My interview with Steven Levy re. leaking of my Facebook Goodbye post

- We can't just ignore the fact that the internet is a global technology but jurisdictions are regionally restricted. This is a tension, of course, but to just throw up the hands in the air and conclude that, therefore, the internet should be a wholly unregulated space is not an option and not a single nation will allow that eventually.

- It is not necessary that the whole of the internet abide by one of these mechanisms, different things can be regulated in different ways, and "mixtures" of the systems are conceivable.

- The fact that proposed regulations have edge cases is not something that makes regulation impossible. That seems to be a very engineer-like mindset, but in truth, the law is quite good when it comes to integrating competing interests and principles or do decide that at some point, something is "good enough". Otherwise no laws would ever be written.

- IP based restrictions do not become ineffective automatically because VPNs exist. This is proven by the fact that geoblocking works reasonably well on streaming services etc. VPNs are often blocked and, even when not, many people are not technically competent enough to set one up. Of course, it depends on what we want to use IP based restrictions for. If we're targeting criminals (or dissidents), that's probably not a viable solution, but if it's about blocking certain content to certain users then it should work reasonably well. NB: I'm not arguing in favour of geoblocking, it's a stupid thing that should disappear, but the point is solely that it works reasonably well for lots of users.

- Finding some sort of common ground between different jurisdictions is something that is necessary in many areas of life which is why trade agreements etc. exist. If the EU pushing GDPR means that Facebook et al. need to adopt better practices wrt. privacy across the globe (because it's too difficult to determine whether a user is EU-based or not), then I guess that's gonna be the price they have to pay to operate in the EU. If the price for operating in China is, nobody is able to talk critically about China anymore, then the response should be "well I guess we won't be operating in China, then" (or, failing that, this should become something that would make western users abandon the network, or even better, something that other countries would take issue with, forcing the service to actually have to take a stand on this).

You can make an end-to-end message between two users perfectly secure, to the limits of engineering and the security hygine of the two users. No problem there. If you have an encrypted message sent out to a group of users, as the group of users gets larger and larger, it's more likely that one of those users might be an informant to law enforcement, or will be sloppy with their message hygine, so that after they get arrested invading the capitol on January 6th (for example), law enforcement gets access to all of their information on their phone with the pin code 1234. Still no problem as far as I'm concerned. Criminals tend to be stupid, and that's good from a societal point of view.

Public posts are a different story altogether, because social networks have an economic incentive to promote "engagement". And if that engagement happens to emphasize messages that incite hate, or anger, or causes people to think that vaccines contain 5G modems, or whatever, hey, that's just good for shareholders, and in the captalist system, shareholder value (especially VC value, for startups) is the highest good, right? Well, I have some real concerns about about that. I think that corporations which are prioritizing engagement uber ales, even if that causes social harm, should be potentially regulated.

And that's why it is quite possible for someone (like me) to believe that end to end encryption should be allowed, and promoted, even if it gives the FBI hives --- and at the same time, argue that public posts should be highly monitored from the perpsective of trying to get insight to whether the amplification alogirhtms might be doing something unhealthy for our society's information ecosystem.

Do you really think those tweeted screen shots sum it all up accurately, though? Considering that she says her views are being mispreresented, couldn't those two quotes be cherry-picked? You know the reputation of the Telegraph, right?

A guy tweeted that someone said (unattributed, but I assume the Telegraph) that she said.... It's just not solid. If you're going to accept that uncritically, I think you're essentially believing what you want to believe.

Sure. You could say this about any company or any country. Or even a person. We're all just a collection of thoughts and actions.