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.
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
#62Mandating 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…
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#63Earlier 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"
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
#64Earlier 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.
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
#65Earlier 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…
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#66Nah, 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.
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#67Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#68You 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>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…
Re: Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship
#70>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.
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.