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

#471

Post by cutemonster » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 8:00 AM UTC

semitones wrote: post #425

Nevermark wrote: post #400

Big tech censorship will not solved without addressing the other half of a problem with two sides. Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation. If we are to avoid this dilemma we need systems that organically promote constructive, tolerant and inclusive communication, and or…

"Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation." - it is impossible to measure the qualifiers "quality", "nuanced", "tolerant", "original", "non-ideological" while still being objective. Thus, whatever implementation for enforcing these qualifiers you choose, it will inevitabl…

What you wrote sounds to me a bit like claiming that it's impossible to qualify paintings as beautiful or not, so therefore there cannot be any art museums

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

#472

Post by Nevermark » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 8:00 AM UTC

semitones wrote: post #425

Nevermark wrote: post #400

Big tech censorship will not solved without addressing the other half of a problem with two sides. Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation. If we are to avoid this dilemma we need systems that organically promote constructive, tolerant and inclusive communication, and or…

"Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation." - it is impossible to measure the qualifiers "quality", "nuanced", "tolerant", "original", "non-ideological" while still being objective. Thus, whatever implementation for enforcing these qualifiers you choose, it will inevitabl…

I disagree.

It is not impossible to measure quality, once you accept that quality has many definitions and therefore requires many contexts incentivizing different versions of it for different purposes and audiances.

And that diversity would be a very good thing.

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

#473

Post by int_19h » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 8:03 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #297

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 This is the basic hierarchical nature of any complex society. In a well functioning society those people, called elites (today already considered a derogatory term), are being funneled to the top where they're put into…

The elites at any given time are actively promoting this premise. But, seeing how elites get wiped out and replaced now and then, and society keeps going on, I think this "basic hierarchical nature" very much ought to be questioned by anyone who does not fancy becoming part of the current or future elite themselves.

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

#474

Post by joshuamorton » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 8:05 AM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #448

clucas wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the government writing censorship rules sounds absolutely dystopian to me. There are plenty of ways to get information on the internet - just because Facebook says "no porn" doesn't mean you can't get porn on the internet, you know? But there's only one government (per country, of course). If your government says no porn... What then?

> Having the government writing censorship rules sounds absolutely dystopian to me. No, because our court system could prevent any censorship that infringed on our rights. It is better to have our court system stop people from censoring too much, than it is for there to be zero rules at all, as to what could or could not be censored.

> No, because our court system could prevent any censorship that infringed on our rights

No they can't. The legislature would. Do you trust Nancy pelosi and Ted Cruz to write censorship rules you agree with?

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

#475

Post by joshuamorton » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 8:07 AM UTC

totony wrote: post #392

8note wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What do you mean? Not anyone has the power they do

The point is that if they're simply responding to consumer demand, then it's collectively us who are the censors.

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

#476

Post by ddvvff » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 8:09 AM UTC

cutemonster wrote: post #471

semitones wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation." - it is impossible to measure the qualifiers "quality", "nuanced", "tolerant", "original", "non-ideological" while still being objective. Thus, whatever implementation for enforcing these qualifiers you choose, it will inevitabl…

What you wrote sounds to me a bit like claiming that it's impossible to qualify paintings as beautiful or not, so therefore there cannot be any art museums

Well, objectively, you can't have an art museum that has only beautiful art in it, since beauty in art is subjective and non quantifiable, so yes there can not be an art museum that has only beautiful paintings, and the beautiful paintings that supposedly are there might only beautiful to the eye of the curator.

Either way, the point is not wether or not you can have a place with discourse with the all good qualities described, it is more so that because those qualities are not quantifiable, it is impossible to know for sure.

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

#477

Post by baobabKoodaa » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 8:42 AM UTC

jhanschoo wrote: post #309

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> 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.

Disagree. This is what OP said, among other things: "We absolutely can, as a society, say that (for example) misinformation about vaccines, where we are dealing with matters of fact, is not on a level with actual vaccine science. This is not really up for honest debate."

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

#478

Post by dvdkon » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 8:43 AM UTC

roody15 wrote: post #87

ashtonkem wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’ll never happen for the same reason why basically nobody runs their own online services today. Most people strongly favor the convenience of existing SaaS services, which is why dropbox beats out all the self hosted alternatives by orders of magnitude.

meh … dropbox really?

Yeah, file storage/syncing is probably the best example of successful self-hosting for moderately "techy" people, with commercial NASes usually offering much better and cheaper services than cloud storage for home/office usage.

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

#479

Post by echelon » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 8:53 AM UTC

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.

I support preventing Roko's Basilisk.

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

#480

Post by PontifexMinimus » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 9:16 AM UTC

clucas wrote: post #231

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.

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 is tasked with writing moderation rules?

That already exists: governments already have laws limiting some forms of speech e.g. copyright infringements or pornography. Obviously corporations that want to stay in business have to obey the laws.

> "the idea of free speech in modern liberal democracies"

As I've already pointed out, all states already have laws limiting speech. Maybe I think there should be more such laws; maybe I think there should be less; but either way it's orthogonal to whether I want FB to have power to control what I can say and hear.

If my government passes laws that I don't like, citizens can vote them out at the next election. I can't vote Zuckerberg out, he's an undemocratic locus of power.

> 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.

As I said, such laws already exist.

> Do you have any other way to implement your idea of forcing Facebook to show you the feeds you subscribe to?

Yes, require all social media apps to provide interoperability though ActivityPub and similar protocols. Make sure there are no legal or technical impediments to people running social media servers (Mastodon etc) on their own hardware though their home internet connections.

What I actually want is a world where people don't care whether FB censors things, because it doesn't matter as people can and do use other means to communicate. So FB censors stuff and no-one notices because it has no practical effect. That is, a world where FB is stripped of their power.