311–320 of 451 posts
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Spam alone would eliminate its utility.
Imagine a spam filter for social media. I actively want this.
Tell me how this is wrong: The US is de facto converting to the Chinese model for the internet: All communication must be monitored, damaging content must be erased, and in serious cases, those responsible must be punished. If Parler gets a foreign data center, I expect a "Great Firewall of China" with American characteristics will soon follow.
Yup this is coming. The "slippery slope" is real and recent actions confirm it. This is scary and these actions are unprecedented. The USA has never seen such restrictions on free speech in its history
Guess you've never heard of slavery or Japanese internment or any number of other massive efforts to silence minorities in this country. Y'all are losing your minds over nothing. If anything this whole thing has just reinforced how incredibly fragile and weak-willed the right has become in this country. You've been catered to for so long you've lost all sense of direction and think anyone asking for seatbelts on this rollercoaster is trying to ruin your life.
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In most cases you'd be shadow-banned. (The post looks fine to you, but is invisible to everyone else.) Or, they just put their thumbs on the scale and make sure your post isn't shown to anyone (or very few people) rather than your typical audience.
Shadow banning is some real underhanded sh#t. On reddit I explained that mayor Pete's M4A wasn't the same M4A as the world understood it. A user immediately responds accusing of me editing my comment to deceive. I say prove it you f#cking liar, there are services that archive. Then I'm hit with the ban for being profane and harassing. Yup, turns out the comment had been very quickly shadow-banned lol. I should have k…
Agree that it's all over the place, but it's depressing to see left's attitude that they have the numbers now to attack the same free speech which helped so many efforts in the last twenty years.
Should the US government make its own social network? That would cut off all kinds of issues. Only content that is literally illegal would be removed. Everyone would be guaranteed access.
A failure of critical thinking skills at the national level or willful ignorance?
Are we really so stupid that we cannot see through this kind of thing and need to actively censor it to have civilized society continue to function? When do we just give up on democracy completely?
To be clear, I'm not indicating that the framers had the right idea about this. Rather, just mentioning that the risks of under-informed general populace exercising direct democratic election has been under consideration since the nation's founding.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...
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Facebook's shadowban mechanism is more elaborate than that. They will still show the post to people they think you are closest to, while hiding it from the general newsfeed where most things show. The Facebook newsfeed is quite similar to TV, because you can only change channels, but have very little control over what is displayed.
How do you know how Facebook's shadowban mechanism works? Has it been reverse-engineered? My search-fu us failing me.
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I completely agree. I would like to see some of the other replies here comment on how democracy can function if the citizens are incompetent/stupid. If they can't be trusted to be knowledgeable, then how can they make informed decisions, including voting? And of course, who decides which people hold legitimate positions and which people are ignorant?
It is well known that an educated, free people are necessary for the functioning of democracy. It's part of the justification for the 1st Amendment. We have new technologies which are being leveraged to intentionally misinform people, in a society that has degraded public education and raised the cost of higher education to levels prohibitive for the majority of the population, and as a result, the society (as a whol…
im saying this because it seems like such an obvious point but i havent seen it here- why are people who want the government to be replaced by the "free market" allowed to be upset that private companies are silencing them? what is the rationale for squaring this circle
That is not to say that censorship is evil on its face. Like taxes, it serves an important purpose especially in private discourse. HN would not be as it is without the tireless efforts at moderation and censorship in the name of pruning out low quality discourse. To disallow all voluntary content discrimination or censorship is to lose direction. However, the key distinction is that the vast majority of the censorship on HN is not backstopped by the threat of government censorship to comply. If the calls for censorship stopped at the private sector and did not threaten the intervention of the government if they did not get what they wanted then I would have absolutely no problem with these private companies silencing individuals in much the same way I have no problem with HN banning people.
I suspect somebody will chime in saying that the censorship is now totally voluntary because they have realized just how bad the consequences of their existing policies are with the riots in the capital. To that I say, have you ever seen Zuckerberg talk about free speech [1]? Just look at 4:50 or so. 5:20, is literally a total refutation of the current arguments. At every step along this path he has spoken in favor of free speech and fought the calls for them to censor Facebook. As far as I can tell he is a true believer in the principles of free speech. There is no doubt in my mind that if he truly believed that the government would not intervene that he would not only not censor, he would immediately revert to their policies as of a few years ago with respect to censorship.
Really this argument seems to come from people saying that the 1st Amendment only applies to the government, so private censorship is totally fine. True, but are you really following the spirit of the 1st Amendment if you threaten government censorship? If people really thought the government would not censor, then they would assign zero credibility to the threat and ignore it. That people truly consider the threat is an indication that they feel it might actually be acted upon.
Also, I am not saying that government censorship is bad in all cases. There are cases where unlimited free speech may not be worth the consequences. However, such rules should always be carefully considered and we should not turn a blind eye to the fact that we are, in fact, using the government to stamp down on speech. It is with great regret that we should make such decisions since we can find no other alternative and we should acknowledge that we have engaged in evil to fight an even greater one.
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Newspapers regularly decline to publish letters to the editor from loonies trying to organize a coup. What is unprecedented is giving these loonies a huge platform that helps them find like-minded loonies to organize while keeping them in an information bubble that shields them from corrections.
Yet we never opened mail to protect society from loonies trying to organize a coup. We never censored phone calls. Social media is the modern mode of communication, and just because we can censor speech online doesn't mean we should. Free speech has always meant tolerating repelent speech.
It would be prohibitively expensive to find enough like-minded loonies to organize a coup using telemarketing or physical mail marketing, and the act of doing so would annoy enough people that you would get shut down anyway.
Deplatforming dangerous loonies on Facebook and Twitter is not a new thing. It already happened with ISIS.