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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

#61
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not the point he's making, any winner can historically write what they want so you don't really get to choose from a history of facts.

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

#62

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 to…

That’ll never happen for the same reason why basically nobody runs their own online services today. Most people strongly favor the convenience of existing SaaS services, which is why dropbox beats out all the self hosted alternatives by orders of magnitude.

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

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

The worst part is that people will be told "You don't know for sure" rather than people using their brain and come to the conclusion that they dont know for sure. Which is actually the default for any critical thinking person. And it helps a lot to not fall for extremist views or ideas which are usually presented oversimplified and thus fool people who usually quickly pick sides rather than accepting the default of not know for sure.

Rather than a fact checker maybe an algorithm could find opposing content and present this. That would force the user to make some "fact"-checks aka to think. needed to say that such an algorithms could/would be biased as well.

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

#64
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A quick perusal through history will show that conflicts where one side is censorious and the other is not has basically never happened. Usually the winning side sweeps their misdeeds under the rug afterwards.

See: US behavior towards communists and left wing groups during the Cold War, or censorship during WW1 and WW2. The whole "fire in a crowded theater" trope comes from the unanimous Supreme Court decision upholding the conviction of someone peacefully distributing fliers protesting the draft in WW1[0]. Funny how that one usually doesn't make it into the history books.

0 - Schenck vs. United States. Thankfully no longer good law.

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

#65
post #50
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 unempat…

Why does any part of this need to happen in public? Not in a text group? Random discord server? Is it just some sort of underlying exhibition drive that Myspace originally tapped into? To me, my friends are the 15-20 people I've grown to know and like. From reading what you said here, it seems as though to you the word friends captures your entire extended network, with friends of friends, old coworkers, etc. If your question is how do you show off to these people, if you're optimizing for the number of 'interactable interactions' or something, we've left friendship far behind and turned this into a 'numbers go up' game. I'm not less friendly with my best friend because I didn't see her latest comment on some random meme an acquaintance from school 10 years ago posted.

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

#66
post #54

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.

> so long as the government doesn’t act as an authority to fuse censorship across all platforms They literally discussed how they're doing this last week during a white house press conference.

Did they?

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

#67
thought experiment: If I have a megaphone rental company and I become aware that one of my clients is using it to walk through neighborhoods annoying people by loudly proclaiming Covid is a Democratic Party hoax and Republicans are fools for not acknowledging Donald Trump lost, can I refuse to rent my megaphone to that person and not be guilty of censorship? I own all the megaphones in town and no one else rents them.

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

#68
It would be workable to designate these social platforms as public spaces, removing liability for speech entirely off of the proprietors and onto the courts if we also implemented mandatory licensing for use of these networks.

You can’t drive without a license and identification. It’s not dystopian to suggest that, as a society, we’re at a point where we need to insist on public places on the Internet and personal accountability for speech.

We can’t abdicate our responsibility to regulate this space to tech companies and pretend that billions of people interacting is somehow magically beyond the point of governments.

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

#69
post #26

>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…

[deleted]

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

#70
post #26

>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…

> factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created I don't think this is unique to the online world. It's just how humans are. We are drawn to sensational, scandalous stories for some combination of entertainment and self-righteous outrage/virtue signaling to the others in our tribe.

> We are drawn to sensational, scandalous stories for some combination of entertainment and self-righteous outrage/virtue signaling to the others in our tribe.

While I agree, I think there's more to it than that, I think it's more serious than that, and I think the message amplification capabilities afforded to profit-driven (or ideologically driven) bad actors is something we've not really seen before. Certainly not at this scale.

So while it is human nature, that's not to say the outcomes are desirable, nor that the marketplace of ideas concept is consistent with reality. In fact I think it might be the point, much like the perfect economic market, the concept of the well-functioning marketplace of ideas cannot exist, because of the humans that make it up.

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