Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by OrvalWintermute » Sun, Jul 18, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

_ykl9 wrote: post #139

daenz wrote: 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. --- 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 dispu…

I think you are waging political warfare on HN, and violating the guidelines of "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."

It is important to never demonize your opponents too much, if you are going to try and remain civil with them.

>* 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)

This smacks of making a list..

> 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.

Please reconsider how you post in the comments section

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

#182

Post by throwawayboise » Sun, Jul 18, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

slashdev wrote: post #176

betterunix2 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. That's mostly a trust issue. If you silence their concerns you're just going to confirm that it's a grand conspiracy theory. You have to fight misinformation with the truth, with dialog, not with censorship.

It's a trust issue for some; others simply don't want to be told what to do. The more you shove the "get vaccinated" message in their faces the more they dig in and reject it.

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

#183

Post by SV_BubbleTime » Sun, Jul 18, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

_ykl9 wrote: post #139

daenz wrote: 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. --- 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 dispu…

Your example that Republicans are the big tent party doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. All those groups venn together a lot. Tell me how well LGBT, Muslim, Jew, Union blue collar, Black, Hispanic, costal elite, youth, and big tech get along if you lock them in a room together if all you have is “at least we aren’t Republicans!”.

>Republicans will regain a trifecta of power and find themselves with carte blanche to pass all sorts of horrible laws eviscerating civil liberties.

>Even so, I say [kill the filibuster].

Ok, seems like you know it’s short sighted but want to “win” just to do so, even if temporary and potentially catastrophic.

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

#184

Post by trentnix » Sun, Jul 18, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

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.

The lab-leak hypothesis is provocative (and probably true), but got smothered anyway. It was just inconsistent with the narrative.

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

#185

Post by sudosysgen » Sun, Jul 18, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

tlholaday wrote: post #180

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.

It seems unfair to deprecate algorithms which "favor 'provocative' ideas that drive clicks" as a `distortion` of the marketplace of ideas. It seems more that by driving clicks, the algorithms are `facilitating` the marketplace. People are signaling the ideas they prefer, idea suppliers are producing more of such ideas, and the people get these ideas at ever-lower prices. How is that in any way a distortion of an idea…

There is no ideal marketplace of ideas.

It takes years to fully develop an understanding of any particular ideology. How are you supposed to judge which one is better at interpreting the world on such a short term system?

There is simply too much friction in the ideological marketplace for it to approximate even loosely an ideal market.

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

#186

Post by the_gipsy » Sun, Jul 18, 2021, 9:12 PM UTC

trentnix wrote: post #184

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.

The lab-leak hypothesis is provocative (and probably true), but got smothered anyway. It was just inconsistent with the narrative .

You believe in the narrative?

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

#187

Post by remarkEon » Sun, Jul 18, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

ianai wrote: post #145

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.…

For good reason we don’t accept people yelling “fire” in a movie theater. Anti-vax misinformation during a pandemic is definitely in the same vein as yelling fire in a theater. There are a few solutions. Don’t know that any of these are possible, but sometimes solutions only get found in a listing of possible solutions. Any sourcing of the internet as a source of truth could be called into question on face. Or massiv…

>For good reason we don’t accept people yelling “fire” in a movie theater.

This meme persists, because it sounds nice, but the phrase is from a Supreme Court case where they ruled you can't distribute anti-WWI-draft flyers. Not exactly the precedent to be invoked, here. It was overturned (in part) to define that criminal speech under the first amendment is only speech that is determined to incite imminent lawless activity.

>Any sourcing of the internet as a source of truth could be called into question on face.

Which is why banning "misinformation" is a terrible idea.

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

#188

Post by 8note » Sun, Jul 18, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

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.

I don't think there is a marketplace of ideas that can be separated from the algorithms used to promote them.

Every ordering of content is going to favour something, even chronological.

Somebody will find a way to abuse any sorting mechanism you use

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

#189

Post by _ykl9 » Sun, Jul 18, 2021, 9:16 PM UTC

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #183

_ykl9 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. --- 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 dispu…

Your example that Republicans are the big tent party doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. All those groups venn together a lot. Tell me how well LGBT, Muslim, Jew, Union blue collar, Black, Hispanic, costal elite, youth, and big tech get along if you lock them in a room together if all you have is “at least we aren’t Republicans!”. >Republicans will regain a trifecta of power and find themselves with carte blanche to p…

Your example that Republicans are the big tent party doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

It shouldn't, because that isn't what I said.

Ok, seems like you know it’s short sighted but want to “win” just to do so, even if temporary and potentially catastrophic.

I also didn't say that.

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

#190

Post by owisd » Sun, Jul 18, 2021, 9:17 PM UTC

MrStonedOne wrote: post #138

jsnell wrote: 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

The town square analogy would be fine if there was a ‘net neutrality’ for social media: they have to show me everything I follow in chronological order with no filtering or recommendations. As it stands it works more like the letters page in a newspaper, where an editor is deciding what gets included and what doesn’t.