A Framework for Moderation • Hacker News Board

Re: A Framework for Moderation

#21

Post by buildzr » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 4:14 PM UTC

swebs wrote: post #13

snikeris wrote: post #2

> Stand on the street corner all you like, at least your terrible ideas will be limited by the physical world. The Internet, though, with its inherent ability to broadcast and congregate globally, is a fundamentally more dangerous medium. The notion behind this seems to be: "We must protect the idiots of the world from terrible ideas." Why does this rub me the wrong way so much? I guess it's such a depressing view of…

>Why does this rub me the wrong way so much? Because you at least subconsciously understand the real intent behind the message. "We must stamp out wrongthink by eroding your rights"

It seems a bit of an oversimplification, but it is the impression I get. Many of the decisions we must make are between those of freedom and security. The security argument is easy, especially after a tragedy, but the slow erosion of rights is only apparent after the fact.

I worry that fear will result in rash decisions, creating widespread censorship abilities and banning anonymizing services that can be used to bypass them.

Re: A Framework for Moderation

#22

Post by frereubu » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 4:18 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #19

bdhess wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not implying that many or most people are idiots or untrustworthy. But that there are extreme outliers at the fringes. Before the internet, they’d mostly be unable to find each other. With the internet, they can build self-reinforcing “communities” on the basis of hate, intolerance, or really anything. If they just stayed in that bubble it’d be fine, but unfortunately sometimes they bring machine guns to departm…

I’m seeing this sort of implicit dialogue in all of this that goes like: “How much moderation/censorship would have been required to have prevented the El Paso shooter? However much that is, is how much we need”. This line of reasoning ought to scare the hell out of people, since we don’t actually have the slightest clue what actually set him off (he was on 8chan?) Even if I could bring myself to believe the underlyi…

I sort of see where you're coming from, but surely there are a plethora of other places with light moderation and far less hate speech where people could go to discuss things? You seem to be making a slippery slope argument, but I don't really see the start of the slope. I'd also be interested to know what you think of this quote from the Cloudflare CEO:

'If this were a normal circumstance we would say "Yes, it’s really horrendous content, but we’re not in a position to decide what content is bad or not." But in this case, we saw repeated consistent harm where you had three mass shootings that were directly inspired by and gave credit to this platform. You saw the platform not act on any of that and in fact promote it internally.'

Re: A Framework for Moderation

#23

Post by buildzr » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 4:20 PM UTC

frereubu wrote: post #22

commandlinefan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m seeing this sort of implicit dialogue in all of this that goes like: “How much moderation/censorship would have been required to have prevented the El Paso shooter? However much that is, is how much we need”. This line of reasoning ought to scare the hell out of people, since we don’t actually have the slightest clue what actually set him off (he was on 8chan?) Even if I could bring myself to believe the underlyi…

I sort of see where you're coming from, but surely there are a plethora of other places with light moderation and far less hate speech where people could go to discuss things? You seem to be making a slippery slope argument, but I don't really see the start of the slope. I'd also be interested to know what you think of this quote from the Cloudflare CEO: 'If this were a normal circumstance we would say "Yes, it’s rea…

> You seem to be making a slippery slope argument, but I don't really see the start of the slope.

Okay, so you ban 8chan. Now they move to another chan... there's about 5 different "bunkers" running the same or similar software to what powered 8chan and with many of the same users that various boards have moved to right now. Some of the larger of those bunker chans are actually on distributed networks.

So now what? You have to ban distributed networks? You shrug your shoulders and say "oh well, we tried"? This is where the slope comes in. There's no good ending to it. Worse, as we've seen with 8chan, the farther you push people from the mainstream, the more extreme they seem to become.

Re: A Framework for Moderation

#24

Post by pmart123 » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 4:21 PM UTC

frereubu wrote: post #22

commandlinefan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m seeing this sort of implicit dialogue in all of this that goes like: “How much moderation/censorship would have been required to have prevented the El Paso shooter? However much that is, is how much we need”. This line of reasoning ought to scare the hell out of people, since we don’t actually have the slightest clue what actually set him off (he was on 8chan?) Even if I could bring myself to believe the underlyi…

I sort of see where you're coming from, but surely there are a plethora of other places with light moderation and far less hate speech where people could go to discuss things? You seem to be making a slippery slope argument, but I don't really see the start of the slope. I'd also be interested to know what you think of this quote from the Cloudflare CEO: 'If this were a normal circumstance we would say "Yes, it’s rea…

In some capacity, is it better to let something like 8chan exist given law enforcement and the government can actively monitor it and try and prevent such events from occurring? Would changing the laws around what constitutes domestic terrorism allow law enforcement to act more swiftly to premeditated descriptions of such acts on similar forums? Even in the NZ shootings, would it be better to let something like that be uploaded and broadcasted as anyone thinking about going a religious service sees the eminent threat of a terrorist attack in real-time? I don't have answers to these questions given the large trade offs, but I do believe it is another side of this debate to discuss.

Re: A Framework for Moderation

#25

Post by pmart123 » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

swebs wrote: post #12

bdhess wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not implying that many or most people are idiots or untrustworthy. But that there are extreme outliers at the fringes. Before the internet, they’d mostly be unable to find each other. With the internet, they can build self-reinforcing “communities” on the basis of hate, intolerance, or really anything. If they just stayed in that bubble it’d be fine, but unfortunately sometimes they bring machine guns to departm…

There are so many counterpoints to that statement that it's ridiculous. The American revolution, the Russian revolution, the Ides of March, every single coup throughout human history, every single cult, religion, or terrorist organization throughout human history. The only thing the internet changed is the fact that now the NSA has the entire log of all their conversations.

This is an important consideration that often gets missed in these discussions in my opinion. The methods and means to organize a group of people against oppression often are the same ones to rally a group of people around hatred and violence.

Re: A Framework for Moderation

#26

Post by abrahamepton » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

snikeris wrote: post #2

> Stand on the street corner all you like, at least your terrible ideas will be limited by the physical world. The Internet, though, with its inherent ability to broadcast and congregate globally, is a fundamentally more dangerous medium. The notion behind this seems to be: "We must protect the idiots of the world from terrible ideas." Why does this rub me the wrong way so much? I guess it's such a depressing view of…

No, the notion is more like "the Internet enables a fundamentally different kind of communication than we've grown up with, and we should rethink our assumptions accordingly."

It's just not like other kinds of human communication that we've had for our entire history as a species.

Human psychological evolution is thousands of years behind the technical capabilities we've developed in the last few decades. A bit of thoughtfulness in the governance of those capabilities isn't too much to ask.

Re: A Framework for Moderation

#27

Post by commandlinefan » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

snikeris wrote: post #2

> Stand on the street corner all you like, at least your terrible ideas will be limited by the physical world. The Internet, though, with its inherent ability to broadcast and congregate globally, is a fundamentally more dangerous medium. The notion behind this seems to be: "We must protect the idiots of the world from terrible ideas." Why does this rub me the wrong way so much? I guess it's such a depressing view of…

> Why does this rub me the wrong way

I’m old enough to remember when Judas Priest (the 80’s rock band) was accused of hiding subliminal messages in their songs convincing their listeners to commit suicide, after a kid did so while happening to be listening to Judas Priest. It seems absolutely ridiculous in hindsight, but people believed it, and it was taken completely seriously at the time: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/judas-prie.... The logic here is essentially the same: some internet message boards are “egging somebody on” to do something that they would not otherwise have done, which results in death, so the internet message boards themselves are to blame, and must be censored.

Re: A Framework for Moderation

#28

Post by commandlinefan » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

abrahamepton wrote: post #26

snikeris wrote: post #2

> Stand on the street corner all you like, at least your terrible ideas will be limited by the physical world. The Internet, though, with its inherent ability to broadcast and congregate globally, is a fundamentally more dangerous medium. The notion behind this seems to be: "We must protect the idiots of the world from terrible ideas." Why does this rub me the wrong way so much? I guess it's such a depressing view of…

No, the notion is more like "the Internet enables a fundamentally different kind of communication than we've grown up with, and we should rethink our assumptions accordingly." It's just not like other kinds of human communication that we've had for our entire history as a species. Human psychological evolution is thousands of years behind the technical capabilities we've developed in the last few decades. A bit of th…

Even if I agreed with your premise that humans can’t be trusted to talk to one another, what makes you think that those same humans can then somehow be trusted to determine when other humans can safely talk to one another?

Re: A Framework for Moderation

#29

Post by atoav » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 4:30 PM UTC

snikeris wrote: post #2

> Stand on the street corner all you like, at least your terrible ideas will be limited by the physical world. The Internet, though, with its inherent ability to broadcast and congregate globally, is a fundamentally more dangerous medium. The notion behind this seems to be: "We must protect the idiots of the world from terrible ideas." Why does this rub me the wrong way so much? I guess it's such a depressing view of…

Sex and violence grab more attention than the cleverest intellectual remark and they usually take less space to be encoded. The design of our internet plattforms is such that these attention grabbers are extremely pushed while valuable statements are drowned.

We on HN should know more than anybody that certain design decisions will nudge communications in certain directions (compare facebook to twitter to hacker news).

They have different goals one could argue and that their design reflects these goals and one wouldn’t be wrong. Only: the goals on the bigger plattforms are more shaped by advertisement and data collection needs than by the valid interests of the users. Similar to the difference between slotmachines and a board game — both let people play, but the former doesn’t has the best for its player in mind.

So when you say this is about the nature about our fellow humans, I’d argue that it is about the nature of the digital Zoos we developed for them.

Re: A Framework for Moderation

#30

Post by mrkstu » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 4:50 PM UTC

islon wrote: post #6

snikeris wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before the internet, they’d mostly be unable to find each other. With the internet, they can build self-reinforcing “communities” on the basis of hate, intolerance, or really anything. If they just stayed in that bubble it’d be fine, but unfortunately sometimes they bring machine guns to department stores. I don't think the internet is fundamentally different here. You could have made the same argument when the pri…

The printing press is heavily moderated.

Where and how exactly is traditional printing regulated? I can buy a high end typesetting laser printer and print anything I want on it- if it isn't child porn/top secret/libelous I can print anything I want that I've originated.

Can I steal other's content and sell it, no, but I would call existing regulations almost non-existent for original content.