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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

#361

Post by rcurry »

heavyset_go wrote: post #171
galaxyLogic wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is no doubt true (about how the algorithms work). At the same time what we see is that there is a market, demand, for misinformation. And some people are making money from that. Why is there so much misinformation about Covid vaccines and vaccines in general? Because people want to believe in such misinformation and because that allows websites to make money from their readership. Therefore the peddling of misin…

> Weekly World News This has always been obvious satire.

Yeah, well the Chupacabra still keeps me up at night.

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

#362

Post by shkkmo »

zamalek wrote: post #326
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…

> improve education around critical thinking, Aye. This would improve so many things. Critical thinking is, in fact, not an instinctual ability. It's perfectly okay to talk mathematics illiteracy, but propaganda literacy? "No, no, we can't imply that people aren't capable of thinking for themselves." We have multiple historical instances of extremely successful disinformation campaigns, and people fell for it en-mass…

Educating people with better critical thinkings skills is great. Deciding that educating people is too hard and that we need to allow large monopilistic platforms to decide what can be said with zero liability is much less good.

Mandating data interoperability between platforms seems like a good middle ground that allows diversity of moderation while reducing the monopoloatic power of large platforms.

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

#363

Post by User23 »

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…

> 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.

This has been well known for a couple thousand years at least. Aristotle comprehensively covered it in his Rhetoric[1]. There have always been people who can only be persuaded by rhetoric and not by dialectic. If anything, our contemporary educational system is designed to form persons to be incapable of dialectic and susceptible to rhetoric. And so the current state of affairs is unsurprising.

It's strange to think that rhetoric used to be a standard secondary level subject in the West. I wonder what it would be like to live in a society where virtually every moderately educated adult were well versed in persuasion tricks.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/

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

#365

Post by 8note »

totony wrote: post #266
root_axis wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

By that definition, they're no more the arbitrator of morality than anyone else is by doing this

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

#366

Post by tekknik »

the_gipsy wrote: post #186
trentnix wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

There was quite a public display last election about news orgs agreeing to not cover Biden in negative light so as to not hurt his chances. What would you call this?

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

#367

Post by mensetmanusman »

markoman wrote: post #290
rayiner wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

Instead of making a snarky smear upon the faculty of what is probably the most coveted university in the world, why don't you just come out and make an informed argument on what you find so wrong with them? “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the…

They are >90% very left leaning, which is common in elite academic institutes, but such groups are typically contemptuous of average Americans and their religious views.

This would set up a likely conflict, such as what we got a hint of when the masses elected Trump as a big middle finger.

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

#368

Post by busymom0 »

Jerry2 wrote: post #323

ACLU is still silent about the latest attack on free speech. They still haven't opposed the White House's plan to enforce speech. I've cancelled my monthly donations to them because of it. Please do the same if you give them money.

ACLU has been down the tubes for a while now, especially when it comes to political cases.

> ACLU Lawyer Cheers Suppression of a New Book

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-ongoing-death-of-free-s...

> ACLU Again Cowardly Abstains From an Online Censorship Controversy

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/aclu-again-cowardly-abstain...

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

#369

Post by shkkmo »

trainsplanes wrote: post #314
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. Gullible people exist. I mean, it's such a well-known phenomenon that the term "gullible" exists to describe people who fall for what should be obviously false information and lies. We all have our instances of gulli…

Flagging a potential scam or potentially self-serving misinformation is not censorship and is very different from blocking content and banning posters.

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

#370

Post by tptacek »

amelius wrote: post #221
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…

> 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…

The ignorant, short-sighted mass. That answer is kind of in the kernel of our civics. You're not supposed to have to think before answering that question. :)

(I mean those first two sentences non-ironically.)

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