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Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate or defend democracy (2018)

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Re: Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate or defend democracy (2018)

#11

Post by api »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #2

2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. Everyone claims to love free speech but when suppression of speech opposing their own worldview comes into play, they suddenly dither and fall back on other rationalizations to justify the censorship. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'hate speech'. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'misinform…

I have to be honest and say that my faith in the capacity of people to think in a free speech totally open environment was severely tested over the past 5-10 years. Things like Qanon, flat Earth, antivax hysteria, the meme-driven return of both "right" and "left" totalitarian ideologies from the early 20th century that should be completely discredited, and so on have made me wonder if most people simply can't handle exposure to unregulated content as they lack the ability to think critically. I've actually wondered if most people might not need to be protected from unregulated content in the same way that people need to be protected from exposure to lead, radon gas, etc.

The human brain simply didn't evolve in this environment. Throughout 99.9% of human history a person's ideas came from the tribe or neighborhood and came with the context of culture, social relationships, and physical body language cues. The brain did not evolve to process a context-free meme stream connected to an algorithm trying to keep you "engaged."

If only a few people had fallen for this nonsense that would be one thing, but I witnessed mass conversions of millions of people to ideas that are more absurd than the craziest conspiracy bullshit I read on Usenet in the 1990s. This is stuff the people who are crazy think is crazy.

It goes beyond shockingly bad ideas too. I've seen an alarming rise of discourse that resembles word salad spewed out by a primitive Markov chain text generator. It's terrifying. It almost looks like exposure to open discourse is causing brain damage in some susceptible fraction of the population. Some subset of people seem to have lost the ability to process or generate a coherent narrative or structured system of ideas. They just spew memes in random order. It's less coherent than classic new age babble or Orwellian "newspeak."

I still lean in the free speech direction pretty hard, but my faith is shaken to the core. I honestly and non-hyperbolically wonder if the right carefully crafted AI-powered social media boosted propaganda campaign couldn't convert double digit percentages of the population into homicidal maniacs or cause a mass suicide wave killing millions.

BTW this and not "Skynet" is the scary thing about AI. The most terrifying AI scenario I can think of is AI-assisted demagoguery or mass stochastic terrorism powered by big data. Think "adversarial attacks against the human neocortex."

Attacks only get better.

Re: Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate or defend democracy (2018)

#12

Post by sebow »

You don't have to force YT,FB,etc to host anything that "violates their TOS",given that: you make the clear distinction in the legislature:do american rights apply in the online space?If yes, and you also consider YT,FB,etc. public places[which has already been done by the courts], what's not to say that you MUST enforce people's right on these platforms?That's the current debate and it should either conclude in: yes those privately-owned places are not public places thus they can do whatever they want, or they are, in which case rights must be applied, to the letter.The latter sounds more scary to non-US citizens because they might see offensive material, but to make the distinction clear in the law, a "bill of rights" should be made that states the rights apply to this 'new' digital information medium aswell. This is not "right to internet" as a "public-utility", because that's mostly non-sense created for political gain amongst the young.The long-term effects of current censorship will eventually set things naturally: people will create off-grid mesh networks, plugged into the mainstream internet,to fight off censorship, and it will be out of some dystopian movie.This won't really be the "web 3.0", because you're still relying on "centralized pipelines" that tie everything together.

By the way, this will inevitably also go into property/copyrights issue, and the law is shaky there aswell(arguably even more so,compared to freedom of expression).The "i store these bits on my machine but i don't own copyright of it" is a big issue and frankly something disturbing.I would rather see copyrights holders enforce streaming(where you don't "store" their content entirely at any given time) rather than continue with this DRM mess and everything that comes with it.

Re: Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate or defend democracy (2018)

#13

Post by BitwiseFool »

farias0 wrote: post #7
BitwiseFool wrote: post #2

2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. Everyone claims to love free speech but when suppression of speech opposing their own worldview comes into play, they suddenly dither and fall back on other rationalizations to justify the censorship. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'hate speech'. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'misinform…

Although I don't fundamentally disagree with your point, I don't think you're framing the issue fairly. It's not a matter of most people being enemies of free speech, it's just that this is an inherently difficult problem. Everyone draws the line differently on what's acceptable and what isn't, and every platform is trying to foster a different kind of community.

I don't think people are enemies, adversaries, or even detractors of free speech, but rather, they won't actually defend the kinds of speech that the ideal of free speech is meant to protect. Especially when the censorship happens to be affecting their partisan opposite. I do, though, recognize the difficulty in allowing some things and not others depending on the forum.

Please excuse the shortcoming I have for explaining this, but I have to fall back on "I know it when it see it" when it comes to what counts as violations of the principle of free speech vs content moderation. In the current zeitgeist though, I absolutely see this as censorship rather than content moderation. This is because I absolutely sense partisan motivations for content take-downs and topic-wide bans on such large platforms as YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc.

Re: Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate or defend democracy (2018)

#14

Post by gedy »

api wrote: post #11
BitwiseFool wrote: post #2

2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. Everyone claims to love free speech but when suppression of speech opposing their own worldview comes into play, they suddenly dither and fall back on other rationalizations to justify the censorship. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'hate speech'. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'misinform…

I have to be honest and say that my faith in the capacity of people to think in a free speech totally open environment was severely tested over the past 5-10 years. Things like Qanon, flat Earth, antivax hysteria, the meme-driven return of both "right" and "left" totalitarian ideologies from the early 20th century that should be completely discredited, and so on have made me wonder if most people simply can't handle…

Flat Earth folks these days mostly seem to just delight in being contrarian/trolls. I'm sure there's some unstable folks in there like any belief system/group though.

Re: Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate or defend democracy (2018)

#15

Post by ggggtez »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #2

2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. Everyone claims to love free speech but when suppression of speech opposing their own worldview comes into play, they suddenly dither and fall back on other rationalizations to justify the censorship. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'hate speech'. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'misinform…

How can you support free speech but prevent a company from exerting that speech?

YouTube banning antivax content is speech.

You want the government to start mandating that a company can't take a stance on important issues of healthcare? Churches spend all day every day taking stances on abortion. You want to the government to tell them they can't take a side?

Re: Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate or defend democracy (2018)

#16

Post by foobarian »

farias0 wrote: post #7
BitwiseFool wrote: post #2

2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. Everyone claims to love free speech but when suppression of speech opposing their own worldview comes into play, they suddenly dither and fall back on other rationalizations to justify the censorship. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'hate speech'. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'misinform…

Although I don't fundamentally disagree with your point, I don't think you're framing the issue fairly. It's not a matter of most people being enemies of free speech, it's just that this is an inherently difficult problem. Everyone draws the line differently on what's acceptable and what isn't, and every platform is trying to foster a different kind of community.

I wonder if we would be better served with a NPR-like publicly funded platform for video hosting that puts a lot more resources into content moderation. The private platforms get away with the bare minimum by throwing black box AI at the problem which leads to problems like the anti-vax censorship chilling effects etc. There should be an easily reached human in the loop with transparent decisions, and levels of appeal which is much more expensive. Kinda like the court system with the jury-of-your-peers litmus test.

Re: Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate or defend democracy (2018)

#17

Post by Kim_Bruning »

wutbrodo wrote: post #8
BitwiseFool wrote: post #2

2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. Everyone claims to love free speech but when suppression of speech opposing their own worldview comes into play, they suddenly dither and fall back on other rationalizations to justify the censorship. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'hate speech'. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'misinform…

> 2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. This is always how it's worked. The idea that protecting the rights of your enemies can be salutary relies on too many complex concepts for the majority of people to have any hope of grasping it: burning the commons, collective action, norm evolution, meta-level thinking[1], modeling counterfactual worlds (eg one a future wher…

I'm not sure people can't grasp it. But it certainly can't be taken for granted.

Perhaps we need to continuously keep making versions of this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 ("Don't be a sucker" 1945)

Re: Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate or defend democracy (2018)

#18

Post by bitwize »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #2

2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. Everyone claims to love free speech but when suppression of speech opposing their own worldview comes into play, they suddenly dither and fall back on other rationalizations to justify the censorship. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'hate speech'. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'misinform…

New Zealand has a Censorship Office and an official called the Chief Censor. The government has the power to declare that certain communications are illegal and prosecute people for making those communications. They recently, famously did this with footage from the Christchurch shootings as well as the shooter's manifesto.

Yet New Zealand consistently tops Cato Institute's freedom index.

Maybe, just maybe, an absolutist reading of free speech that favors spreading of hate and misinformation, as we have in the USA ever since Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969[0] is not a necessary condition for freedom. Maybe restricting speech actually has a public benefit and can increase the freedom and well-being of individuals with no hateful or dishonest intent.

[0] Note that the plaintiff was a KKK member, so yes, the current bedrock court ruling for free speech in the USA was crafted specifically to protect hate speech.

Re: Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate or defend democracy (2018)

#19

Post by 1cvmask »

foobarian wrote: post #16
farias0 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I don't fundamentally disagree with your point, I don't think you're framing the issue fairly. It's not a matter of most people being enemies of free speech, it's just that this is an inherently difficult problem. Everyone draws the line differently on what's acceptable and what isn't, and every platform is trying to foster a different kind of community.

I wonder if we would be better served with a NPR-like publicly funded platform for video hosting that puts a lot more resources into content moderation. The private platforms get away with the bare minimum by throwing black box AI at the problem which leads to problems like the anti-vax censorship chilling effects etc. There should be an easily reached human in the loop with transparent decisions, and levels of appea…

NPR censored coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop claiming it was not newsworthy. All platforms with any moderation will be censorious platforms by definition. You can always tweak the degree of censorship though with moderation.

Re: Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate or defend democracy (2018)

#20

Post by Jiro »

bitwize wrote: post #18
BitwiseFool wrote: post #2

2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. Everyone claims to love free speech but when suppression of speech opposing their own worldview comes into play, they suddenly dither and fall back on other rationalizations to justify the censorship. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'hate speech'. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'misinform…

New Zealand has a Censorship Office and an official called the Chief Censor. The government has the power to declare that certain communications are illegal and prosecute people for making those communications. They recently, famously did this with footage from the Christchurch shootings as well as the shooter's manifesto. Yet New Zealand consistently tops Cato Institute's freedom index. Maybe, just maybe, an absolut…

If you can ban something for being hate speech, calling something hate speech becomes a weapon. I absolutely don't trust any of the people banning "hate speech" to not have double standards that make it easy to call anything politically disagreeing with them "hate speech".
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