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Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

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Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#231
post #16

Cockroaches thrive in the dark corners. Sunlight is antiseptic. And forcing ideas/speech into those dark corners don't keep them from growing, it merely allows it to grow unobserved and un-countered. Ideas are the only counter to other ideas and how we communicate those idea is via speech. Suppression only invites martyrdom on the behalf of those suppressed, increasing their credibility.

I like to think of facebook type algorithms as amplification, not suppression. Its not what content gets deranked, its what content gets promoted to the top.

The question is, should "bad speech" be amplified, promoted, propogated, broadcast, surfaced, and repeated, ON PURPOSE; just so it can get rebuked, debunked, dismissed, and exposed?

(I agree with you, the answer is closer to "The Remedy to Bad Speech is More Speech ... Marketplace of Ideas" however, the question being discussed is more akin to "Theres a limited amout of space at the front page, and people have limited amounts of attention to give, WHO gets the megaphone, and for how long". Its the inverse of "the robust debate principle recognizes that sometimes in a crowd of speakers it is necessary to turn down the volume of certain loud and clamorous speakers in order to give others a chance to speak." Facebook and the algorithm DO DECIDE who to turn the volumn up on, who to promote to the top. They already arent neutral, they already exhibit preference and bias for certain ideas.)

Others are arguing that this is flipping the argument, BUT we are talking about algorithmic placement moreso than true censorship. If someone is allowed to post something but it NEVER makes it into someone elses Newsfeed, is it as good as censored?

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#232
post #68
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another possibility that you're overlooking, and that is that your subjective view is far more polarized than the average persons view. The language you've used so far shows you are thinking about all of this in very absolutist terms. Most people recoil from absolutism.

There is no "grey" area for hate. It's absolutely binary. If you hate something or someone, there's no half-way. Hate is the force behind the Holocaust, hate is the force behind the Iraq Wars. Hate has torn the Middle-east to shreds for millennia. Hate was the Khmer Rouge's genocide. Hate was Apartheid. Giving hate any leeway is to give it 100% of its power. It must MUST MUST be fought as an absolute.

Do you hate Nazis?

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#233
post #94

There's still too many unsolved philosophical questions here. What is hate speech? What should the limits of free speech be? How do we contended with the multitude of religious, legal, and cultural differences and anomalies when policing news and thought across the world? How do we react to people weaponizing the policing of hate speech to remove free speech? I have yet to hear compelling answers to this problem, and…

Speech is either free or not free, there is no middle path. If you want free speech, you accept the consequences. If you want “regulated” speech, there are consequences. That’s it. I would argue that the level of satire a society can cope with, is directly proportional to the quality of democracy the society has.

Free speech is a principal (one that existed before the United States) and a goal. You can have a goal, and operate principally, and still have univerally agreed upon edge cases and exceptions.

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that this comment dehumanized me. Therefore, you must remove it. See the issue?

How do you feel dehumanized? Let's have that discussion. (see the answer?)

The people who think "hate speech" should be deplatformed are actively seeking to stop the discussion from happening.

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still missing the above commenter's point. > When I was a kid, I saw a full hooded KKK march on TV, and I said "why do we let them march?" and my mom said "because you have to hear from people you don't want to hear from to know free speech is working" The point is, exposure of reprehensible ideas is part of free speech. The fact that we consume media differently today does not change this. Maybe the 21st cent…

I think you're still not understanding the dynamic between children and parents these days. Things are not how they were 30 years ago. Children are exposed to a myriad of information on a myriad number of ideas in a myriad number of ways every day of their lives. Here's the reality of being a parent today, your children will have set ideas about many many topics long before they would ever speak to you about it. So t…

For any new or hopeful parents sweating this description, I do in fact have kids (the oldest is a teenager) and my experience with them is pretty different from all of this.

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is this analogy bad (sunlight helps plenty of bad things grow, things even detrimental to our survival as a species), but it assumes that you're dealing with rational actors. Stop naively assuming this. It's a bad assumption. There are people out there who will argue in bad faith and have no interest in reasoning or truth. And there are people who will fall victim to those bad ideas. Religion, terrorist fact…

How is this argument differ from the following one: (setup - 1950 but we have facebook/twitter/youtube/instagram) Most of the population thinks that people promoting same sex relationships are just hell bent on destroying the good and wholesome America and demand that the leaders of LGBT of the time be deplatformed from that twitter/facebook/youtube/etc.

How is the argument the same? You can't just ask me to do all the work for you while you just presume your statement is factual with no supporting evidence. Though I've gone ahead and responded because I feel very passionate about this issue.

To answer the heart of your point: any kind of editorial/screening system isn't perfect. We'll get things wrong. We always have, always will. It's still better than what's happening right now on these mediums where we know some portion of the population are "getting things wrong" and we're just allowing it to happen in a free fall fashion. "Do nothing" is never the answer, never has been and probably never will be.

To address your specific example: It's not based on what most of the population thinks. Qualified opinions are a thing. We can talk about what makes a qualified opinion, with your example or any other subject. Notably we see these types of opinions in your example gaining momentum because we're allowing certain groups of people unfettered access to an audience. It's really a bad example in my opinion, but I understand and sympathize with the point you're trying to make.

Unfiltered, unstructured information from unqualified sources tends to prey on our darker nature more often than it appeals to our better senses as people. To kind of expand on implementing practical systems around how we actually function as humans, in a lot of ways the "bad" part of human nature is why we've structured many western governments with explicit separation of powers with checks and balances. There are just some things we gravitate towards as humans that just aren't "good." James Madison in fact said the state was just a reflection of human nature, for the previous reasons. In a lot of ways, we have historically treated information dissemination in the same manner, checking and preventing the worst of our nature when broadcasting and consuming information via editorial controls and trusted, proven sources.

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#237
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What advertisers? I haven't seen any on mastodon. In fact, I think the network would be actively hostile to their presence.

We're talking about a world where the distributed social network instances replaces the facebooks and twitters of the world. And be assured, in such a world, the advertisers would move to the distributed social network instances.

All I really want from a social network is to be able to share small files with my friends and see small files that my friends have shared with me. It's convenient to have a for-profit handle all the hard parts (checking whether people are who say they are, storing the stuff when one of us is offline, etc) but it's not an actual requirement. Especially if some portion of the members of the network have a $5 VPS, which is certain to be true.

(As an aside, it mystifies me that some VPS provider hasn't already built this. A FOSS decentralized social network that requires a small dedicated server would be like a whalefall for that industry. If I were a PM at Amazon, I would have a team contributing 'store my files on AWS instead of my phone' to Scuttlebutt right now, and ditto for every other promising-looking decentralized social app.)

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#238
post #98
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let me simplify further, in the face of your ad hominem: Sorry? I attacked your phrasing and logic, not YOU. Its like you're wanting to get angry at nothing. I'm done here if you don't want to act civilized.

Okay, I clearly got a bit too passionate. Let me try and clarify, civilly: Hate speech is always an attack. Whether it's overt (Westboro, the N-word, Swastikas, homophobic slurs, etc.) or more subtle ("the 14 words", "88", etc). Supporting the "right" of someone to use hate speech is supporting their right to attack (and thus violate the rights of) others. Whereas, by preventing those attacks, nothing of value is los…

You think anything that is an attack should be illegal?

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#239
post #68
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another possibility that you're overlooking, and that is that your subjective view is far more polarized than the average persons view. The language you've used so far shows you are thinking about all of this in very absolutist terms. Most people recoil from absolutism.

There is no "grey" area for hate. It's absolutely binary. If you hate something or someone, there's no half-way. Hate is the force behind the Holocaust, hate is the force behind the Iraq Wars. Hate has torn the Middle-east to shreds for millennia. Hate was the Khmer Rouge's genocide. Hate was Apartheid. Giving hate any leeway is to give it 100% of its power. It must MUST MUST be fought as an absolute.

I really don't care what you have to say, and I don't like you, but I don't particularly hate you. Happy?

Re: Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”

#240
post #106
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you hate white tech bros

Sounds like you've never heard actual hate speech. Consider that a privilege.

Sounds like you have a lot of internalized self-hate. You certainly have a lot of guts saying this on an account attached to your name and resume.
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