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

#461

Post by int_19h » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 7:29 AM UTC

SantalBlush wrote: post #429

PontifexMinimus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will facebook be forced to show its users the same nastiness it just booted off, because of the interop necessities? Facebook should be forced to show me the feeds I choose to subscribe to. I'm perfectly capable of deciding for myself whether I find something nasty, and I find the idea of Zuckerberg as an arbiter of morality both absurd and dystopian.

>Facebook should be forced I would consider this sentiment more absurd and dystopian than Facebook freely removing content from its own website.

Do you consider the already-existing (in other fields) common carrier arrangement to be absurd and dystopian?

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

#462

Post by int_19h » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 7:29 AM UTC

justbored123 wrote: post #99

PontifexMinimus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will facebook be forced to show its users the same nastiness it just booted off, because of the interop necessities? Facebook should be forced to show me the feeds I choose to subscribe to. I'm perfectly capable of deciding for myself whether I find something nasty, and I find the idea of Zuckerberg as an arbiter of morality both absurd and dystopian.

So, you are in favor of things like pedophilia/child grooming online, revenge porn, defamation, false advertisement, fraud, etc. because YOUR moral may approve of it regardless of laws or harm to others. Got it. The idea of no-regulation free for all is childish/sick nonsense. If you want to have your own nazi-phedo site/feed, host it yourself and face the cost and consequences yourself, don't force private for profi…

Will somebody please think of the children?

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

#463

Post by int_19h » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 7:32 AM UTC

diffeomorphism wrote: post #454

MrStonedOne wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 service sends their way? If not, how is this supposed to fix the moderation problem? Does gmail block emails from your friends containing misinformation? Why should facebook be allowed to do the same thing?

Don't they? If someone sends me spam/malware I expect gmail to filter that, even if it is from a friend's (hijacked) account. I think there definitely is a very blurry line between spam/fraud and spam/misinformation.

There's no blurry line - both are spam if the recipient didn't ask for them. But at the same time, misinformation is not necessarily spam, and the ongoing brouhaha is largely about the kinds that people voluntarily choose to consume (and come back to ask for more).

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

#464

Post by re-al » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 7:33 AM UTC

No one has 'the truth', it's just not that sort of thing. Everyone has opinions. Some opinions are lies. Transparency is the way to deal with the lies.

But if you're the one lying and have your hands on the levers of power, censorship is a great tool.

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

#465

Post by int_19h » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 7:34 AM UTC

clucas wrote: post #239

MrStonedOne wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 service sends their way? If not, how is this supposed to fix the moderation problem? Does gmail block emails from your friends containing misinformation? Why should facebook be allowed to do the same thing?

I think it's OK to say (1) you are allowed to send pornographic magazines through the mail from your place of business, but (2) you are not allowed to put a pornographic image on the front of your building. I also think it's fair to carry this analogy over to the internet, and the difference between an email and a social media post.

A social media post is read only by the people who subscribed to the author, and those who followed the links to it. Not quite the same as a public building that random people walk past, and have to see regardless of whether they want to or not.

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

#466

Post by int_19h » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 7:35 AM UTC

throwawayboise wrote: post #247

shrimpx wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that gmail isn't publicly serving your emails to an open audience. The restrictions on Drive are only for publicly-served content.

So they say. For now.

I dunno why this is downmodded, given that e.g. OneDrive already applies its rules to all content, not just shared stuff; and Facebook is actively censoring even private chats (it will refuse to send some links, e.g. to certain websites about cannabis).

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

#467

Post by int_19h » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 7:44 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 don't understand how one can say "it's not good enough" without proposing options that are actually better. I've yet to see any; all the censorship proposals on the table are far worse than the present state of affairs.

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

#468

Post by int_19h » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 7:48 AM UTC

hrh wrote: post #401

nights192 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe I am, though--you are, if I'm not mistaken, asserting that it's some prolific iniquitous undercurrent which these platforms are subtending in some manner. (Which would seem somewhat misleading to me, as your assertion that r/TheDonald moved was of their own volition, rather than a banning by the site.) Any platform harboring content will, as a matter of course, simply through the caprice of a moderato…

I think the number of discussions that are off-limits should be very small and platforms should be much much more transparent. However, if allowing certain discussions means also allowing other discussions, I'm not broken up if sites like reddit were to ban a subreddit like conspiracy or at least try to reshape it to something much more objective. If the owners a property decide certain views are abhorrent, that's th…

You're correct in that it's really a market capture problem as things are. But the popular proposals that try to co-opt Big Tech into the censorship game are popular precisely because of that market capture - it's a way to make it extensive without putting the government in charge of it explicitly.

So we can't really treat these two as completely separate right now. Indeed, if those schemes are allowed to go forward, the next thing you'll hear is that we can't break Facebook etc up, because doing so will limit how effectively some information can be suppressed. The more power is concentrated, the more it seeks to sustain that state of affairs, and the better it is at that - so why would we hand those companies so much power when they already are a major problem?

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

#469

Post by int_19h » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 7:53 AM UTC

hrh wrote: post #354

Zpalmtree wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is being murdered on a daily basis because of holocaust deniers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_synagogue_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Jersey_City_shooting Every day? No. But when it's 2021 and you gotta worry about getting gunned down for being a Jew? Putin loves to use anti-Semitic rhetoric when convenient. Which is the big part of this...the stand pat and do nothing approach doesn't work when the resources of nation states can (logically) and have been…

Christchurch shooting is a good example, because the follow-up crackdown on associated content showed just how far this can go. Remember his "manifesto"? In NZ, its distribution was banned outright by law (or rather government order, but they have laws on the books that allow for it). Not so in Australia - they couldn't find any legal means to restrict it, so the government basically informally asked the ISPs to "do something".

And they did - to the point where a bunch of websites with forums were blocked outright because of their hands-off policy wrt comments (usually in some particular subforum; it's a fairly common way to keep it civil elsewhere) meant that there were a bunch of posts with links to the document.

The end result is that a bunch of completely unrelated stuff was blocked in Australia outright for a while, by private companies in charge of communications acting in unison - effectively, a censorship cartel - with no political or judicial recourse, since the government was not involved in it, and the ISPs were in their right, legally speaking.

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

#470

Post by rayiner » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 7:56 AM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #434

rayiner wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an immigrant to America, I have thought hard about the differences between it and the developing country I came from. We don’t have any shortage of intellectuals, and those Harvard professors export their ideas for the whole world. Professors at elite colleges have created exactly zero prosperous nations. I’m convinced that what we’re missing is ordinary Americans.

> Professors at elite colleges have created exactly zero prosperous nations. It turns out that you can make that statement for any group of people. It takes all kinds of people to build prosperous nations. It'a also particularly ironic that you're writing this because of a project that professors (and grad students) at some elite colleges started back in the 1970s, with some funding from the defense department. And t…

We’re talking about who to put in charge. The US was built with basically just a few kinds of people in charge: farmers, lawyers, businessmen, and military officers. It was already wealthy before there were any Ivy League professors doing anything.

There are countries where the government was heavily influenced by academic theories. Marx was a PhD and a professor and his political philosophy was the basis for several quite unsuccessful efforts at governance.

This is not a knock on academic elites in general. I want them sitting around and building the Internet! But I want a farmer actually running the country.