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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

#131
post #101
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

People are turned off by appeals to authority logical fallacies.

Trying to make them the only acceptable source of information is never going to sell.

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

#132
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…

> Better ideas, better models of truth and reality don't win out. People have not shown themselves interested in intellectual debate or argument.

This is plausible, so people believe it. Fortunately, it is false. Compare the state of the world regarding germ theory, human rights, smoking, racism, education, the belief in violence to solve problems, or the delusion that is theism to the world 100 years ago.

It used to be way, way worse. The better ideas are winning.

Things are improving tremendously. It just takes time.

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

#133
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…

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

#134
post #77

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.

FDR's track record on individual rights is rather poor. Seizure of gold, censorship, and internment come to mind.

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

#135
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.…

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 mes…

Agreed. I doubt that half the population thinks that the COVID vaccine is a conspiracy to kill them, render them infertile, or depopulate the earth.

I'm not vaccinated, and I don't believe those things. I do see the dentist every 6 months though.

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

#136
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…

Its less a "Marketplace of Ideas" and more a "church or private establishment" on the network. Even HN isnt spot on sometime bad ideas do rise up when they it appeals to peoples emotions more than sensibilities.

Social media (and the internet as a whole) are shaped by and promote the values of those who create it. They allow certain interactions and not others. (to what extent are the creators the leaders of the social media companies, vs. the users?)

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/51...

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

#137

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…

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

#138
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…

Why does a town square need moderation?

You can't just ignore the fact that social networking has become the new town square because its inconvenient

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

#139
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.

That's a great approach. I like the concise way of stating it. I'll apply it to a couple things that are popular topics right now.

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Automated fact checking:

The negative consequences are pretty obvious. It's easy to cheer when the target is neo-Nazis who want to overthrow the government. Well what if the shoe were on the other foot, and Republicans had been able to compel social media companies to flag posts disputing Trump's claims of election fraud as misinformation? It's not exactly censorship, but it's a ridiculously powerful lever for manipulating public opinion.

On a more mundane level, clamping down on non-mainstream opinions could cause a lot of low-level chronic harm. For example, it's not hard to imagine social media "fact checking" disrupting discussions on fitness and/or nutritional science to promote the food pyramid and the importance of a low-fat diet for heart health, or to shut down conversations about medical uses of cannabis because the DEA still has it listed as schedule 1.

Maybe there's a reasonable middle ground, but it's dicey either way.

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Killing or reforming the filibuster:

The obvious negative consequence (from a center-right to left-wing perspective) is that Republicans will regain a trifecta of power and find themselves with carte blanche to pass all sorts of wildly unpopular laws eviscerating civil liberties.

Even so, I say do it. The filibuster is massively advantageous to Republicans because it gives them the ability to complain about problems while offering few or no solutions. I say we call their bluff, and risk giving them the opportunity to pass their agenda.

Either they'd still do nothing (in which case they'd lose a lot of single-issue voters), or they would do the things that they claim to want to do (in which case they would lose the next election in a landslide and never hold power again).

As-is, they're stuck in between a rock and a hard place trying to appeal to:

* Pro-life Christians

* Gun owners

* Right-leaning libertarians

* "Selfish"/anti-tax rich people

* The alt-right / neo-Nazi / Q cultist crowd

* Populists (who may not necessarily be conservative, as evidenced by the overlap in support for Trump and Bernie)

* People with conservative social/cultural values

* Typical center-right conservatives (to the extent that they still vote Republican consistently, or at all)

That's just what I can think of off the cuff, but even that is a pretty diverse coalition. All they really have in common is that they oppose (or, in some cases, believe they oppose) various parts of the Democratic agenda (both real and imagined). Their continued unity depends on the GOP remaining a superposition of all the different values they each independently project onto it. The second the GOP actually gets a chance to pass a major law along partisan lines, whether they choose to do it or not, the superposition collapses and shoes will start to drop.

What do you think will happen if they take power and proceed to ban all abortions, remove every form of gun control, repeal the Affordable Care Act, take federal action against vaccine development/distribution during a pandemic, pass or shoot down a relief bill during a pandemic, escalate or deescalate the Drug War, dramatically increase or decrease environmental regulations while a climate disaster affects a red state, and/or dramatically alter regulations on the Internet / social media / E2EE / cryptocurrency? What if, with a legislative majority and in the absence of the filibuster, they don't do any of those things? I suggest that any action or lack thereof would be a huge blow to their support in some of those groups; they would have to pick their poison.

The wildcard here is if they were to use such a trifecta combined with their current dominance of the Supreme Court to enact anti-democratic reforms to prevent any further transfer of power. However, seeing as this is already the direction we're heading in, I would say that it's vitally important to override the filibuster and pass voting rights legislation now so that we have a stronger chance at remaining a democracy, rather than accept the massive gamble of doing nothing.

The greatest threat facing humanity today isn't climate change. It's the current Republican Party, and the prospect of world's most powerful military and nuclear arsenal ending up in the hands of a hypothetical future theofascist America.

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

#140
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…

The internet has been a beautiful experiment to find out how what crank ideology aligns best to the human default instinctive nature.
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