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Protect me from what I want

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Re: Protect me from what I want

#131

Post by kannanvijayan »

ilyt wrote: post #111
kannanvijayan wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main takeaway is that you care what other people read, not about what people are making you read. As do I, and you. I was pretty happy when all of those ISIS accounts that were spewing violence and hate got shut down. I'm sure you have your boundaries on what you'd want society to allow and restrict on public mediums. The specific details of what those boundaries are will depend on your personal notion of what…

Right but I don't want some wanker at Twitter or Facebook office decide that. If I want to press the ban/blacklist button on tag, account, group, or whatever social unit to not see it again that's my decision. Sure, some of them should be default (probably don't want people to get porn the second they sign up), but user should be in power to moderate and filter their own stream. > Copyright violations. Beheading vide…

The distinctions you're bringing up seem kind of perfunctory to me.

The wanker at the twitter office that was presumably appointed by twitter management to do that, yes? And some people want to appeal to that particular seat of power to influence and limit discourse along some dimension, within twitter.

And yet other appeals to higher powers, such as governments - control communication with deeper consequences across broader domains.

What's legal or illegal evolves with politics and culture. So there's no fundamental purchase there for the kind of moral conversation you were trying to elicit.

If in a few years the people you accuse of wanting to control other people's speech are able to get some laws passed making the speech they want controlled properly illegal, I'd venture you would resist accepting that as suddenly legitimate - even if those things would be "straight up illegal" at that point.

I guess I should have been more explicit in the first response - but what I'm suggesting is that this conversation is better had in less absolutist terms than what you proposed. There was the implication that the other person somehow inherently wanted to control communication in a qualitatively different way than you (or I did).

That's not to go down the path of sophistry - but just to suggest to orient the conversation around where the boundaries should be placed in practical terms, and discuss where the differences in boundaries lie and on an issue by issue basis evaluate that, rather than absolutist/ideological terms.

"You want to control speech (and I don't)" doesn't really lead anywhere in terms of discourse. It's a dead end.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#132

Post by rsj_hn »

toofy wrote: post #125
zmgsabst wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you haven't noticed the chorus of coastal media types asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum, then you are truly oblivious. This doesn’t seem like a low-signal comment: it’s factually true and relevant to the context. Rather, people are falsely marking it as low signal because they don’t like it and want to manipulate the discussion by hiding things they don’t like…

> …it’s factually true and relevant to the context. this is factually true? what exactly is a “coastal media type”?

I would say someone living in a specific media bubble. Politico has an article about this with some data:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...

Pew has done a study recently on this as well:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/07/13/u-s-journal...

Re: Protect me from what I want

#133

Post by toofy »

zmgsabst wrote: post #129
toofy wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …it’s factually true and relevant to the context. this is factually true? what exactly is a “coastal media type”?

Large US news companies have their staff largely in areas like California, New York, etc. because US media conglomerates are concentrated in those areas. Eg, WarnerMedia who is the parent company of CNN — a news agency that’s undergone substantial cuts under a new CEO due to its bias.

could you expand on this a bit?

Re: Protect me from what I want

#134

Post by fleddr »

miloignis wrote: post #115
fleddr wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instance blocking will ultimately create the exact same dynamic as found at Twitter. Aggressive online activism, regardless of your political direction, is here to stay. So it can and will be used to pressure other instances into blocking yet other instances.

Small and single-user instances don't really fall prey to this - how is one even supposed to know what a single-user instance is blocking if you don't tell them? Anyway, even for those that do what you'd have is a stratification into levels of instances with different tolerance levels of blocking. I think this is a very different dynamic than exists on Twitter, can you explain more about what the identical dynamic wo…

The dynamic would be that the tolerance level you refer to would be as low as found on Twitter: people perpetually offended at the smallest of disagreements and aggressively silencing, blocking, canceling the supposed offender.

An example I saw on Mastodon. A mid-sized instance wanted to stop federation with another instance that is well known and large. Why? Because that instance is federating with yet another instance containing a user supposedly affiliated with some right wing movement. Said user had not posted anything yet.

So we're talking about a 3rd order blockage in this example. Now you might reason, the mod of the large instance is under no obligation to do anything, it's their instance. But that's not how the game is played. You wouldn't want to be called an enabler of fascism, would you? You'll comply or be labeled a monster. Or they could lobby to put your instance on a standard block list that is widely reused.

When you let this run unchecked, you'll end up with Twitter: bubbles and fighting "the other side".

Re: Protect me from what I want

#135

Post by shadowgovt »

ilyt wrote: post #113
shadowgovt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen them asking for private forums to stop giving such folk a platform, because an organization can choose to do what it will with its private property. But public forums? No, I can't say I have. In fact, I remember witnessing a President giving a large speech in a public forum that was followed by a riot at the Capitol (whether said speech was causal to the riot is still a matter for the courts). Nobody challe…

Define "public forum". Because both Facebook and Twitter have way more range than most of what would be defined as "public forum" does

Range doesn't make something a public forum. Generally, control of the space by the public (or their delegates) does.

A letter to the editor of the New York Times has the potential to be seen by 343,000 households (a number down from 1.3 million). This never made the New York Times' letters page a public forum.

Twitter, for example, was at least previously accountable to shareholders. Now, it's very much a private forum.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#136

Post by kneebonian »

bitwize wrote: post #15
nostromo wrote: post #8

Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see. In their view, they have the "correct opinions" and have not been biased by any algorithms or moderation. Meanwhile, the people that disagree with them are the ones being duped by algorithms, bad moderation, and bad actors. That's why there's a huge censorship movement right now in the…

Read Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" to see why this is the case: https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr... The tl;dr is that if you actually want to move toward a society of free and equal human beings and eliminate oppression, "free speech for all" is not how you go about it. One side of the political spectrum supports equality and emancipation, the other is opposed to it. Therefore the speec…

> The internet has had its time to experiment with free speech for all, and now we have Nazis.

Interestingly enough did you know that the original Nazis came about before the internet ever existed, way back in the 1930's, further did you know Nazis existed prior to the internet as well. It is true, in fact one may argue that there is no real correlation between the existence of Nazis and the internet, just their visibility.

But in a less sarcastic vein, I can only speak from my personal experience, but from what I see the more we try and suppress speech that some do not like, whether labeling it as hate speech, misinformation, or whatever else has produced in fact the exact opposite of the intended result, where more people are willing to tolerate actual Nazi's, question official information more readily and tolerate real racism more because the label became so broadly applied that it lost any meaningful effect.

Finally I also heard one interesting theory that part of the reason one side of the political spectrum is currently struggling so much is because the other side had even their moderate views censored from twitter, whereas another side was treated in a much more lenient fashion. The result was only the most reasonable and centerist voices of one side were shared, whereas the other side had many of their most radical and vocal members airing their views for all to see, which was a turn off to many, whereas the most extermist content on the other side was hidden and squelched.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#137

Post by shadowgovt »

zmgsabst wrote: post #119
shadowgovt wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not irony. The ability to say something doesn't imply anyone is obligated to either listen or agree. Downvotes imply a desire to quiet a signal (or at least, a belief the signal is uninteresting and should show up below other signals) and the site is designed to enhance interesting signals and suppress uninteresting ones. Everything here is doing exactly what it says on the tin. The weird notion is that one shou…

> If you haven't noticed the chorus of coastal media types asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum, then you are truly oblivious. This doesn’t seem like a low-signal comment: it’s factually true and relevant to the context. Rather, people are falsely marking it as low signal because they don’t like it and want to manipulate the discussion by hiding things they don’t like…

People sometimes down-signal a comment because it's not the type of comment they want to see on HN for reasons other than factual content.

Prognosticating the zeitgeist is a fraught enterprise, but in this case, I'd guess tone twanged a lot of nerves. The first two sentences of comment guidance [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html] are "Be kind. Don't be snarky." There's a vast Internet that lacks a rule like that and HN tries to do something other than be that.

Re: Protect me from what I want

#138

Post by toofy »

rsj_hn wrote: post #132
toofy wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …it’s factually true and relevant to the context. this is factually true? what exactly is a “coastal media type”?

I would say someone living in a specific media bubble. Politico has an article about this with some data: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub... Pew has done a study recently on this as well: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/07/13/u-s-journal...

neither of these at all show that a "...chorus of coastal media types..." (still waiting for an honest definition of this) are "...asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum."

Re: Protect me from what I want

#139

Post by floxy »

KaiserPro wrote: post #42

Instagram, youtube & tiktok are a reflection of what you click on. But, to make them nice, you need to give them both negative and positive feedback at the very early stage. If you see something that you don't like? Don't ignore it, hit the "..." and select the "get tae fuk" option. Otherwise it'll keep trying that genre of what ever is popular with a similar persona to yours. The problem is, the "I don't like this"…

>Youtube...Don't ignore it, hit the "..." and select the "get tae fuk" option.

Is there a way to downvote something on the Youtube "home" page? Before you would click on it to play it? There is a vertical ellipsis, but the only options under that are "Add to Queue" and "Share".

Re: Protect me from what I want

#140

Post by zmgsabst »

toofy wrote: post #133
zmgsabst wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large US news companies have their staff largely in areas like California, New York, etc. because US media conglomerates are concentrated in those areas. Eg, WarnerMedia who is the parent company of CNN — a news agency that’s undergone substantial cuts under a new CEO due to its bias.

could you expand on this a bit?

In what way?

My experience of WarnerMedia is that they have politics among their staff reflective of the cities they’re in, but which may not reflect the overall demographics of the US. Eg, their Seattle office had politics at place in Seattle — but those are far left of most US politics. That bias impacts the choices made about content.

This matches other peoples experience and apparent business decisions — eg, the other poster referring to this same bias and CNN experiencing a sharp drop in ratings followed by corporate restructuring under a new CEO.

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