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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

#221

Post by amelius »

version_five wrote: post #203
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…

It's ironic (or maybe appropriate) that this, talking about how better ideas don't rise to the top, is the top comment. The most abhorrent idea of all to me is that there are stupid, weak people that are worse than "us" that we need to shield from bad ideas because they are not smart enough (like we are) to handle them. Lots of support for this view in downstream comments (we're just intelligent apes etc). The strawm…

> we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice

One of the problems is that we don't all get the same information.

> or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us (and you hope it's you but it doesn't have to be) gets to decide. Frankly, the latter idea is ridiculous to me.

You've bumped into the exact same problem that exists with our democracy. Do you want our future determined by a few well-informed, rational people? Or do you want it determined by an ignorant, short-sighted mass?

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

#222

Post by UncleMeat »

robertlagrant wrote: post #216
UncleMeat wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This approach only works if you expect other people to do the same. I don't want to be thrown in prison for my beliefs. I'm not certain that "hey, we let you march in public" is going to stop fascists from throwing me in prison or outright killing me.

That can only happen if you gave government the ability to throw you in prison for that, and then somehow a tiny minority got into government and abused the power you gave them.

> That can only happen if you gave government the ability to throw you in prison for that

Why? The universe won't stop anybody from doing that just because laws exist. Authoritarians will not be halted by existing laws or norms. That's what I'm worried about. And that's why things like preventing fascists from organizing in public has merit.

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

#223

Post by renewiltord »

chroem- wrote: post #54
renewiltord wrote: post #44

Nah, 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.

Yes, that’s why I mentioned it. I am against that.

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

#224

Post by [deleted] »

version_five wrote: post #203
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…

It's ironic (or maybe appropriate) that this, talking about how better ideas don't rise to the top, is the top comment. The most abhorrent idea of all to me is that there are stupid, weak people that are worse than "us" that we need to shield from bad ideas because they are not smart enough (like we are) to handle them. Lots of support for this view in downstream comments (we're just intelligent apes etc). The strawm…

[deleted]

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

#225

Post by shrimpx »

smoldesu wrote: post #194
LoveLeadAcid wrote: post #174

Just do what smart people have been doing for years - stop using big tech. Stop using Google, Facebook, Apple, IBM, Microsoft. Buy a used computer and install a Free OS and just check out of the entire big tech ecosystem. Otherwise you get what you deserve. And let’s all disabuse ourselves of the incorrect notion that it’s big tech alone which is ordering censorship. It’s our own governments, who use the many secret…

This right here is it, for the most part. I see a lot of people who lament how terrible the takeover of "big tech" is, but they still use Facebook on a regular basis and don't go out of their way to seek alternatives. It's like complaining that Kraft has taken over your local supermarket aisle while you're buying 10 boxes of name-brand mac and cheese.

Not really. There's a gradient of entrenchment. Your example doesn't work at all if we're talking about deeply-entrenched/natural-monopoly products like electricity or internet access instead of a trivially-switchable product like a brand of mac & cheese or ranch dressing.

The question is where does Facebook fall on that gradient? It's certainly not on the "product on the supermarket shelf" end. It's closer to the middle somewhere.

I gave up Facebook in 2013 and more or less lost any semblance of an ongoing connection to a dozen childhood friends from my home country. Many people aren't willing to give up that type of thing. This isn't whatsoever like swappable supermarket products.

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

#227

Post by tshaddox »

version_five wrote: post #203
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…

It's ironic (or maybe appropriate) that this, talking about how better ideas don't rise to the top, is the top comment. The most abhorrent idea of all to me is that there are stupid, weak people that are worse than "us" that we need to shield from bad ideas because they are not smart enough (like we are) to handle them. Lots of support for this view in downstream comments (we're just intelligent apes etc). The strawm…

> The most abhorrent idea of all to me is that there are stupid, weak people that are worse than "us" that we need to shield from bad ideas because they are not smart enough (like we are) to handle them.

I find this idea abhorrent as well, but I’m curious if you find it abhorrent because you think the claim is false and/or unsubstantiated, or if you find it abhorrent because even if it’s true it ought to be rejected due to some moral principle.

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

#228

Post by tshaddox »

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…

Or that a few algorithms created by a few companies does not constitute anything remotely resembling a marketplace.

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

#229

Post by cornel_io »

cratermoon wrote: post #122

Probably a good place for reposting this: https://publicseminar.org/essays/why-we-should-outlaw-oppres...

That's basically just saying that racism and hate speech are super ultra duper bad and we should outlaw things like that, as well as vastly expand what we consider beyond the pale so that it captures what are fairly mainstream opinions. I (as well as many others) disagree, and in fact I think that the people that argue for hate speech laws are far more dangerous than the tiny handful of actual white supremacists out there who are just losing their battle slowly over time.

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

#230

Post by noxer »

mistermann wrote: post #94
noxer wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part is that people will be told "You don't know for sure" rather than people using their brain and come to the conclusion that they dont know for sure. Which is actually the default for any critical thinking person. And it helps a lot to not fall for extremist views or ideas which are usually presented oversimplified and thus fool people who usually quickly pick sides rather than accepting the default of n…

> 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. What do you think of a small social network composed of vetted (and always subject to review) reasonably trustworthy and fairly unbiased but definitely open minded users who decompose, fact…

Almost everything will be "not really known for sure". So the next step to make it useful would be somehow count/vote and get "an X is more likely true than Y". Maybe even add % and now you essentially have "mob-fact-checking". Needles to say that the majority isn't a source of truth, especially not if you have a broad range of topics and a broad range of people so that for any given topic only a fraction of the people have deep knowledge and "the truth" is actually defined by the rest (mob) who dont have deep knowledge about the topic.

What you actually would need is a peer-review like system. Where people familiar with the topic do the fact-checking. But this just moves the problem to another place because someone would need to defined who is familiar with a topic, but without putting people with aliened views together, its just as impossible as the fact-checking itself.

Lastly if we actually would be able to create a working fact-checking system, once that system has been used for one of the long time controversial topics like for example fact-checking a statement about abortion being murder, then almost everyone who disagrees with that fact-checking would loose trust in the system which render is essentially useless. You now have a "source of truth" but a significant portion of people (roughly 50% probably) don't trust it.

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