My question to everyone supporting restrictions on speech and supporting privacy violations, even for good reasons, is this: are you prepared to have these tools fall into the wrong hands? The same methods used to quickly shut down a dangerous website or to track down a terrorist by their online posts can be used to silence protests and to hunt down political opposition.
Yes. The solution to trolling has always been moderation.
If the moderation is too strict then people leave and setup elsewhere. If it is just the trolls leaving then no one cares and it is a win/win.
...speech loopholes? Oh that's right... The first amendment only applies to printed materials and live spoken word. The founding fathers couldn't have foreseen social media, and certainly would have worded the amendment differently if they saw how powerful Twitter was.
The First Amendment to the Constitution explicitly forbids "Congress" from "abridging the freedom of speech." It goes no further. There's certainly a question of public policy here, but that result will be unlikely to turn on the First Amendment.
On whether a private company could prohibit the distribution of written materials in a town that they owned:
> Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.
> Regardless of what YouTube says, they are an advertiser-friendly entertainment website. Why in God's name would you use it to "chronicle history"? I don't understand this argument at all. The entire Fourth Estate in the US has always been primarily paid for by advertisers, and just saying YouTube is an "entertainment website" seems like a poor attempt to say it can only be used for cat videos or something. YouTube…
As a de facto monopoly, it’s certainly the only one that matters right now. But if, say, the porn tubes wanted to wall off a non-NSFW side, they could become a serious competitor overnight. Or if Netflix or Amazon started allowing end-user content, for that matter.
If someone uploaded non adult content to one of the adult sites doing totally non-controversial things, like discussing smart phones or say a 20 part series on linear algebra, would they be kicked off the platform? Is there some effort to titillate requirement?
I'm imagining some vlogger doing an epic trolling email thread with the mods about how "actually, many people find e&m physics lectures erotic..."
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/world/new-zealand-mosque-s... Maybe they don't want livestreams like this?
Well too goddamn bad. That's part of life in a post-Enlightenment world. You don't get to have the all the great shit without all the worst shit along with it. The very nature of freedom means at some point, someone is going to do something you don't like. And I don't mean the mosque shooting. That was illegal. I mean part of having a free society means you have put up with people saying crazy nonsensical bullshit th…
How we entered this post-enlightment is how we can get past it. I believe some censoring, with specific rules and fair enforcement is a healthy way to go. The disinformation has gone too far. Some of us have relatives who live in a parallel reality. This can’t go on forever..
However, random censoring is bad and if it does not break the rules it should not be censored.
My question to everyone supporting restrictions on speech and supporting privacy violations, even for good reasons, is this: are you prepared to have these tools fall into the wrong hands? The same methods used to quickly shut down a dangerous website or to track down a terrorist by their online posts can be used to silence protests and to hunt down political opposition.
What tools are these actually - the delete button? When it comes down to it - i like moderated spaces on the internet. I dont want to wade through spam, not to mention violent and abusive content. I don't like seeing shock images. So yes, i support having moderation. The question to me is not: yes/no moderation, its where you draw the line; what are your policies and how are they enforced. Fundamentally i think the s…
Whether or not you even see specific content on Facebook, Google or Hacker News depends on sorting algorithms, so that would be one of the tools used to censor content. It's not just "the delete button", it's so much more, like how DMCA processes are handled or AIs created to find naked people (which affects artists).
My question to everyone supporting restrictions on speech and supporting privacy violations, even for good reasons, is this: are you prepared to have these tools fall into the wrong hands? The same methods used to quickly shut down a dangerous website or to track down a terrorist by their online posts can be used to silence protests and to hunt down political opposition.
What tools are these actually - the delete button? When it comes down to it - i like moderated spaces on the internet. I dont want to wade through spam, not to mention violent and abusive content. I don't like seeing shock images. So yes, i support having moderation. The question to me is not: yes/no moderation, its where you draw the line; what are your policies and how are they enforced. Fundamentally i think the s…
>What tools are these actually - the delete button?
>are you prepared to have these tools fall into the wrong hands? Yes, because society has a plurality of institutions that constrain power. Restrictions (even speech restrictions themselves) are subject to the court of public opinion (we're talking about them right now), there's the judiciary, political opposition and so on. This argument never had any pull for me for the same reason I'm against abolishing the police…
What country do you live in?
Born and lived most of my life in Germany, now UK. I'd be willing to make that claim for much worse governed countries.
My birth place influences my position a lot. After the end of the war we enshrined the principle of 'militant democracy' in our basic law. Giving the state and its institutions the explicit power to deal with threats to the constitutional order, not repeating the mistakes of the weakened government of the Weimar period that gave rise to unchecked extremist forces.
I'm not prepared to have them 'fall into the wrong hands'. But these platforms are owned by these companies. What rules do we put in place that they have to host some of this content? Blatant misinformation, vague encouragement of violence... hate? Is the price of free speech that someone has to host it? Who doesn't want to?
> What rules do we put in place that they have to host some of this content? Blatant misinformation, vague encouragement of violence... hate? Why do they have to be rules? Why can't we have a culture of tolerance? Robots aren't running these companies. They're people, just like you and me. They can choose to be tolerant. Tolerance is about tolerating the most horrid things. Not because it's nice or those things have…
> Why can't we have a culture of tolerance?
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.[1]
If you haven't read Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies" then I'd suggest you do.
That is why I prefer these tools be used by private organizations to enforce their own private rules rather than being managed by government mandate. That ensures that enough social rules exist to maintain society but not rules which are so ingrained in law as to prevent progress or allow trivial total abuse.
Would you support breaking the near-monopolies that certain organizations have?
Yes although that's a tangential topic I feel related more to power concentration in a society. None of the organizations have close to a monopoly on communication or content. They simply all agree right now which is generally how implicit social rules tend to function. Eventually they'll start to disagree again in one way or another.
> Regardless of what YouTube says, they are an advertiser-friendly entertainment website. Why in God's name would you use it to "chronicle history"? I don't understand this argument at all. The entire Fourth Estate in the US has always been primarily paid for by advertisers, and just saying YouTube is an "entertainment website" seems like a poor attempt to say it can only be used for cat videos or something. YouTube…
As a de facto monopoly, it’s certainly the only one that matters right now. But if, say, the porn tubes wanted to wall off a non-NSFW side, they could become a serious competitor overnight. Or if Netflix or Amazon started allowing end-user content, for that matter.
I have no idea why porn sites wouldn't attempt to compete, their technology is solid, sometimes industry leading. Diversify.