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

#331

Post by cartoonworld » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 1:01 AM UTC

TheFalun wrote: post #327

cartoonworld wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, don't get lost in the insincere gaslighting.

Can you answer my questions? They paint a different story than what the NYT is telling you. I'm being very sincere I want to get to the truth. If one person of a specific group does something bad and it gets mainstream news does the size of that group and overall impact it has increase? Of course not. If there are less neonazis now than in the early days of the internet then doesn't that mean that having the ability…

I am struggling to see how this relates at all to how I have answered your rhetorical questions from before.

As you are well aware, it is a material thing how the structure of this kind of indoctrination occurs in society and this I have adequately described, albeit very briefly, as it has a long and colorful history.

I would like to answer your question in another fashion: Is Stormfront the KKK?

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

#332

Post by SMAAART » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 1:04 AM UTC

Censorship is like Zeno's dichotomy paradox; today the people promoting Censorship as a solution are happy; give it a long enough timeline and the very same people promoting Censorship will be the ones being censored.

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

#333

Post by jensensbutton » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 1:07 AM UTC

belorn wrote: post #305

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…

> In theory this would not put any additional requirement on the social network

This falls apart as soon as you examine it though. If the law only required a platform to give competitors access to whatever API they currently have without actually detailing what needs to be accessible then it would be trivially easy for platforms to change/restrict those APIs in ways that make them useless. And as soon as you try to address this you're back at the original problem of how you create a standard model that works for everyone.

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

#334

Post by jensensbutton » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 1:10 AM UTC

claytoneast wrote: post #249

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…

What's wrong with: anything a user can do on your app in the interface must also be doable via API call by that user. You don't have to map everything so the platform interactions are the same, simply make them equal-access via API call. It seems flawless to me but I also only spent the time I took to type this thinking about it, so it may be 98% flawed.

What if the platform added 1 day of latency to every call?

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

#335

Post by jensensbutton » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 1:20 AM UTC

Article and linked proposal really just don't even attempt to tackle the privacy implications of all this. People don't like that WhatsApp knows your _metadata_, but we're supposed to be good with anyone being able to bring all the metadata of their entire social network to any random provider? How do you make such an argument in 2021, the year "privacy" went mainstream?

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

#336

Post by refurb » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 1:22 AM UTC

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 approach of “people are gullible and need someone smarter to show them the truth” of course requires some “smart enough” and no doubt many HNers consider themselves those people. Which is a hilarious take on HN if you ever read a discussion on health matters.

The amount of bad information, random conjuncture and conspiratorial thinking is pretty shocking.

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

#337

Post by refurb » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 1:25 AM UTC

aabaker99 wrote: post #306

rayiner wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He had a highly curable type of pancreatic cancer.

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

#338

Post by hrh » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 1:31 AM UTC

monkeybutton wrote: post #328

Nursie wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most abhorrent idea of all to me is that there are stupid, weak people that are worse than "us" Not what I said. However the idea that everyone is equally able to parse out good information from bad is absurd, and I make no claims to be one of the group of enlightened ubermensch who should be able to decide for the rest. Neither do I argue that such people exist or are necessary. > we can be adults and let ever…

I don't understand how one could look at the current state of affairs regarding rampant misinformation online and say "yeah this is the best we can do without compromising our ideals". Its not good enough.

I think that's the real issue in all of this discussion: there is simply no will.

It's too hard, it's too impossible, we've decided big tech has already won, we've ceded decades of open progress in tech to moguls who don't give the fuck about us, or we're so ideological that any step to the "left" or "right" is perceived as abdicating principles of freedom.

My gp was a former-Jew (thanks anti-semites) that flew over nazi germany. My other grandfather served in Europe after that whole debacle. I feel I have as much right as anyone to say that it's bullshit going on Reddit and running into the same hateful misinformation on every thread, of "arguing" with holocaust deniers on conspiracy that think Sly Stallone kisses dolphins, use the same canards they've been suing for 2k years, and I can promise you were the first to notice my crypto-Jewishness. These same dummies love Q and have never found covid information that fit their narrative that they didn't love.

We really gonna relitigate (and lose) historical issues like the Holocaust for the next 10,000 years? We gonna sit by and whine about "principles" as people are murdered on a daily basis because of misinformation like that? That's not good enough.

What marketplace of ideas? How many serious challenges have there been to big tech by any company in the last decade? What freedom is there if you can't walk out your front door without being directly impacted by disinformation of various kinds on a daily basis?

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

#339

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 1:33 AM UTC

jacob2484 wrote: post #43

britch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Winners usually frame their fights as ones for freedom and liberty, and emphasize their enemy's use of censorship and re-education camps.

Something is either being censored or it's not. Regardless of the issue, I'll side with the side that is not censoring information.

[deleted]

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

#340

Post by teeray » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 1:34 AM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #256

clucas wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this gets you into really weird places really quickly. How do you not end up with a censorship department of the government, that is tasked with writing moderation rules? It probably wouldn't be called a censorship office, but that's what it would be: a government office determining what can and can't be posted on social media. This seems entirely antithetical to the idea of the first amendment. Do you have a…

> How do you not end up with a censorship department of the government That department of censorship will exist no matter what. Internally, it is called the trust and safety department, at most big companies. The only question is do you want to have the decisions of that department to be limited by judges and rights that are laid out in the constitution, or do you want it to be an unaccountable free for all, where th…

> The only question is do you want… or do you want…

Therein the problem lies. Users have no choice over which moderation policies their feeds are curated by at all. I should be able to choose moderation that I deem acceptable. To continue your analogy to telcos, this is akin to robocall blocking services which are a user decision and often tell you when blocking occurs.