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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

#41

Post by ctoth »

rektide wrote: post #7

I tend to agree with this article: we all should be worried about being dependent on having only a few core systems where speech happens, especially when network effect & switching costs are very very high. I believe platforms have the right to moderate themselves as they see fit. They get that freedom, and we're better for letting private systems regulate themselves. Or, (as mentioned) as Twitter is floating, creati…

"Hey man, I really enjoy our friendship but I just can't do Facebook anymore for mental health reasons, what's your email?"

What people are really saying is they know it's bad but can't stop, they can't turn away, they can't say "no, I don't want to participate anymore." Then they blame their friends, "oh I'm just going where they go." I wouldn't want to "lose all digital connection with this person" well why not reach out to them? Said another way, if your friends and you don't maintain connections regardless of the underlying social systems, are you really friends? I've somehow carted a group of random online people along with me across various networks, fragmenting messengers, good old email, phone numbers, going in and out of contact since at least 2002. The underlying protocols might change but they're the same people. What prevents you from doing this?

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

#42

Post by pjc50 »

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 applies to policing in general of all kinds? Isn't this literally an "abolish the police" argument? After all, imagine the police used against you in the worst possible way ..

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

#43

Post by jacob2484 »

britch wrote: post #31
jacob2484 wrote: post #24

The people on the "right side of history" are usually fighting for freedom and liberty, not censorship and re-education camps

Winners usually frame their fights as ones for freedom and liberty, and emphasize their enemy's use of censorship and re-education camps.

Something is either being censored or it's not. Regardless of the issue, I'll side with the side that is not censoring information.

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

#44

Post by renewiltord »

Nah, I’m actually totally on board with big tech censorship so long as the government doesn’t act as an authority to fuse censorship across all platforms and instead acts to ensure that cartelized blackballing doesn’t happen I.e. a ban from Facebook shouldn’t cause an auto-ban from Twitter.

Otherwise, I don’t care. Kick me off your platform. It’s your house and you have a right to not share it with me.

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

#45

Post by PontifexMinimus »

Mandating interoperability, with ActivityPub and similar protocols, would help.

In the long term I'd like to see a future where it's a normal thing for people to roll their own social media platforms, by putting a Raspberry Pi on their local network, downloading and configuring some open-source software, and the local nodes all talk to each other and doing so gives someone the same level of functionality that they today have with a Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/Tiktok/etc account.

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

#46

Post by pueblito »

pjc50 wrote: post #42
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 applies to policing in general of all kinds? Isn't this literally an "abolish the police" argument? After all, imagine the police used against you in the worst possible way ..

Surely one can conceive of effective ways to limit to damage the police can do to people short of abolishing the police. For example, disarm the police and they can’t shoot you.

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

#47

Post by PontifexMinimus »

Nursie wrote: post #33
jsnell wrote: post #30

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 se…

> Will the services be forced to accept whatever unmoderated feed of filth the linked to service sends their way? I was kinda wondering that. If a user gets banned, and moves off-platform to continue the behaviour there, but is somehow magically still linked to everyone they were linked with before... has anything really changed? Will facebook be forced to show its users the same nastiness it just booted off, because…

> Will facebook be forced to show its users the same nastiness it just booted off, because of the interop necessities?

Facebook should be forced to show me the feeds I choose to subscribe to. I'm perfectly capable of deciding for myself whether I find something nasty, and I find the idea of Zuckerberg as an arbiter of morality both absurd and dystopian.

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

#48

Post by noxer »

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…

>force fact checking

Its not possible, period. You can remove this option. FB/Twitter/YT all have "fact checkers" and they are neither neutral nor do they get it right. Even if outsourced it still fails miserably. On top of that people should not be told what the "facts" are for complex thinks. It removes the need to think and build an opinion. This is essential because for almost everything controversial there is no way to find the absolute truth. People need to learn what it means to accept that we dont know something and likely never will know what the truth is.

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

#50

Post by rektide »

ctoth wrote: post #41
rektide wrote: post #7

I tend to agree with this article: we all should be worried about being dependent on having only a few core systems where speech happens, especially when network effect & switching costs are very very high. I believe platforms have the right to moderate themselves as they see fit. They get that freedom, and we're better for letting private systems regulate themselves. Or, (as mentioned) as Twitter is floating, creati…

"Hey man, I really enjoy our friendship but I just can't do Facebook anymore for mental health reasons, what's your email?" What people are really saying is they know it's bad but can't stop, they can't turn away, they can't say "no, I don't want to participate anymore." Then they blame their friends, "oh I'm just going where they go." I wouldn't want to "lose all digital connection with this person" well why not rea…

Your friend is actively broadcasting to the world (except you) their photos, they're sharing articles & their opinion, they're writing on other friend's wall (and you can see). Social places are filled with activity. They are broadcast mediums that beget further broadcast interactions, which beget yet more broadcast interaction.

This cruel small hearted tough-love view of social you present reads as extremely unempathic to me. I don't see how you can miss so clearly the core idea of Metcalf's law, that the value of a network rises according to the square of it's nodes. And each interactable interaction, in my view, constitutes it's own node, is it's own potential for something new to start amid the network. Not being in that place can be enormously detrimental, and imo, Competitive Compatibility is absolutely an obvious, sensible public policy to insure that you can still be with your friend, even if you don't want to be with Facebook.

Reducing this to "why don't you stay in better touch" is like, "oh you don't speak the same language, why don't you two invent one?".

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