Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

eff.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 600 posts

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

#101

Post by Nursie »

peytn wrote: post #92
Nursie wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I genuinely don't have a good solution - I'm pretty sure "ban it" is not one. But I think we need to recognise, when we try to address this stuff, that our current picture of speech online is suffering not just from deplatforming, but also domination of some narratives by high volumes of motivated bullshit. > usually shit hits the fan in social issues of poverty, homelessness, abortion rights and such.…

> and such views actually start to impact the uptake I’m not sure that’s how the chain of causality works. We have 80s-style public health communication that isn’t effective today. People are looking for a reason to reject it. If not the 5G chip stuff, it’d be something else.

I think this just reinforces that the marketplace of ideas is a bust... personally. Because again, people aren't looking to evaluate rationally.

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

#102

Post by pjc50 »

politician wrote: post #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 ac…

Alex Jones was able to post disinformation on the radio under his own name for years before he finally overstepped into defaming the Sandy Hook parents.

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

#103

Post by PontifexMinimus »

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.

> Most people strongly favor the convenience of existing SaaS services

If it was more convenient to roll your own, then I contend that many people would, and many more would have accounts on friends' servers. The difficulty shouldn't be any higher than the cost of a Pi server and spending an hour setting it up -- all of which is perfectly possible to achieve technocally.

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

#104

Post by giantg2 »

hindsightbias wrote: post #29
eloff wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Isn't it the same concept (giving up freedom/power in a shortsighted way), just a different population (government liberties vs individual liberties)?

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

#105

Post by TheFalun »

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…

“But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” -- John Stuart Mill couldn't disagree more.

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

#106

Post by throwawayboise »

sbuk wrote: post #27
eloff wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Franklin used that line in more than one context. He also said "The Massachusetts must suffer all the Hazards and Mischiefs of War, rather than admit the Alteration of their Charters and Laws by Parliament. They who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

https://franklinpapers.org/framedVolumes.jsp?vol=21&page=497...

I think less important than the nuance of what Franklin meant in any specific statement, is that what most people mean when they use that quote is its literal meaning, and that if you look at Franklin's life and body of work he was clearly a staunch defender of the idea that Liberty is a God-given (or inherent) right of mankind, and one worth defending.

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

#107

Post by pjc50 »

tomjen3 wrote: post #77
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

The people on the right side of history in WWII locked up their own citizens based on their ethnic heritage.

Quite. The UK also had a formal censorship regime; America managed with an informal one voluntarily carried out by media organisations: https://censorshipissues.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/censorship...

(See the varied career of William Joyce: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Haw-Haw from informing against the IRA to British fascism to German propaganda broadcaster; he was eventually hanged for treason.)

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

#108

Post by betterunix2 »

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.

Free speech absolutism has not worked very well. Usenet was overrun by neonazis and all the interested discussions moved to moderated newsgroups/mailing lists/forums. A genocidal terrorist organization made effective us of various social media platforms to recruit large numbers of people to their cause and the world is a better place now that they have been banned.

Right now we are missing one of our best chances to end the COVID pandemic -- widespread vaccination -- because too many people are spreading lies about the vaccine on social media.

There is plenty of room for legitimate political debate, where people passionately advocate their preferred policies on various issues, without having to give a platform to people who are not arguing in good faith and whose real purpose is to advance a violent agenda. The cost of "free speech" is not "giving terrorists a platform to recruit and spread propaganda" and the politicians of Ben Franklin's generation actually did understand that (shortly after his death Congress passed the Sedition Act, which banned false statements about the US government to prevent foreign agents from destabilizing the newly formed country).

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

#109

Post by readflaggedcomm »

justbored123 wrote: post #84
spamizbad wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ind…

If the algorithm distorts conversation, then how can you be sure it more accurately reflects human nature?

How does something that isn't a marketplace of ideas prove it's dumb? Or should this question be punished by your algorithm?

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

#110

Post by AlexTWithBeard »

Nursie wrote: post #80
AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas There are indeed some factual mistakes floating around, mostly around covid-is-just-a-flu and the-earth-is-flat discussions. But usually shit hits the fan in social issues of poverty, homelessness, abortion rights and such. Alas, there's no hard science in most of these issues. There is a bunch of plausible-looking speculations, phi…

I don't know, I genuinely don't have a good solution - I'm pretty sure "ban it" is not one. But I think we need to recognise, when we try to address this stuff, that our current picture of speech online is suffering not just from deplatforming, but also domination of some narratives by high volumes of motivated bullshit. > usually shit hits the fan in social issues of poverty, homelessness, abortion rights and such.…

I don't think antivax conspiracy makes a lot of impact.

Current vaccination rate in the US is 55%.

This is comparable with the number of people who, for example, do a dental check-up at least once a year, which is 60%, although there's no dentists conspiracy theory, at least not such a popular one.

P.S. those downvoting, please feel free to, but I would highly appreciate a couple of lines on what's wrong with the message? Pure curiosity.

Post reply on HN