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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

#81

Post by LatteLazy »

version_five wrote: post #15
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…

I didn't downvote but I read twice and I don't understand what you're saying. Maybe you could try and rephrase to make your point clearer?

* Problems with fake news, censorship etc are much bigger outside of big tech than inside (media monopolies and propoganda like fox news for a start).

* so if you actually care about those issues (rather than just hating big tech) you need to fix things beyond big tech

* that means reform of the 1st amendment

* I suspect that no one actually wants that, they just don't like Facebook etc but they're used to Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan

Is that any better :)

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

#82

Post by betterunix2 »

cortesoft wrote: post #22
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…

> 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 perso…

Except that it is not a miniscule chance of some violence occasionally being committed. ISIS nearly succeeded in establishing a new country in the territory they captured and it is absurd to pretend that they had not exploited poor moderation on major websites to recruit large numbers of people to their cause. White nationalists and neo-nazis have been equally effective in their use of social media to recruit members and to spread their propaganda.

We are not talking about isolated incidents or hypothetical scenarios. Extremists in the US and Europe are becoming part of the political mainstream because so many people believe the extremist propaganda they are reading on social media platforms. Those same extremists have inspired an increasing number of terrorist attacks as their propaganda has spread. For someone like me, someone who is part of a minority group that is frequently targeted by those terrorists, that represents an immediate and growing danger.

Really though, this entire debate is poisoned by extreme positions on free speech. I remember watching as unmoderated Usenet groups were overrun by neonazis; everyone fled to moderated newsgroups or off of Usenet altogether to some better-moderated platform. Free speech absolutism has never worked well and it is juvenile to pretend that the choice is between "sacrificing all your personal freedom" or taking an absolutist approach to free speech.

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

#83

Post by vsareto »

>The promise of the ACCESS Act is an internet where if you don’t like a big platform’s moderation policies, if you think they’re too tolerant of abusers or too quick to kick someone off for getting too passionate during a debate, you can leave, and still stay connected to the people who matter to you.

Use any number of other communication methods or services that brilliant humans have invented to allow us all to talk to each other within seconds?

How have we reached such technical ineptitude that we can no longer consider other options other than big tech platforms when communicating? As if folks weren't stringing wires up across countries 100+ years before so we could send beeps at each other. Now we're going to write laws so your crazy relatives can talk about their conspiratorial alternate reality because losing their friends list is such a painful burden? I think I'd swallow a bullet before being asked to work on any technical features for this act. I know that's absolutely going to suck and I can't think of a worse place to end up after dealing with the difficulty of learning CompSci and programming.

This is going to be a waste of everyone's time and resources for no good social benefit. Literally go fix a bridge with this time and money and it'll do more good for the world.

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

#84

Post by justbored123 »

spamizbad wrote: post #59
Nursie wrote: 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…

That's because the "marketplace of ideas" is being distorted by algorithms that are going to favor "provocative" ideas that drive clicks. Exciting lies defeat boring truths.

That tells you that "marketplace of ideas" is a dumb idea, because we already have proved a million times that people are not the rational creatures that we were sold we were for a long time. We are smart apes, but apes none the least: emotionally driven by our limbic system, very tribal and status seeking. Prone to rationalize all these basic impulses in a million different ways creating the illusion of rational individualism. The algorithms just shows us our true nature, don't make the mistake of shooting the messenger.

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

#86

Post by wmf »

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.

https://oversightboard.com/ is trying to do this.

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

#87

Post by roody15 »

ashtonkem wrote: post #62
PontifexMinimus wrote: post #45

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.

meh … dropbox really?

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

#88

Post by Layke1123 »

You can't censor the left. You might be able to silence them for a time, but reality has a liberal bias and the same ideas will always resurface. It's ironic that they are called the conservative ones really since their schemes perpetually change to suit themselves.

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

#89

Post by PokedBear »

dragonwriter wrote: post #28
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 t…

This - the solution isn't to compell overly large websites or web hosts to carry speech that they don't want. It's to use antitrust law to break them up so more smaller websites can viably carry whatever they want.

Now there should also be a clear demarcation of what internet services need to be a common carrier vs not. Let's say bandwidth, colocation, ip address allocation, and domain registration services were required to take all comers. Then if you want to have your gay commie gun club forum, you could get a domain, buy your own hardware, put it up in a colo facility, get bandwidth and ip addresses, and then have an uncensored presence on the net.

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

#90

Post by galaxyLogic »

spamizbad wrote: post #59
Nursie wrote: 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…

That's because the "marketplace of ideas" is being distorted by algorithms that are going to favor "provocative" ideas that drive clicks. Exciting lies defeat boring truths.

That is no doubt true (about how the algorithms work). At the same time what we see is that there is a market, demand, for misinformation. And some people are making money from that.

Why is there so much misinformation about Covid vaccines and vaccines in general? Because people want to believe in such misinformation and because that allows websites to make money from their readership. Therefore the peddling of misinformation continues.

It is not so different from what publications like National Inquirer and Weekly World News have been doing for a long time. But instead of paying for National Inquirer you can now get such misinformation for free on the web, because you are paying for that by spending your time seeing the advertisements. Information wants to be "free" whatever that means, but people want misinformation, to give them the feeling they are right about their prejudices.

SEE: https://fortune.com/2021/05/14/disinformation-media-vaccine-...

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