A big problem with freeing up communications from everybody is how toxic some people and groups will be to others. Facebook is just a mirror, a fun-house mirror that magnifies some things and minimizes others, but it's not adding the content. Some "information" is best kept under wraps.
It gives voice to nut job fringe elements and brings them together in echo chambers. All bad stuff, someone has to shut this monstrosity down. It is out of control.
The regulation BS will not work because it's become way too big to monitor and control.
It isn't nut job fringe elements that commit genocide - in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia it was thousands and thousands of people - ordinary people - who either cooperated and enabled or sometimes even picked up machetes and guns to participate in the genocide.
I don't feel like this is a facebook problem (although I wouldn't object to shutting them down - as long as we kill that other cancer, Twitter, too). I think this is a people-with-poor-education problem.
Exactly this. However, smart people are manipulated by the illusion of individual choice and their ability make above-average decisions. Less intelligent people are manipulated through slightly different mechanisms, but intelligent people are enlisted just as surely, and their confidence in their own unique individual attributes creates a trap. We are social animals. Libertarianism is simply the will to power, not a an expression of truth.
Every genocide is portrayed as a unique accident, but they follow the same gamelan. Facebook is literally a crowd control mechanism and it works no matter how smart you think you are.
From what I’ve read, the violence that ultimately lead to Hitlers grab for power was mostly between rank and file brownshirts and communists: young, working class males who were stirred up by the exact same sort of deliberate misinformation that is propagating in social networks today.
This is not, to the best of my understanding, what's actually happening. Such elements are actively cultivated and their reach is facilitated by powerful benefactors. It's not a natural phenomenon. Right-wing populism must be bred and right-wing terrorists must be groomed. It's not simply an inevitable development of environmental factors, e.g. "the shape of the room," or the structure of online discourse. It's a deliberate campaign.
I agree that they are being bred. Just like the Tea Party was not a collection of frustrated people tired of the system, like it was painted, but rather a party propped up by wealthy right wing interests.
I just think that a platform like FB or Twitter makes it absurdly easy to do it.
I'm in my late 50s so I recall news in the 70s. There were basically 3 networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) and if there was a slant, they all had the same slant. There wasn't right-wing news and left-wing news there was just news. Sure, there were fringe elements like the John Birch Society, but they were considered so far out of the mainstream that they weren't even on most people's radar. We also still had the Fairness Doctrine. Now the fringe conspiracy theorists have huge followings. There's a very deep epistemic gap between the various factions of society. The possibility that this will spin out of control - especially since we have a leader who seems to want to fan the flames of division - is terrifying.
Case in point: The Oregon fires are happening in the politically Redder part of the state, but many not too far from Portland. There are rumors going around in those Red areas that "left wingers" and BLM started the fires. Folks in those areas are generally very well armed. If those rumors get traction (and from looking through social media they seem to be) and people think that the folks on the left burned down their houses and towns... it's not gonna be pretty. We've already had trouble with right-wing groups showing up in Portland looking for a fight on several occasions and the police don't seem to be inclined to try to reign them in probably because these groups are so well armed.
At this point I'd just as soon see FB, Twitter, et al shut down before this gets ugly. But I also suspect they'll find other outlets on the internet for spreading conspiracy theories.
The issue is that Facebook is not simply a mirror, it’s one of those infinity mirrors. It doesn’t just let people spread their opinions it helps you find others with similar views. And then because those views align with your own you engage more so it reinforces the algorithm.
It’s a positive feedback loop. (Positive in the sense that the relationship between input and output is not inverted)
This is an echo of the "dumb pipes" argument, which characterizes social media as neutral carriers of both harmless and harmful content. While I recognize that harmful ideology originate outside of Facebook, it's really unhelpful to deny that in Facebook's capacity as "a fun-house mirror that magnifies some things and minimizes others" it's really very deliberately shaping the discourse, the zeitgeist and, as such, political reality.
We don't know the algorithm's ultimate purpose. It is, inevitably, biased. What biases Facebook management has decreed (and how closely its implementation hews) is an unknown to those of us on the outside. But it's certainly not, at this point an accident.
Whenever discussing algorithmic bias, I am always reminded of the old programming koan:
I think one of the reasons why folks are mad at Facebook is it uncovered the uncomfortable truth that freedom of speech is not a first-order good. I used to be a free speech maximalist, but it is clear that lack of education and aggressive state-actor PsyOps is simply too high a hurdle to overcome.
I wouldn't be surprised if when historians look back in 50 years, that they determine that the Pandora's box of free information interchange from the Internet hastened the end of free society.
Which gets balanced out greatly with policy proposals like Andrew Yang's Democracy Dollars, where every eligible voter gets allocated $100/year to contribute to the politician(s) of their choosing.
At least with the press, historically, the editor was a human being (generally with a known set of allegiances), rather than an algorithm; and people had to pay for their news, which kept the publisher accountable.
If people had multiple (interoperable) Facebooks to choose from, and had to pay for them based on how often they visited the site, I imagine the news / social media landscape would look a lot different.
Sure but not wherever you want, e.g. a privately owned platform doesn't prevent freedom of the press, just not on their private property - just like if a business requires a mask for you to enter/be served, they don't have to allow you on their property if you don't follow their rules.
> lack of education and aggressive state-actor PsyOps
Are there media which are not susceptible to PsyOps?
(Edit: for example, print or online newspapers, television, etc. They arguably, by setting a higher standard of rational and investigative rigor, produce fewer propaganda sock-puppets but, by that same token, coalesce trust into personages which can, in one fell swoop, be assassinated or—in the case of Ellen Degeneres—persuaded to reiterate state propaganda.)
And, are only state-actors to blame? After all, Facebook themselves were experimenting with emotion manipulation[0], and transnational corporations have at least as sophisticated branding, PR, and propaganda departments.
I cannot tell you how gratifying it is to see my words described as "rational."
Many technologists have a Right-Libertarian bent which rests on a fundamentally irrational trust in the ethics of the private firm, as a reflective validation of their own unimpeachable ethics. In short, they hate to be reminded that private corporations are unaccountable, and dangerously unethical. It can make it very hard to sleep at night.
Edit: I mean, there are probably other factors at play, too.
Bad ideas and aggressive state actors (doing "PsyOps" or otherwise) were the norm before social media. I see no hard evidence that social media has made any of these problems much worse, other than making people much more paranoid about state actors and the uneducated. (In reality, the traditional press has seeded much of this paranoia. Traditional press feels threatened by social media competition, and so has spent over a decade now raising the hue and cry about social media's "dangers"; they apparently wish to retain their monopoly on fear- and rage-inducing mind viruses only for themselves.)
Furthermore, I see no evidence that in the absence of free speech, state actors will be less aggressive or people will be more educated. I see plenty of evidence that both would get worse in a regime of restricted speech.
I see what you're getting at, but I wouldn't consider this very compelling evidence. Plenty has happened in the past ten years that isn't attributable to social media.
I am as well but I don't think that's the central issue here. Some governments don't agree but I believe there's a vast gulf between posting about how much you hate those lazy left-handed people and actively calling for left-handed people to be murdered in the street. Facebook is not a free speech maximalist company. They just decided to operate in this region without bothering to enforce their own rules to it or even publish the rules in the native language. Should we as Westerners punish them for that? Can we, legally? Let's remove all the moral grey area and pretend Dropbox Fake-country was hosting vast amounts of child pornography and doing nothing about it because the local legal authorities let them and Dropbox HQ just didn't care. Could we do anything about it?
What does this mean? Do you oppose laws against defamation, child pornography, fraud, violent threats, etc? No developed nation has truly free speech. The debate is where the line is drawn. Pretending it is a binary choice just ends up hiding all the smaller choices that we could make that could actually lead to a better society.
EDIT: There is irony in "free speech maximalists" downvoting questions like this rather than trying to answer them.
Do we really have to go to asinine level of detail given that freedom of speech has been a constitutionally protected right for over 230 years? We have plenty of legal precedent for what should be protected. There's no reason to move those markers. Ethiopia has many problems and Facebook is but one.
I think social media is toxic, but not because it allows freedom of speech. Social media rewards virality and outrage is inherently and unfortunately one of the most viral things you can put out on social media. The problem is the platform, not the speech.
I would argue the fact that the rules were first created 230+ years ago is an argument in favor of reevaluating them not an argument in favor of them being infallible. The laws were written before social media, the internet, and the foundations go back to before any real form of mass media. What is the harm in questioning if our laws are setup in the best possible way?
I would argue that the founders were students of Greek and Roman history which preceded them by almost 2000 years. The lessons encoded in the bill of rights were in fact, timeless and speak to the innate nature of human beings. As a species we haven't evolved much in 200K years. Freedom of speech is an important check against a monopoly on ideas. Propaganda is one of the most powerful and dangerous forces and the only way to fight it is with opposing propaganda or debate. Freedom of speech guarantees the right to have that debate. The printing press was a form of mass media. The problem is not the speech on social media. The problem is the platform. Who knows if social media will even be a thing in 10 years? It could just be a temporary fad in history, like disco, that just fades away. It already is starting to wane. More people are tuning out and gen Z is just not as into Facebook or Twitter as my gen was. The need to protect speech and debate will always be essential, however.
>I would argue that the founders were students of Greek and Roman history which preceded them by almost 2000 years. The lessons encoded in the bill of rights were in fact, timeless and speak to the innate nature of human beings. As a species we haven't evolved much in 200K years.
Which is why it took until just within the last century to guarantee voting rights to people besides white men? It is bizarre how we want to pretend that those who came before us had some magical foresight to setup rules to govern a world they could never imagine while we ignore so many clear mistakes they made such as calling rights inalienable while simultaneously disenfranchising a majority of the population.
Voting rights as a whole are about 2 centuries old. The United States, as young as it is, is the oldest continuous democracy in existence. The United States came out of a world of empires and war and conquering, which is how the world was for almost all of human history. Not a square mile of it hasn't had blood spilt over it several times over. At any rate, it was Thomas Jefferson who encoded the bold words "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights." in our founding documents. That the world wasn't ready for its eventual conclusion didn't matter. A seed was sown. And that same language was used by MLK (himself taking full advantage of the first amendment to effect change). Lot of powerful and timeless ideas there.
The world doesn't stop outside of US borders and cultures don't all agree on the ideal extent of free speech. I find it silly to assume that the world should revolve around the US constitution.
So yes, the idea that if you say "I support free speech" you should specify more clearly what that means and where it ends, is not really unreasonable.
> Do we really have to go to asinine level of detail given that freedom of speech has been a constitutionally protected right for over 230 years? We have plenty of legal precedent for what should be protected.
We have plenty of legal precedent on what is protected in the US.
There is considerable debate, even in the US, as to whether this captures all of and only that whic should be protected.
One should not confuse even well established US Constitutional law with universally accepted moral principles.
I didn't downvote your post, however pedantic and silly I found it. You have no idea who downvoted it or for what reason, and neither do I. And simply because I want all speech to be aired without constraints doesn't mean I judge it all to be of the same quality.
As to the substance...
> What does this mean? Do you oppose laws against defamation, child pornography, fraud, violent threats, etc? No developed nation has truly free speech. The debate is where the line is drawn. Pretending it is a binary choice just ends up hiding all the smaller choices that we could make that could actually lead to a better society.
I assumed we all understood what "free speech" meant: the principle that opinions can be aired without restrictions. Obviously I don't think malicious lies, true threats, depictions of abuse and even "fighting words" are somehow pro-social or deserving of protection according to that rule. Malicious lies are the hardest to draw the proverbial line about - if someone has a deranged but good faith belief in some bizarre conspiracy theory that aliens all run the big tech companies or something, is that a "malicious lie?"
Anyway, there are pretty straightforward limiting principles for what constitutes free speech that deserves to be protected by law or in principle.
I didn't accuse you specifically of downvoting. You can't downvote direct responses to your comments on HN so I know you didn't downvote it. However I would bet people with similar ideologies downvoted it.
"Free speech" does not have a universal definition. I doubt people in Germany think they don't have free speech just because they can't legally deny the holocaust. However we allow that in the US even if it is a "malicious lie" that is disputing facts and therefore isn't an opinion which would seem to leave it outside your definition of free speech. Would you be in favor of a similar law in the US to outlaw holocaust denial?
You also seem to be in support of defamation not being protected speech. But why should defamation of an entire group of people in the form of hate speech be protected? Saying a specific person has negative traits X, Y, and Z isn't protected but it is protected when you say everyone of that person's ethnicity including that specific individual has traits X, Y, and Z. Why the distinction?
This idea of free speech is not us straightforward as "free speech maximalists" try to make it appear.
> "Free speech" does not have a universal definition. I doubt people in Germany think they don't have free speech just because they can't legally deny the holocaust. However we allow that in the US even if it is a "malicious lie" that is disputing facts and therefore isn't an opinion which would seem to leave it outside your definition of free speech. Would you be in favor of a similar law in the US to outlaw holocaust denial?
No. People have good faith beliefs in all sorts of insane/horrible things. If I encounter holocaust deniers, I ask them if they're calling me a liar. I've been to Dachau. I'm convinced.
And Germany is hardly the gold standard of freedom.
> You also seem to be in support of defamation not being protected speech. But why should defamation of an entire group of people in the form of hate speech be protected? Saying a specific person has negative traits X, Y, and Z isn't protected but it is protected when you say everyone of that person's ethnicity including that specific individual has traits X, Y, and Z. Why the distinction?
Are we talking about opinions or not? "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year" is different than "I think all of Group Y are dangerous and have no place in our country." Certainly "hate speech" would go after both with equal vigor (and quite a bit more), but only the first is defamatory. The latter is simply an opinion. Other opinions: "I don't trust the Trump administration's COVID vaccine." "The rent is too damn high." "We need to build the wall." Etc.
> This idea of free speech is not us straightforward as "free speech maximalists" try to make it appear.
No, it really, really is. Engaging in good faith is apparently much harder.
>And Germany is hardly the gold standard of freedom.
What country do you want to use as your gold standard? Holocaust denial is illegal in most of Europe. Many countries outlaw hate speech. Most other countries have more restrictive speech laws than the US.
>Are we talking about opinions or not? "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year" is different than "I think all of Group Y are dangerous and have no place in our country." Certainly "hate speech" would go after both with equal vigor (and quite a bit more), but only the first is defamatory. The latter is simply an opinion.
Either. Both of those are fully legal in the US. Is that a problem? Why do we need to protect speech like "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year"? What is the societal good that comes from protecting that speech?
> Why do we need to protect speech like "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year"?
We need to protect it because humans are prone to becoming very protective or defensive about certain opinions, especially religious ones[1] or, lately, statements like "women are women"[2]. Since drawing the line at good opinions and "hate speech" is impossible, regulating them gives a rise to authoritarianism, as is the case across Europe and in much of the rest of the world. And we know that "banning hate speech" doesn't actually prevent the thoughts from persisting or being expressed privately. Germany still has neo-Nazis[3] and Holocaust deniers[4]; they have merely been driven underground, not reformed. How could they be reformed, since even expressing any of the thoughts they believe is illegal? And, as many have cited, often the small groups whom hate speech laws are meant to protect end up being the primary victims of it.[5]
The social benefits of protecting horrible opinions are not a first-order good, but they are a second-order good once we realize that all opinions are subjective and thus impossible to judge in a systematic way.
>We need to protect it because humans are prone to becoming very protective or defensive about certain opinions
You keep on using the word "opinions". "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year" is not an opinion. Holocaust denial is not an opinion. These are statements of alleged fact that are inarguably wrong. I understand the need to protect opinions. I don't understand the need to protect lies.
>And we know that "banning hate speech" doesn't actually prevent the thoughts from persisting or being expressed privately. Germany still has neo-Nazis[3] and Holocaust deniers[4]; they have merely been driven underground, not reformed. How could they be reformed, since even expressing any of the thoughts they believe is illegal?
I guess that means the US doesn't have any neo-Nazis or holocaust deniers, right?[1] How could beliefs like that exist in a country in which those ideas are easily overcome by opposing speech?
It isn't a question of completely stomping out thoughts like this. That is impossible. It is about preventing them from spreading. By allowing this type of speech, we are making it easier for these hateful people to recruit and radicalize other individuals who would have never come to these beliefs on their own.
Before, the Soviets simply didn't have any mechanism to get 100 million American voter impressions. Facebook delivered that on a silver platter, with narrowly sliced demos, purposefully curated by a Facebook sales team.
The message and the basic mechanism is the same, but the scale is what turns this from merely concerning into serious discussion about the end of democracy.
> Before, the Soviets simply didn't have any mechanism to get 100 million American voter impressions.
They didn't? Back in the 60s, around half of the US population (100M people) watched the national nightly news on a regular basis from the three networks. What's easier: convincing three networks to run a fake story sympathetic to Soviet interests, or convincing 100M people of something through "impressions?"
And keep in mind that for decades, Western journalists (mostly in newspapers or magazines) parroted stories about how the Soviet Union was advanced and prosperous, when the reality was starkly different. Reality only penetrated through when samizdat, arguably the social media of its day, was able to funnel Khrushchev's so-called Secret Speech into Western hands. That and Gulag Archipelago really tarnished the image of the Soviet Union in spite of coverage from journalists.
Also, quick aside: I remain highly perplexed that otherwise intelligent people in the tech industry believe so strongly in the power of social media to "program" people just by virtue of "number of impressions." Hacker News is the only place on the Internet where I might see side-by-side stories where social media advertising is called out as essentially fraud and also that social media advertising is bringing about the end of civilization because some Russian Bots paid for some Facebook ads. I don't get it. Getting anyone to commit to anything beyond cheap talk is extremely difficult (and even the cheap talk part is hard if it doesn't confer some status).
You make a good point that mainstream media is and has been an attack vector; however, your comparison "3 networks vs 100M people" is a bad one--obviously the choice is "3 traditional media networks vs 3 social media networks".
This is fair. In this 3 vs. 3 framing, the social media companies are much easier to "convince," since it's easier to defeat algorithms than a person's mind.
I stand by what I said, though. The two types of network are not equivalent. People in the 1960s generally trusted media implicitly. Walter Kronkite has the trust of reportedly 90%(!!!) of Americans at the time. I don't think anyone trusts what they see on Facebook because it is on Facebook. Doubly so for Twitter. (Nevertheless, Facebook clearly wants this kind of trust - it deranks and adds disclaimers to posts it claims are false. Maybe this makes some people think Facebook posts are more reliable. Yet their somewhat repeated failure to mistake political opinions that dominate in the Valley for facts[1] has made me trust Facebook itself less.)
Instead, people trust or don't trust what they see filtered through critical thinking, personal experience and individual biases. If a Russian creates pages for "Americans for the Second Amendment" and "Black Lives Matter Network," people already predisposed to supporting those causes will inherently trust the claims a bit more. But very few would be convinced to change their minds based on this. Social media can be used to amplify preexisting polarization, especially given the engagement-based algorithms. (Perhaps that is the lesson we should learn from OP.) But I have yet to see any evidence that state-sanctioned "PsyOps" on social media have been terribly effective at convincing people of lies or narratives that they might not otherwise believe. I have seen gobs of evidence that the mainstream media is still effective at convincing tens of millions of people of the veracity of stories that are propaganda or close to it.
It's not just state actors, but all kinds of neighborhood ones too. OP topic was non-state.
Speech before Facebook, Twitter et al wasn't restricted in the sense of being actively prevented, there was just much more friction to getting it out widely.
>lack of education and aggressive state-actor PsyOps...
Very succinctly put, but it deserves adding something else: the horribleness of the human spirit. Centralized information control by a meritocracy that mostly got it right (modulo all the bigotry) characterizes the mid-twentieth century West, and this idealized, sanitized view of ourselves was optimistic in the extreme. Indeed, I think we can characterize that controlled optimism as morphing from future-tech-worship (50's) to self-worship as the boomers subsumed the hippy ideals along with the apparently easy money they earned in the wealthiest society Earth has ever known. Now instead of morphing into something else, it is the central control that is changing, and we are seeing why, despite its very real flaws, the benevolent dictatorship of even flawed institutions is preferable to the cynical, hateful chaos that reigns when individuals get a chance to shout their bile to the world.
I'm not entirely sure all is lost, however. Perhaps we can have our cake (absolute freedom of speech) and eat it too (some sort of moral standard) by introducing social norms no-one has even thought of yet. For example, I would personally love it if cancel culture would turn its gaze not to sexual harrassers, but to the more obvious problem of baseless accusers: those who make accusations without any proof, not even bad proof. Such people should be shunned by society, and not listened to ever again, for they have squandered their right to speak. Within academia, something similar might work when a researcher publishes deeply flawed research, they should be expelled from academia. If the academy doesn't maintain a high standard, then the entire thing could come crashing down (and that's already happening in slow motion). If a whole field refuses to do this (psychology, social sciences) then those entire fields should be dropped, lest they damage the reputation of the other fields of the academy.
This sounds harsh, but I think its fair, and it lets us have nice things a little bit longer.
It’s safer to distribute and multiply the psy-ops targets instead of having centralized weak points with regulatory power that can be captured. Free speech ultimately improves our information.
<I wouldn't be surprised if when historians look back in 50 years, that they determine that the Pandora's box of free information interchange from the Internet hastened the end of free society.>
Exactly. And they'll say internet-spread panic caused the unnecessary collapse of the world economy in 2020 -- very similiar to the panic of Y2K, but amplified by 20 years of progress in social media.
Meanwhile, in other non-reported news, ~2.7 million more humans were born this week. And about ~1.2 million died this week from regular non-covid causes. [1]
Free speech by itself doesn't mean much without amplification. I don't think we've got free speech wrong. But with Facebook and other social media we've got amplification wrong.
Interesting, I have actually come to similar, but even broader, conclusion and that was not a comfortable realization. I come from Russia so I used to be a democracy absolutist, but based on the recent social-media-influenced grassroots (and astroturf) movements, I've realized that the American democracy and many others only worked so well because they had so many de-facto small, arbitrary/authoritarian filters. Speech is one of them - if you were fringe 30 years ago your message and movement would simply never get thru the editors / party machines / etc.; but I think it applies broader in a sense that people were far more insulated from actual decision making.
I now view a workable democracy as something that should be more like a technocracy with good feedback mechanisms, and not like something that should actually give "people" "power". Exhibit A: people on Facebook.
This is the biggest issue, and hopefully will gain more eyeballs.
This isn't a fair fight of the rational vs irrational in open discourse.
Facebook has intentionally stacked the deck in favor of the irrational and amplified them artificially because it's correlative with "engagement".
This isn't an organic outcome that just happens to be mediated by Facebook because it's the agora of our times. This is an unintended (I hope) side effect of a business model that intentionally skirts the line between inflammatory and violent because it also happens to be where maximum profit resides. And it was intentional, strategic, and extremely powerful.
We don't know, and we may never. But we do know it's not a fair fight. The amount of psychologists and scientists Facebook actively employs is absolutely staggering [0]. The most educated person in a western country, with expendable income, hobbies, and endless sources of pleasure stands no chance. Someone in Ethiopia who is actually feeling the stresses of conflict and poverty?
This isn't some accidental outcome of Facebook. Every data point suggests Facebook designed their system from the ground up to maximize it.
> A big problem with freeing up communications from everybody is how toxic some people and groups will be to others.
Another big problem is how stupid and violent many people are - enough to take Internet bullshit serious and kill people. I would only allow people into the Internet after they get educated and pass a test of not taking ANYTHING they find there too serious.
I disagree. I believe Facebook profits from hate speech, this incentivizing is spread. I don’t buy that Facebook is merely a mirror and just reflecting what is already there. I believe is promoting and making stronger this kind of behaviors.
I see that, unlike the US, Ethiopia has yet to learn how to draw strength from their diversity. A lesson the Balkans likewise failed to learn before their run in with ethnic cleansing and, later, splitting into separate countries.
I'm not sure whether that was sarcasm, but the US isn't doing great at drawing strength from diversity either at the moment. (It may still be doing better than Ethiopia, but the US is not a shining example of how to do it, at least right now.)
Just tell the Ethiopians that the solution to hate speech is more speech, and that censorship is a fate worse than death. I'm sure everything will be fine.
That you're unable to defend your ideas because they are "obvious" is unfortunate and a danger to any society where people like you make up the majority.
You like minorities today, tomorrow who knows, you might burn some books, or stores, or people. Depends how you feel like, because consistency is a tool of white supremacy.
Would everyone, say, be angry anyway? Probably. Would everyone be angry enough to take to the streets with guns and clubs? Probably not (or at least in much fewer numbers).
The correct way to reason about this is stochastically. Facebook/unchecked mass communication increases the rate and chance that resentment turns into a mob or violent action. It's rather meaningless to debate the causality of individual cases, but more important to look at the effect in a broad sense.
Also the question to your answer is likely both, as in there's a feedback loop between real world violence, causing more conflict on social media, fuelling yet more violence.
> Facebook/unchecked mass communication increases the rate and chance that resentment turns into a mob or violent action.
Is there any evidence of this? Do you have any research showing the correlation of the rise in Facebook to increased mob violence in the world. The world has actually enjoyed a few decades of low violence compared to the historic mean.
The genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar is probable the clearest example, which Facebook has even acknowledged itself[1], after a UN fact-finding mission investigated the relationship between social media and the racist sentiment in the country[2]
"The Mission has examined documents, publications, statements, Facebook posts and audio-visual materials that have contributed to shaping public opinion on the Rohingya and Muslims more generally. The analysis demonstrates that a carefully crafted hate campaign has developed a negative perception of Muslims among the broad population in Myanmar. This campaign has been the work of a few key players: nationalistic political parties and politicians, leading monks, academics, prominent individuals and members of the Government. This hate campaign, which continues to the present day, portrays the Rohingya and other Muslims as an existential threat to Myanmar and to Buddhism"
I'm not even sure I can take the second point in good faith. Violence having decreased compared to historical high points has literally nothing to say on whether social media itself causes violence. Other factors can easily explain an overall decline, which obviously is not uniform. If you live in one of the countries in which social media is used as a means to instigate genocides, I can tell you that more safety in a US city will matter very little to you.
You have basically responded with an ancidote. Nearly all forms of media can and have contributed to violence. What evidence is there that Facebook is especially noxious? Facebook isn't especially old, I remember a world pre-Facebook book and we still had things hate and violence in roughly the same proportion.
Furthermore did the lack of Facebook produce better outcomes for Muslims in China? The world is complicated place, the answer probably isn't as simple as "Facebook is bad".
A case study of a nation-wide butchering of more than 24000 people is not an anecdote. If that's not enough then I'm not sure what sort of evidence it is you're looking for.
And again, the issue is not the state of violence in the world or just Facebook, which is why I used 'social media' more generally at the end of my last post, it's the ways in which those companies uniquely contribute to violence.
You don't need to be responsible for all violence in the world to be held accountable for the violence you cause. The fact that the world is complicated and violent doesn't absolve actors from their responsibility. Social media is quite unique in many ways. From mass bot-networks to influence campaigns that disguise themselves as bottom-up, to speed and virality that no other medium has, to lack of accountability and the ease at which information moves cross borders and enables nefarious states to conduct sabotage.
And China is not a good example either. It's probably the prime example of a country that has used digital technologies, including social media, to build a dystopian surveillance network, including on Uyghurs, that could not otherwise function.
You can not compare it with islam. Look at middle east. Islam is a religion designed on violence and it gets what it asks for everywhere in the world, even within muslim countries.
Really we need to ask about the frequency and intensity of genocides before Facebook or without facebook availability. E.g. if we could find proxy countries, like ethiopia but with more, less, or no Facebook use, we could compare genocides in each country.
Maybe take "communication" instead of just Facebook so we could go further back in history if there is a good way to objectively measure how much communication is happening.
Hard task for sure, but I'd be interested in reading about it if anyone has done so.
The radio facilitated in the rwanda genocide, and is probably a bigger influence than facebook, as far as last-mile delivery of information is concerned.
I'm sure it's not helping, let's put it that way. If they have, as some suggest, any ambitions toward nation-state-hood, they are proving daily that they're not cut out for it.
What does liking something actually accomplish, though? And how do we compare it to pre-social media? How do we know those people didn't already have that preference, but had no medium to express it, and so no one knew it existed?
You don't need to go all the way to Ethiopia to see the harm. Hate speech on Facebook and Twitter is pushing United States dangerously close to civil war, too. People have literally died in this country because of social media radicalization. Perhaps amplifying the fringes wasn't such a swell idea after all.
You mean the 17 y.o. kid chased by an angry mob? The one who shot three people attacking him?[1] Your comment is ambiguous as to whom you are referring, but based on the evidence, I don't think the 17 y.o. kid was the radicalized one. I've also seen no evidence that any of the people involved are/were particularly active on social media (although the one who lived allegedly told his friend he wishes he emptied his entire gun into the 17 y.o.).[2] I also haven't seen any evidence that the 17 y.o. was in a militia (he apparently worked as a life guard), but maybe there is some.
This sort of proves my point, though: social media has "radicalized" people into believing claims that lack a factual basis and serve a particular narrative. But this is mostly perpetrated by members of the traditional press, not ordinary social media users. If anything, social media has only radicalized people by privileging members of the traditional press at the expense of the random people, no matter how crazy they are.
> Are we really citing alt right collaborator Andy Ngo, who has already been exposed for spreading misinformation?
The only "Alt-Right" collaborator I know of is a Joe Biden supporter who perpetrated the Charlottesville massacre.[1] Of course, you could try to refute any of the evidence Ngo supplied in his tweets, but since you have nothing yourself, it's much easier to call him names, slander him and generally resort to FUD tactics, ad hominem and guilt by association. If you could actually refute anything Andy Ngo reported (and for all I know, maybe there's plenty), then go ahead and do it. It would be irrelevant to the particular claims I was citing, but at least it would be informative. What you've given us so far is an over-the-top innuendo narrative that is so sleazy even your average MLM salesperson would cringe.
Yeah, sure, I just need to first finish debunking the allegations that Hillary is an blue iguana and then deal with the guy claiming the moon is not vegan.
Thank you for admitting you are not able to refute it. I didn't really know who Andy Ngo was before, but now I think he might be a credible journalist (of color, too) who did his research and provided evidence, something that is not well liked by idiots across the political spectrum.
Because there was a _riot_ there and he was protecting property and giving medical help (including to the rioters). Much of Kenosha is burned to the ground.
It turns out the kid himself has some thoughts on this.[1] (I'm linking to Noir's summary not because I agree with him on gun rights or whatever else, but just because he has a concise and factual argument, using the kid's own words from before the fact to cast light on intent and his state of mind, as well as the chaotic events later where he was being chased by a mob and shot at.) I think the boy made a very unfortunate decision to go out there, but the actions of the mob are self-evident justification for why he was carrying a weapon. If he wasn't, he likely would be dead or severely injured today.
He pretty clearly extinguishes a dumpster fire that several rioters were pushing toward a set of gas pumps. This enraged the mob, leading them to chase him and even start shooting at or around him. He only fired when he was cornered (whether surrounded by the mob or even literally on his back on the ground), and only at those who were actually attacking him.
> Aren't the police there for protecting property?
Kenosha has a democrat mayor, so no. Police had to stay well out of the way, and was frobidden from using any kind of force. Just watch the videos of what transpired. Don't rely on misleading, "fiery but mostly peaceful" CNN edits - watch the whole thing just this once. Watch the interview with Kyle before the events, taken by a journalist embedded with the protesters, as well. Your question indicates you've been quite severely gaslit. Bet you don't even know how many people got shot in CHAZ.
I would not go to that area unarmed at that time. The guy Kyle shot in the arm was pointing a Glock pistol at his head at that moment (you can see it on videos from several angles), and later said his only regret was that he didn't kill him.
That was self defense, tho. He wasn't there to start trouble, and his life literally was in danger thanks to, you've guessed it, social media radicalization of the rioters. Kid will walk, and will make millions from defamation settlements.
You can't be serious with that question. Over 30 people have been murdered in riots and related activity over the past 3 months. Riots are coordinated and sustained using Twitter. Most recent high profile case was Jay Danielson, murdered in cold blood in Portland by Michael Reinoehl. But there are dozens of others. Just a couple of days ago 2 cops were shot in their car.
Your factual understanding is much better than the average HN poster, so I appreciate that.
I only question whether "social media" is some unique bad that has perpetrated this, rather than the traditional media and entertainment establishment or technologies that predated social media. Players have been kneeling at NFL games for years now, every TV news outlet (except for approximately one) has been parroting endless nonsense about various social problems for years (the nonsense has reached a fever pitch these past four years), and our universities have been pushing cultish ideology for a long time as well. (In fact, my personal theory is that a lot of this nonsense is an outgrowth of the Occupy movement in 2012, which seems to have formed long-lasting personal social networks, which social media platforms have made marginally more efficient, but were in no way the only online tool to strengthen bonds.
I'd also add that as horrible as I find Danielson's murder and the treatment of the boy in Kenosha (I try not to even say his name, because the zealots are out in force) by the media and social media, social media was also the tool used to identify Reinoehl as his murderer in less than 24 hours. Social media was also the tool that convinced many of us that the boy in Kenosha was actually innocent and acting in self-defense.
To frame this differently, what social media platforms did Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot use to recruit and radicalize their supporters? How about Osama bin Laden or the Ayatollah?
I know (and I knew when I asked) that there were going to be people truly "radicalized" on social media in a way that is unique, though I did not know any instances of it off the top of my head. Even Twitter, which seems like a completely toxic and horrible place these days, seems almost entirely filled with keyboard warriors who just shitpost. (Insofar as certain groups are using it to coordinate violence and mayhem, someone should put a stop to it.)
> social media was also the tool used to identify Reinoehl
The dumbass was stupid enough to give a _video_ interview, from which his location could likely be identified. 4chan found Shia LaBeouf's flag from far less, and I can only assume the FBI is better at this than 4chan. If you read more about him (which I'm sure you have), you'll see that this is not a coincidence. The guy has been leaving a trail of chaos behind him for most of his adult life.
> almost entirely filled with keyboard warriors who just shitpost
_Almost_ is the operative word. Quite a few believe the shit the "shitposters" post. Lacking life experience and historical perspective, they're trying to usher a future in which they themselves would be the first to go. This is what happened in Russia a hundred years ago: 6 months before the revolution Vladimir Lenin gave a lecture in Zurich in which he said he was sure the revolution would not happen in his lifetime. So in a way Lenin too was a "shitposter", who, 6 months before, believed shitposting would not have consequences. And then the revolution did happen. And then Lenin eliminated most of the useful idiots, as well as a lot of his higher level comrades - no one wants competition.
This is due to a confluence of economic stress caused by WW1, some foreign cash from Germany, and (illegal) newspapers, printed abroad, then brought over the border and distributed. Interestingly, Lenin was radicalized by the execution of his brother Aleksandr Ulyanov, for the attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander the Third.
I'm pretty sure 4chan found Reinoehl's identity before the Vice interview. Danielson was murdered on Saturday evening, 4chan had a possible ID for Reinoehl sometime Sunday, and then the interview + his death were later in the week.
Let's be clear about who should be "just defending themselves" from whom:
"Trump frequently accuses the far-left of inciting violence, yet right-wing extremists have killed 329 victims in the last 25 years, while antifa members haven't killed any, according to a new study"
I guess David Dorn can take solace in the fact that the looter who executed him on FB live stream while his grandson watched was not a formal Antifa member.
I agree that the statistics would be more useful if everyone who intended to commit a violent criminal act would first become a formal member of a group whose ideology they share. That would help to avoid miscounting False Flag attacks, and relying on individual anecdotes to decide which side is the worst.
The messenger here goes out of its way to push engagement and spread content that cause outrage and anger, while encouraging that anger to bounce and amplify into echo chambers.
Normally I'd agree but there's something weird about social media that brings out the worst in people. It's kind of automatically polarizing and divisive.
I think the factor Social media misses is the get popped in the mouth factor. People have always spewed trash, though they dealt with the responses of others "popping them in the mouth".
Social media / the internet as a whole, allows you to say and do things without any real fear of repercussion in the real world. That definitely doesn't help. Compound that by the ease of which we all can fall into an echo chamber, only hearing the ideals we seek out, and it's risky for sure.
The dopamine fix of winning in arguments or commentary through the various gamification definitely feed an unhealthy addiction.
The jump to nuclear weapons immediately in any conversation of the 2A is as many would say a "Strawman" argument.
But to play along, NO, because 42 U.S. Code § 2122 makes that illegal. If nuclear weapons are ever issued as standard individual weapons to soldiers, then they will be covered by the 2A via the Militia Act. Until they are, nukes are not covered by the 2A.
The constitution and current laws, clearly define what you can or can't have under the 2A. NFA laws exist as were voted to control Automatic weapons, SBR's, Silencers, Sawed off Shotguns etc. Until new laws are enacted that change this, it's pretty clear.
I for one don't want new laws written to change my first amendment rights, lest we get to the point where the 2nd is needed to defend the first.
> Do you think the second amendment should provide for an individual right to own nuclear arms?
If it was to serve its original purpose, it arguably might need to (just as private ownership of the heaviest artillery was in the early Republic not unheard of) but any hope of it serving its original purpose has been lost since at least the late 19th Century with the expansion of paramilitary police forces, and the final nail in it's coffin was drilled with the transition to a fully professional military after Vietnam, and what weapons are covered doesn't really matter any more to it's intended function, only to the degree of incidental harm it inflicts while failing to protect from the harms of the isolated culture of large permanent military/paramilitart internal and external security forces.
Fortunately you're wrong, and the Supreme Court already addressed this. Freedom of speech doesn't mean you're free to say anything you want at any time, and it never has.
>As the Supreme Court held in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the government may forbid “incitement”—speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and “likely to incite or produce such action” (such as a speech to a mob urging it to attack a nearby building). But speech urging action at some unspecified future time may not be forbidden.
Hate speech is not generally considered protected free speech. And since you're using American standards, it also does not fall under 1st Amendment protections.
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater doesn't kill people, people trampling other people kills people. That seems about the sum total of the argument you just made
Hate speech is in fact protected speech, with narrow exceptions.
> The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."[2][3]:702 Specifically, the Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence.
> The Brandenburg test remains the standard used for evaluating attempts to punish inflammatory speech, and it has not been seriously challenged since it was laid down in 1969.
I don't think that's a fair assessment of their comment. There are clear guidelines and interpretations of the 1st and 2nd amendment.
The context I believe they tried to share is that if we go beyond what we have established as free speech (to include your comments)_then we start our way down a slippery slope. Small changes will have big impacts.
The same is said for control measures around the 2A.
> 1st amendment advocates are soon going to be put in the same position as 2nd amendment advocates to retain any semblance of freedom.
You mean living in the country with the broadest, most unrestricted recognition of such a right in the entire world? And suffering from a persecution complex, nurtured by a steady diet of historical revisionism, concurrently with a creeping expansion of those rights?
> Are you arguing that "most X in the world" is equivalent to "the optimal amount of X"?
No.
> Just because something is worse somewhere else doesn't mean that it can't be improved.
I agree. I'm just not sure what needs to be improved, or why. The discourse around free speech has become, for lack of a better word, incoherent.
The only thing I have a substantial degree of certainty about is that most people, including an unfortunately large number of supposed legal scholars, have a very ahistorical notion of (or at least unjustified certitude about) what the term has meant politically and legally and the significance it was given relative to other rights.[1] And while history shouldn't dictate our decisions, its unfolding is often a good reference for understanding the interplay of various ideas. The loss of that reference is the loss of an anchor that could help keep the discourse grounded and constructive. Instead "free speech" has become a vehicle into which we shove a diverse array of beliefs and aspirations, which by dint of our fetishization of the Bill of Rights then become unquestionable and even sacred.
[1] For a hint at what might have been on the minds of the drafters we could look at, for example, Chapter VI, The Right to Freedom of Discussion in A.V. Dicey's famous Introduction to the Study of The Law of the [British] Constitution. I don't mean to suggest that British law was the same in the late 19th century as in 18th century America (or 18th century Britain, for that matter), but Dicey's take on the issue as well as his distinctions between British and French law suggest that American developments (most quite late, occurring in the mid 20th century), such as giving political speech and journalists special protections from, e.g., libel law, or eliding the distinctions between commercial and individual speech, might partially conflict with both the letter and spirit of the First Amendment as originally conceived. I could provide many other examples that contradict the history of free speech in the U.S. as we commonly assume it. None of which to say I think our modern conception is inherently bad; only that it is, indeed, modern, and in many respects can be traced in a direct line back to--or through--Louis Brandeis (i.e. market place of ideas, truth will conquer lies in a Darwinian struggle). So cries about the sky falling seem misplaced.
Ethiopia does not have amendments to it's constitution. It is a young democracy, the constitution only being signed in 1995. Freedom of speech is enshrined in law, but practically it ranks 101 / 179 in press freedom. Private gun ownership is not protected by law and licensing is required generally for firearms related issues. Guns are not popular in Ethiopia; ownership rates are ~4/1000 people and it ranks as 174 / 178 in gun ownership.
I agree there are parallels to US based issues, but this article is about Ethiopia and the struggles of the people living is a dynamic young system. In fact, the article is a very good look into a country that is estimated to have ~300M people by the end of the century.
This is really quite provably wrong, and an extremely dangerous position to take.
The 'pen' amplified by the media - is much, much, mightier than the sword.
It is mass/social media that creates waves of outrage that compound unto themselves, without this, general uprisings are really quite hard to fathom.
This is exactly what happened in the Rwandan Genocide.
In Rwanda it was 'radio jockeys' on a daily basis would spew really crazy hate speech all day, every day: "The Tutsi/Hutus are like cockroaches, one day, we will exterminate all of them! They are vile creatures, from hell, they rape our children, the rape our women, soon we will rise up!"
And then it gets worse, and worse until one day "The time is now, come out of your homes, rise up and kill them!"
Now imagine people coming out of their homes, with machetes, hacking up their neighbours with knifes.
It's uglier than a zombie film.
Pregnant women hacked to bits, on the side of the road. Roving gangs of people, literally blood in their hands, burning down buildings with people inside them. Breaking into catholic girls schools, grabbing the girls, raping them, then hacking them up.
Unthinkable stuff.
The Rwandan genocide was not 'Force A' (pro this) and 'Force B' (pro that) fighting one another, it was more or less widespread ethnic warfare - a lot of regular people on the streets coming out to fight one another.
When General Dallaire (Cdn. General overseeing the tiny UN mission) tried to take action - it was to go the radio station to try to get them to appeal for calm, because that was the primary means of mass communication.
It's really, really easy to ferment 'hate' in the populist sense of the word.
It's one thing to talk about 'hate speech' in the sense of 'some guy said something terrible about another' - that's more or less an intellectual concept.
But when it starts to be organized and compounded, it becomes a serious problem very quickly.
Nobody cares about the redneck next door - but when people start forming mini-local movements ("Kill all the Cops", "Kill the Negros", "Kill the White People") then it will get out of hand, fast.
I have seen on TikTok in the last few days, some really scary stuff: A young Black man referring to some kind of African 'God' that will come and wipe out all the 'pale skins' and the 'sun will wither their white skin away'. Literally calling for genocide. And a young white guy with sunglasses, just staring at the camera with a note: "Hey, what if we didn't have any Black People in America. Just sayin' ..." Which is directly more or less a controversial, rhetorical question, but it has some pretty heavy/scary overtones.
This stuff can get out of hand very fast.
Finally note that the press - including CNN/Fox/MSNBC etc. have drastically toned down their coverage of protests. There are protests all over the nation right now - if you turn on TikTok it's crazy - there is a lot going on. The press realizes their 'complicity' in that covering such activities gives rise to the notion in other people and I believe have 'turned it down' on purpose on some level. Certainly the 'pro Biden' press is very wary because they realize images of violence hurt him.
Consider the 'Tea Party Movement'. It was a relatively small movement, but when Fox decided to 'go all in' on it, it got very big, very fast. When a small movement is thrust into the homes of millions of people, led and supported by 'respected advocates' then such things can grow quickly. Without national coverage, it's very difficult for movements to get big - which is of course one of the central sources of problematic editorial bias for cable news: they 'decided' what is going to be 'national news' by virtue of where they point the l...
Alongside this developing body of evidence and consensus about the crimes that have been committed in Myanmar, debate has raged over Facebook’s role in these events. In recent months, Facebook has taken steps to accept its role and responsibility. In a surprising concession before the Senate intelligence committee in September 2018, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg even accepted that Facebook may have a legal obligation to take down accounts that incentivize violence in countries like Myanmar. Sandberg called the situation “devastating” and acknowledged that the company needed to do more, but highlighted that Facebook had put increased resources behind being able to review content in Burmese.
Note that Facebook was aware the problem of being unable to review content in Burmese several years ago. The new Vice article points out that the same pattern is repeating itself in other parts of the world, and Facebook can't even handle the basics of translating its own community guidelines.
How hard can that be for a company with Facebook's resources?
This happened after the invention of the printing press as well. Pamphlets and broadsides recounting (often fictitious) atrocities committed by protestant against catholic and catholic against protestant were circulated widely before and during the 30 years war. We figured out how to prevent that from happening again with print media. We don't have to start from scratch with digital media, but it sure feels like no one is paying attention to what happened last time.
I'm a bit confused. The government shut down the internet for 2 weeks and it sounds like the violence ramped up at that point. The volunteer facebook moderators couldn't access it due to the shutdown. Were the violent attackers able to access facebook?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] threadI don't feel like this is a facebook problem (although I wouldn't object to shutting them down - as long as we kill that other cancer, Twitter, too). I think this is a people-with-poor-education problem.
Every genocide is portrayed as a unique accident, but they follow the same gamelan. Facebook is literally a crowd control mechanism and it works no matter how smart you think you are.
> I think this is a people-with-poor-education problem.
Do you think that German adults in the 1930s had poor education?
This is not, to the best of my understanding, what's actually happening. Such elements are actively cultivated and their reach is facilitated by powerful benefactors. It's not a natural phenomenon. Right-wing populism must be bred and right-wing terrorists must be groomed. It's not simply an inevitable development of environmental factors, e.g. "the shape of the room," or the structure of online discourse. It's a deliberate campaign.
These grooming networks are not organic.
1. https://datasociety.net/library/alternative-influence/
2. https://datasociety.net/library/media-manipulation-and-disin...
Case in point: The Oregon fires are happening in the politically Redder part of the state, but many not too far from Portland. There are rumors going around in those Red areas that "left wingers" and BLM started the fires. Folks in those areas are generally very well armed. If those rumors get traction (and from looking through social media they seem to be) and people think that the folks on the left burned down their houses and towns... it's not gonna be pretty. We've already had trouble with right-wing groups showing up in Portland looking for a fight on several occasions and the police don't seem to be inclined to try to reign them in probably because these groups are so well armed.
At this point I'd just as soon see FB, Twitter, et al shut down before this gets ugly. But I also suspect they'll find other outlets on the internet for spreading conspiracy theories.
It’s a positive feedback loop. (Positive in the sense that the relationship between input and output is not inverted)
This is an echo of the "dumb pipes" argument, which characterizes social media as neutral carriers of both harmless and harmful content. While I recognize that harmful ideology originate outside of Facebook, it's really unhelpful to deny that in Facebook's capacity as "a fun-house mirror that magnifies some things and minimizes others" it's really very deliberately shaping the discourse, the zeitgeist and, as such, political reality.
We don't know the algorithm's ultimate purpose. It is, inevitably, biased. What biases Facebook management has decreed (and how closely its implementation hews) is an unknown to those of us on the outside. But it's certainly not, at this point an accident.
Whenever discussing algorithmic bias, I am always reminded of the old programming koan:
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970937
I wouldn't be surprised if when historians look back in 50 years, that they determine that the Pandora's box of free information interchange from the Internet hastened the end of free society.
The Supreme Court of the US decided that freedom of speech implies freedom of reach, including the financial means to do so.
If people had multiple (interoperable) Facebooks to choose from, and had to pay for them based on how often they visited the site, I imagine the news / social media landscape would look a lot different.
Are there media which are not susceptible to PsyOps? (Edit: for example, print or online newspapers, television, etc. They arguably, by setting a higher standard of rational and investigative rigor, produce fewer propaganda sock-puppets but, by that same token, coalesce trust into personages which can, in one fell swoop, be assassinated or—in the case of Ellen Degeneres—persuaded to reiterate state propaganda.)
And, are only state-actors to blame? After all, Facebook themselves were experimenting with emotion manipulation[0], and transnational corporations have at least as sophisticated branding, PR, and propaganda departments.
0. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...
Many technologists have a Right-Libertarian bent which rests on a fundamentally irrational trust in the ethics of the private firm, as a reflective validation of their own unimpeachable ethics. In short, they hate to be reminded that private corporations are unaccountable, and dangerously unethical. It can make it very hard to sleep at night.
Edit: I mean, there are probably other factors at play, too.
1. https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideo...
Bad ideas and aggressive state actors (doing "PsyOps" or otherwise) were the norm before social media. I see no hard evidence that social media has made any of these problems much worse, other than making people much more paranoid about state actors and the uneducated. (In reality, the traditional press has seeded much of this paranoia. Traditional press feels threatened by social media competition, and so has spent over a decade now raising the hue and cry about social media's "dangers"; they apparently wish to retain their monopoly on fear- and rage-inducing mind viruses only for themselves.)
Furthermore, I see no evidence that in the absence of free speech, state actors will be less aggressive or people will be more educated. I see plenty of evidence that both would get worse in a regime of restricted speech.
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-measles-us-california...
What does this mean? Do you oppose laws against defamation, child pornography, fraud, violent threats, etc? No developed nation has truly free speech. The debate is where the line is drawn. Pretending it is a binary choice just ends up hiding all the smaller choices that we could make that could actually lead to a better society.
EDIT: There is irony in "free speech maximalists" downvoting questions like this rather than trying to answer them.
I think social media is toxic, but not because it allows freedom of speech. Social media rewards virality and outrage is inherently and unfortunately one of the most viral things you can put out on social media. The problem is the platform, not the speech.
Which is why it took until just within the last century to guarantee voting rights to people besides white men? It is bizarre how we want to pretend that those who came before us had some magical foresight to setup rules to govern a world they could never imagine while we ignore so many clear mistakes they made such as calling rights inalienable while simultaneously disenfranchising a majority of the population.
The world doesn't stop outside of US borders and cultures don't all agree on the ideal extent of free speech. I find it silly to assume that the world should revolve around the US constitution.
So yes, the idea that if you say "I support free speech" you should specify more clearly what that means and where it ends, is not really unreasonable.
We have plenty of legal precedent on what is protected in the US.
There is considerable debate, even in the US, as to whether this captures all of and only that whic should be protected.
One should not confuse even well established US Constitutional law with universally accepted moral principles.
As to the substance...
> What does this mean? Do you oppose laws against defamation, child pornography, fraud, violent threats, etc? No developed nation has truly free speech. The debate is where the line is drawn. Pretending it is a binary choice just ends up hiding all the smaller choices that we could make that could actually lead to a better society.
I assumed we all understood what "free speech" meant: the principle that opinions can be aired without restrictions. Obviously I don't think malicious lies, true threats, depictions of abuse and even "fighting words" are somehow pro-social or deserving of protection according to that rule. Malicious lies are the hardest to draw the proverbial line about - if someone has a deranged but good faith belief in some bizarre conspiracy theory that aliens all run the big tech companies or something, is that a "malicious lie?"
Anyway, there are pretty straightforward limiting principles for what constitutes free speech that deserves to be protected by law or in principle.
"Free speech" does not have a universal definition. I doubt people in Germany think they don't have free speech just because they can't legally deny the holocaust. However we allow that in the US even if it is a "malicious lie" that is disputing facts and therefore isn't an opinion which would seem to leave it outside your definition of free speech. Would you be in favor of a similar law in the US to outlaw holocaust denial?
You also seem to be in support of defamation not being protected speech. But why should defamation of an entire group of people in the form of hate speech be protected? Saying a specific person has negative traits X, Y, and Z isn't protected but it is protected when you say everyone of that person's ethnicity including that specific individual has traits X, Y, and Z. Why the distinction?
This idea of free speech is not us straightforward as "free speech maximalists" try to make it appear.
No. People have good faith beliefs in all sorts of insane/horrible things. If I encounter holocaust deniers, I ask them if they're calling me a liar. I've been to Dachau. I'm convinced.
And Germany is hardly the gold standard of freedom.
> You also seem to be in support of defamation not being protected speech. But why should defamation of an entire group of people in the form of hate speech be protected? Saying a specific person has negative traits X, Y, and Z isn't protected but it is protected when you say everyone of that person's ethnicity including that specific individual has traits X, Y, and Z. Why the distinction?
Are we talking about opinions or not? "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year" is different than "I think all of Group Y are dangerous and have no place in our country." Certainly "hate speech" would go after both with equal vigor (and quite a bit more), but only the first is defamatory. The latter is simply an opinion. Other opinions: "I don't trust the Trump administration's COVID vaccine." "The rent is too damn high." "We need to build the wall." Etc.
> This idea of free speech is not us straightforward as "free speech maximalists" try to make it appear.
No, it really, really is. Engaging in good faith is apparently much harder.
What country do you want to use as your gold standard? Holocaust denial is illegal in most of Europe. Many countries outlaw hate speech. Most other countries have more restrictive speech laws than the US.
>Are we talking about opinions or not? "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year" is different than "I think all of Group Y are dangerous and have no place in our country." Certainly "hate speech" would go after both with equal vigor (and quite a bit more), but only the first is defamatory. The latter is simply an opinion.
Either. Both of those are fully legal in the US. Is that a problem? Why do we need to protect speech like "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year"? What is the societal good that comes from protecting that speech?
We need to protect it because humans are prone to becoming very protective or defensive about certain opinions, especially religious ones[1] or, lately, statements like "women are women"[2]. Since drawing the line at good opinions and "hate speech" is impossible, regulating them gives a rise to authoritarianism, as is the case across Europe and in much of the rest of the world. And we know that "banning hate speech" doesn't actually prevent the thoughts from persisting or being expressed privately. Germany still has neo-Nazis[3] and Holocaust deniers[4]; they have merely been driven underground, not reformed. How could they be reformed, since even expressing any of the thoughts they believe is illegal? And, as many have cited, often the small groups whom hate speech laws are meant to protect end up being the primary victims of it.[5]
The social benefits of protecting horrible opinions are not a first-order good, but they are a second-order good once we realize that all opinions are subjective and thus impossible to judge in a systematic way.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/01/908414559/charlie-hebdo-to-re...
[2] https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/11/28/meghan-murphy-and-t...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/24/eight-german-n...
[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ursula-haver...
[5] https://www.jta.org/2020/09/03/opinion/former-aclu-president...
You keep on using the word "opinions". "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year" is not an opinion. Holocaust denial is not an opinion. These are statements of alleged fact that are inarguably wrong. I understand the need to protect opinions. I don't understand the need to protect lies.
>And we know that "banning hate speech" doesn't actually prevent the thoughts from persisting or being expressed privately. Germany still has neo-Nazis[3] and Holocaust deniers[4]; they have merely been driven underground, not reformed. How could they be reformed, since even expressing any of the thoughts they believe is illegal?
I guess that means the US doesn't have any neo-Nazis or holocaust deniers, right?[1] How could beliefs like that exist in a country in which those ideas are easily overcome by opposing speech?
It isn't a question of completely stomping out thoughts like this. That is impossible. It is about preventing them from spreading. By allowing this type of speech, we are making it easier for these hateful people to recruit and radicalize other individuals who would have never come to these beliefs on their own.
[1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/fbi-neo-na...
The message and the basic mechanism is the same, but the scale is what turns this from merely concerning into serious discussion about the end of democracy.
They didn't? Back in the 60s, around half of the US population (100M people) watched the national nightly news on a regular basis from the three networks. What's easier: convincing three networks to run a fake story sympathetic to Soviet interests, or convincing 100M people of something through "impressions?"
And keep in mind that for decades, Western journalists (mostly in newspapers or magazines) parroted stories about how the Soviet Union was advanced and prosperous, when the reality was starkly different. Reality only penetrated through when samizdat, arguably the social media of its day, was able to funnel Khrushchev's so-called Secret Speech into Western hands. That and Gulag Archipelago really tarnished the image of the Soviet Union in spite of coverage from journalists.
Also, quick aside: I remain highly perplexed that otherwise intelligent people in the tech industry believe so strongly in the power of social media to "program" people just by virtue of "number of impressions." Hacker News is the only place on the Internet where I might see side-by-side stories where social media advertising is called out as essentially fraud and also that social media advertising is bringing about the end of civilization because some Russian Bots paid for some Facebook ads. I don't get it. Getting anyone to commit to anything beyond cheap talk is extremely difficult (and even the cheap talk part is hard if it doesn't confer some status).
I stand by what I said, though. The two types of network are not equivalent. People in the 1960s generally trusted media implicitly. Walter Kronkite has the trust of reportedly 90%(!!!) of Americans at the time. I don't think anyone trusts what they see on Facebook because it is on Facebook. Doubly so for Twitter. (Nevertheless, Facebook clearly wants this kind of trust - it deranks and adds disclaimers to posts it claims are false. Maybe this makes some people think Facebook posts are more reliable. Yet their somewhat repeated failure to mistake political opinions that dominate in the Valley for facts[1] has made me trust Facebook itself less.)
Instead, people trust or don't trust what they see filtered through critical thinking, personal experience and individual biases. If a Russian creates pages for "Americans for the Second Amendment" and "Black Lives Matter Network," people already predisposed to supporting those causes will inherently trust the claims a bit more. But very few would be convinced to change their minds based on this. Social media can be used to amplify preexisting polarization, especially given the engagement-based algorithms. (Perhaps that is the lesson we should learn from OP.) But I have yet to see any evidence that state-sanctioned "PsyOps" on social media have been terribly effective at convincing people of lies or narratives that they might not otherwise believe. I have seen gobs of evidence that the mainstream media is still effective at convincing tens of millions of people of the veracity of stories that are propaganda or close to it.
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/adam4d/status/969405110324523008
Speech before Facebook, Twitter et al wasn't restricted in the sense of being actively prevented, there was just much more friction to getting it out widely.
Very succinctly put, but it deserves adding something else: the horribleness of the human spirit. Centralized information control by a meritocracy that mostly got it right (modulo all the bigotry) characterizes the mid-twentieth century West, and this idealized, sanitized view of ourselves was optimistic in the extreme. Indeed, I think we can characterize that controlled optimism as morphing from future-tech-worship (50's) to self-worship as the boomers subsumed the hippy ideals along with the apparently easy money they earned in the wealthiest society Earth has ever known. Now instead of morphing into something else, it is the central control that is changing, and we are seeing why, despite its very real flaws, the benevolent dictatorship of even flawed institutions is preferable to the cynical, hateful chaos that reigns when individuals get a chance to shout their bile to the world.
I'm not entirely sure all is lost, however. Perhaps we can have our cake (absolute freedom of speech) and eat it too (some sort of moral standard) by introducing social norms no-one has even thought of yet. For example, I would personally love it if cancel culture would turn its gaze not to sexual harrassers, but to the more obvious problem of baseless accusers: those who make accusations without any proof, not even bad proof. Such people should be shunned by society, and not listened to ever again, for they have squandered their right to speak. Within academia, something similar might work when a researcher publishes deeply flawed research, they should be expelled from academia. If the academy doesn't maintain a high standard, then the entire thing could come crashing down (and that's already happening in slow motion). If a whole field refuses to do this (psychology, social sciences) then those entire fields should be dropped, lest they damage the reputation of the other fields of the academy.
This sounds harsh, but I think its fair, and it lets us have nice things a little bit longer.
Exactly. And they'll say internet-spread panic caused the unnecessary collapse of the world economy in 2020 -- very similiar to the panic of Y2K, but amplified by 20 years of progress in social media.
Meanwhile, in other non-reported news, ~2.7 million more humans were born this week. And about ~1.2 million died this week from regular non-covid causes. [1]
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths
I now view a workable democracy as something that should be more like a technocracy with good feedback mechanisms, and not like something that should actually give "people" "power". Exhibit A: people on Facebook.
Facebook is curated, it’s on the oposite side of the spectrum from free.
This isn't a fair fight of the rational vs irrational in open discourse.
Facebook has intentionally stacked the deck in favor of the irrational and amplified them artificially because it's correlative with "engagement".
This isn't an organic outcome that just happens to be mediated by Facebook because it's the agora of our times. This is an unintended (I hope) side effect of a business model that intentionally skirts the line between inflammatory and violent because it also happens to be where maximum profit resides. And it was intentional, strategic, and extremely powerful.
This isn't some accidental outcome of Facebook. Every data point suggests Facebook designed their system from the ground up to maximize it.
[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Jobs/Facebook-psychology-Jobs-EI_I...
Another big problem is how stupid and violent many people are - enough to take Internet bullshit serious and kill people. I would only allow people into the Internet after they get educated and pass a test of not taking ANYTHING they find there too serious.
As is the case in Turkey.
That you're unable to defend your ideas because they are "obvious" is unfortunate and a danger to any society where people like you make up the majority.
You like minorities today, tomorrow who knows, you might burn some books, or stores, or people. Depends how you feel like, because consistency is a tool of white supremacy.
Not calling for violence
Should be obvious. I don't want to debate antisocial gangs out for power- I want to be protected from their violence.
I don't want to debate antisocial car gangs out for blood, I want them locked up where they can't hurt anyone else with their murder machines.
Also the question to your answer is likely both, as in there's a feedback loop between real world violence, causing more conflict on social media, fuelling yet more violence.
Is there any evidence of this? Do you have any research showing the correlation of the rise in Facebook to increased mob violence in the world. The world has actually enjoyed a few decades of low violence compared to the historic mean.
"The Mission has examined documents, publications, statements, Facebook posts and audio-visual materials that have contributed to shaping public opinion on the Rohingya and Muslims more generally. The analysis demonstrates that a carefully crafted hate campaign has developed a negative perception of Muslims among the broad population in Myanmar. This campaign has been the work of a few key players: nationalistic political parties and politicians, leading monks, academics, prominent individuals and members of the Government. This hate campaign, which continues to the present day, portrays the Rohingya and other Muslims as an existential threat to Myanmar and to Buddhism"
I'm not even sure I can take the second point in good faith. Violence having decreased compared to historical high points has literally nothing to say on whether social media itself causes violence. Other factors can easily explain an overall decline, which obviously is not uniform. If you live in one of the countries in which social media is used as a means to instigate genocides, I can tell you that more safety in a US city will matter very little to you.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
[2]https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/FFM-Myanm...
Furthermore did the lack of Facebook produce better outcomes for Muslims in China? The world is complicated place, the answer probably isn't as simple as "Facebook is bad".
And again, the issue is not the state of violence in the world or just Facebook, which is why I used 'social media' more generally at the end of my last post, it's the ways in which those companies uniquely contribute to violence.
You don't need to be responsible for all violence in the world to be held accountable for the violence you cause. The fact that the world is complicated and violent doesn't absolve actors from their responsibility. Social media is quite unique in many ways. From mass bot-networks to influence campaigns that disguise themselves as bottom-up, to speed and virality that no other medium has, to lack of accountability and the ease at which information moves cross borders and enables nefarious states to conduct sabotage.
And China is not a good example either. It's probably the prime example of a country that has used digital technologies, including social media, to build a dystopian surveillance network, including on Uyghurs, that could not otherwise function.
That should answer your question.
Maybe take "communication" instead of just Facebook so we could go further back in history if there is a good way to objectively measure how much communication is happening.
Hard task for sure, but I'd be interested in reading about it if anyone has done so.
This sort of proves my point, though: social media has "radicalized" people into believing claims that lack a factual basis and serve a particular narrative. But this is mostly perpetrated by members of the traditional press, not ordinary social media users. If anything, social media has only radicalized people by privileging members of the traditional press at the expense of the random people, no matter how crazy they are.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ro8hkfBDVw&bpctr=1600132912
[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/mrandyngo/status/1299086141329563...
The only "Alt-Right" collaborator I know of is a Joe Biden supporter who perpetrated the Charlottesville massacre.[1] Of course, you could try to refute any of the evidence Ngo supplied in his tweets, but since you have nothing yourself, it's much easier to call him names, slander him and generally resort to FUD tactics, ad hominem and guilt by association. If you could actually refute anything Andy Ngo reported (and for all I know, maybe there's plenty), then go ahead and do it. It would be irrelevant to the particular claims I was citing, but at least it would be informative. What you've given us so far is an over-the-top innuendo narrative that is so sleazy even your average MLM salesperson would cringe.
[1]https://www.newsweek.com/richard-spencer-joe-biden-trump-mag...
yeah dude, tell me more about this alleged "slander" of Ngo, no dude he's a grifter, that's not "FUD", that's old news and not really controversial.
It seems to me that carrying a rifle with the intent to apply medical assistance is a military occupation, not a civilian one.
He pretty clearly extinguishes a dumpster fire that several rioters were pushing toward a set of gas pumps. This enraged the mob, leading them to chase him and even start shooting at or around him. He only fired when he was cornered (whether surrounded by the mob or even literally on his back on the ground), and only at those who were actually attacking him.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSU9ZvnudFE&t=307s&bpctr=160...
Kenosha has a democrat mayor, so no. Police had to stay well out of the way, and was frobidden from using any kind of force. Just watch the videos of what transpired. Don't rely on misleading, "fiery but mostly peaceful" CNN edits - watch the whole thing just this once. Watch the interview with Kyle before the events, taken by a journalist embedded with the protesters, as well. Your question indicates you've been quite severely gaslit. Bet you don't even know how many people got shot in CHAZ.
I would not go to that area unarmed at that time. The guy Kyle shot in the arm was pointing a Glock pistol at his head at that moment (you can see it on videos from several angles), and later said his only regret was that he didn't kill him.
I only question whether "social media" is some unique bad that has perpetrated this, rather than the traditional media and entertainment establishment or technologies that predated social media. Players have been kneeling at NFL games for years now, every TV news outlet (except for approximately one) has been parroting endless nonsense about various social problems for years (the nonsense has reached a fever pitch these past four years), and our universities have been pushing cultish ideology for a long time as well. (In fact, my personal theory is that a lot of this nonsense is an outgrowth of the Occupy movement in 2012, which seems to have formed long-lasting personal social networks, which social media platforms have made marginally more efficient, but were in no way the only online tool to strengthen bonds.
I'd also add that as horrible as I find Danielson's murder and the treatment of the boy in Kenosha (I try not to even say his name, because the zealots are out in force) by the media and social media, social media was also the tool used to identify Reinoehl as his murderer in less than 24 hours. Social media was also the tool that convinced many of us that the boy in Kenosha was actually innocent and acting in self-defense.
To frame this differently, what social media platforms did Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot use to recruit and radicalize their supporters? How about Osama bin Laden or the Ayatollah?
I know (and I knew when I asked) that there were going to be people truly "radicalized" on social media in a way that is unique, though I did not know any instances of it off the top of my head. Even Twitter, which seems like a completely toxic and horrible place these days, seems almost entirely filled with keyboard warriors who just shitpost. (Insofar as certain groups are using it to coordinate violence and mayhem, someone should put a stop to it.)
The dumbass was stupid enough to give a _video_ interview, from which his location could likely be identified. 4chan found Shia LaBeouf's flag from far less, and I can only assume the FBI is better at this than 4chan. If you read more about him (which I'm sure you have), you'll see that this is not a coincidence. The guy has been leaving a trail of chaos behind him for most of his adult life.
> almost entirely filled with keyboard warriors who just shitpost
_Almost_ is the operative word. Quite a few believe the shit the "shitposters" post. Lacking life experience and historical perspective, they're trying to usher a future in which they themselves would be the first to go. This is what happened in Russia a hundred years ago: 6 months before the revolution Vladimir Lenin gave a lecture in Zurich in which he said he was sure the revolution would not happen in his lifetime. So in a way Lenin too was a "shitposter", who, 6 months before, believed shitposting would not have consequences. And then the revolution did happen. And then Lenin eliminated most of the useful idiots, as well as a lot of his higher level comrades - no one wants competition.
This is due to a confluence of economic stress caused by WW1, some foreign cash from Germany, and (illegal) newspapers, printed abroad, then brought over the border and distributed. Interestingly, Lenin was radicalized by the execution of his brother Aleksandr Ulyanov, for the attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander the Third.
"Trump frequently accuses the far-left of inciting violence, yet right-wing extremists have killed 329 victims in the last 25 years, while antifa members haven't killed any, according to a new study"
https://www.businessinsider.com/right-wing-extremists-kill-3...
I despise the way Vice has to make such an important topic "Woke"
They are using dead Ethiopia's in a genocide for their own agenda. Could they not turn it off and be centrist for such an important topic.
I was interested how Rwanda was referred to, specifically cockroaches and radio at the time.
Some people did refer to it as hate speech - 1996 - https://www.article19.org/data/files/pdfs/publications/rwand...
Hate media was also popular when referring to the incident.
Facebook design specifically impairs reasonable discourse.
Speech doesn't kill people. People kill people.
Blaming this on Facebook instead of the people swinging the machetes is not going to solve the problem.
Suddenly the world is full of cliques, cabals and clandestine societies.
Social media / the internet as a whole, allows you to say and do things without any real fear of repercussion in the real world. That definitely doesn't help. Compound that by the ease of which we all can fall into an echo chamber, only hearing the ideals we seek out, and it's risky for sure.
The dopamine fix of winning in arguments or commentary through the various gamification definitely feed an unhealthy addiction.
But to play along, NO, because 42 U.S. Code § 2122 makes that illegal. If nuclear weapons are ever issued as standard individual weapons to soldiers, then they will be covered by the 2A via the Militia Act. Until they are, nukes are not covered by the 2A.
The constitution and current laws, clearly define what you can or can't have under the 2A. NFA laws exist as were voted to control Automatic weapons, SBR's, Silencers, Sawed off Shotguns etc. Until new laws are enacted that change this, it's pretty clear.
I for one don't want new laws written to change my first amendment rights, lest we get to the point where the 2nd is needed to defend the first.
That's a 10^1000 multiplier. It doesn't even matter what unit you use really...
If it was to serve its original purpose, it arguably might need to (just as private ownership of the heaviest artillery was in the early Republic not unheard of) but any hope of it serving its original purpose has been lost since at least the late 19th Century with the expansion of paramilitary police forces, and the final nail in it's coffin was drilled with the transition to a fully professional military after Vietnam, and what weapons are covered doesn't really matter any more to it's intended function, only to the degree of incidental harm it inflicts while failing to protect from the harms of the isolated culture of large permanent military/paramilitart internal and external security forces.
May the citizens rip apart the federal LE agencies into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the wind.
>As the Supreme Court held in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the government may forbid “incitement”—speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and “likely to incite or produce such action” (such as a speech to a mob urging it to attack a nearby building). But speech urging action at some unspecified future time may not be forbidden.
You are free to say what ever you feel like, and if anyone tells you differently say you use a foreign VPN! ;)
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater doesn't kill people, people trampling other people kills people. That seems about the sum total of the argument you just made
> The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."[2][3]:702 Specifically, the Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence.
> The Brandenburg test remains the standard used for evaluating attempts to punish inflammatory speech, and it has not been seriously challenged since it was laid down in 1969.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
The context I believe they tried to share is that if we go beyond what we have established as free speech (to include your comments)_then we start our way down a slippery slope. Small changes will have big impacts.
The same is said for control measures around the 2A.
I don't see op's comment as anything beyond that.
You mean living in the country with the broadest, most unrestricted recognition of such a right in the entire world? And suffering from a persecution complex, nurtured by a steady diet of historical revisionism, concurrently with a creeping expansion of those rights?
I'm pretty sure we're already there.
Just because something is worse somewhere else doesn't mean that it can't be improved.
No.
> Just because something is worse somewhere else doesn't mean that it can't be improved.
I agree. I'm just not sure what needs to be improved, or why. The discourse around free speech has become, for lack of a better word, incoherent.
The only thing I have a substantial degree of certainty about is that most people, including an unfortunately large number of supposed legal scholars, have a very ahistorical notion of (or at least unjustified certitude about) what the term has meant politically and legally and the significance it was given relative to other rights.[1] And while history shouldn't dictate our decisions, its unfolding is often a good reference for understanding the interplay of various ideas. The loss of that reference is the loss of an anchor that could help keep the discourse grounded and constructive. Instead "free speech" has become a vehicle into which we shove a diverse array of beliefs and aspirations, which by dint of our fetishization of the Bill of Rights then become unquestionable and even sacred.
[1] For a hint at what might have been on the minds of the drafters we could look at, for example, Chapter VI, The Right to Freedom of Discussion in A.V. Dicey's famous Introduction to the Study of The Law of the [British] Constitution. I don't mean to suggest that British law was the same in the late 19th century as in 18th century America (or 18th century Britain, for that matter), but Dicey's take on the issue as well as his distinctions between British and French law suggest that American developments (most quite late, occurring in the mid 20th century), such as giving political speech and journalists special protections from, e.g., libel law, or eliding the distinctions between commercial and individual speech, might partially conflict with both the letter and spirit of the First Amendment as originally conceived. I could provide many other examples that contradict the history of free speech in the U.S. as we commonly assume it. None of which to say I think our modern conception is inherently bad; only that it is, indeed, modern, and in many respects can be traced in a direct line back to--or through--Louis Brandeis (i.e. market place of ideas, truth will conquer lies in a Darwinian struggle). So cries about the sky falling seem misplaced.
I agree there are parallels to US based issues, but this article is about Ethiopia and the struggles of the people living is a dynamic young system. In fact, the article is a very good look into a country that is estimated to have ~300M people by the end of the century.
The 'pen' amplified by the media - is much, much, mightier than the sword.
It is mass/social media that creates waves of outrage that compound unto themselves, without this, general uprisings are really quite hard to fathom.
This is exactly what happened in the Rwandan Genocide.
In Rwanda it was 'radio jockeys' on a daily basis would spew really crazy hate speech all day, every day: "The Tutsi/Hutus are like cockroaches, one day, we will exterminate all of them! They are vile creatures, from hell, they rape our children, the rape our women, soon we will rise up!"
And then it gets worse, and worse until one day "The time is now, come out of your homes, rise up and kill them!"
Now imagine people coming out of their homes, with machetes, hacking up their neighbours with knifes.
It's uglier than a zombie film.
Pregnant women hacked to bits, on the side of the road. Roving gangs of people, literally blood in their hands, burning down buildings with people inside them. Breaking into catholic girls schools, grabbing the girls, raping them, then hacking them up.
Unthinkable stuff.
The Rwandan genocide was not 'Force A' (pro this) and 'Force B' (pro that) fighting one another, it was more or less widespread ethnic warfare - a lot of regular people on the streets coming out to fight one another.
When General Dallaire (Cdn. General overseeing the tiny UN mission) tried to take action - it was to go the radio station to try to get them to appeal for calm, because that was the primary means of mass communication.
It's really, really easy to ferment 'hate' in the populist sense of the word.
It's one thing to talk about 'hate speech' in the sense of 'some guy said something terrible about another' - that's more or less an intellectual concept.
But when it starts to be organized and compounded, it becomes a serious problem very quickly.
Nobody cares about the redneck next door - but when people start forming mini-local movements ("Kill all the Cops", "Kill the Negros", "Kill the White People") then it will get out of hand, fast.
I have seen on TikTok in the last few days, some really scary stuff: A young Black man referring to some kind of African 'God' that will come and wipe out all the 'pale skins' and the 'sun will wither their white skin away'. Literally calling for genocide. And a young white guy with sunglasses, just staring at the camera with a note: "Hey, what if we didn't have any Black People in America. Just sayin' ..." Which is directly more or less a controversial, rhetorical question, but it has some pretty heavy/scary overtones.
This stuff can get out of hand very fast.
Finally note that the press - including CNN/Fox/MSNBC etc. have drastically toned down their coverage of protests. There are protests all over the nation right now - if you turn on TikTok it's crazy - there is a lot going on. The press realizes their 'complicity' in that covering such activities gives rise to the notion in other people and I believe have 'turned it down' on purpose on some level. Certainly the 'pro Biden' press is very wary because they realize images of violence hurt him.
Consider the 'Tea Party Movement'. It was a relatively small movement, but when Fox decided to 'go all in' on it, it got very big, very fast. When a small movement is thrust into the homes of millions of people, led and supported by 'respected advocates' then such things can grow quickly. Without national coverage, it's very difficult for movements to get big - which is of course one of the central sources of problematic editorial bias for cable news: they 'decided' what is going to be 'national news' by virtue of where they point the l...
Alongside this developing body of evidence and consensus about the crimes that have been committed in Myanmar, debate has raged over Facebook’s role in these events. In recent months, Facebook has taken steps to accept its role and responsibility. In a surprising concession before the Senate intelligence committee in September 2018, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg even accepted that Facebook may have a legal obligation to take down accounts that incentivize violence in countries like Myanmar. Sandberg called the situation “devastating” and acknowledged that the company needed to do more, but highlighted that Facebook had put increased resources behind being able to review content in Burmese.
Note that Facebook was aware the problem of being unable to review content in Burmese several years ago. The new Vice article points out that the same pattern is repeating itself in other parts of the world, and Facebook can't even handle the basics of translating its own community guidelines.
How hard can that be for a company with Facebook's resources?