931–940 of 996 posts
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No, and there are laws and tomes of case law that reinforce that no matter how much curation they do, an interactive computer service will not be held liable for user generated content.
Yeah but that can be changed with a simple act of Congress and it should be. Their support is rapidly eroding the more they flex their power.
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The only way they can define and enforce "hate speech" policies is by torturing the language, the definitions, and hoping no one looks closely at the resulting policies. In the US, beyond explicit calls for illegal behavior (usually illegal) and kiddie porn (always illegal), we don't have many restrictions or even a legal definition of "hate speech." But even those laws aren't consistently applied. For the most part,…
>>The rationale [Google] gave is that hate speech appears on these apps >The only way they can define and enforce "hate speech" policies is by torturing the language, the definitions, and hoping no one looks closely at the resulting policies The rest of your comment is about the first amendment to the US constitution, which constrains governments (US Federal and state governments), not private parties such as Google.…
Or at least the general principles that would make it obvious to a "reasonable person" are..?
The rationale they gave is that hate speech appears on these apps, because some of the microblogging sites that can be accessed via Fediverse have this kind of content. Based on this rationale, I look forward to Google Play removing Chrome, Firefox, and all other web browsers from the store as well.
one of the problems we have in Tech (as an industry and on social media) is to allow individuals who make poor and bad decisions to hide behind the collective of a company/organization. And we continue applauding them for their great work they do in areas that are removed from the political. But these days innovation acts as a shield where we let the innovators get away and reap praise as individuals (the inventors o…
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Hanlon's razor has hobbled everyone's ability to see what the establishment is doing. This isn't about good intentions gone wrong. The loss of control of the narrative due to the internet has been a severe setback for the powerful, and they have been slowly clawing it back by limiting access to alternative media. Various think tanks, NGOs, board members with multiple irons in the fire, foreign interests, and the gove…
>The loss of control of the narrative due to the internet has been a severe setback for the powerful How was the narrative controlled by the powerful before the internet became a part of everyday life? Specifically, how was the narrative controlled in the US in the decades before 1993? I'm asking for recommendations of books written by historians, journalists and other serious people. (Understanding the situation dec…
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Which powerful, privileged people should get to decide what we are allowed to hear about? When the power is inevitably abused, how can we address that abuse when we may not be allowed to know about it? Is it even necessary for free speech to directly result in a happier humanity? What if it simply preserves the conditions that we need for progress, or merely keeps us from sliding backwards? Would that be enough to ma…
> Which powerful, privileged people should get to decide what we are allowed to hear about? Journalists and news media, bound by the respect and principles of their profession, fulfilled this function in the past. There seemed to be a time in the past where division between reporting and editorials were more separate. We've destroyed the institution of news media without a good replacement; now people are taking edit…
It is nonsensical to claim social media destroyed the news media. It was already dying before the internet let alone social media. To put blame on it is a blatant lie from the losers of the old era who got regularly dunked on by bloggers and forum posters in basic fact checking.
Early wikipedia "not suitable for reports" clearly did a better job. They didn't catch up with the internet until it got basic enough for them to follow it with Twitter.
The rationale they gave is that hate speech appears on these apps, because some of the microblogging sites that can be accessed via Fediverse have this kind of content. Based on this rationale, I look forward to Google Play removing Chrome, Firefox, and all other web browsers from the store as well.
The far more likely reason is that they know we have an issue. They've been monitoring and they don't like what they've been hearing.
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Fair. By my own admission, I don't know much about gab. I think the first time I ever heard about it was when Firefox banned Dissenter from their addons. Dissenter to me was a genius idea that has an ugly userbase. I'd love to have a version of Dissenter that isn't populated entirely by bigots. I think the idea of Dissenter really has some value, you walk along the web for all sorts of reasons, and then up in the cor…
That by itself implies that every URL you visit has to be looked up to see if there's a related discussion. No way I'd trust any add-on/startup/mega corp to do that. I barely trust Mozilla to keep my history on their servers, and that's only because they only keep the last few months and purge older data.
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No one is forcing Google or their employees to write hate speech on a cake or an app though, that's a pretty massive difference in analogies. Nor are people asking for a free-for-all where Google can't delete any speech on their platforms. People were fine when they were deleting spam and had a limited content restriction policies against things like directly promoting violence or posting gore/cp and other obvious ti…
Both situations are really a matter of freedom of speech. Forget Google, does a person with a personal website that allows comments get to control what comments they want displayed on their site or not? Does that person get to choose what work they want to accept from a potential customer? Both situations boil down to freedom of speech. Both have extra, specific laws that deal with their situations. Without a well th…
Why would you ever want to ignore Google in this situation? Unless you don't want to earnestly debate the real topic?
Their size, control, and the fact they run massive platforms for publishers to post content, whose consumers often can post their own content, with multiple centrally controlled areas for control for hundreds of millions of people at any moment, makes it pointless to ignore such important context and semantics.
Debating the role of these major gatekeepers at a cultural, rational, and moral level - in the context of the position which they actually hold in society - is an entirely valid, and essential to any useful arguments.
Just because there are some weak analogies to governmental constitutions, or small business's/independent publisher's/individuals website's freedom to choose what people post directly on their site/app, doesn't mean it's a useful position to judge what self-imposed limitations should be employed by major monopolistic companies who run entire portions of the internet.
Great power requires great responsibility.
The difference here is basic common sense.
The fact people keep resorting to these reductionist analogies, ignoring critical context and arguing from positions of fundamentally different levels of power/responsibility, in order to push some pro-censorship and expansive moderation of speech, shows the weakness in these arguments.
If you need to ignore significant amounts of context to make your points then you're being deceitful, whether intentionally or not.
I'd go even further to argue this intentional ignorance of context and semantics is a fundamental tactic used by pro-censorship activists - despite the fact context and intention are fundamental to almost all human communication, verbal or otherwise.
At a more local level it's commonplace for these activists to ignore the obvious intention and context of the speaker, and critically the tastes and tolerances of the specific audience itself - who are entirely voluntary consumers. Making whole words, phrases, and concepts totally off limits, regardless if it was used in intentionally and rationally derogatory or offensive ways.
It's basically intentionally missing the forest for the trees. All for some vague greater good. No matter how many false-positives, unintended side-effects, misunderstandings, or wasteful side-shows it creates.
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Both situations are really a matter of freedom of speech. Forget Google, does a person with a personal website that allows comments get to control what comments they want displayed on their site or not? Does that person get to choose what work they want to accept from a potential customer? Both situations boil down to freedom of speech. Both have extra, specific laws that deal with their situations. Without a well th…
> Forget Google, does a person with a personal website that allows comments get to control what comments they want displayed on their site or not? Does that person get to choose what work they want to accept from a potential customer? Why would you ever want to ignore Google in this situation? Unless you don't want to earnestly debate the real topic? Their size, control, and the fact they run massive platforms for pu…
Because presumably Google isn't special and doesn't lave laws and ethics that apply only to them? I'm trying to distill the issue to its essence.
> The fact people keep resorting to these reductionist analogies, ignoring critical context and arguing from positions of fundamentally different levels of power/responsibility, in order to push some pro-censorship and expansive moderation of speech, shows the weakness in these arguments.
If you think I'm doing that then you're making a lot of assumptions about what I was trying to communicate and why I commented, and you're way off base.
I'll make it clear, just because I pointed out a fault I see in a position doesn't mean I subscribe to the traditionally opposed opinion, it just means I'm willing to point out faults as I see them.
Additionally, hypocrisy doesn't care how correct one argument is over another. It's entirely possibly for someone to be a hypocrite and correct. We have a situation where some people believe A is okay and B is not, and some people believe A is not okay but B is okay. Unless they can actually distinguish why A and B are different, both groups of people are hypocrites, because they're either regurgitating someone else's opinion, or they're speaking before they understand what they're talking about. Whether one side or the other is "right" doesn't matter, hypocrisy isn't about correctness, it's about using the same knowledge and convictions to come to the same desired outcome with similar facts. Without the knowledge to distinguish between situations, how can someone be so sure that they differ?
And that's before we even go to the fact that there's actually four possible combinations of those attributes, not the two that have been presented so far (both negatively), and that the "right" way to view this is one of those.