I can't believe the same man responsible for the vile minstrel show that was Borat is so often lauded as some sort of progressive champion. I guess it's ok to be racist as long as the targets are Kazakhs and not Jews.
You're pretty dense if you think borat etc is unfiltered racism. Even people in kz see borat as high comedy. If you think anyone is offended by borat and etc then you yourself has unreasonably soft skin.
If Borat is your version of high comedy then I feel sorry for you. That scene in the beginning where he calls his sister the highest ranked prostitute in the country really makes you instrospect. You can say Borat is some sort of modern Tocqueville but Tocqueville didn't spend the entire time pretending to be German and telling everyone about how they drink horse piss in Germany.
I'm not kazakh. So borat is no high comedy for me. I'm just saying that kz people have felt so. I'm sure we agree, but I've discussed borat as recent as a couple of weeks ago, in kz, and they see it as comedic and not a problem. Borat is not a problem, but not my kind of comedy either. So it seems we agree, good sir.
Its not personal at all, sir. "You" and all the other aspects is the royal you, not at all anything personal against the good sir. "You" is just a wider you, do not worry about it. Thank you good sirs. We have no problems sirs.
My experience with this is very different. I used to know a few kazakh fellows and their views on Borat were resentful to say the least. They said Sacha Cohen is a universally hated figure in Kazakhstan, along with the Borat movie itself, to the point where a lot of people genuinely want him dead. I have no doubt some Kazakhstan citizens actually enjoy Borat but to generalize it as being seen as "high comedy" over there is a vast and incorrect exaggeration.
Yep. I know that your version is correct, as well. My only point is that there are several young kz thst are not offended by it. They just don't associate it with Kazakhstan, and take no offence. It's just like the red sonja movie or whatever with Schwarzenegger, in russia, they just think it's disconnected fun, and has nothing to do with Russia. But i agree sir
Yup, the controversial scenes in Borat's "home village" were actually shot in rural Romania. But I'm not sure that stereotyping poor, rural Romanians is any better.
Jewish people portrayed as greedy is an existing stereotype with a sad history. There is no such existing stereotype for the people of Kazakhstan in the target audience of the movie.
Also, say what you mean. Raise eyebrows? So what. The last Star Wars movie raised some eyebrows. This thread already has enough people righteously missing points, so just say what you mean.
I thought it was a representation of our ignorance towards eastern culture. Even his opening lines are polish and nothing at all to do with Kazakh..
Playing on the west’s ignorance was the joke, and him convincingly reeling people in for interviews was the comedy. Not the character itself, the reaction to the character.
If ads (political or not) had to be true to be run then nobody would run any ads at all, ever. Ads are all lies and everyone knows that.
Also, as for the role of truth in public discourse: If at least a majority still gave a shit, Trump couldn't be president. The propagandists produce, but the masses gobble up that crap as if it meant their life. Entertainment has won over truth and without the customers ("users", like if the product were a drug) that buy it the propagandists, and Zuckerberg, would have no market and nothing to sell.
No. Some ads are simply straightforward and factual. Ads which tell you that "the election is on" or "the circus is in town" or "items are now half the usual price" aren't lies.
So.. not the usual price then. I always find the lack of media sophistication interesting. I think it must come from having isolated yourself too much from practical realities. You lose the ability to evaluate what's in front of you and your judgement is impaired.
While you're absolutely correct, I've never seen an ad like that. They must exist, but they're also a tiny fraction of all ads.
One might also argue that a purely factual, straightforward ad is a fairly ineffective one -- one of the reasons no major corporation would point you to Wikipedia or an investigative news piece to learn more about them.
Assuming some amount of Darwinism in the ad space, people who make purely factual ads will go out of business pretty soon.
Like I said, I believe you that these exist, but they are a tiny fraction of total ads. It's not unlikely that most ads aren't even for legitimate products/services.
I can’t prove it other than to say: go to literally any website and count.
My claim, that ads are more dishonest than honest, seems much less controversial. If you can find me even a single podcast episode with only honest ads, I’ll concede.
So you found the 0.05 % of ads that are less of a lie than the rest. Congrats, you are this week's winner of the split-a-hair-with-your-bare-hand-blindfolded contest.
I'm sorry you feel that way but this is exactly the kind of speak that got us here - everyone but us are 'deplorables'. I don't think more of this will help us get to higher ground.
At this point it shouldn't be controversial to call Trump a liar. I don't believe saying so creates the consequences you describe (as opposed to deeper issues about tribalism, education, and opportunity in America).
I urge you to watch this video, esp if youre an American. I'm not even a fan - not even by a mile - of Bill Maher but the man has a point when he implies that you are not going to be able to just make the other half vanish into thin air, by beating them in an election. They will still be around and you will just have to live with them, come what may.
[1]
New Rule: Let It Go | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)
I understand his/your point, but you can beat them in an election and then take better care of them than their own party has.
There are conservative people who voted for Obama twice, which almost certainly was because of the broad economic recovery under his presidency.
People are a lot less ideological than everyone thinks. If they're worried about money or health, many will vote for whomever gives them the most hope.
I suspect social media companies don't like the message because they don't like the costs required for good moderation. They don't really care about free speech, that's just spin.
Come on, Zuckerberg never designed FB with freedom of speech in mind, it started as a campus thing and transformed into a money printing machine, he may or may not care about freedom of speech but it's irrelevant, it's nowhere near the top of facebook priorities.
"Freedom of speech" is the new mantra you have to repeat if you want Americans to stop thinking about a problem.
This is as true as saying "more code = more programming" -- possibly a technically correct statement, but if your goal is to create something valuable (to your business, to society) this won't help.
It's probably simpler than that. Their earnings are proportional to click-baitiness, so they optimize for that. Moderation is probably more akin to a water pump on a ship: its purpose is to keep it afloat. Free speech is probably just passing regulatory nuissance that moderation has to account for.
I'd like to call Occam's Razor, but, then, when has it become that the most selfish interpretation of an organization's motivations is the simplest one? Maybe it's simple simply because it aligns with my beliefs. Something to ponder.
People are allowed to have independent thoughts outside of their identity you know? If you don't want to wake up one day with government agency deciding what truth is, then a lot of unsavory stuff becomes ok-ish even if you dislike it personally.
I’m also Jewish and believe anyone even stupid misinformed people should have the right to free speech. Corporations shouldn’t have power to determine what is or isn’t true
That’s not what ads are. Facebook is letting anyone with money speak their minds. The “organic” feed is already filtered algorithmically. To counter them you would also have to spend money. Facebook gets paid twice.
This seems like a very convenient coincidence of “morals” and economic incentives.
This is ridiculous. Facebook bans photos of nursing mothers. The average person already doesn’t have the “right to free speech” in the absolute sense on Facebook. So why does Facebook moderate hints of nudity but not holocaust denial? It’s a choice. That’s not to mention that most other ad companies would refuse to run a holocaust denier ad.
Also ads are “special” on Facebook. They show up on your wall whether you want them or not, while normal content from your friends goes through an algorithmic sphincter. In a sense Facebook is already limiting the free speech of normal users by putting their speech through some kind of “engagement” black box. Meanwhile, if you have money, you get to say whatever you want to whomever you want.
If I understand this correctly, he's pulling back from offline comments he's made about Hollywood (vis Jewish people) and of course years of negative Jewish stereotypes in his work.
Before this, he "bent the knee" with his portrayal of Eli Cohen. Wasn't a terrible film but his reverence for the character was a bit much.
FB is a dumpster fire, I don't think anyone argues otherwise these days. But differentiating between freedom of speech and "reach" is just as dangerous as saying we need to treat freedom of speech on a case by case basis.
We either have freedom of speech or we don't. If we don't, sooner or later we're all fucked.
There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous. If people are easily convinced to hate other people, the problem is not dangerous speech or ideas. The problem is a breakdown in fundamental education, i.e., those people are dangerously ignorant.
We need to work on the fundamental issues, not grant more power to groups with specific political / authoritarian agendas.
> There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous.
Shouting fire in a crowded theatre that could lead to a stampede that puts people in danger. Deliberately misinforming people about the risk of an action they are about to take could be too.
This reply already gives too much credit to the original claim. The acoustic vibrations generated by mouth sounds could physically cause damage, like an opera singer breaking glass, or shouting next to a microphone.
After re-reading and self-reflecting, I do not agree. The original claim is about defining certain actions as intrinsically not side-effectful (no sounds can themselves be dangerous), but actions having side-effects cannot be considered in isolation of the physical and social circumstances they are embedded in, which can require restricting an action.
I think my reply really adequately responds to the core intent of the original comment.
I’d also like to point out that your reply is not helpful. Merely gainsaying something is not useful or informative.
Bringing up opera singers breaking glass as an example of sound vibrations physically hurting people is just not useful in a conversation about freedom of speech because it’s a nitpicky convoluted example that is not a great thing to bring up when you’re trying to redefine the claim so that you could rebut it. (Note that I am specifically talking about the example you brought to to support your interpretation of the claim. I’m fine with your speculation that the claim literally meant something along the lines of “sticks and stones can break my bones” rather than “free speech has never had adverse consequences”. It just didn’t need your qualification. I do appreciate the self-reflection, though.)
I'd argue that the orignal sentence was using 'sounds' a bit symbolically, so the clearer interpretations would be closer to "there are no communications I can utter that are dangerous".
His point being about the critical thinking on the part of the listener, not about the physics of making actual sounds.
A communication costs energy to transmit. It cannot be decoupled from physical circumstance. But it’s beside the point. The communication is still embedded in a context of the situation it’s in.
If you utter a communication to an insane person, the side effect might be that you are stabbed. You as the person uttering it must take responsibility for what neurophysical response in the mind of the listener might result.
If you emit communications, there can be consequences which are causal. Not strictly the volitional responsibility of the listener.
I hate when people use this metaphor. Not because it's inaccurate to say that speech can cause imminent harm in some circumstances. But because its origin was a Supreme Court opinion that argued against the right to speak out against the draft in WW1, which I don't think too many people using this analogy today would agree with. Also, this legal argument has been rejected since then.
Point is, this exact argument could be (and has been) used to justify some pretty bad ideas.
Reflexively, the only way to neuter the danger of speech is to suppress everything that isn't already accepted. Then nobody can effect change on the grounds that change might be harmful.
The fact that you think Cohen "bent to knee" sounds creepy to me, like you're implying some secret Jewish cabal that made him do it. It reminds me of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
What exactly has Cohen ever said that's anti-Semitic? The racism in his work, like Borat, is satire. If anything, he should've offended Kazakhs by implying they ignorantly hate Jews.
> There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous. If people are easily convinced to hate other people, the problem is not dangerous speech or ideas. The problem is a breakdown in fundamental education, i.e., those people are dangerously ignorant.
OK, so let's say we agree that the fundamental problem is lack of education. That's great in theory, but that doesn't solve a problem today.
There are societies where unfettered lies about groups caused genocides. You can lament the poor education that contributed, but that doesn't change the fact that it can happen again.
The real issues are that lies are much harder to undo than they are to create; that many people are resource-poor, under-educated, and susceptible to lies; and that we have a biological tendency toward out-group violence that requires a thick layer of socialization to counteract.
Nothing FB is doing is threatening speech in the US. If you want them to have less power over the broadcast of speech, I'm on your side, and I'll be voting for people who want to break them up and decrease Zuckerberg's power.
As much as I admire Sacha Baron Cohen's efforts to uncover hypocrisy of our society, I agree with your comment and disagree with him - that social platforms have to filter content; just on the basis that this filtering, even if done with good intentions initially, may later be seized by individuals with their own agendas, which may not at all be virtuous.
If we mute people talking about races and skin color, prohibit to single out minorities, do we actually relieve the pressure in the society, or help build it up to a radical level and fuel even more hatred that way?
But Facebook already filters content in various ways. They boost content according to its engagement which downgrades/hides the other content from your feed. They sell targeted ads to the highest bidder which implies that you do no see the ads of the other bidders.
If Facebook would just stop manipulating and selling your attention it would have a better defense against calls to filter the content on it.
> If people are easily convinced to hate other people, the problem is not dangerous speech or ideas. The problem is a breakdown in fundamental education, i.e., those people are dangerously ignorant.
With reeducation camps reappearing in parts of the world and sensitivity, bias and other types of training in other parts ... that makes me somewhat uncomfortable as idea. The ones in power always want to educate the wrongthinkers.
And judging how easily Democrats learned to hate everything Trump related and before them Republicans - everything Obama, and hating each other - I would say that it is not a problem with education. People hate because it is fun and pleasurable.
> the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron" - dril (https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312)
That's why Cohen's speech is all the more important. To be clear, I don't agree with everything he said but he is absolutely right that there are some facts that are objectively true. Filtering out misinformation from fact and opinion means those political parties can still have their debates where they slam their opponents but they cannot make lies nor baseless allegations.
The problem we have these days is it's become impossible for the casual observer to separate fact from fiction. Which then just encourages people to take information spread within their own echo chamber at face value (since, rightly or wrongly, that's the network they trust). If we can at least remove the falsehoods from the conversation that is a step forward in having open debates.
Someone will no doubt point out that there's a fuzzy line between a lie and something that is true but intentionally misleading, so where do you draw the line. Unfortunately there's no easy answer to that. However I personally believe things have gotten bad enough where it's now worth the trying.
>To be clear, I don't agree with everything he said but he is absolutely right that there are some facts that are objectively true
Like the fact that "Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia" ? Who decides what is fact and what misinformation. Caitlyn Jenner is a woman - this is objectively true for half the society, bullshit for the other half. Who decides?
"Objectively true" doesn't mean "people believe it to be true" (that's "subjective" not "objective"). "Objectively true" means there's a body of evidence that supports it being true. So the question shouldn't be "who decides what's true?" but rather "what evidence is there to support a claim?"
I've got no issue with subjective content so long as it isn't intentionally harmful but when content is objectively false (the example Cohen used was Holocaust deniers -- there's a body of evidence which proves the Holocaust did happen) it's probably better it was removed. Newspapers, for example, are often forced to write retractions when courts find them to be dishonest.
Where the blurred line lies isn't the "who" behind the moderation but the "where". Where do you draw a line between content that is untrue and content that is technically true but written in an extremely dishonest way? Do we define things as a strictly boolean state (ie only objectively false content gets removed) or is there a state in the middle where content that is not objectively false but still hugely dishonest can also be removed.
For example the UK Brexit slogan "We send £350 million to the NHS, lets fund the NHS instead" was not objectively false (well, the figure they published was untrue but lets ignore that for the purpose of this example) but it was also dishonest because it suggest the EU membership fee would fund the NHS if we left the EU and the actual truth is that almost certainly wouldn't happen. So should dishonest content be removed also when it is as damaging as something objectively false?
That's such a dangerous precedence to take however I'm also not convinced the status quo is working either because people currently game the system and it does have massive repercussions.
Work on "fundamental" issues takes time and no one has stopped working on education.
But in the current environment noise and distraction is incentivized and amplified and that makes things like education even more complicated and time consuming.
> There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous. If people are easily convinced to hate other people, the problem is not dangerous speech or ideas. The problem is a breakdown in fundamental education, i.e., those people are dangerously ignorant.
Now open your mouth and make the sounds "education is bad, our young people are being corrupted by an educational elite that is destroying America".
It's about differentiating (i.e. creating a distance) between speech and our reaction to it, or, in other words, it's about taking responsibility for our reactions.
In my opinion, prohibition of symbols, under the premise that they're subversive, like the Nazi ones, is one of the biggest cultural blunders of our time. It castrates entire generations of the possibility to experience the difference between ideas and their effect on us. It is ceding to the symbols, saying "you have power over us, with which we cannot come to terms with, the only thing we can do is prohibit your use".
The seeming culture-wide inability to discuss politics, religion or other dividing topics in a constructive way is part of the same phenomenon, in my view.
In that sense everything is dangerous and the word 'dangerous' is nearly meaningless. Just because the idea is stupid and it would be dangerous if people take it seriously doesn't mean saying it should be treated as dangerous.
We can cope with people saying stupid things. It happens regularly.
No. Open your mouth and utter the sounds ‘water is wet’ demonstrate how these words are dangerous. It is ludicrous to assert that all sentences are equally liable to be dangerous
The issue is that 'danger' is in the eye of the beholder. There are plenty of people who would love to ban advocacy of Socialism or Communism. There are people who want to ban 'hurtful' speech. And people who want to ban 'blasphemous' speech.
In the end, they are all self-interested parties who want to ban speech that they disagree with.
There is no magic wand that can ban harmful speech without creating a framework for authoritarian meddling, with very few exceptions, which are already on the books.
If you don't have a gun, your hands are clearly visible, and you make no threatening actions, the worst they had better do is get you gently into a quiet room and arrange a psych eval.
Which dovetails perfectly with the intent of the OP... police just as much, or arguably even more, than every other person, need to think about what they here and not just knee jerk respond.
> There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous.
This might just be revealing a lack of imagination on your part. I'd argue the opposite: there are sounds you can make with your mouth that can change the course of history.
Just break the advertising business model. Literally that's it. Don't allow data sharing with advertisers, and don't allow political advertising, solved. Overnight the internet's better.
Now you just have to define data, data sharing, advertiser, political, advertising, and political advertising in a way that can be affected by such a policy without all the obvious and non-obvious harms.
Ill jump on this one too and say I am consistently impressed with the engineering quality of their teams, and appreciate their contributions to open source communities. The scale and up-time of their product over its lifetime is impressive, as is their ability to make so many underlying changes and survive with the same user interface for a decade each iteration.
> I argue that Facebook isn't a dumpster fire. I use it mostly to share photos with my friends and family, and I see little or no propaganda on my feed.
So Facebook, a site used by hundreds of millions of people, is fine because... you don't see any propaganda?
> But differentiating between freedom of speech and "reach" is just as dangerous as...
I don't think so.
> those people are dangerously ignorant.
I think that is a gross oversimplification.
Much of the repulsive vile speech, such as hate speech, is generally festered among a group bouncing their ideas off each other. You may or may not label such groups as echo chambers. Part of the reason for this is that many people find comfort organizing into groups and generally fear/distrust originality. In other words many people value conformance more than the message to which they are conforming because an idea or message gains credibility the less original it appears and because there is security in numbers.
Mild changes of technology will not instantaneously cure original hateful speech any more than it will instantaneously modify behavior in advance or increased originality or critical thinking. It can, however, vastly alter the reach of that speech allowing vile ideas to proliferate or be constrained to faithful believers.
The balance there is if you modify technology to open wider reach then all speech, including vile hate speech and conspiracy theories, are widely available. If you modify technology to restrict reach then all speech is restricted including objective research and educational material.
My personal solution is to just avoid the online swamps where people congregate merely for the point of gathering and try not to worry about the loud volume of amplified stupidity that leaks out. When the stupidity confronts me in the real world I respond as directly as I can without regard for making people feel stupid or embarrassed, because I generally presume when people bring the full force of unoriginal ideas to me conversationally they do so in a quest to solve their personal insecurities. Don't waste time with stupid.
There are indeed sounds you can make that are dangerous, here are some examples:
1. Follow this instructions to build a bomb with materials bought at a drug store: ......
2. There's an American spy in North Korea going by the name Ichi working at ...
3. (As a woman) Michael raped me (when he didn't).
Oh how mighty are the righteous who now swiftly mount one of the galloping horses in the stampede against Facebook.
How self-serving they are when the criticism comes from all directions and they take no risks in joining the chorus.
How conveniently they point their finger to the to the west when a bit further to the east they’d rather the world’s gaze not firm into a stare and a squint.
Politicians care about taking down Facebook’s or Twitter’s power mainly to leverage it for themselves or because they view it as an existential threat.
What are you on about, he basically said democracy needs to police social networks and hold them to a high standard given their huge amounts of power. I particularly like the line about a restauranteur not having to serve an 8 course meal to a fascist. This is the correct way to look at freedom of speech - you can say what you want - but there is no requirement for me to provide services for you to reach billions of people with your statements.
If normal people want to hear my message, and there's only one platform they can effectively locate it through, then I'd say you are required to provide services to me. At this point, it's like cutting off somebody's internet or phone service for their political views - the argument that Verizon isn't the government and is just "muh showing you the door" wears thin.
There seems to be this underlying assumption that nationalism, paleoconservatism and various commonly-held views that are wrongly called "fascism" are actually things people want to hear, and if we allow them the same access to services as any other views, their popularity will overturn this entire neoliberal scheme that's being artificially propped up by organizations like the ADL rooting out free speech in every area they can legally do so. I sort of agree - this entire project would fail without censorship.
And, if as Baron Cohen implies, we're really just a bunch of stupid hateful beasts always primed to commit another Holocaust as soon as the boot is off our neck, well...then we've got deeper problems in our society than a lack of social media censorship.
Your Karma of -9 leads me to worry about the quality of your opinions, however your arguments are quite well put, so I'll do my best to address them.
Firstly, I mean really hateful fascistic stuff not any of the things you mention - I don't agree with nationalism (or even patriotism, countries are a completely made up idea) but would defend your right to talk about it as you see fit on any platform, paleoconservartism is more than fine too or even talk about advocating gun laws or anti abortion stuff. All fine.
The problem is the current climate is not a fact based discussion about issues on their merits, instead the system is being gamed by these platforms and people using these platforms to wield influence (and craft a society) that will allow much great abuses of power going forward.
I think the Standford prison experiment and the smaller version Cohen ran in his film shows you that people are not good, we all can be riled up and lash out because of strong beliefs we might hold. I think having platforms that don't try to help tone down and instead encourage hateful thinking really is dangerous, especially when a lot of these opinions are based on lies.
The West is not doing too well in the human rights department, yo. You have to actually work pretty hard to understand that, however, as the mass ignorance is by design.
However, as long as we are free to speak to each other about our differences of opinion, we can avert catastrophe and build a diverse, and therefore stronger, civilisation.
Those who would lecture the masses on what is and isn't free speech, don't seem to be getting the point. Words, in and of themselves, never kill.
A world-wide, sudden enlightenment at the hands of celebrity figures in an attempt to create a godhead may .. or may not .. be the kind of solution to collective destruction .. we should be celebrating.
So somebody who has a voice via his fame, argues about which of regular non famous people that shouldn't have free speech. And he even talks about tolerance in the same text.
My fear about all of these calls to police speech on social networks is that eventually people will call for the same to be applied everywhere on the Internet.
I realize that the major difference is how easy it is for someone to have an audience on FB/Twitter vs. Running their own blog. But there’s no real barrier to someone we might not agree with to build that audience outside those platforms too.
Eh debatable. There are plenty of folks that go Google-free, Facebook-free, Twitter-free, etc. It's not hard to apply digital minimalism. SDC is right: outrage is what drives clicks and the recommendation algorithms are designed to maximize clicks. However, it really just comes down to education. You need to be an educated consumer to make an informed decision on your own. It really isn't the responsibility of the publisher, data broker, etc. if you form an opinion using their platform. If that were the case, then we'd filter every single website that touts anything false - it's just not possible. People need more critical thinking skills, not Facebook.
You can't browse the web without Facebook and Google tracking you. Website owners cooperate with them. You could avoid their sites, but you'll still be in their data sets.
You also can't contact Google Fi or Gmail users without Google tracking you.
"This is ideological imperialism. Six unelected individuals in silicon valley imposing their vision on the rest of the world, unaccountable to any government..."
"Now here's an idea, instead of letting the silicon six decide the fate of the world, let our elected representatives voted for by the people of every democracy of the world have at least some say..."
Democracy is a political system, not a system of rational inquiry. It can not establish facts, outside of voting statistics. Dressing up censorship with the pretenses of democracy is nothing more than appealing to the tyranny of the masses. Democracy as we know it requires a free and open forum for discussion.
The trend towards 'fact checking' disappoints me. Individuals must be capable of processing and consuming information without authoritarian hand-holding. To pessimistically dismiss this possibility is to refute the premises of democracy. It baffles me how proponents of censorship feel that they can have it both ways here.
Furthermore, the underlying philosophy of fact-checking dismisses the fallible nature of man. Information is constantly emerging. The horizon is contentious by definition. What would fact checkers have said to Copernicus? That a scientific consensus has already been formed?
The popular view that we have somehow escaped these human limitations is nothing more than special pleading: "This time is different. This is the age of reason and science. Dogma is dead."
This time is not different. Progress will continue to unfold and regressive ideologies will continue to limit us. On the historical scale we are becoming more tolerant. One has to wonder if the pessimistic view which highlights hatred is accurate.
Is it a meaningful assertion to say that you are intolerant of intolerance? Should we applaud this as noble? Perhaps a more rational inquiry would be to ask who would benefit from the proposed censorship and fact-checking regime.
To expect a platform with billions of content posted every day to have algorithms capable of distinguishing the intricacies of what humans subjectively determine is vulgar, untrue, etc. is insane.
Moreover, who determined what is "banworthy"? This is dangerous territory. I agree with the sentiment of SBC's speech, but in reality, that's such a slippery slope into suppressing speech simply because somebody is going to dictate what penetrates the filters.
Disgusting and hypocritical. Given that the ADL already has outsized censorship abilities on Google and Twitter amongst other platforms, everyone should read the transcript to see how self-righteous and presumptuous Cohen is and their aligned vision of controlling what information you are allowed to access: https://www.adl.org/news/article/sacha-baron-cohens-keynote-...
This coming from the guy who played Borat and Bruno- it was ok when he did it, because he is on the right side of history you see.
If by "controlling what information you're allowed to access" you mean removing hate speech, then yeah they have the right and the duty to do that. I really wonder why you're against that.
Maybe you shouldn't limit what other people say because of your subjective views. Moreso if you define hate speech as "The incomfortable truth that I don't want to hear" and not "insults or objectively proved deceit"
There's no such thing as "hate" speech. The label is a tool to suppress speech the accusers don't agree with and I've never encountered anyone who uses the term to do so objectively.
That's quite the claim and I don't really think it's defensible. Hate speech definitely exists. Your claim is equivalent to saying there exists no speech meant to demean or harm others based on race, gender, religion, etc. Why does this kind of speech need to be protected from removal? Surely we wouldn't tolerate it in this forum, why should it be tolerated in others?
In the USA, it does not exist, in the sense that freedom of speech is absolute, even when you're demeaning or "harming" others with your words. The only way in which it is limited is when it is directly inciting action as a call to violence.
In Canada, hate speech laws exist, but again are designed around the case where a reasonable person would view the speaker as making credible threats and inciting violence.
Neither country prohibits you from saying mean things about groups you don't like. Certainly neither country prohibits you from saying true-but-uncomfortable, even scientifically backed things that are banned outright on most platforms for being hateful.
There’s plenty of stuff that you and I would both look at and say, “yep, that’s definitely hate speech”. There’s lots of stuff that I might call hate speech under any definition of it but you might think is perfectly reasonable. Since you’re defending censoring hate speech, I suspect there’s even more stuff that you would call hate speech but I would think is perfectly reasonable. And as we’ve seen over and over again, once you allow for censorship/cancellation based on “hate”, the definition of “hate” grows without bound.
I think your claim that hate speech is indefensible. Because in order to show it exists you would have to define what it is and what it isn’t entirely, and not allow that definition to expand. But that’s not really possible, so really what does exist is people who try to call things hate speech things and then make others conform to that.. but what do you do when they start defining legitimate criticism as hate speech? You can’t do anything if they’re enforcing things by law (ie guns).
> Surely we wouldn't tolerate it in this forum, why should it be tolerated in others?
Because this is the difference between moderation and freedom of speech. It is fine to say that some things are not acceptable to say within a particular forum; it is not fine to stop people saying those things everywhere.
Yeah, I don't agree with people advocating for violence against me. That's why I don't want it in my social circles. What's wrong with that? Why do you support hate speech? Do you agree with it?
Couldn’t agree more. I find the defense of Cohen here bewildering, and the fact that you are downvoted sad.
My take:
1)It is a failing of our public education system if hate speech is a problem.
2)There is a significant difference between targeted hate speech and generalized hate speech, also between speech in public and private.(not to say its ever a good quality)
2b) Private speech should never be controlled under any circumstance. It’s simply unethical.
3)Just because you deliver messages between people doesn’t mean you need to preform SIG/INT on it.
Sorry. I don’t buy that study. I can’t believe that statistic from personal experience, and find the conducting authority partial. And nothing is stoping us from educating adults, ever heard of The Ad Council?
I also don't buy the study. Further, any questioning about knowledge of Auschwitz should also include questioning about knowledge of other 20th century atrocities, such as the British suppression of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, the Nanjing Massacre by the Japanese army in China, the Greek, Assyrian and Armenian Genocides under the Ottoman Empire, the Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, the expulsion and killings of Germans at the end of WWII, the Cambodian Genocide by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, the East Timor and West Papua Genocides in Indonesia, the Anfal Genocide in Iraqi Kurdistan, etc. I would guess that Auschwitz is better known than most other 20th century atrocities.
Then you're not paying attention. The ADL and the SPLC, though the latter is suffering some issues presently, are basically the key arbiters of what is classified as "hate speech" today. FAANG will not go to bat for the free speech rights of anyone the ADL has classified as verboten, because going up against anything the ADL does or says is anti-Semitic.
>Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft, among others, are joining with the ADL to form a Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab, the companies and the civil rights group said Tuesday. They'll exchange ideas and develop strategies to try to curb hate speech and abuse on the companies' various platforms and across the internet.
>"These companies have an added responsibility to do everything within their power to stop hate from flourishing on their watch," ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. "We look forward to tackling this pressing challenge together."
That article does not describe any censorship abilities being granted to the ADL. It merely says that they're looking for solutions without stating what those solutions would be.
I agree. I'm deeply suspicious of Cohen. He has used 'comedy' to trick and ridicule people but taken it to another level by taking statements they make and twisting meanings. A religious jew disguised as a visitor to the US from Kazachstan going to a provincial US bar and singing 'throw the jew down the well' and then subsequently openly ridiculing and shaming the audience for singing along is a form of baiting and hate speech, the sort of thing the ADL should be commenting on. I'm surprised Kazachstan hasn't officially protested this misrepresentation, maybe they have....
I'm normally pretty well versed in dry humour, being a near native speaker of such. But I'm failing to comprehend whether you're being satirical or serious... perhaps I need more tea. Can you clarify?
Well, you're either employing tactical nihilism or you truly do need more tea. Cohen has shown himself to enjoy manipulating rubes in social contexts where the pressure to perform is present, not entirely dissimilar from how hypnotists work in crowd situations. Rather than letting it be all in good fun, though, Cohen has made people say offensive things, and then uses it to pretend it's what those people really think rather than admitting it's 99% social pressure.
Is your argument that none of the people Sacha has gotten to say things, actually believe those? Its just pressure to perform, so EVERYONE would say things they dont believe if put in the same position?
Cohen is a great comedian, but I suspect he also has the skills of a con-artist, or a hypnotiser: he manages to get people to "sing along" with him well beyond what is normal and reasonable, and then ridicules them. It's funny, sometimes very interesting, sometimes leaves you a bit suspicious.
Yes. I'm confident that a charismatic person could walk into any bar anywhere in the world, and get some of the people there to sing along with an offensive song. I'm not quite sure how someone who's familiar with bars or alcohol in general could doubt this.
I'm equally confident that most of the people who sang along did not actually want to throw Jews down a well.
I was being serious. Cohen plays a dangerous game of tricking people into interviews and situations under false pretenses and disguises and then ridicules their responses. This is low blow comedy but can be very funny. When you subsequently reach a point of publicly deliberately mischaracterizing and misrepresenting the tricked people it becomes defamation. You'd think the ADL would not want Cohen as a spokesperson.
I was going to point out that no one made them sing that but you've already got a subthread going where people are saying that he's hypnotizing them. You can't make this stuff up.
> When Borat got that bar in Arizona to agree that “Jews control everybody’s money and never give it back,” the joke worked because the audience shared the fact that the depiction of Jews as miserly is a conspiracy theory originating in the Middle Ages. [..] If we make that our aim—if we prioritize truth over lies: https://www.adl.org/news/article/sacha-baron-cohens-keynote-...
The hitler example is easy, but it’s almost the exception :
Should someone in 1938 advocating launching war against Germany after they invaded tchekosloviakia and calling chamberlain a coward be censored as promoting « hate speech » ?
He constantly makes comparisons about his comedy and how much more of an experiment it was to showcase the "hidden prejudice" of people. The content of his speech are totally valid and agreeable and don't see why he cannot have an influence for discussing social problems. Actually comedians are of great help for ethical social concerns; for instance take a look at George Carlin.
You're right and I loved Sasha's Made in America show, however George Carlin would be absolutely fucked in today's day and age. His political/cultural angles are not nearly as "safe" as Sasha's.
His recent comedy takes aim directly at the cancel culture that most other comedians don't dare offend. It seems to me that he doesn't need the acceptance of the system because he largely lives outside it, producing new specials when it suits his fancy.
I double-dog dare you to go to a Jewish wedding and ask about circumcision. (Or to a tech conference and ask where the women are and why everyone is single.) With good editing, it will be exactly as funny as Cohen's best.
Everyone has a door and can be convinced to go through it. And at any given time, some people are safe targets.
> I double-dog dare you to go to a Jewish wedding and ask about circumcision.
I've been to Jewish weddings and the community themselves make jokes about circumcision. It's not like it's a subject for which they have to be tricked into showing their true colors on like the latent racism and sexism that Cohen exposes in his comedy. In fact, circumcision is the subject of a lot of of traditional Jewish humor.
> Or to a tech conference and ask where the women are and why everyone is single.
I suspect you'd get a lot of laughs from the attendees, because after all, most normal people can laugh at themselves, and even at caricatures of themselves. If some of them end up shouting mysoginistic stuff in response, that's on them.
> Actually comedians are of great help for ethical social concerns; for instance take a look at George Carlin.
George Carlin is a pretty impressive example of a comedian affecting meaningful change, or at least forcing a legal confrontation, though probably not in the way he wanted [1].
> He constantly makes comparisons about his comedy and how much more of an experiment it was to showcase the "hidden prejudice" of people
Was that his original intent or is that a retcon? Maybe I was too young to "get it" at the time, but I watched the original Da Ali G Show when it came out and don't really remember that being the point. Maybe if Ali G asked legitimate questions despite his low-status dress/speech mannerisms you'd have a point, but the character was actually incredibly stupid.
Wow this touches really deeply and closely - given I use social media all. the. time.
My love for the Web and freedom of discussion and how it would free us from the powers of authority. This was me imagining the future of information in the early 2000s.
I'm thinking this may very well be a lie: as Sasha so eloquently and comedically touches several points about how these social media giants (Facebook, Twitter etc) have developed algorithms to satisfy our most basic "monkey brain" instincts: we want information that is agreeable.
The comparison he made with "fake scientists" on the internet getting more attention than nobel prize winners really hit me hard.
The issue seems to be that with the internet we got rid of authority, but another type of hierarchy grew out of this: algorithm hierarchy. Where we don't have authorities in charge of giving us information, rather we have algorithms.
An obvious solution to this (from a programmer's point of view) would be to allow users to freely and openly (through an open source kind of movement) change these algorithms to fit their needs. For instance I want information that is "not biased" and I can quickly get the "non biased algorithm" from github (as an example) and plug it into my social media. If I want information from academica I would get the "academia algorithm" and plug in. And so on.
I don't know how something like this can help, but it seems we may need to stop thinking in terms of social media companies being the problem; it's the fact that we can't change these algorithms that is the problem.
I struggle as to how we could regulate massive companies like Facebook and Google from opening up their algorithms in a verifiable way.
Perhaps a better way to attack this is to allow them to continue, but break them up - ie, mandate competition, and admit that monopolies in markets like search and social media (not to mention specific segments of advertising) are as dangerous as monopolies in operating systems or telephone services.
my fear of everything being decided by algorithms that exist to please us, is us being trapped in the past and creativity being extinguished. if netflix makes shows based on what it knows will be popular, what happens to visionaries that have an idea nobody else can comprehend. risk, exploration, adventure, new, is replaced by nostalgia, familiarity, comfort.
we can debate fighting google and facebook, or we can come up with a "Human Best Practices" behavior guide for how to best consume content, and spread it. There will always be temptation, moderation is either taught or learned. If not facebook, there will be another mind drug to over indulge. Spend effort countering the concept of unlimited "picked-just-for-me feed" or "whats popular with everyone today" intake, not attacking this specific villain. We need new ways to surface and propagate novel, intelligent, thought provoking content, AND we need to teach people to resist human hedonistic urges and impulses, and offer social support and encouragement to deviate from consuming new and fresh news. Watching the news (on tv anyway) is, and shouldnt be, looked up to.
I believe it's an economic problem. There is no reason all of these comfort services cant exist to help keep the peace among people uninterested in anything else. If they make up the majority of the economy, then we have other problems to solve though.
After all, we do need comfort for sleep - so it could be .. maybe the role of BIG companies should be comfort focused.
Visionaries can still exist - we would only need to improve their discoverability and ensure they are not at risk of financial crisis as a result of going outside the line
facebook, reddit, google amplify what is popular, not necessarily ideas with depth. they in particular incentive things that can be consumed quickly and moved on from. a person consuming 100 links per hour upvotes at 10x the rate of someone consuming 10 links per hour. those shorter posts, bits, soundbytes, images, memes then gain 10x the amplification of longform content.
what is popular is not necessarily without depth either.
Also consider propagation of danger alerts. the longer time it takes to consume the average piece of media, the longer it takes for people to become aware of dangers. There are, of course, shortcuts for authorities to spread information about dangers already identified, but danger is a gradient.
Maybe there is an inherent trade-off between quick, scanning behavior being good for safety and deep, thoughtful consumption being good for progress
For a while, I thought decentralization could help with this problem. If people just published websites and there were no central social media, you can better control what content is seen and not seen. But then Google came around and aggregated these websites and made them searchable and now has it's own algorithm for maximum engagement.
Sasha's idea of delaying the spread of information via a timer is very interesting. It can get people a chance to second guess their posts and also give a chance for something in-between to publish or not. If every retweet was delayed then the network spread slows down a lot which might have really interesting consequences.
But ultimately I believe the problem we have is we have chosen the mall over the public park.
An important question is how would it even be possible to have a public park without government intervention?
You have to buy and maintain your own server and pay for uptime. That all costs a continued stream of knowledge and money and it’s very hard. Maybe not for you and I, but for many other people.
We most definitely did not get rid of authority, we got rid of central authority. Every nation used to closely control media so all of their citizens were on the same page. What they believed was biased propaganda with a strong illusion of truth due to dominance in commonly consumed media channels and the echo chamber of talking to others who drank from the same trough. It was far from being high quality information but at least your neighbors had the same beliefs as you so it was less contentious. There never was an authority of truth - only a facade of one. Critical thinking by individuals was discouraged to avoid conflict. Now that people can get their information from anywhere they are completely unprepared to use their minds to separate the good from the bad so they try to find "authoritative sources" instead of using their own judgement. Except their are no authoritative sources, and there never were.
Do we have actual reason to believe that really high adoption rates of people using their own judgement actually is a good thing?
I think there is inherent need for specialization to occur on digesting information and drawing conclusions from it. And when someone is good at it, we should want them to leverage other people parroting what they say to help signal boost
the focus is more that I dont have the time or energy to form personal beliefs on everything talked about on TV (or by news authorities in general). It's easier to adopt someone else's beliefs and entertain that position than talk out of my ass or not be able to talk at all. If that belief is successfully challenged, I change it. It is also easier to change my belief on something if I did not form it myself.
Most people lack strong beliefs on most things. news authorities exist because people are looking for them to help fill that gap and relieve the responsibility of forming beliefs on all the things relevant to the community each person is a part of
That’s fair. I didn’t interpret the original comment that way, but I wouldn’t agree with the strong position that there literally shouldn’t be such a thing as an authoritative source of news.
Ah yeah, I did not want to rule out the possibility that people in general may be shit at forming their own opinions even when they do spend the time and energy. But that also opens the rabbit hole into why that would be the case (low vs high intelligence - but intelligence is hard to generalize), and variance of judgement based on context (e.g. quality soccer judgement vs shit hockey judgement for same person).
All of which kind of comes back to quantitative changes to either time or energy needed for each person to get to an acceptable judgement (even if it's infinite of both for some people-topic pairs), and both of those resources are incredibly finite compared to the volume of topics that are beneficial to the community to have beliefs on.
The big point I want to drive home here, which I have a feeling we agree on, is that we should prioritize the topics people are forming their beliefs on more than what those beliefs are. This is something authoritative figures actually can help with (for better or worse) due to the centralization. So imo, maybe you disagree here, it is not enough to simply allow authoritative sources to exist but we should be more actively promoting sources as authorities for topics.
But you would still require the skill to judge who is and is not a legitimate authority. This sounds more difficult and easily gamed than not bothering with a middle man and judging the facts yourself. Even if there is some perfect way of distinguishing true authorities from frauds, nobody is so authoritative as to never make a mistake, or so clueless as to not occasionally stumble into a correct answer.
You are only thinking about a single belief on a single topic, but we are tasked with a near endless amount of potentially important things to form beliefs on and an incredible sum of time and energy needed to actually do that yourself.
Authorities would be open to judgement by communities. You can better leverage your trust in people to cut down on the amount of energy and time you need to spend to get to a reasonable opinion. There becomes less instances for common miscommunication to go unnoticed. Yes, this comes with a risk of being gamed, which is another interesting conversation, but that's more a human vs human topic than a humans vs reality topic. which is important (economic incentives destroying the world and all) but a bit off-topic from the more general point I am making
basically, looking at all the details yourself is only good if you know what you are looking at and have the time to do so for everything you need beliefs on. The value that authorities provide is in consolidating multiple beliefs into a feed. Secondary to that is getting those beliefs to be high quality. Even if you go do the research yourself for a more quality belief to "fact-check" what you just heard - you have still accepted the value of the authority to tell you the TOPIC on which you should be forming a belief. All you did was locally iterate their work on a single topic to improve the deliverable.
Context matters as well. I dont need to judge the facts myself to figure out how many people died in the california fires if that detail is included in the report from authority. I'm okay with an authority figure telling me that number. Maybe I could arrive at a more accurate number myself, sure - but to what extent does the accuracy matter? It certainly matters if I believe no one died, or if I believe the death toll was orders of magnitude higher than it was.
The only real issue with trusting authority figures is the recursion. Authority figures using their own authority figures.. resulting in an appearance of multiple independent sources arriving at the same conclusion when in reality it is all signal boosting of a single source.
To protect yourself, the simple thing to do is assume any people who say the same thing heard it from the same place until you're given reason to believe otherwise
My solution would be similar, but the user can use a drop down/settings menu to change algorithms rather than install a different algorithm from github.
I frequently ask myself, if Hitler took power today - how many of our government officials, engineers, and soldiers, would get in line behind him. He would have no problem getting the census data and locations of subversives.
I run an email newsletter[1] that aims to combat exactly this issue. It's a single link every day to something interesting, the kind of blog posts that you come across every once in a while that really make you think. The overwhelming feedback is that being able to read the kind of non-viscerally-targeted news and analyses that aren't easily found online is incredibly valuable.
Sasha Baron Cohen is a manipulator - that's the basis of his comedy, and for comedy, it's funny. It's not the person who I want to take cues on freedom of speech from.
Yes, you can go to a group of people and get them to sing anti-semitic songs, just as you can bluster them with an unlabeled map or have them fall prey to trivial parlor magic. That's a terrible basis for attacking basic human rights on.
He calls the openness of platforms a defect, and he would like to censor every single word before it is public - that is not freedom, it is authoritarianism.
I suspect he believes that most people are dumb sheep - this is after all how he made his money - and he sees himself as protecting the poor sheep. He believes that because his intent is just, his actions are just - that the end justifies the means. He is the most dangerous kind of strongman: the self-righteous kind.
One thing I've noticed about the far-right is that, when they can't argue with the substance of what someone's said, they choose to attack his character instead.
When did he argue against anything Cohen said? He just said his comedy sucks and he’s “the worst kind of strongman”, while implying that Cohen wants to take basic human rights away from people. If that’s not an ad-hominem, it’s pretty close.
Not only did I not insult his comedy, I actually even called it funny.
Cohen from his ADL speech genuinely believes that platforms should be publishers and should be on the line for what is posted to them - and therefore the publisher should censor all words which disagree with its opinions. He doesn't use the word censor, he instead uses the words "restrict", "limit" and "delay". He uses examples like hate speech and racism, and while that sounds fine on the surface, he makes it very clear he believes publishers can rightfully restrict speech in many ways well beyond what the law requires.
In arguing for censorship, he is restricting the freedom of expression and that is against human rights. While it sounds great when it's focused on "big platforms" of "American Billionaires", forcing online platforms to be publishers is de facto censorship and it doesn't only affect Facebook, but your small community forums and message boards too.
Yes, I do accuse Cohen of playing the strongman. He's a wealthy comedian (his net worth is about $130M) who made his money by filming himself manipulating other people, and he believes average people shouldn't be able to post freely on the internet without someone (the platform, the Government) approving their speech. That's an abhorrent view and it's in stark contrast to the belief that humans should have agency.
So let me get this straight, a person who supposedly got a platform to manipulate many others at once (and thats dangerous, according to you) is saying that manipulators shouldn't get a platform to manipulate many others at once, and you find that... also bad?
Worst case it might be hypocritical, but the claim is certainly inconsistent. The question is, how do we handle dangerous manipulators on social media? Are they not a problem at all?
This is not exactly isolated to the far-right. It's anyone who is bad at arguing or finds themselves beaten logically and needs an illogical escape. We should call that out on all sides.
One thing I've noticed about authoritarians is that they have been pretty successful at categorizing anything outside of their Overton window as "far", a corollary of branding authoritarianism as "centrist".
I've already flagged lph's comment smearing vorpalhex but I see it as so egregious I'm also going to list the HN guidelines that I see it as breaching:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle
It is funny that Why Isn't Sacha Baron Cohen Working Anymore video was posted just three months before his latest show started airing on Showtime. It is also weird seeing the video feature criticism of him from the ADL considering this speech was at his acceptance of an award from the ADL. It doesn't seem like his image needed much repairing after all.
It's amazing how his past movies, made not that long ago, would be completely verboten today. Using racial and ethnic and homophobic stereotypes to make audiences laugh... and raking in millions for doing so.
And... it makes sense. Can you imagine if his movie portrayed a ridiculous caricature of a Jewish person, the way he portrayed a ridiculous caricature of a gay man ten years ago, today?
> and he would like to censor every single word before it is public - that is not freedom, it is authoritarianism
He never said that. He said that a publishing delay just enough to filter out potential illegal content (snuff, hate speech are illegal under US law) would benefit the society overall.
And who decides what's filtered? Unless it's the judicial system, don't want it.
If you have 2 opposing views, and one is delayed long enough, you've effectively censored it, in favor of the other.
Which is exactly what's going to happen. Once the dissenting view "passes filter", the news cycle is over, the unfiltered view remains in everyone's retinas, the filtered one ignored, despite any merits it may have.
This is just preparing the field for stronger, more arbitrary censorship.
Who is deciding which content is promoted now on social media? An unaccountable algorithm. Isn't this just the flip side of the censorship coin? Except now the truth is being censored and lies are being promoted because it's financially better for the publisher.
Wouldn't the most appropriate legal response to this be not allow social media companies to have any sort of recommendation algorithm and force them to have feeds that are linear in time of people who you follow?
The appropriate response would be to take them to justice if law was broken, and for you not to use the platforms if you don't want to, as a free citizen.
The problem with the mixed approach is that these platforms get the official recognition they don't deserve, and the private censors we don't need or want.
Neither "snuff" (unless you're talking about CSE or other specific categories) nor hate speech are illegal in the US. The supreme Court has repeatedly ruled on this:
That's because, unlike other countries, the US Supreme Court doesn't define speech that calls for imminent violence upon a person or group as "hate speech".
That specific type of imminent danger speech and it's expression are not protected by first amendment rights. It's right there in your Brandenbug v. Ohio.
The above commenter wrote that hate speech was illegal. This is not correct. I'm not sure what you think I'm missing here. The bar for speech to be inciting imminent lawless action is pretty high:
> Portions of the rally were filmed, showing several men in robes and hoods, some carrying firearms, first burning a cross and then making speeches. One of the speeches made reference to the possibility of "revengeance" [sic] against "Niggers," "Jews," and those who supported them.
This was determined to be protected speech under the First Amendment.
Smashing a speaker that deafens those around it doesn't inhibit free speech. Believing that building such a thing is an act of freedom is authoritarian.
With all due respect, you don't understand his comedy whatsoever. I suspect you believe Bill Hicks is also a misanthrope. These are extremely gauche interpretations, it's like saying Picasso didn't care about painting because he didn't paint realistic flowers and horses and barns like a "proper painter" would.
Cohen performed his bits without the audience knowing they were part of it - and he only shows the bits that had the outcomes he wanted (or were at least funny). There are more then a few security cam clips of the bits that didn't go so well - and I recommend finding them.
Cohen isn't a surrealist who is using a medium to convey the depth of life, he's just a comedian with an editing team.
It's true he's just a comedian, but his comedy goes deeper than your run of the mill midlife crisis jokes at the comedy cellar or whatever.
Just like Bill Hicks, he's a political comedian that reveals hard to stomach truths. Unlike Bill Hicks who creates an abstract persona (of a particular kind of bigot, etc.) and then critiques it, Cohen astonishingly shows you a concrete instance.
Cheney autographed a milk jug he was convinced was used for waterboarding. Saying a joke about this on stage would be pretty funny, but Cheney himself autographed a waterboarding milk jug on camera and lamented about how much it would be worth as a collectors item.
Deeply thought-provoking. Confronts difficult issues and makes logical, compelling and important arguments. May have to think about all this a little differently now.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadif censorship is cool now, how about starting with the crass bullshit people like SBC beam into people's living rooms?
i'm willing to bet money that people will do a better job sorting fact from fiction when they're no longer immersed in hollywood stupidity 24x7.
Your points are voided, in any cases.
They were a vehicle to poke fun at ignorant westeners.
How could one tell?
- Kazakh people (mostly) look nothing like Borat
- It was clearly (to me, a European) set in eastern Europe
- Cohen played on our ignorance to make us believe Rumania is Kazakhstan
- Everybody he encounters thereafter is American
- Cohen uses Borat to mock stereotypical American[0] behaviour
- I am aware just how much juvenile humour there was too
[0] applies to most places, but the film is set in America
Jewish people portrayed as greedy is an existing stereotype with a sad history. There is no such existing stereotype for the people of Kazakhstan in the target audience of the movie.
Also, say what you mean. Raise eyebrows? So what. The last Star Wars movie raised some eyebrows. This thread already has enough people righteously missing points, so just say what you mean.
Playing on the west’s ignorance was the joke, and him convincingly reeling people in for interviews was the comedy. Not the character itself, the reaction to the character.
Also, as for the role of truth in public discourse: If at least a majority still gave a shit, Trump couldn't be president. The propagandists produce, but the masses gobble up that crap as if it meant their life. Entertainment has won over truth and without the customers ("users", like if the product were a drug) that buy it the propagandists, and Zuckerberg, would have no market and nothing to sell.
No. Some ads are simply straightforward and factual. Ads which tell you that "the election is on" or "the circus is in town" or "items are now half the usual price" aren't lies.
One might also argue that a purely factual, straightforward ad is a fairly ineffective one -- one of the reasons no major corporation would point you to Wikipedia or an investigative news piece to learn more about them.
Assuming some amount of Darwinism in the ad space, people who make purely factual ads will go out of business pretty soon.
- An ad for a tour of parliament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5tEKKRf8WY
- An ad for an exhibition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeM0ktptknI
- An ad for ballet performances: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC13KUebpxE
- An ad for concert dates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf3Ih7aaBq4
They tell you what it is, they tell you when it's on. If they're lies then they won't be getting any bookings and they will be going out of business.
Prove it. Factual ads are far more likely to be the largest fraction purely because they're simpler and cheaper to make.
My claim, that ads are more dishonest than honest, seems much less controversial. If you can find me even a single podcast episode with only honest ads, I’ll concede.
[1] New Rule: Let It Go | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW6C1UaQKhI
There are conservative people who voted for Obama twice, which almost certainly was because of the broad economic recovery under his presidency.
People are a lot less ideological than everyone thinks. If they're worried about money or health, many will vote for whomever gives them the most hope.
"Freedom of speech" is the new mantra you have to repeat if you want Americans to stop thinking about a problem.
But yeah, would agree that "freedom of speech" wasn't a design pillar or anything for FB.
This is as true as saying "more code = more programming" -- possibly a technically correct statement, but if your goal is to create something valuable (to your business, to society) this won't help.
I'd like to call Occam's Razor, but, then, when has it become that the most selfish interpretation of an organization's motivations is the simplest one? Maybe it's simple simply because it aligns with my beliefs. Something to ponder.
Wait a minute. Zuck, a Jew himself, is saying the Holocaust denier ads are okay-ish?
Edit: note that (1) paid ads are not free speech and (2) while you can say what you want, a commercial entity has no obligation to amplify your voice.
There is great value in allowing everyone to speak their minds, and sorting out who the idiots are afterward. Freedom of speech works very well.
For one, these are presented to you (as facts) with no direct channel to argue for and against.
Consider that normal (not political) TV ads cannot make any wild claims about their product. Is that also limiting free speech to you??
This seems like a very convenient coincidence of “morals” and economic incentives.
Also ads are “special” on Facebook. They show up on your wall whether you want them or not, while normal content from your friends goes through an algorithmic sphincter. In a sense Facebook is already limiting the free speech of normal users by putting their speech through some kind of “engagement” black box. Meanwhile, if you have money, you get to say whatever you want to whomever you want.
https://m.facebook.com/help/340974655932193?helpref=uf_perma...
Before this, he "bent the knee" with his portrayal of Eli Cohen. Wasn't a terrible film but his reverence for the character was a bit much.
FB is a dumpster fire, I don't think anyone argues otherwise these days. But differentiating between freedom of speech and "reach" is just as dangerous as saying we need to treat freedom of speech on a case by case basis.
We either have freedom of speech or we don't. If we don't, sooner or later we're all fucked.
There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous. If people are easily convinced to hate other people, the problem is not dangerous speech or ideas. The problem is a breakdown in fundamental education, i.e., those people are dangerously ignorant.
We need to work on the fundamental issues, not grant more power to groups with specific political / authoritarian agendas.
Shouting fire in a crowded theatre that could lead to a stampede that puts people in danger. Deliberately misinforming people about the risk of an action they are about to take could be too.
I think my reply really adequately responds to the core intent of the original comment.
I’d also like to point out that your reply is not helpful. Merely gainsaying something is not useful or informative.
His point being about the critical thinking on the part of the listener, not about the physics of making actual sounds.
If you utter a communication to an insane person, the side effect might be that you are stabbed. You as the person uttering it must take responsibility for what neurophysical response in the mind of the listener might result.
If you emit communications, there can be consequences which are causal. Not strictly the volitional responsibility of the listener.
Point is, this exact argument could be (and has been) used to justify some pretty bad ideas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
If speech can effect change, how can you be sure it is incapable of being dangerous?
What exactly has Cohen ever said that's anti-Semitic? The racism in his work, like Borat, is satire. If anything, he should've offended Kazakhs by implying they ignorantly hate Jews.
> There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous. If people are easily convinced to hate other people, the problem is not dangerous speech or ideas. The problem is a breakdown in fundamental education, i.e., those people are dangerously ignorant.
OK, so let's say we agree that the fundamental problem is lack of education. That's great in theory, but that doesn't solve a problem today.
There are societies where unfettered lies about groups caused genocides. You can lament the poor education that contributed, but that doesn't change the fact that it can happen again.
The real issues are that lies are much harder to undo than they are to create; that many people are resource-poor, under-educated, and susceptible to lies; and that we have a biological tendency toward out-group violence that requires a thick layer of socialization to counteract.
Nothing FB is doing is threatening speech in the US. If you want them to have less power over the broadcast of speech, I'm on your side, and I'll be voting for people who want to break them up and decrease Zuckerberg's power.
If we mute people talking about races and skin color, prohibit to single out minorities, do we actually relieve the pressure in the society, or help build it up to a radical level and fuel even more hatred that way?
If Facebook would just stop manipulating and selling your attention it would have a better defense against calls to filter the content on it.
Bad ideas spread through exposure.
With reeducation camps reappearing in parts of the world and sensitivity, bias and other types of training in other parts ... that makes me somewhat uncomfortable as idea. The ones in power always want to educate the wrongthinkers.
And judging how easily Democrats learned to hate everything Trump related and before them Republicans - everything Obama, and hating each other - I would say that it is not a problem with education. People hate because it is fun and pleasurable.
The problem we have these days is it's become impossible for the casual observer to separate fact from fiction. Which then just encourages people to take information spread within their own echo chamber at face value (since, rightly or wrongly, that's the network they trust). If we can at least remove the falsehoods from the conversation that is a step forward in having open debates.
Someone will no doubt point out that there's a fuzzy line between a lie and something that is true but intentionally misleading, so where do you draw the line. Unfortunately there's no easy answer to that. However I personally believe things have gotten bad enough where it's now worth the trying.
Like the fact that "Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia" ? Who decides what is fact and what misinformation. Caitlyn Jenner is a woman - this is objectively true for half the society, bullshit for the other half. Who decides?
I've got no issue with subjective content so long as it isn't intentionally harmful but when content is objectively false (the example Cohen used was Holocaust deniers -- there's a body of evidence which proves the Holocaust did happen) it's probably better it was removed. Newspapers, for example, are often forced to write retractions when courts find them to be dishonest.
Where the blurred line lies isn't the "who" behind the moderation but the "where". Where do you draw a line between content that is untrue and content that is technically true but written in an extremely dishonest way? Do we define things as a strictly boolean state (ie only objectively false content gets removed) or is there a state in the middle where content that is not objectively false but still hugely dishonest can also be removed.
For example the UK Brexit slogan "We send £350 million to the NHS, lets fund the NHS instead" was not objectively false (well, the figure they published was untrue but lets ignore that for the purpose of this example) but it was also dishonest because it suggest the EU membership fee would fund the NHS if we left the EU and the actual truth is that almost certainly wouldn't happen. So should dishonest content be removed also when it is as damaging as something objectively false?
That's such a dangerous precedence to take however I'm also not convinced the status quo is working either because people currently game the system and it does have massive repercussions.
But in the current environment noise and distraction is incentivized and amplified and that makes things like education even more complicated and time consuming.
Now open your mouth and make the sounds "education is bad, our young people are being corrupted by an educational elite that is destroying America".
Thank god those sounds aren't dangerous.
In my opinion, prohibition of symbols, under the premise that they're subversive, like the Nazi ones, is one of the biggest cultural blunders of our time. It castrates entire generations of the possibility to experience the difference between ideas and their effect on us. It is ceding to the symbols, saying "you have power over us, with which we cannot come to terms with, the only thing we can do is prohibit your use".
The seeming culture-wide inability to discuss politics, religion or other dividing topics in a constructive way is part of the same phenomenon, in my view.
We can cope with people saying stupid things. It happens regularly.
No. Open your mouth and utter the sounds ‘water is wet’ demonstrate how these words are dangerous. It is ludicrous to assert that all sentences are equally liable to be dangerous
Which dovetails perfectly with the intent of the OP... police just as much, or arguably even more, than every other person, need to think about what they here and not just knee jerk respond.
So you're arguing that Osama Bin Laden, who did not himself commit violent acts but merely persuaded others to do so, was in fact not dangerous?
This might just be revealing a lack of imagination on your part. I'd argue the opposite: there are sounds you can make with your mouth that can change the course of history.
(Agree with your other points.)
So Facebook, a site used by hundreds of millions of people, is fine because... you don't see any propaganda?
I don't think so.
> those people are dangerously ignorant.
I think that is a gross oversimplification.
Much of the repulsive vile speech, such as hate speech, is generally festered among a group bouncing their ideas off each other. You may or may not label such groups as echo chambers. Part of the reason for this is that many people find comfort organizing into groups and generally fear/distrust originality. In other words many people value conformance more than the message to which they are conforming because an idea or message gains credibility the less original it appears and because there is security in numbers.
Mild changes of technology will not instantaneously cure original hateful speech any more than it will instantaneously modify behavior in advance or increased originality or critical thinking. It can, however, vastly alter the reach of that speech allowing vile ideas to proliferate or be constrained to faithful believers.
The balance there is if you modify technology to open wider reach then all speech, including vile hate speech and conspiracy theories, are widely available. If you modify technology to restrict reach then all speech is restricted including objective research and educational material.
My personal solution is to just avoid the online swamps where people congregate merely for the point of gathering and try not to worry about the loud volume of amplified stupidity that leaks out. When the stupidity confronts me in the real world I respond as directly as I can without regard for making people feel stupid or embarrassed, because I generally presume when people bring the full force of unoriginal ideas to me conversationally they do so in a quest to solve their personal insecurities. Don't waste time with stupid.
How self-serving they are when the criticism comes from all directions and they take no risks in joining the chorus.
How conveniently they point their finger to the to the west when a bit further to the east they’d rather the world’s gaze not firm into a stare and a squint.
Whataboutism at its best from you.
There seems to be this underlying assumption that nationalism, paleoconservatism and various commonly-held views that are wrongly called "fascism" are actually things people want to hear, and if we allow them the same access to services as any other views, their popularity will overturn this entire neoliberal scheme that's being artificially propped up by organizations like the ADL rooting out free speech in every area they can legally do so. I sort of agree - this entire project would fail without censorship.
And, if as Baron Cohen implies, we're really just a bunch of stupid hateful beasts always primed to commit another Holocaust as soon as the boot is off our neck, well...then we've got deeper problems in our society than a lack of social media censorship.
Firstly, I mean really hateful fascistic stuff not any of the things you mention - I don't agree with nationalism (or even patriotism, countries are a completely made up idea) but would defend your right to talk about it as you see fit on any platform, paleoconservartism is more than fine too or even talk about advocating gun laws or anti abortion stuff. All fine.
The problem is the current climate is not a fact based discussion about issues on their merits, instead the system is being gamed by these platforms and people using these platforms to wield influence (and craft a society) that will allow much great abuses of power going forward.
I think the Standford prison experiment and the smaller version Cohen ran in his film shows you that people are not good, we all can be riled up and lash out because of strong beliefs we might hold. I think having platforms that don't try to help tone down and instead encourage hateful thinking really is dangerous, especially when a lot of these opinions are based on lies.
However, as long as we are free to speak to each other about our differences of opinion, we can avert catastrophe and build a diverse, and therefore stronger, civilisation.
Those who would lecture the masses on what is and isn't free speech, don't seem to be getting the point. Words, in and of themselves, never kill.
A world-wide, sudden enlightenment at the hands of celebrity figures in an attempt to create a godhead may .. or may not .. be the kind of solution to collective destruction .. we should be celebrating.
Repulsive.
I realize that the major difference is how easy it is for someone to have an audience on FB/Twitter vs. Running their own blog. But there’s no real barrier to someone we might not agree with to build that audience outside those platforms too.
You can't even choose to visit websites that are free from Google ads. They're too ubiquitous.
You have no choice as a consumer. There is no invisible hand that can hurt Google or Facebook now, which is why the breakup talk is important.
You also can't contact Google Fi or Gmail users without Google tracking you.
"This is ideological imperialism. Six unelected individuals in silicon valley imposing their vision on the rest of the world, unaccountable to any government..."
"Now here's an idea, instead of letting the silicon six decide the fate of the world, let our elected representatives voted for by the people of every democracy of the world have at least some say..."
Democracy is a political system, not a system of rational inquiry. It can not establish facts, outside of voting statistics. Dressing up censorship with the pretenses of democracy is nothing more than appealing to the tyranny of the masses. Democracy as we know it requires a free and open forum for discussion.
The trend towards 'fact checking' disappoints me. Individuals must be capable of processing and consuming information without authoritarian hand-holding. To pessimistically dismiss this possibility is to refute the premises of democracy. It baffles me how proponents of censorship feel that they can have it both ways here.
Furthermore, the underlying philosophy of fact-checking dismisses the fallible nature of man. Information is constantly emerging. The horizon is contentious by definition. What would fact checkers have said to Copernicus? That a scientific consensus has already been formed?
The popular view that we have somehow escaped these human limitations is nothing more than special pleading: "This time is different. This is the age of reason and science. Dogma is dead."
This time is not different. Progress will continue to unfold and regressive ideologies will continue to limit us. On the historical scale we are becoming more tolerant. One has to wonder if the pessimistic view which highlights hatred is accurate.
Is it a meaningful assertion to say that you are intolerant of intolerance? Should we applaud this as noble? Perhaps a more rational inquiry would be to ask who would benefit from the proposed censorship and fact-checking regime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading
Moreover, who determined what is "banworthy"? This is dangerous territory. I agree with the sentiment of SBC's speech, but in reality, that's such a slippery slope into suppressing speech simply because somebody is going to dictate what penetrates the filters.
This coming from the guy who played Borat and Bruno- it was ok when he did it, because he is on the right side of history you see.
In the USA, it does not exist, in the sense that freedom of speech is absolute, even when you're demeaning or "harming" others with your words. The only way in which it is limited is when it is directly inciting action as a call to violence.
In Canada, hate speech laws exist, but again are designed around the case where a reasonable person would view the speaker as making credible threats and inciting violence.
Neither country prohibits you from saying mean things about groups you don't like. Certainly neither country prohibits you from saying true-but-uncomfortable, even scientifically backed things that are banned outright on most platforms for being hateful.
There’s plenty of stuff that you and I would both look at and say, “yep, that’s definitely hate speech”. There’s lots of stuff that I might call hate speech under any definition of it but you might think is perfectly reasonable. Since you’re defending censoring hate speech, I suspect there’s even more stuff that you would call hate speech but I would think is perfectly reasonable. And as we’ve seen over and over again, once you allow for censorship/cancellation based on “hate”, the definition of “hate” grows without bound.
I find the claim that there are not clear double standards within this context to be indefensible.
Is wearing a MAGA hat in public hate speech?
Is telling someone their opinion doesn't count because of "white privileged" or "the patriarchy" hate speech?
What about calling evangelical's red neck climate change deniers?
You see, I've never encountered anyone that's vocal in this realm to apply their own standards logically and objectively.
Because this is the difference between moderation and freedom of speech. It is fine to say that some things are not acceptable to say within a particular forum; it is not fine to stop people saying those things everywhere.
My take:
1)It is a failing of our public education system if hate speech is a problem.
2)There is a significant difference between targeted hate speech and generalized hate speech, also between speech in public and private.(not to say its ever a good quality) 2b) Private speech should never be controlled under any circumstance. It’s simply unethical.
3)Just because you deliver messages between people doesn’t mean you need to preform SIG/INT on it.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/auschwitz-...
Can you explain this? I dont know what censorship ability the ADL has on Google and Twitter?
May I refer you to this comic? https://www.xkcd.com/1053/
>Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft, among others, are joining with the ADL to form a Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab, the companies and the civil rights group said Tuesday. They'll exchange ideas and develop strategies to try to curb hate speech and abuse on the companies' various platforms and across the internet.
>"These companies have an added responsibility to do everything within their power to stop hate from flourishing on their watch," ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. "We look forward to tackling this pressing challenge together."
I'm equally confident that most of the people who sang along did not actually want to throw Jews down a well.
Sacha would be wise to start with himself: from 1970 to 2018, there was only 1 year (78-79) during which the Federal Reserve Chair wasn't Jewish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chair_of_the_Federal_Reserve
At ~2% of the US population, someone can calculate how far above random chance this is.
Should someone in 1938 advocating launching war against Germany after they invaded tchekosloviakia and calling chamberlain a coward be censored as promoting « hate speech » ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8yV8xUorQ8
"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." -- Mark Twain
Everyone has a door and can be convinced to go through it. And at any given time, some people are safe targets.
I've been to Jewish weddings and the community themselves make jokes about circumcision. It's not like it's a subject for which they have to be tricked into showing their true colors on like the latent racism and sexism that Cohen exposes in his comedy. In fact, circumcision is the subject of a lot of of traditional Jewish humor.
> Or to a tech conference and ask where the women are and why everyone is single.
I suspect you'd get a lot of laughs from the attendees, because after all, most normal people can laugh at themselves, and even at caricatures of themselves. If some of them end up shouting mysoginistic stuff in response, that's on them.
George Carlin is a pretty impressive example of a comedian affecting meaningful change, or at least forcing a legal confrontation, though probably not in the way he wanted [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_v._Pacifica_Foundation
Was that his original intent or is that a retcon? Maybe I was too young to "get it" at the time, but I watched the original Da Ali G Show when it came out and don't really remember that being the point. Maybe if Ali G asked legitimate questions despite his low-status dress/speech mannerisms you'd have a point, but the character was actually incredibly stupid.
My love for the Web and freedom of discussion and how it would free us from the powers of authority. This was me imagining the future of information in the early 2000s.
I'm thinking this may very well be a lie: as Sasha so eloquently and comedically touches several points about how these social media giants (Facebook, Twitter etc) have developed algorithms to satisfy our most basic "monkey brain" instincts: we want information that is agreeable.
The comparison he made with "fake scientists" on the internet getting more attention than nobel prize winners really hit me hard.
The issue seems to be that with the internet we got rid of authority, but another type of hierarchy grew out of this: algorithm hierarchy. Where we don't have authorities in charge of giving us information, rather we have algorithms.
An obvious solution to this (from a programmer's point of view) would be to allow users to freely and openly (through an open source kind of movement) change these algorithms to fit their needs. For instance I want information that is "not biased" and I can quickly get the "non biased algorithm" from github (as an example) and plug it into my social media. If I want information from academica I would get the "academia algorithm" and plug in. And so on.
I don't know how something like this can help, but it seems we may need to stop thinking in terms of social media companies being the problem; it's the fact that we can't change these algorithms that is the problem.
Perhaps a better way to attack this is to allow them to continue, but break them up - ie, mandate competition, and admit that monopolies in markets like search and social media (not to mention specific segments of advertising) are as dangerous as monopolies in operating systems or telephone services.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...
my fear of everything being decided by algorithms that exist to please us, is us being trapped in the past and creativity being extinguished. if netflix makes shows based on what it knows will be popular, what happens to visionaries that have an idea nobody else can comprehend. risk, exploration, adventure, new, is replaced by nostalgia, familiarity, comfort.
we can debate fighting google and facebook, or we can come up with a "Human Best Practices" behavior guide for how to best consume content, and spread it. There will always be temptation, moderation is either taught or learned. If not facebook, there will be another mind drug to over indulge. Spend effort countering the concept of unlimited "picked-just-for-me feed" or "whats popular with everyone today" intake, not attacking this specific villain. We need new ways to surface and propagate novel, intelligent, thought provoking content, AND we need to teach people to resist human hedonistic urges and impulses, and offer social support and encouragement to deviate from consuming new and fresh news. Watching the news (on tv anyway) is, and shouldnt be, looked up to.
If I were making a tldr of guide v.01, it would start: "Supplant your facebook, google, and reddit intake with https://aldaily.com/ https://redef.com/ https://longform.org/ https://longreads.com/ "
and here i am now moving on to the next n.yc post.
After all, we do need comfort for sleep - so it could be .. maybe the role of BIG companies should be comfort focused.
Visionaries can still exist - we would only need to improve their discoverability and ensure they are not at risk of financial crisis as a result of going outside the line
facebook, reddit, google amplify what is popular, not necessarily ideas with depth. they in particular incentive things that can be consumed quickly and moved on from. a person consuming 100 links per hour upvotes at 10x the rate of someone consuming 10 links per hour. those shorter posts, bits, soundbytes, images, memes then gain 10x the amplification of longform content.
Also consider propagation of danger alerts. the longer time it takes to consume the average piece of media, the longer it takes for people to become aware of dangers. There are, of course, shortcuts for authorities to spread information about dangers already identified, but danger is a gradient.
Maybe there is an inherent trade-off between quick, scanning behavior being good for safety and deep, thoughtful consumption being good for progress
Sasha's idea of delaying the spread of information via a timer is very interesting. It can get people a chance to second guess their posts and also give a chance for something in-between to publish or not. If every retweet was delayed then the network spread slows down a lot which might have really interesting consequences.
But ultimately I believe the problem we have is we have chosen the mall over the public park.
You have to buy and maintain your own server and pay for uptime. That all costs a continued stream of knowledge and money and it’s very hard. Maybe not for you and I, but for many other people.
I think there is inherent need for specialization to occur on digesting information and drawing conclusions from it. And when someone is good at it, we should want them to leverage other people parroting what they say to help signal boost
Most people lack strong beliefs on most things. news authorities exist because people are looking for them to help fill that gap and relieve the responsibility of forming beliefs on all the things relevant to the community each person is a part of
All of which kind of comes back to quantitative changes to either time or energy needed for each person to get to an acceptable judgement (even if it's infinite of both for some people-topic pairs), and both of those resources are incredibly finite compared to the volume of topics that are beneficial to the community to have beliefs on.
The big point I want to drive home here, which I have a feeling we agree on, is that we should prioritize the topics people are forming their beliefs on more than what those beliefs are. This is something authoritative figures actually can help with (for better or worse) due to the centralization. So imo, maybe you disagree here, it is not enough to simply allow authoritative sources to exist but we should be more actively promoting sources as authorities for topics.
Authorities would be open to judgement by communities. You can better leverage your trust in people to cut down on the amount of energy and time you need to spend to get to a reasonable opinion. There becomes less instances for common miscommunication to go unnoticed. Yes, this comes with a risk of being gamed, which is another interesting conversation, but that's more a human vs human topic than a humans vs reality topic. which is important (economic incentives destroying the world and all) but a bit off-topic from the more general point I am making
basically, looking at all the details yourself is only good if you know what you are looking at and have the time to do so for everything you need beliefs on. The value that authorities provide is in consolidating multiple beliefs into a feed. Secondary to that is getting those beliefs to be high quality. Even if you go do the research yourself for a more quality belief to "fact-check" what you just heard - you have still accepted the value of the authority to tell you the TOPIC on which you should be forming a belief. All you did was locally iterate their work on a single topic to improve the deliverable.
Context matters as well. I dont need to judge the facts myself to figure out how many people died in the california fires if that detail is included in the report from authority. I'm okay with an authority figure telling me that number. Maybe I could arrive at a more accurate number myself, sure - but to what extent does the accuracy matter? It certainly matters if I believe no one died, or if I believe the death toll was orders of magnitude higher than it was.
The only real issue with trusting authority figures is the recursion. Authority figures using their own authority figures.. resulting in an appearance of multiple independent sources arriving at the same conclusion when in reality it is all signal boosting of a single source.
To protect yourself, the simple thing to do is assume any people who say the same thing heard it from the same place until you're given reason to believe otherwise
[1] https://thinking-about-things.com
Yes, you can go to a group of people and get them to sing anti-semitic songs, just as you can bluster them with an unlabeled map or have them fall prey to trivial parlor magic. That's a terrible basis for attacking basic human rights on.
He calls the openness of platforms a defect, and he would like to censor every single word before it is public - that is not freedom, it is authoritarianism.
I suspect he believes that most people are dumb sheep - this is after all how he made his money - and he sees himself as protecting the poor sheep. He believes that because his intent is just, his actions are just - that the end justifies the means. He is the most dangerous kind of strongman: the self-righteous kind.
Cohen from his ADL speech genuinely believes that platforms should be publishers and should be on the line for what is posted to them - and therefore the publisher should censor all words which disagree with its opinions. He doesn't use the word censor, he instead uses the words "restrict", "limit" and "delay". He uses examples like hate speech and racism, and while that sounds fine on the surface, he makes it very clear he believes publishers can rightfully restrict speech in many ways well beyond what the law requires.
In arguing for censorship, he is restricting the freedom of expression and that is against human rights. While it sounds great when it's focused on "big platforms" of "American Billionaires", forcing online platforms to be publishers is de facto censorship and it doesn't only affect Facebook, but your small community forums and message boards too.
Yes, I do accuse Cohen of playing the strongman. He's a wealthy comedian (his net worth is about $130M) who made his money by filming himself manipulating other people, and he believes average people shouldn't be able to post freely on the internet without someone (the platform, the Government) approving their speech. That's an abhorrent view and it's in stark contrast to the belief that humans should have agency.
Worst case it might be hypocritical, but the claim is certainly inconsistent. The question is, how do we handle dangerous manipulators on social media? Are they not a problem at all?
- I'm right because ...
- You're right because ...
- You're ugly!
- Person 'A' hits person 'B'.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle
https://youtu.be/tF_2QZo90lw
Kind of like Eminem and Michael Vick, it'll probably work.
And... it makes sense. Can you imagine if his movie portrayed a ridiculous caricature of a Jewish person, the way he portrayed a ridiculous caricature of a gay man ten years ago, today?
So yes. I can imagine such a movie today. And it would be funny as hell.
Wait! Actually this already exists as a TV show, it’s called I Am America and Cohen frequently portrays a caricature of a Jewish Mossad agent.
He never said that. He said that a publishing delay just enough to filter out potential illegal content (snuff, hate speech are illegal under US law) would benefit the society overall.
False - explained by a 1st Amendment lawyer: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-white-first-amen...
If you have 2 opposing views, and one is delayed long enough, you've effectively censored it, in favor of the other.
Which is exactly what's going to happen. Once the dissenting view "passes filter", the news cycle is over, the unfiltered view remains in everyone's retinas, the filtered one ignored, despite any merits it may have.
This is just preparing the field for stronger, more arbitrary censorship.
Wouldn't the most appropriate legal response to this be not allow social media companies to have any sort of recommendation algorithm and force them to have feeds that are linear in time of people who you follow?
The problem with the mixed approach is that these platforms get the official recognition they don't deserve, and the private censors we don't need or want.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.A.V._v._City_of_St._Paul
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyder_v._Phelps
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_St...
That specific type of imminent danger speech and it's expression are not protected by first amendment rights. It's right there in your Brandenbug v. Ohio.
> Portions of the rally were filmed, showing several men in robes and hoods, some carrying firearms, first burning a cross and then making speeches. One of the speeches made reference to the possibility of "revengeance" [sic] against "Niggers," "Jews," and those who supported them.
This was determined to be protected speech under the First Amendment.
Edit: misspelling.
Cohen isn't a surrealist who is using a medium to convey the depth of life, he's just a comedian with an editing team.
Just like Bill Hicks, he's a political comedian that reveals hard to stomach truths. Unlike Bill Hicks who creates an abstract persona (of a particular kind of bigot, etc.) and then critiques it, Cohen astonishingly shows you a concrete instance.
Cheney autographed a milk jug he was convinced was used for waterboarding. Saying a joke about this on stage would be pretty funny, but Cheney himself autographed a waterboarding milk jug on camera and lamented about how much it would be worth as a collectors item.