isnt this what india china kazhakistan and other places are doing?
Local rules instead of global censorship
181–190 of 221 posts
Re: Local rules instead of global censorship
#182> After all the very reason they are in this “difficult position” is their business decision to insist on providing centrally-controlled global social media platforms, trying to push the round peg of a myriad of cultures into a square hole of a single moderation policy.
Facebook does have decentralized moderation. Every facebook group could in theory individually decide that Qanon conspiracies are unacceptable and remove them, and indeed most do. The problem is a minority won't, and the crazies just aggregate there. And the same principle applies whether the decentralized authorities are subreddit moderators or small site admins or what have you.
Moderation is fundamentally forced upon people against their individual will for the sake of the larger community. If the "baddies" self-censored, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Decentralized authority can work in situations where people can't freely associate, for example if my town forbids me from putting a "Hail Satan" sign on my lawn, it's a significant burden to move to a town of satanists, and even if I did, it would no longer be a problem for the town I left. But online it's trivial to find some place that will let me post "hail satan" and ignoring its existence will just have to be good enough for those who don't like it. There is no "local" on the internet - there is no distance nor natural barriers over which the actions of others lose potency. You are never more than a few keystrokes away from the deepest darkest pits of the internet, and there is no way of ensuring any concept stays in those pits.
I am not in favor of global censorship as I feel the harm outweighs the good. Unfortunately, local censorship is not a way to have our cake and eat it too.
Re: Local rules instead of global censorship
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe, but centralized services seem to have that problem too in practice.
The upside of that maybe there is more awareness of what is going on. If there is no centralization, could we end up in a world there no consensus on what is acceptable or right?
Isn't that where we currently are with centralization?
Re: Local rules instead of global censorship
#184Judging by the comments on these and similar threads, it seems that the biggest danger to democracy is voters who have different ideas about how the country should be run. The fundamental danger, of course, is money. Everything else is noise.
Money being able to influence elections is called corruption. Money isn't a problem in itself, corruption is. Just giving up and saying that money will always have this kind of influence and that all politicians will always be bought and there is nothing you can do is how you ensure corruption festers and grow.
The challenge is, aside from a few people, most are perfectly happy with money, censorship, etc if it helps their side.
Re: Local rules instead of global censorship
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free discussion does not axiomatically stop radicalization. There is a reasonable argument to be made that as we've seen communication get easier, it's made radicalization more possible rather than less. That said, I'd invite you to continue your line of reasoning: decentralization leads to free discussion. Free discussion leads to X. X leads to the reduction in radicalization. What is the X you see?
There are studies, just google "free speech". Your way does not work, unless you go full China. Then it sort of works fpr couple of decades. For example I converted several hard antivaxers by explaining importance of each vaccine one by one. They agreed that at least some of them are important. They went to less radical position. Another example was Brexit referendum. Populists had stupid arguments like 350 million/w…
The idea that you can just debate every point with every person is frankly absurd. It doesn't scale, it's always easier to produce more garbage that will appeal to folks on the fringe than to meticulously debunk it all point by point.
And even if you could keep up, not everyone will even engage. Folks don't want their beliefs challenged point by point -- it feels bad. It takes energy and commitment to be willing to hear challenges to ones own beliefs and not everyone has that ability.
And there's clearly positions that effectively reduce radicalization between fully open and "full China". There are also studies that say deplatforming is effective.
Re: Local rules instead of global censorship
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think lobbying is a symptom of centralization. You see large concentrations around power centers because lobbyists will go wherever the people in power are. In a decentralized system, you'd still have lobbyists, they'ed just be spread out more. Lobbying is a consequence of a professional political class. Those who make and implement laws need to be knowledgeable about laws, which is why such large numbers are…
It would be harder to lobby in dozens of international jurisdictions, for example, they’d have a hard time imposing western values in Turkey or Iran, for example and vice versa, which I think we’d be better off with.
There are significant foreign lobbies in many nations already. To pick a visible and relevant example, a major controversy over the past 4 years has surrounded Michael Flynn who was acting as an unregistered agent lobbying for Turkey in the US.
Re: Local rules instead of global censorship
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Competition is the hallmark of liberalism, or a free-market economy. Capitalism and a free market are pretty much orthogonally related (consider, if you will, the ideal capitalist state in which a single capitalist controls 100% of the market). The central philosophy is capitalism sure isn't competition. It's the accumulation of wealth. It's usually accomplished by taking it from those who create it. Reducing competi…
Now you've got my brain in a twist. What about the other extreme (apparently equally ideal) case of a capitalist state in which every single person controls an equal share of the market? Doesn't that sound the least bit socialist to you?
Not really. Everyone having an equal ownership of capital is not the same as a central representative authority holding all capital. Democaratically syndicated ownership of capital is closer to (true) communism and the complete opposite of socialism.
Re: Local rules instead of global censorship
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should be mentioned that Denmark, which has often been pointed to as an example of a successful socialist country is not socialist. The country's politicians vociferously protest against this label and going by Engels' own definition, the country is not at all socialist. It is extremely capitalist with classical hierarchies of business ownership. High tax, free healthcare and free schooling does not make a country…
So what does make a country even remotely socialist, in your opinion?
Not having some of the largest wealth inequality in the world (look it up).
Re: Local rules instead of global censorship
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it doesn't meet this definition, I wouldn't call it socialist. Otherwise, the word socialism would lose its meaning. California having high taxes does not make it socialist. Austria having free education does not make it socialist.
Purple is more red than blue is red. This doesn't make the word "red" lose its meaning. In my opinion, it gives the word more meaning by defining it as a spectrum of quality. Thus we can plot colors on a spectrum of red-ness, which can be useful for certain applications. Similarily for capitalism-socialism. It is a spectrum. The United States represents one extreme, where something like, I don't know, North Korea may…
That is not a good comparison. Blue and red are well defined as high frequency and low frequency electromagnetic radiation. Capitalism and socialism, on the other hand, are very vague terms, and I think the many discussions here prove that.
Take, for example, a country where the majority of things are privately run but are heavily taxed by the government. Is that more capitalist or socialist than a country where most of the economy is run by the government, but the remaining private businesses pay little to no taxes?
Or a country where one party owns everything but pretends to act on behalf of the workers, as opposed to a country where everyone is a business owner? Or a country that has little labor regulation but a strong social safety net, versus a country with weak social welfare but strict labor regulation?
Re: Local rules instead of global censorship
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you really need that much of a justification to claim that centralized power is a danger to democracy. Democracy is to place power into the hands of each individual, every form of centralized power necessarily pulls this power away from people and into the hands of a limited number of individuals. Democracy isn't so much threatened but actually harmed by the mere existence of centralized power.
Actually this is not so clear. One can make arguments either way. For example in feudal Europe and later on, Europe was divided into very small states ruled by tyrants. The power was highly local but this did not result in more freedom for the people. Freedom actually corresponds well with the rise of nation states that centralized power. Even today it is not so clear. It is not hard to find local administrations tha…
I reckon it's more about what power is taken away than into how many tyrants that power is concentrated. If you have more tyrants then technically the power is less concentrated but it's mostly the tyrants that have any additional power.
It would get interesting if you could come up with an example where taking power away from the people resulted in more freedom but that sounds like a contradiction.