Turkey determined to control social media platforms, Erdogan says • Hacker News Board

Re: Turkey determined to control social media platforms, Erdogan says

#141

Post by rorykoehler » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 5:39 PM UTC

salmonfamine wrote: post #100

briefcomment wrote: post #24

In a dictatorship, cracking down on social media is a no brainer. But I think social media undermines democracies as well. Social media vastly amplifies loud minorities. Democracy assumes that the majority of people are reasonable, so majority rule will also be reasonable. Loud minorities undermine majority rule. Loud minorities have always existed, but social media is now amplifying them to the point of obscuring wh…

I think we're encountering a fundamental conflict between an unregulated free market and a digital economy that doesn't have any notion of scarcity or cost. The old paradigm just doesn't fit. And the result is that a handful of tech employees and billionaires can wield outsized influence over the dominant media channels and public forums of the entire world without any democratic input or regulatory oversight. The fa…

Convert them into utilities

Re: Turkey determined to control social media platforms, Erdogan says

#142

Post by salmonfamine » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

nickik wrote: post #138

salmonfamine wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're encountering a fundamental conflict between an unregulated free market and a digital economy that doesn't have any notion of scarcity or cost. The old paradigm just doesn't fit. And the result is that a handful of tech employees and billionaires can wield outsized influence over the dominant media channels and public forums of the entire world without any democratic input or regulatory oversight. The fa…

So what? You want to ban all websites with a comment section that are for profit? What about non-profits that make the founders rich by simply paying out a huge wage? Do you mean it should only be allowed to run on donations? What if the US bans them, and Britain does not. Do you want the US government to systematically control the internet to prevent US citizens from using that British websites? The things you say a…

> So what? You want to ban all websites with a comment section that are for profit? What about non-profits that make the founders rich by simply paying out a huge wage? Do you mean it should only be allowed to run on donations?

No, I'm just pointing out that a for-profit structure necessarily clashes with the public value that these platforms produce. The only platform that escapes this conflict and functions quite well is Wikipedia. I don't think that's an accident.

> The things you say are easy to say, but hard to actually make in the real world without running into many more complications.

Yes, of course. My point is that we need to start thinking of solutions. If doing nothing had no consequences, I would be heavily in favor of doing nothing. But I believe it's clear that things are going quite wrong.

> What if the US bans them, and Britain does not. Do you want the US government to systematically control the internet to prevent US citizens from using that British websites?

I don't want anything to get banned. I don't want any government to unilaterally control the internet. I just want people from every country to have some democratic input into the massive tech platforms that heavily impact their daily lives. Perhaps international data rights legislation is the solution. I don't know. But we need to start taking these problems seriously and discussing real solutions -- not just creating federated Twitter clones that offer an unwieldy UX that the average user will never adopt.

Re: Turkey determined to control social media platforms, Erdogan says

#143

Post by salmonfamine » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

nickik wrote: post #139

salmonfamine wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, good questions. I'm not advocating an end to global platforms. And I don't think the democratic oversight should come from the US government. The end goal should be a website like Wikipedia -- non-profit, maintained and perhaps even funded by users. In fact, I think a lot of the fragmentation of the internet you see abroad is a reaction against the powerlessness of users and governments against the unassailable…

> is a reaction against the powerlessness of users and governments against the unassailable power of these corporations Its about governments powerlessness to control the message from foreign cooperations likely influenced by foreign governments. Maybe 0.000001% of it is 'protecting users'. > essentially, the ability to control their feeds Again, probably 0.0001% of Users will so even if you give them the option. > m…

> Its about governments powerlessness to control the message from foreign cooperations likely influenced by foreign governments.

Fair enough, that is also an issue.

> Maybe 0.000001% of it is 'protecting users'.

I think we need to bring in concrete examples here. Consider GDPR -- would you characterize that as a governmental entity protecting its users?

> Again, probably 0.0001% of Users will so even if you give them the option.

I kind of doubt that. Facebook has introduced limited control over certain aspects of your feed and everyone I know has used those features. Even non-technical people I know routinely complain about suggested content, non-chronological feeds, and so on. These are popular (if not nearly-universal) concerns.

> So hurting users even more in the process?

Ok, I was off the mark there. I just mean that there are problems with the current platforms that expose real vulnerabilities into public discourse and democracy that have been exploited, and will be exploited much more thoroughly in the future. So doing nothing is not sustainable.

Re: Turkey determined to control social media platforms, Erdogan says

#144

Post by new2628 » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

ipnon wrote: post #91

new2628 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of exaggeration surely doesn't help the cause either.

Anti-democratic ethnic nationalism doesn't sound as catchy and fascism is a historically loaded term.

Anti-democratic may also not be the best term when a majority of the people more or less support what you do. Illiberal, populist, protectionist, sure, but these do not sound nearly as bad.

Re: Turkey determined to control social media platforms, Erdogan says

#145

Post by new2628 » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

hetspookjee wrote: post #12

haunter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing. Just like how Poland and Hungary are EU members and they are walking their own way not giving a f about anything, rewriting the constitutions and laws as they wish

And completely backing each other in the votes as well... It's a sham.

Yes, it's a sham that members of an organization are exercising their voting rights. Why not take away these rights in the name of democracy when they are not voting in the proper way.

Re: Turkey determined to control social media platforms, Erdogan says

#146

Post by GaryNumanVevo » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #101

pjc50 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The statues are not arbitrary and many of them have been objected to for years. Similarly, US police have been routinely murdering people for years. What social media has done is allow the creation of a "headless" protest movement that can outrun attempts to take it down. In both cases, some people have leapt in and gone too far because they enjoy the chaos, but don't let that obscure the real issues. No, the problem…

> The statues are not arbitrary and many of them have been objected to for years. Christopher Columbus and Francis Scott Key aren't arbitrary? It's not like they were removed by a democratic process. The majority had no say. A loud minority decided they needed to come down for arbitrary reasons and did it without permission. Anyone challenging them would be browbeaten by the loud minority mobs on social media and can…

Implying that these statues were put up were done so by a democratic process?

Re: Turkey determined to control social media platforms, Erdogan says

#147

Post by lowdose » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 6:05 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #47

lowdose wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm so glad they haven't been accepted into the EU. That would be a disaster. At that time though Turkey would have been a real welcome growth addition to the EU. 2005 +9% growth, the year the EU opened accession negotiations with Turkey. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union%E2%80%93Turke...

Growth is irrelevant unless you're a net-contributor. The EU really doesn't need more underdeveloped economies to support, it needs to get everybody to a similar level and deal with the tax havens, not do some SV-hypergrowth model where the issues will magically resolve themselves if only you can have 15% population growth by acquiring more members.

In my view China has used exactly some SV-hypergrowth model where almost every Chinese living is 50x better off than their parents.

Re: Turkey determined to control social media platforms, Erdogan says

#148

Post by boreas » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 6:05 PM UTC

dantillberg wrote: post #69

briefcomment wrote: post #24

In a dictatorship, cracking down on social media is a no brainer. But I think social media undermines democracies as well. Social media vastly amplifies loud minorities. Democracy assumes that the majority of people are reasonable, so majority rule will also be reasonable. Loud minorities undermine majority rule. Loud minorities have always existed, but social media is now amplifying them to the point of obscuring wh…

> This is why we can have an election outcome that no one in the media predicted. I presume you're referring to the 2016 presidential election in the US, and if so that's patently false. FiveThirtyEight estimated a ~28% probability[0] that Trump would win, and other major media outlets had similar outlooks prior to the election. Many willfully interpreted "28% chance" as "with any luck it won't happen," but you can't…

Also relevant to note that Trump wasn't supported by a majority, as OP seems to be implying. He won in the arbitrary schema of the electoral college.

Re: Turkey determined to control social media platforms, Erdogan says

#149

Post by ipnon » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 6:06 PM UTC

new2628 wrote: post #144

ipnon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-democratic ethnic nationalism doesn't sound as catchy and fascism is a historically loaded term.

Anti-democratic may also not be the best term when a majority of the people more or less support what you do. Illiberal, populist, protectionist, sure, but these do not sound nearly as bad.

Authoritarian is a more descriptive term than anti-democratic.

Re: Turkey determined to control social media platforms, Erdogan says

#150

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #132

syshum wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont know that I agree there is no racism in the laws. The War on Drugs is littered with laws that seem to have no other explanation that targeted racism. The most well known example is the Sentencing disparity between Crack and Cocaine. I would agree that not everything that is claimed to be racism based is in fact racism based, alot of it is Class based as well. But to say there is NO racism in the law is also an…

> I would agree that not everything that is claimed to be racism based is in fact racism based It's hotly debated topic. Sometimes, statistics clearly show that some system has a racial bias. But often it's misleading because the variable the system is _actually_ selecting might be poverty, not race. The racial bias only appears due to the fact that is disproportionately impoverished.

Sometimes I think the race is brought in by the elites to divide us. Bill Gates and Beyoncé have more in common than Bill Gates and an Appalachian coal miner. Also, a white Appalachian coal miner has more in common with a black inner city grocery store employee than they do with Bill Gates.

The biggest factor keeping someone from succeeding in the US, is intergenerational poverty, not skin color. Black and brown immigrants have high success rates in America, because they do not have intergenerational poverty. Black and white people from impoverished families struggle in America. The problems of black citizens in the inner cities are very similar to the problems of white people in rural trailer parks.

If we focused on dealing with the problem of intergenerational poverty, we might make a lot of progress in improving the lives of both black and white Americans. However, the rich elites of all races might see their money And influence diminish. So they use race to divide us.