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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

#301

Post by quicklime »

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…

It's not ironic, and not surprising. HN is very willing to "censor" (i.e. moderate, ban, etc) and on top of that, "politics" is considered off-topic altogether according to the guidelines.

In such an environment, the better ideas often do rise up to the top. Twitter and Facebook are not such environments.

"We" shield ourselves from bad ideas because this forum would be overrun if we didn't.

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

#302

Post by baobabKoodaa »

Nursie wrote: post #285
exporectomy wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with actual vaccine science Who decides what that is? Plenty of actual scientists publish papers in actual science journals that conflict with each other and with official public health advice. The whole vaccines cause autism idea came from what looked like actual vaccine science. Knowledge isn't actually that sure. Sometimes the authorities are wrong. Remember when bread was at the bottom of the food pyramid? > bu…

So there’s no way at all, to your mind, to distinguish millions of shitposts about “The covid vaccine causes infertility, and contains 5G chips” from, for instance, genuine risk information? We truly are swimming in a world in which nothing is true. Or you are anyway.

You take an extreme example (5G chips in vaccines) to support the idea that we can draw a line in the sand and say what's true & what's false. But if you take an example closer to the line, things start to become less clear. Are masks useful to the general public? If you said "yes" a year ago, you would've been censored for spreading misinformation. If you said "no" yesterday, you would've been censored for spreading misinformation.

Anyway, if you think it's so easy to do a good job censoring information, why don't you point to a single example where that worked out? Just one is sufficient. It's okay, I'll wait.

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

#303

Post by mandmandam »

throwawayboise wrote: post #170
mandmandam wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The marketplace of ideas works. It may not work in the timescale you want I'm astounded anyone can say that with a straight face. The misinformation for profit strategies employed by big tobacco, oil, military, pharma etc. have proven extraordinarily effective, time and time again. The timescales are nothing to do with "what I want" and everything to do with the fate of people's lives. From losing relatives to cance…

How can you say that with regards to tobacco? It's all but illegal, completely banned in most public places, you can basically only use it in your home or outdoors alone. "Not on the timescale you want" is the salient point.

That tobacco is "all but illegal" now (in the US - the same exact companies continue their murderous strategies in developing countries) is a bit late for all the people who lost family members in slow and horrifying agony.

Their execs kept the money they made.

Their model was so "successful" that it has been studied, copied, and extended by the other industries I named - with global and irreversible consequences.

As was put so succinctly above; timescales matter. Oceans don't give a fuck what I want, they won't de-acidify themselves no matter how much I cry about the marketplace of ideas/

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

#304

Post by _ykl9 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #209
_ykl9 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. I didn't attack any particular ideology. I politely described my opinion on a specific organization that attempted to overthrow my country's government, first via a soft coup and then by force, as it related to the current discussion. This smacks of making a list.. And? Are you suggesting that HN is anti-lists?

> The greatest threat facing humanity today isn't climate change. It's the current Republican Party > I didn't attack any particular ideology. Well, sorry, my fault, it just seemed that when you aligned anyone right of center with neo-Nazis that some people probably took it that way.

when you aligned anyone right of center with neo-Nazis

Again, I didn't say that.

Furthermore, while it's entirely beside the point, I personally do hold many political positions that might be considered right of center in America; for example, I'm in favor of liberal gun rights and a restriction on late-term abortions.

When I use the term "neo-Nazi", I mean it in a literal sense, not as an insult directed at conservatives. In fact, I went out of my way to distinguish between the center-right and neo-Nazis. There's a big difference between advocating for a balanced budget and joining an armed white nationalist militia to fight a satanic pedophile cult. Pretending otherwise is an obvious bad faith argument.

If anything, by suggesting that these are the same people, you are the one equating conservatives with neo-Nazis. Call me far-left, far-right, or whatever else you want; I just don't see someone like Bush/McCain/Romney storming the Capitol with a Confederate flag while calling for the assassination of acting government officials.

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

#305

Post by belorn »

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…

A good question, but much of it does get answered in the linked articles discussing the proposal.

Large social networks already have API's with partners, but who and how they are allowed to be used is defined through legal agreements and access controls. The access act is intended to regulate how those legal agreements over the API should be defined.

The EFF wants to allow third-party to ask consent of those users in order to use those API's for interoperability. In theory this would not put any additional requirement on the social network, and the consent request could occur out-of-band. The only change would be the legal ramification and access control.

In theory there could be a dominating social network without any API for third-parties, in which this proposal might be defeated. In practice that is very unlikely given the need of large companies. The proposal could also require if needed that internal API, if they exist (which all of them have as a matter of practicality), get opened up in the lack of any external API that can be used to enable interoperability. I would however guess that such a broad brush would be problematic, and a bit unnecessary since again every large social network already has third-party API's.

Do Discord have an API that a selected group of partners has access to? Do Instagram have it too? Given the correct permission, interactions between those two networks would be a matter of a third-party using those API's.

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

#306

Post by aabaker99 »

rayiner wrote: post #265
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…

"According to the American Cancer Society, for all stages of pancreatic cancer combined, the one-year relative survival rate is 20%, and the five-year rate is 9%." (https://pancreatic.org/pancreatic-cancer/about-the-pancreas/...)

I would hesitate to say your prominent tech billionaire died because of diet choices.

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

#307

Post by amelius »

rayiner wrote: post #278
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…

> 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? "I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."

That's called "sortition" [1], but currently not part of our democratic process.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

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

#309

Post by jhanschoo »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #302
Nursie wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So there’s no way at all, to your mind, to distinguish millions of shitposts about “The covid vaccine causes infertility, and contains 5G chips” from, for instance, genuine risk information? We truly are swimming in a world in which nothing is true. Or you are anyway.

You take an extreme example (5G chips in vaccines) to support the idea that we can draw a line in the sand and say what's true & what's false. But if you take an example closer to the line, things start to become less clear. Are masks useful to the general public? If you said "yes" a year ago, you would've been censored for spreading misinformation. If you said "no" yesterday, you would've been censored for spreading…

You take a moderate example to support the idea that we cannot nevertheless have a threshold where we can be sure that something is false. But while we cannot clearly say where the land ends and the ocean begins, there are large swaths of places that we can positively identify as ocean.

The OP never claimed to have an appropriate solution so I don't know what you are talking about regarding them thinking censorship is easy.

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

#310

Post by CursedUrn »

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…

How do you explain the massive list of advancements humanity made during the Enlightenment period with this attitude? Seems like you're advocating another dark age.
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