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Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship

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Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship

#21

Post by prepend »

radley wrote: post #18
daenz wrote: post #5

Take what you support and imagine it used against you in the worst possible ways. Do you still support it? If yes, then it is worth supporting. If it's not, then maybe you're only supporting it because of who it currently helps or harms. This exercise also works with things that you don't support.

This makes the false assumption that authoritarians won't abuse the system simply because non-authoritarians didn't. Authoritarians gonna make up their own authority regardless.

> Authoritarians gonna make up their own authority regardless.

I think they’ll try to, but not always succeed. They will definitely use and abuse any existing powers.

So I think it’s logically unsound, and quite sad to me, to argue that it’s pointless to resist allowing powers that can be exploited because authoritarians will do it anyway.

Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship

#22

Post by cortesoft »

betterunix2 wrote: post #13
daenz wrote: post #5

Take what you support and imagine it used against you in the worst possible ways. Do you still support it? If yes, then it is worth supporting. If it's not, then maybe you're only supporting it because of who it currently helps or harms. This exercise also works with things that you don't support.

...which is exactly how I concluded that the censorship we see online is basically necessary. The worst possible ways that online speech can be used against me include being murdered by a lone-wolf terrorist who received instruction online. The worst that can happen to me from censorship being imposed is that I will not be allowed to say certain things online or challenge those in power, or possibly that I will be ex…

> which is certainly bad, but not quite as bad as being dead.

This sort of reductionist argument doesn't work. If you start from the premise "any chance of dying is not worth it", then you won't do much of anything. Driving to the store could kill you, so now you can't go to the store?

You have to look at probability when assessing risk. Is a 0.0000001% reduction in your risk of death worth sacrificing all your personal freedom? I think most people would say no.

Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship

#23

Post by colordrops »

LatteLazy wrote: post #6

There are really 2 options here: 1. Live with the first amendment at section 230 as. That means things stay mostly the same. Big tech will continue to censor too many of the things I like and too few of the things I don't like. And we wait for the pre-internet generation to die off and be replaced so society can progress. 2. Restrict the 1st and force fact checking, fairness, neutrality, etc. This would get us back t…

Option 2 implies that there is some truly unbiased entity without conflict of interest that could both be able to handle speech vetting and also be allowed to do it. This is extreme fantasy.

Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship

#25

Post by AlexTWithBeard »

colordrops wrote: post #23
LatteLazy wrote: post #6

There are really 2 options here: 1. Live with the first amendment at section 230 as. That means things stay mostly the same. Big tech will continue to censor too many of the things I like and too few of the things I don't like. And we wait for the pre-internet generation to die off and be replaced so society can progress. 2. Restrict the 1st and force fact checking, fairness, neutrality, etc. This would get us back t…

Option 2 implies that there is some truly unbiased entity without conflict of interest that could both be able to handle speech vetting and also be allowed to do it. This is extreme fantasy.

Such a vetting would be (1) extremely expensive and (2) in most cases the decision would "well... We don't know for sure"

Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship

#26

Post by Nursie »

>First of all, the internet’s “marketplace of ideas” is severely lopsided at the platform level

The marketplace of ideas itself has been show to be a bust in recent years, IMHO.

Better ideas, better models of truth and reality don't win out. People have not shown themselves interested in intellectual debate or argument. We do not see the 'best' ideas rise to the top. And before anyone asks who I am to judge the best ideas, I'll answer - nobody, but I can see that factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created. Often at the root of these is a profit motive.

Is censorship the best way to deal with it? Probably not. But we do need to recognise this as a problem as well as getting het up about giant internet platforms deplatforming people.

Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship

#27

Post by sbuk »

eloff wrote: post #16
betterunix2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...which is exactly how I concluded that the censorship we see online is basically necessary. The worst possible ways that online speech can be used against me include being murdered by a lone-wolf terrorist who received instruction online. The worst that can happen to me from censorship being imposed is that I will not be allowed to say certain things online or challenge those in power, or possibly that I will be ex…

Benjamin Franklin once said: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." I will not sacrifice free speech for added protection from terrorists.

This quote is taken out of context - see https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...

Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship

#28

Post by dragonwriter »

drstewart wrote: post #19

It was certainly weird to see all the "they're private businesses, they can do what they want!" takes from the internet when Trump and Parler were banned, after the same people have been yelling for years that these same corporations have too much power over the public narrative.

> It was certainly weird to see all the "they're private businesses, they can do what they want!" takes from the internet when Trump and Parler were banned, after the same people have been yelling for years that these same corporations have too much power over the public narrative.

Why?

Its not inconsistent to argue, as many on the left have, both before and after the right-wingers started whining because they lost their excessively favorable treatment from Twitter, Facebook, et al.: (1) Free speech means that private actors should have the right to control the messages their resources are used to relay. (2) A subset of the tech companies right-wingers complain about to justify trying to impose state-backed mandates to carry right-wing content on internet providers generally are overly dominant monopolies and have excessive power over public communication because of that, which is a problem that is should be dealt with by dealing with the monopolies, not curtailing the freedom of speech of private actors.

Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship

#29

Post by hindsightbias »

eloff wrote: post #16
betterunix2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...which is exactly how I concluded that the censorship we see online is basically necessary. The worst possible ways that online speech can be used against me include being murdered by a lone-wolf terrorist who received instruction online. The worst that can happen to me from censorship being imposed is that I will not be allowed to say certain things online or challenge those in power, or possibly that I will be ex…

Benjamin Franklin once said: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." I will not sacrifice free speech for added protection from terrorists.

Not that context ever matters to extremist:

“It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means.”

https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...

Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship

#30

Post by jsnell »

This all sounds very nice, but there's a bit of sleight of hand here since the article goes out of its way to avoid details. That way everyone reads into exactly what they want, and it's totally non-obvious whether this is actually a workable proposal or not.

But what's the concrete proposal here? How would things actually work? Will the services be forced to accept whatever unmoderated feed of filth the linked to service sends their way? If not, how is this supposed to fix the moderation problem?

How are you supposed to link together applications with totally different data, interaction, and identity models? Obviously you couldn't link e.g. say Discord to Instagram and have the interactions between the systems make any sense. Are we just going to have a predefined ontology of possible social networkign apps, populated with the currently existing models, and define an API for all of then? When and how does that ontology get redefined? Or define a single lowest common denominator covering everything? What happens with features that don't fit into the models? They're entirely forbidden? They need to go through a multi-year public review bureacracy?

Who exactly will be forced to interoperate, and who gets a free pass?

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