to talk about something for fear of getting cancelled then anonymity is the natural answer.

---

Maybe in the future if something is written by a bot it will need to be disclosed that a real human did not %100 write it. I mean I just looked at your blog and your twitter and I feel like a devious enough actor could use AI to help them create just as genuine of an online presence as you have, even down to the profile pic.

I actually wanted to raise this discussion on HN and created a thread [1] but it didn't get any traction. Maybe it could be a future topic for you.

If things continue the way they are we'll all be paranoid about everything being fake, like an internet Truman show. The sad part is you know it's fake and there's nothing you can do about it. So basically we have to go back to meatspace for genuine human interaction which is not the absolute worst I guess as long as there's not a deadly pandemic going on.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24807090

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

#342

Post by gejsvsgajaba »

natmaka wrote: post #286
arvinsim wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quote "If you do not pay, you are the product" implied that if you pay, you are not the product. That is, a profile won't be built around you to be tracked and manipulated. Today it's more like "You are the product, whether you pay or not".

> The quote "If you do not pay, you are the product" implied that if you pay, you are not the product Such a contraposition isn't necessarily true. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraposition

Well if you want to get pedantic then "if you pay, you are not the product" is the inverse, not the contraposition. The contraposition is "if you are not the product, then you pay".

(Finally, the philosophy classes I took at university can be used for something)

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

#343

Post by erichocean »

cortesoft wrote: post #178
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…

Can't I believe both things? I believe that Free Speech is one of the most important rights we have, but I also believe that people utilize their free speech to mislead and do harm. While it would be nice to believe that "the solution is simple more free speech", and that the truth will win out in the end, is not fully backed up by the evidence. Lies can be carefully crafted to exploit the way human brains work, to m…

> people utilize their free speech to mislead and do harm

Trust the government, comrades, and fear the people! It's the people that mislead and do harm.

Seems legit.

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

#344

Post by gejsvsgajaba »

shadowgovt wrote: post #217
monoideism wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Universal Basic Income people (that used to be called the "dole" in the UK) I'm much more ambivalent than I used to be about UBI, after seeing what large groups of sequestered, out-of-work, bored, and angry people are capable of doing, but just to clarify, UBI is not the same as the dole. The dole is only given to people who are unemployed, whereas UBI is given to everyone.

Probably worth keeping in mind that what you're seeing is sequestered, out-of-work, bored, angry people who still have to make ends meet in a hyper-capitalist society without some kind of guaranteed income. In general, it's not people with time on their hands who pick up a brick and huck it through a store window; if it were, you'd see more millionaire looters. It's people who don't have anything to lose.

> who still have to make ends meet in a hyper-capitalist society without some kind of guaranteed income.

Not true in the UK, where those out-of-work people have been getting a six-month paid holiday funded by government debt.

Totally agree with GP that the behaviour of those people this year has severely dampened my enthusiasm for UBI.

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

#345

Post by dkobia »

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…

I too grew up without free speech in a dictatorship and believe fervently in free speech. However I believe too that dictating to a company what speech they can have or can't have on their platform is a violation of free speech in itself. It is their right to disagree with someone's opinion and to deny them access to their platform. If we disagree with that action we punish with our eyeballs, or our wallets or we build our own.

That these platforms are so huge is a problem for sure but doesn't automatically classify them as institutions owned by the public. There are other ways to deal with companies that get too big.

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

#346

Post by didibus »

betwixthewires wrote: post #138
didibus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently the ideas in the first amendment were influenced by the enlightenment thinkers philosophies from Europe such as John Locke and Cesare Beccaria. It's said that Thomas Jefferson influenced James Madison heavily as well in having him come up with the bill of rights. So already you can read up on those people and their phylosophies to get a better idea of the concepts behind freedom of speech. Similarly, about…

> Similarly, about 200 ideas were proposed by the various states to be included in it, and Madison selected 10 from those ideas. I don't know where you got this, but I wanted to let you know it is very much incorrect. The bill of rights was originally submitted to congress as 17 articles, passed by congress as 12 articles, 11 of which have been ratified by the states. 10 ratified in 1789 and one, the 27th amendment,…

I got it from here: https://www.thoughtco.com/who-wrote-the-first-amendment-7211...

Where it says:

> When in 1789, he outlined 12 amendments, it was after reviewing over 200 ideas proposed by different state conventions. Out of these, ultimately 10 were selected, edited, and finally accepted as the Bill of Rights.

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

#347

Post by didibus »

defen wrote: post #67
didibus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently the ideas in the first amendment were influenced by the enlightenment thinkers philosophies from Europe such as John Locke and Cesare Beccaria. It's said that Thomas Jefferson influenced James Madison heavily as well in having him come up with the bill of rights. So already you can read up on those people and their phylosophies to get a better idea of the concepts behind freedom of speech. Similarly, about…

What I find interesting about that is that it's presented as an originalist argument, by a presumably progressive writer, against the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Usually it's the other way around, and conservatives are amenable to originalist arguments.

That's interesting, since most founding fathers were progressive in their own right. And most ideas related to the founding of the USA revolved around the ideas of the enlightenment, which were all progressive and liberal in nature, in fact they pretty much coined both terms.

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

#348

Post by BlackFly »

betwixthewires wrote: post #112
taxicab wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it is a straw man. The idea that crazygringo highlighted was simply the notion that maybe the best ideas don't win in a free marketplace of ideas. The straw man presented was that you wouldn't be able to discuss this at all if there was no free speech.

But there are regulations on free speech and they are sensible. My understanding of speech regulations in the USA is that they primarily need to be focused on time, place and manner restrictions unless they fall into some exceptions that typically don't matter (edit: typically don't matter in political discussions).

A sensible manner restriction: you will generally be told to move along if you are shouting your message at the top of your lungs in a public place. Especially so if it is the middle of the night.

How you speak your message can be regulated in a more easily balanced way, although it is somewhat dangerous as well. This leads to potential place, manner restrictions online. A manner restriction can easily be content neutral.

A manner restriction: you could maybe regulate the use of sock puppets or fake accounts.

Here you see it is a strawman argument to say we could not have a discussion regarding whether good ideas will win in a marketplace where sock puppets are banned.

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

#349

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

kelnos wrote: post #324
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If country's own citizens do the voting, I'm personally fine with anyone influencing them. If we postulate that people are responsible and reasonable enough to have a say in the elections, it is an insult to assume that they are some weak-minded fools who can be easily swayed by a hostile foreign government.

Insulting or not, we already have Exhibit A: the US 2016 Presidential election. In all seriousness, I think you're framing it the wrong way. It's really: they are normal human beings with fallible intellect and emotions who can be swayed by the sophisticated propaganda campaigns of a hostile foreign government.

Yeah, the US 2016 Presidential election. The losing side is so devastated by the loss, that it still can't accept that it's their own compatriots who didn't elect their rather questionable candidate, so they are desperately grasping any other explanation, why she lost.

Americans did the voting, not Putin. If $200k of ads did the job, well, Dems should have spent $201k to counter that.

Also, are you suggesting that any foreign power can cheaply puppeteer the feeble-minded US population? Of so, maybe you need some form of authoritarian rulership to protect the people. Or else, I'm sure, even Iran and North Korea will find a few million bucks to install their own presidents.

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

#350

Post by mensetmanusman »

tzs wrote: post #252
refurb wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we start censoring everything people might misinterpret we might as well just throw in the towel at that point.

Pointing out that a satirical article is not actual news is censoring it?

We could put labels next to all text/speakers speaking that say: ‘this is comedy’
Post reply on HN