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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

#261

Post by Nursie »

wyager wrote: post #148
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…

> I can see that factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created. The fact that you phrase your characterization of incorrect ideas like this suggests with pretty high certainty that you don’t exactly have a great birds’-eye view of the epistemic landscape yourself. People who characterize the “opposition” this way mostly get their ideas…

I don’t characterise “the opposition” this way. I characterise some of the more prominent ‘fringe’ stuff as this.

I don’t really have an ‘us’ for there to be a singular ‘them’ I’m talking about, I’m not American and I don’t identify with any particular political party.

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

#262

Post by stale2002 »

betterunix2 wrote: post #13
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.

...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…

> The unfortunate truth is that terrorist organizations use mainstream social networking sites to recruit and radicalize

If an actual terrorist organization is doing this, as defined by the FBI, then our government should be in charge of handling that.

Terrorist is already illegal, and we already have government organizations, in charge of tracking that stuff down.

And those government organizations have checks and balances, and judges, and have to follow certain rules.

These checks and balances do not exist, with other forms of moderation.

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

#263

Post by umvi »

blfr wrote: post #215
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…

I use Linux, discuss political ideas on private, members-only forums, and share memes over Signal. This is an excellent setup... if you want to have conversations with your fellow computer janitors. This is no way to connect to other people. And these people might also have interesting ideas, ideas I might want to hear before some bot at Facebooks deems them against "community standards" or whatever they call their c…

> This is no way to connect to other people. And these people might also have interesting ideas, ideas I might want to hear before some bot at Facebooks deems them against "community standards" or whatever they call their censorship that is totally not censorship.

Well, people connected with each other before 2007, so presumably you could be exposed to different, interesting ideas by joining local clubs, churches, or other community gatherings where you have interactions with non "computer janitors"

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

#264

Post by version_five »

tshaddox wrote: post #227
version_five wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've not really thought about it this way, but I believe both statements. Nobody should be a slave to how someone else wants them to behave, because people are autonomous beings with their own capacity and right to make their own decisions, and there is no universal law about how we should decide or prioritize things. I believe of course in many of the societal constructs we have (most of the ten commandments e.g., taxes) but I think there has to be an almost impossibility high bar in any new imposition we make on peoples right to have their own priorities, because we're all equal in the universe.

Maybe a weird answer, I'm not a philosopher, I just don't think there is a scale of rights that people have, or in the idea of an elite that has special decision making power because it is enlightened.

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

#265

Post by rayiner »

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 not clear to me that censorship isn't making it worse. You have a mass populist/anti-elitist movement in the country. You're telling me that a solution to this is to have elites at multi-national mega-corporations deciding what information should reach the unwashed masses?

What exactly is the end-game here? You're not going to beat (or educate) the populism and conspiracy theories out of Americans. We're talking about a country where a prominent tech billionaire died because he disregarded "the medical elite" and went on an all-fruit diet to treat his pancreatic cancer.[1] That river is wide and deep, my friend. Telling people that the elites are controlling information sharing online for their own good is unlikely to have the desired result.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

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

#266

Post by totony »

root_axis wrote: post #206
PontifexMinimus wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If FB are blocking things that they deem bad, then they are clearly setting themselves up as arbiters of morality, even if they say they aren't.

Facebook has opinions about the type of content they'd prefer not to facilitate on the Facebook platform, that doesn't make them "arbiters of morality", it just makes them curators of their product identity.

It's not one or the other, they can both care about their product identity, but by the same stroke arbitrate morality by doing so. (Product identity takes popular morality as an input).

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

#267

Post by throwawaysea »

version_five wrote: post #232
amelius wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'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? Isn't this an argument for limiting the power we give to those in power? It's unrealistic to think that only people who are right will be in charge (I doubt I need to give examples). The realistic thing i…

Yes and this is why individual freedoms and local decision making should take precedence over collectivist thought, tyrannies of the majority, and top-down decisions.

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

#268

Post by api »

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…

I think you could make a basic content richness argument. There are interesting nuanced left, right, libertarian, socialist, etc. ideas but none of these are the ones discussed. The stuff that gets popular is meme level trash. Social media selects for punchy sound bites as much or more than the old media it is replacing.

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

#269

Post by anyonecancode »

version_five wrote: post #232
amelius wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'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? Isn't this an argument for limiting the power we give to those in power? It's unrealistic to think that only people who are right will be in charge (I doubt I need to give examples). The realistic thing i…

Yes, but the tricky part here is that "those in power" is far more than just those in government. As this very thread topic itself demonstrates, there are plenty of people and organizations that are not the government that have a large amount of power.

In a democracy, we have a way to limit the power of our government -- but what's the way to do that for those in power who are not in government? The traditional approach has been to use government power to check non-government power, but this seems to run counter to the whole "limiting the power we give to those in power." But if we don't use government power to check outsize private power, then we are again ceding too much power.

My own view is that the answer is less about how much power we grant than about how much accountability there is -- ie, broader and deeper democracy. But that seems to work mostly in theory; in practice this often gets circumvented by those with power and we get shallow democracy with limited accountability and thus unsatisfactory restrictions on both governmental and non-governmental power.

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

#270

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…

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