Interesting. The analogy I reach for is the invention of the printing press. It saw an explosion of pamphlets in Germany, around the Reformation. Luther was one of the great authors. But by the 1520s the ideological opening had led to the Peasants War, and the disaster of Münster (think Waco on a larger scale). Luther himself became disillusioned, and turned more towards the power of the civil authorities and away from unrestricted Bible reading.
Yet, in the long run, societies that embraced this chaotic power did better than those that tried to repress it.
The printing press still required costs to operate - and these costs were huge compared to the costs of required to post on the Internet nowadays. This post mentions that it is the posts done by usual people that do the most harm, usually due to their sheer amount first and foremost: this is equivalent to giving everyone on the planet the power of having a printing press of their own and multiple free places to hang their pamphlets for other people to see.
The scale of the Internet's "printing power" is already millions of times bigger than that of the renaissance printing press.
That is absolutely true. But compared to what went before, the printing press was a huge advance too. Going from 0 to 1 can be a bigger deal for society than going from 1 to 100.
It definitely was - I'm not negating the fact that the discovery and implementation of printing press was a giant net positive for human civilization as a whole.
I'm just not really sure about the omnipresence of the Internet. Too much of a good thing, you know; the sheer volume of information is insane, usually unless someone actively and awarely combats it. Then there comes the questions of whether and how much pieces of that information are meritorious and beneficial.
> The scale of the Internet's "printing power" is already millions of times bigger than that of the renaissance printing press.
True, but much of that "printing power" benefits the behemoths through their central nodes on the network.
If everyone's not locked down device were also acting as shared consensus/validation on crypto transactions with payouts (instead of ledgers at banks and ZIRP account payouts), partial distributed file storage (instead of on AWS/Azure/GCP), etc, then a lot of the benefits the behemoths have would decrease (while the benefits non- behemoths have increase). I think this will be the case in the long run as the costs go down, knowledge of implementing such capabilities go up and the incentives to move in this direction go up, but getting to such a state can happen outside of our lifetimes.
The rhetoric coming from Big Tech ("we can't let people even think these bad ideas") is extremely similar to the rhetoric that came from the Catholic Church during the Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion. The universalist ethic is also the same; i.e. letting other parts of the world have differing ethical views on certain issues is unacceptable and must be eliminated. There cannot be more than one opinion on X social issue, just as there could not be more than one interpretation of Christianity.
I think we are still in the power-building stages. There is no real alternative to Facebook/YouTube/etc. yet. But say, 30 years from now, there probably will be. Combined with increasing governmental hostility, we'll probably see a deeply fractured internet, undercut by a (semi-illegal) totally open one.
I don't know, I think it just betrays a deep insecurity. Who cares what a bunch of teenagers say on the Internet? Even the real world consequences of fringe online groups are minuscule in comparison to their perceived threat.
Civil society, in theory, is supposed to be about keeping civil with people that you have fundamental disagreements with - so that society can function. That has morphed into one highly religious in tone, in which it's not merely enough to tolerate other people - you have to convert them, and if they refuse to comply, excommunicate (deplatform) them.
...and this actually happens how often? Say, in comparison to the consequences of suppressing speech (easily observable throughout the 20th century)? Or even just other causes of death or violence? It's minuscule, so little that it's almost absurd to even be worried about it.
They send hate letters to each other with stagecoach services?
The problem is that there is no such thing as "freedom of speech" it's BS, there is a right to have an opinion, but some opinions are crimes and should never become speech, let alone be public
Corollary: public speech must be granted to everyone, because it's in the US Constitution, but you should not use it to badmouth the US
> No. The US does not criminalize thought, and doing so would be tyranny.
That's why nobody takes Americans seriously and they need so many guns to get attention
Fascism is a crime in Italy, it's in the Constitution
Nazism is a crime in Germany as well
They are not opinions, they are crimes
Of course not for the US that saved lots of them and brought them home
Or supported them when they literally destroyed South America instating far right dictatorships...
> The very purpose of freedom of speech and the press is to maintain channels for criticism and change
Says the country where every year tens of mass shooting episodes happen and never changed anything to prevent them, despite being the only place in the developed World where it happens and an insurmountable amount of criticism
Not as an occupant of course, because that's what usually Americans living abroad do
The point is to prove that "freedom of speech" said by American corporations is ridiculous and nobody should believe it, on the contrary, everybody should start to worry
If you're sincere, you are definitely acting on incomplete information with regard to what America and Americans are actually like, and missing the point that it's individuals who need to have the freedom to speak, not corporations. If you're here with an agenda, well, whatever you're doing isn't making the world better.
Individuals will retain the freedom to speak even if we shutdown social networks.
That's the point you are missing.
> whatever you're doing isn't making the world better.
Imagine what a nation founded to avoid taxation and that became a superpower by securing resources in half of the World by starting wars or supporting dictators that committed genocides is doing to make the World better...
OP never said he pretends that USA are not a violent country where mass shootings don't happen all the time. OP implied that young adults PLANNING mass shootings on the INTERNET is miniscule.
What website should we block if we want to avoid another Boston Marathon bombing or men running trucks over people in Christmas markets like in Berlin?
(I just realized that both happened mere blocks of my residence at the time. Maybe if I become homeless we will be able to prevent these horrific events)
So rare that a very similar one happened in the French Riviera just some months after?
Anyway, the point is that we can not solve social issues with technological solutions. You are just acting on the symptoms but still never going to get a cure. Block a "cancerous" open site, and crazy sick people are just continue to do what they do in a darker corner of the net.
Like a few times in a century, not hundreds times in a year, every year, sir.
Closing social networks is not a technological solution, it's political.
Public speech must not be controlled by private entities
Unless you are the US and don't understand it.
Crazy people with their forums for crazy people have no ability to target hundreds of millions of people through paid ads
Please, try to understand it, because it's really not that hard
There's a reason why every developed country in the World strictly controls firearms but not knifes
There's a reason why the only "developed" country where mass shootings happen all the time is the only developed country that refuses to strictly control firearms
It's the most evident proof of Einstein law of insanity
> Public speech must not be controlled by private entities
This is part where we disagree. Not that I am defending that private entities should "control" public speech, but rather that this control is circunstancial. Remove Facebook and Twitter (and every big media conglomerate as well, FOX, CNN, NBC) all you want, people will still look for groups that share their views and messages that confirm their biases.
This is not just a guess. I am seeing this first-hand with the people looking into leaving Twitter and joining Mastodon. Go to /r/mastodon and you will see me arguing with every one that comes with the idea that different instances mean different "communities" and "interests".
Also, consider the alternative. The article is saying that we shouldn't want a decentralized web. Who would you propose to "control" public speech? If not private companies and if not smaller groups, the only alternatives left is, guess what, Big State and tyrants
They always looked for places where to share their opinions with other people
Those places didn't weaponize their feelings and weaknesses against them to sell them ads
Want to make a global social network?
The State should be able to control them (every single state they operate in) and their decisions should be held accountable in court
The SN banned you?
They should have human support to solve the issues and a judge could overrule the decision, while now they are black holes
I trust the State, more than Facebook, if someone doesn't they shouldn't impose their decisions on other groups, including other countries
It's weird to read that people living in countries where the police can arrest you for not stepping out of the car or saying to a police officer to f*ck off defend the right to wear swastikas or private companies keeping public speech hostage in the name of freedom
Decentralised web can exists only among many small actors, when there are a few behemoth that control everything, of course segregation is gonna be the most obvious response: Russian internet, Chinese internet and let's hope European internet soon.
> Those places didn't weaponize their feelings and weaknesses against them to sell them ads.
This can be said of every media company. Every newspaper, magazine (low-brow or high brow), radio, TV station, cable TV company.
Every. Single. One.
> I trust the State, more than Facebook.
It doesn't matter who you trust more. It matters who you are able to disengage from. We as individuals and as groups can choose to keep Facebook of our lives. Can the Chinese say the same from the CCP?
> segregation is gonna be the most obvious response (...) let's hope European Internet
So, you are so afraid of Facebook's "control" of the internet that you would actively advocate to put in the hands of tyrants and kleptocrats?
Either you don't understand the concept of "decentralized web" or you are just fucking with me.
> This can be said of every media company. Every newspaper, magazine (low-brow or high brow), radio, TV station, cable TV company
No.
It can't.
How can you even believe something so ridiculous?
> It matters who you are able to disengage from.
It matters that the State is not profit based and is under public control.
Chinese are more free than many Americans
I would strongly prefer to be Chinese than black in USA
But what baffles me more are people always bringing up CCCP without even knowing about the different positions in the communist space (that people like you often confuse with socialism)
For example you even ignore the existence of the Sino-Soviet split of 1956
> o, you are so afraid of Facebook's "control" of the internet that you would actively advocate to put in the hands of tyrants and kleptocrats?
It's definitely true that arguing with stupid people is a useless waste of energy.
Regarding media: "playing the insecurities of people to sell them ads" is actually something that every marketer does. No exceptions. Fabricate demand. From news channels that are considered infotainment to product placement spots on movies, from teen magazines that promote utterly wrong role models and lead girls to bulimia, anorexia and all sorts of psychosis to any property from Arianna Huffington that mastered the exploitation of outrage culture to sell to Millennials. Rest assured that every single media outlet that depends on ads to make money has no interest in elevated public discourse and thrives on public anxiety.
And no matter how bad it is, it is still better than State-owned media, which bypasses the whole marketing mechanisms and just relies on the ruling power to keep the very same type of public control through fear and intimidation.
Regarding China and freedom: tell me if you prefer to be Black in the US or a Uighur in a concentration camp. Afterwards tell me which people gets to more or less manipulated by their media.
> Regarding media: "playing the insecurities of people to sell them ads" is actually something that every marketer does
Nope.
That's an American centric view, there are other markets outside of US and they don't operate in the same way at all.
> Regarding China and freedom: tell me if you prefer to be Black in the US or a Uighur in a concentration camp
Maybe you don't realise it, but your answer represent everything's wrong in US and why people don't believe in US BS anymore.
Black people in US aren't even considered Americans, nobody ever answered to me "they are not black, they are Americans"
Nobody ever challenged the idea that black people in US are lesser people in the first place
nobody!
In fact to find something worse you had to resort to bringing up concentration camps, while I simply said. "I would prefer to be Chinese that black in USA"
I stand on my idea
concentration camps < being black in USA < being Chinese in China
I hope you realize that you so into getting into a shouting match that you are not making any sense whatsoever.
I don't know where you are from, but as someone who grew up in Brazil, lived in the US for ~5 years and now has 7 years in both Northern and Southern Europe and close relationships in the Middle East: globalization is real. Someone autistic like you may not notice due to subtle differences to adapt to local cultures and local flavors, but the message everywhere is to get people to measure themselves by what they consume and to stimulate consumption by creating needs where there are none.
It might surprise you but being in the spectrum doesn't mean being autistic as in the cliché.
It's, as the same implies, a spectrum.
I've lived in the US, New York, Los Angeles and Columbus Ohio for a brief period.
(I also lived in Berlin and Barcelona, but that doesn't really count as a radically different experience for an European)
I have strong northern African looks, but am still white and loved every moment in the US.
But the devil is in the details, I could not ignore that when my friends there told me that some neighborhood was dangerous it really was dangerous, not dangerous as we usually mean it when we say it in Italy.
I could not ignore the staggering amount of homicides reported in the news.
This year LA will surpass 300 homicides in a year, Italy has 12 times the population of LA and there were "only" 270 homicides last year.
I could not ignore that the police is scary there and you should not talk to them or engage in any way.
I swear I notice a difference when I see one.
Having said that.
Globalization is real, but the media here are not trying to exploit my weaknesses to sell me ads, they are putting ads on their products, generic ads, not "I know who you are and I know you're gonna like this" ads.
I'm ok with the first kind, not so much with the latter.
The point of decentralised web is a misguiding one.
The decentralised web is the web!
Everyone can build their own website and host it at home on a raspberry PI on their connection.
That's what made the web a novelty that could (hopefully) spread culture and knowledge.
The dicotomy between centralised and decentralised web was born because the web has been taken away from people and transformed in a targeted ads delivery machine by the same companies that sell ads (FB, Twitter, Instagram and most of all Google, they sell ads as a primary business)
They are fighting to get screen attention so that they can deliver even more ads to the people.
And when we say ads we are not simply talking about product advertisement, we are talking about political ads used to radicalise the debate, that the same companies selling ads control, thanks to the network effect.
And since the majority of companies doing it are American, I blame the USA that let them do it
As paradoxical as it might sound China doesn't need to sell ads to people to convince the people to support this or that position, because there is no alternative position.
They rely on good old State propaganda, which existed for centuries ans has been studied for decades and is a well understood topic.
China gets more propaganda, but average Chinese knows they're being fed propaganda, whereas free citizens with their free 5th estate are rarely aware of when their consent is being manufactured. More highinfo/curious Chinese are informed about the world simply because there's a fuckload of bilingual Chinese with English fluency able to share news from across the wall. You can't say the same about anglosphere and Chinese information literacy. The amount of absolutely ignorant western commentary on China is staggering, where as Chinese net actually has western perspectives that somewhat comport with reality.
At the end of the day, media that doesn't turn society into idiots that undermine national interests has its virtues and maybe preferrable. That was once the case with tame free media before much of it turned into divisive reality TV. Similarly you can have dangerous state media that whip up nationalist frenzy, cause sectarian violence etc, or you could have boring ass state media and manage civic engagement for political serenity. All media are manipulated, all narratives shaped, blatantly manipulating media for serenity to a knowing population self-fulfilling properties. People stop giving a shit about politics, and politicians end up government instead of campaigning. Prerequisite is having a good system for selecting competent leadership in the first place.
This is not unambiguously endorsing state media as good, but decline of free media in many places is simply that bad. Some countries still have passable public broadcasting, but for how long, and whether commercial pivot for ads + anxiety is terminal transition.
For Uyghurs: under the most delusional estimates, Chinese Uyghurs still have less lifetime chance of being in a indoctrination camp than US blacks in US prison industrial complex. For much shorter sentences. After they'll be coerced to work in vocational program for more pay, even adjusted for exchange rate. Not US prison labour moving covid bodies tier coerced labour, but actual useful jobs designed to transition into society instead of recidivate back into for profit prisons. China actually wants to integrate minorities instead of exclude, even at extreme costs. So I suppose the answer is, it's better to be a Chinese Uyghur in a few generations after they've been sinicized and integrated than a Black American in 20 years who will still be getting executed on the street and fighting equal treatment.
What good is it to be aware of the propaganda if no one gets to act and defend the values they seem worthy of protection?
Take the Hong Kong situation. If "highinfo/curious" chinese people in mainland China look at it and just repeat the Party line of "they are just troublemakers" instead of supporting them as loudly and as effectively as they can, then all this awareness of being fed propaganda is as good as nothing.
I mean, you are actually parroting the bullshit about concentration camps being about "integrating minorities". Minorities that are being tortured and brainwashed into submission are not "integrated", just destroyed while keeping a shell of the people to show around.
Maybe mainlanders don't deem HK worthy of protection. Mainlanders cared about pollution, they protested, government responded. They lost their shit at poor safety due to rapid development (aviation, high speed rail, food, medicine), the government responded. They were disgruntled over pork prices. The government responded. Chinese society skews old, conservative and anti LGBT. Government unfortunately responded. Unprecedented MeToo trials happening right now. Government responding. Sufficiently significant issues that elicit widespread attention gets addressed, Chinese people advocate for themselves all the time.
> fed propaganda
Fact is pork prices is literally a bigger problem to mainlanders than plight of privileged HKers with historic acrimonious relationship. This is a well understood dynamic, suggesting HKers would have ever got mainstream mainland support because of propaganda and not bad blood is exactly the kind of anglosphere illiteracy on China I'm talking about. ProHK / pro liberal reform voices exist but not much. Why? HK protestors from mainland perspective: young, nativist, disillusioned but privileged individuals who spread shit about mainlanders on social media for years... Yeah, I just described alt-right. Is it any surprise they got minimal support. Lots of mainland diaspora in the west with access to both side of the story, did meaningful numbers come out to support HK? No, they had access to both sides of the story, they just knew better.
>integration
Of course the goal is integration, CCP is not spending tremendous resources to be cruel for shits and giggles. If Han knew how much was going into XJ they'd protest, due to costs not human rights. Like people everywhere, the public would rather the minorities rot than take disproportionate resources. But unlike democracies, CCP can actually ignore public sentiment. Some in this generation will be a shell, their descendants will be integrated. It's ugly, but things move fast in Chinese 5 year plans. None of this long arc of justice nonsense. It's not right, but history will judge relative wrongness compared to locking up 1/4 of black Americans or trapping indigenous peoples in backwater reserves forever.
> Weird and revealing double standard you got there, comparing "Chinese" as a collective to "many" Americans.
Chinese are collectively more or less in the same situation, they are ethnically mostly the same people and live under the same rules, Americans are not.
Few very reach Americans enjoy all the freedom power can buy, everyone else either comply or suffer the consequences
You really did not know?
> Chinese who are much, much, much less free than nearly all Americans
Nope.
I don't believe in the kind of freedom Americans believe to possess
It's simply a different kind of tyranny
Unless you mean the freedom to be shot in the streets.
For example: there are 700 people in jail every 100k citizens in USA, they are only 115 in China.
In 2008 USA had the 25% of the global World jail population
And you know why?
Because the private prison system in USA is highly profitable
USA has the lowest life expectancy of the whole west and it's only one year longer than China, despite being the country with the highest spending per capita in healthcare in the entire globe.
Is this the freedom you're talking about?
So no, USA is not a benchmark for anything good, including the exercise of free speech, which is only a lame excuse to not take action against extremists propaganda
> Indeed
So sometimes you experience moments of lucidity when you see yourself for what you really are?
> Because the private prison system in USA is highly profitable
LOL. You "know" just enough to remain comfortable in your ideology, and your self-imposed media echo chamber is more than happy to feed that "knowledge" to you.
If you think you are credible outside your tribe... don't quit your day job. You're just as delusional as the people whose speech you wish to control, and hence provide an abject illustration of why we don't want state control of our speech.
And don't feel bad that China is still behind the US in so many ways, there will be a Great Leap Forward very soon!
You must know that USA is not on the media here unless there are the elections
Of course having elected a madmen you rose to the top of everything that's ridiculous, but still not at the level of things we really care about
There is no "media echo chamber" on the contrary, the media are quite aligned to being US allies no matter what, because US have always bought friendships with good money
On the other hand there are real situations you probably don't know about, being American and ignorant, that actually happen involving Americans here that if they happened on US soil, USA would have started a war
I can name just a few: Sigonella,Cermis, Ustica
But I can also name the many military bases on our soil that all the girls know toa void because if some American soldier rapes you, nobody will pay
And it happens a lot more than you imagine
But all in all the question remains: if the World average jail population is 156 people every 100k citizen, how is it possible that a country that has 5 times that should be considered more free?
Can you explain how the US prison system is better than the Norway's one and why we all should copy it?
Please.
Also, I don't wish to control anyone's speech, I know that it's hard to understand, but I simply don't want to let the control in the hands of American mega corporations, which, history proves, have never operated in good faith out of the kindness of their hearts, but only to keep spoiling poor people for their profit
Have you ever considered the possibility that China has "less people in prison" because their government just kills any dissident and "troublemaker" without any semblance of due judicial process?
Stop giving him such a hard time! China's execution rate is a state secret, so no one really knows how high it is, but it's estimated to be significantly lower than that of peer countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran :)
And besides that, who cares if some troublemakers are killed off? The Han "collective" is not bothered by such minor things as individual rights and due process
They only kill their presidents, the brothers of the dead presidents, political activists who only wanted fair treatment for the minorities and of course regular citizens
can you tell me anyway why in US there are still 700 people in jail every 100k while in Italy they are 112, the European average is 127 and the World average is 156?
Do you really believe that China has 15 million people in jail while they secretly killed 86 million (assuming they have the same rate of incarceration of the US) of them to not look bad in comparison to USA?
Do you really believe you can go from 700 to 115 by hiding the deaths?
First, stop moving the goal posts and the whataboutism. Now you are bringing things like political assassinations. Can you go the part where almost we talk about how almost 50 million people starved to death due to the ideology of the Great Leader, or how the country has 300 million excess men because of the one-child policy which led to sex-selective abortions and plain brutal infanticide?
Second, you seem to be the under the impression that I defend the things done by the US State. I do not. It is precisely because I do not like the US State that I do not want to give it more power than it already has. In fact, it has been quite a bit amusing to see your cognitive dissonance of talking about all the horrible things that the US Government has done and yet you want me and everyone else to "Trust the State" with social media. It's almost as amusing as the cognitive dissonance you show when you say you want to take things out of control of "private entities" and put them to the control of the state that you so clearly (and justifiably) loathe.
> Do you really believe you can go from 700 to 115 by hiding the deaths?
Take just the million Uighur in "re-education centers" and call the thing by what it really is - a concentration camp - and suddenly this number already goes up quite a bit.
However, what you are failing to understand is that there is no point in comparing a country that has established (however flawed) democratic institutions with a country whose authoritarian rulers have unchecked powers. The numbers are meaningless if the masses are subjected to tyranny and indoctrinated to never question the authority of the leaders.
> First, stop moving the goal posts and the whataboutism. Now you are bringing things like political assassinations
Can you tell me who wrote this and brought up political assassination?
Because I'm sure it wasn't me.
> Have you ever considered the possibility that China has "less people in prison" because their government just kills any dissident and "troublemaker" without any semblance of due judicial process?
> effects of the Gulf War and over a decade of economic sanctions have resulted in the deaths of 500,000 children due to malnutrition, diarrhea, and other preventable diseases.
(The gulf war was started on a lie, fabricated by the US government)
I ask to stop with the whataboutism and you respond with more of it.
I get it, you don't like the US State. Me neither.
You don't like Facebook. Guess what? Neither do I.
The point of our disagreement is that you seem to believe that people do only bad things because Big Bad American companies are manipulating them. And your solution is to destroy them by executive order and give all this power to... the US State!
The cognitive dissonance is so strong you simply refuse to acknowledge this point every time I mentioned, and you prefer to distill more diatribes against the US.
I am not interested in more diatribes against the US government. I dislike it and distrust it already to know that I don't want it to have more power. What I want to understand is what do you propose besides measures only seen in totalitarian dystopias.
> I ask to stop with the whataboutism and you respond with more of it.
Whataboutism is not what you think it is
If you ask, you might not like the answer.
Get over it.
> The cognitive dissonance is so strong you simply refuse to acknowledge this point every time I mentioned, and you prefer to distill more diatribes against the US.
Only because they did wrong, repeatedly.
Would you hire a pedophile as a kid educator?
> What I want to understand is what do you propose besides measures only seen in totalitarian dystopias.
Isn't the US government using the same measures only seen in totalitarian dystopias?
Assange, Mannings, Snowden and the poor Aaron Swartz are victims of which government?
For the simple fact that they exposed what the US government did.
Aaron Swartz only released public material to the public...
You can argue about solutions once you address the problem.
But what would you do to address the problem?
Keep bombing other countries?
Or ban people for saying out loud what's evident?
Freedom of speech
But not on HN
Because freedom of speech is valued only when they agree with you?
What's the difference between silencing what you don't like and totalitarian dystopias?
> what do you propose besides measures only seen in totalitarian dystopias
Funny
This website has rules about what you can say and what you can't say.
Nobody thinks it hinders the freedom of speech
But if someone says that it's not different from what totalitarian dystopias do, their karma goes below the level allowed to post anymore
So, I ask you, is freedom of speech an absolute value or is it not?
Who decides which rule enable better debates or it's censorship?
What does it mean whataboutism when someone addresses the elephant in the room: some country acted in a criminal way, exactly like other countries did, in a different way, but unilaterally deciding whatis good and what isn't anyway?
Am I allowed or not to exercise my freedom of speech right here on HM or am I not?
Why the fact that HN doesn't allow freedom of speech in a broad way makes it different from actors that deny the same right to others?
If I can't say what I want and are punished when I do it, what makes USA better than China in this regards?
Wouldn't it be better if it was the US State to protect the freedom of the people to express their opinions instead of some private company?
If you think about it China doesn't want people to talk about politics in the same way HN don't.
Where I come from challenging the status quo is a virtue, not a defect.
And that's probably how much different we are and the reason why you will never understand freedom, which is not granted, it's something you must fight for.
Bombing other countries it's not fighting for their freedom, it's imposing your own single point of view.
To answer your question: what I would do?
I would never put the public speech under private companies control.
Because that's what totalitarian dystopias do.
I live in a democracy and believe that being scared of the State that incarnates the democracy (what people chose to govern them) is no better than dictatorships.
More than 1 in 15 Chinese people are not part of the Han ethnic group. When somebody makes big “mostly” generalisations about people, I don't expect “you could have half the clubs in a school composed of these people and still have some left over, assuming uniform distribution” to be true.
You do know that saying bad things about $CountryX doesn't prove good things about $CountryY, and vice versa, right?
> There's a reason why every developed country in the World strictly controls firearms but not knifes.
As a slight tangent, Britain actually does strictly control knives - a short folding non-locking penknife is the only knife that can be carried in public without good reason, and “self defence” is considered never a good reason, and the penknife can still get you arrested if you happen to have it on you in an inappropriate place (bar, nightclub, sports event, etc).
480 deaths in a year in a country of 350M isn't a lot, and doesn't make a place "a violent country".
Being killed in a mass shooting in the US is only approximately one order of magnitude more likely than getting struck and killed by lighting in the US.
It’s non-obvious what the consequences of suppressing free speech are. You can’t just assume an equivalent between that and fascism or socialism. Today, Germany bans certain kinds of hate speech, as a result of its previous experience.
Rather than censoring people, we could take the approach that our worldview is robust enough to withstand competition / challenge. More discussion should in theory wither the fragile ones:
Which they never will without some central power because the (economic)market selects for virality when it comes to communication tools.
The action of that central power will be called censorship.
You could also try to have some guarantee of interoperability to reduce network effects and thus make the market effect weaker and reduce the selection for virality. That seems like something we could try.
Maybe they become those young adults for different reasons? It could be an effect of an alienating society, focused mainly on wealth instead of on the human being.
You can’t explain a change with a constant. We’ve had capitalism for centuries. Far right and Islamic terrorism are not new, but they have risen greatly, and their spread is linked to extremism on the internet.
Most Islamic extremism is spread through mosques and prisons, at least in Europe. I can't remember the last time a terrorism investigation tracked the original radicalisation back to the internet. It's a non issue.
Good point, but I'm struggling to remember people who were radicalised exclusively through ISIS websites. There probably have been a few just because there were so many cases by now they all blur together a bit, but usually ISIS sympathisers seem to have been exposed to a lot of ISIS propaganda during sermons. They may also have consumed online content but it was in addition to, not in replacement of, traditional offline radicalisation.
There's been more than a few terrorist incidents connected to forums like 8chan. In terms of the physical damage these attacks are not a threat to society but that's true of all terrorism. The argument normally is that the psychological damage to society as a whole is worth throwing everything we have at it.
Large media outlets like The New York Times were instrumental in convincing the public that Saddam had WMDs and thus justifying the Iraq War. That conflict led to something like a million deaths (and counting), which is 1000x more than all the "Internet forum"- related terrorism put together.
Yet I don't see anyone calling for further control of The New York Times or implementing restrictions on the corporate media.
I think instead of deplatform them, it's trying to force them off onto their own platform.
When racists (or similar "undesirables") share a larger platform they've kinda got to be on their best behaviour, they can't be too obvious instead they've got to be subtler and in doing so they likely attract more people to their cause because susceptible people tip toe in their direction gradually.
If they're all forced out onto their own platforms because of "muh free speech" the users won't tolerate being policed and so the absolute worst comes out and anyone stumbling across the community is going to be repelled fairly quickly.
That assumes they all only go to one place, which then turns into a cesspool that immediately repels anyone who enters.
There are two problems with this. The first is that it works both ways. If you expel all the heretics then your site becomes a cesspool of groupthink that immediately repels anyone who has had so much as a conversation with someone from the other side, because you'll be saying things that are transparently wrong to anyone who has had any real-world contact with the subject matter and be unable to correct yourself because anyone who spots the error fears being ejected for pointing it out.
And the second is that the version of the opposition on their best behavior for doing recruitment doesn't actually disappear, it just ends up in separate places. Your opponents will have their home base which is full of their own obviously wrong groupthink, but there will also continue to exist places where moderates gather.
Which means you have a new problem. The place where moderates gather will still have the subtle extremism you were trying to eject, but now, because your population hasn't been exposed to it, they're more susceptible to it. They're unvaccinated. So now you have to not only eject the extremists but also the moderates, because anyone who starts listening to the moderates may start to realize that some parts of the things your own extremists say aren't exactly true. Which puts them at high risk of switching to the other team. And you've already turned the other team into a coalition of crazy extremists. But ejecting the moderates turns your team into a coalition of crazy extremists, which is likewise quite ungood.
People like their own online bubbles in much the way they like their own offline bubbles. If you're sick of hearing the shit some people spew in the real world you don't go out of your way to be in the same places as them if you can avoid it.
We choose our social circles and the material we consume in real life it's not unsurprising this happens online as well. These broad platforms like twitter, reddit e.t.c. aren't any more immune to this than offline.
So let me give you an example of the problem. You have your filter bubbles, but then you visit an independent forum for amateur taxidermy. It has an irrelevant miscellaneous section which is well moderated enough to not be full of spam, but not by someone who really cares about or even particularly understands politics at all.
Someone on that forum posts the following statement. "The concept of white privilege is anti-Semitic because the subset of white people who are doing better than black people are disproportionally Jewish."
The factual component is true, it's not obviously spam, so the moderators leave it there. But what happens when people on the left read that?
It pits members of the same coalition against each other. If you're black you start wondering whether Jewish privilege is a term you should start employing, but you're not likely to be pleased with the response if you do, and that may leave a bad taste in your mouth. If you're Jewish you feel attacked and suddenly nervous about a popular tenet of your party's platform. If you're a non-Jewish white Democrat who has never been exposed to anything like this before, you're primed to receive some outright Nazi propaganda next.
Statements like that need to be encountered for the first time in an environment where the problems with them can be analyzed thoughtfully and without vitriol or recriminations, because otherwise, when they are encountered, they create internal conflicts and push people into the arms of the opposition.
If you ban them from your filter bubble, that is not the context in which they'll be first encountered.
This is self correcting. The mod will see the inevitable shit storm and ban anything that looks remotely like it in the future. The filter bubble of amateur taxidermists will filter it out in the future.
"Statements like that need to be encountered for the first time in an environment where the problems with them can be analyzed thoughtfully and without vitriol or recriminations, because otherwise, when they are encountered, they create internal conflicts and push people into the arms of the opposition."
This will never happen in social media. Unless in some highly highly moderated forum setup for the purpose, which is its own filter bubble and in which expertise of the participants can be ascertained.
Any forum like that essentially excludes most of the general public.
You're assuming the shit storm happens on the taxidermy forum. But most of the taxidermists aren't there to talk about that stuff, or maybe some of them are but they're not the sort to be uncivil or try to cancel the heretics, so it isn't a problem there.
But then those people bring the heresy into the rest of their lives and get thumped by the mob for crimethink when they bring it up. And then once they're declared an enemy by their own tribe they seek refuge in the opposition.
I am not going to be the first one to say that Wokeness has become the perfect 21st century version of Puritanism for SJW. Take a look at some BLM protests and how people wanted to chant, display repent for their sins, subjugate in Communion, etc.
And the worst part of it all is how SJWs all claim to be against collonialism and how they want to defend diversity, yet don't realize how the ideology is spreading around the world turning everything into an echo chamber of myopic morals.
Won't speak for your OP, but from my perspective most Social Justice Warriors embrace the term, even if it is thrown at them derisively from the other side. Same thing goes for being "Woke" -- it is a term and mindset that they embrace.
Yeah, pretty much. My comment was not about trying to put a blanket statement on anyone that defends any kind of progressive policies. I am referring to the fundamentalist "activists" and those that turn Progressive/Liberal values to an extreme core point of their identities.
No. The vague language is to avoid getting caught in fruitless conversations with some holier-than-thou puritanical clown who will comb through any comment I make with the intent of showing how something I said is an unforgivable sin.
"SJWs are the puritans of the 21st century." What's vague about that? The fact that you are trying to police me show that it doesn't take much to have such a good sample of the statement.
I don't care what you think. You're a mental fruitcake and will most likely commit suicide within a decade. Get a grip and seek a therapist if you desire to avoid said outcome. Wait, on second thought, don't. Just terminate yourself. You are insufferable and you know it.
OP’s argument was specific: “ Take a look at some BLM protests and how people wanted to chant, display repent for their sins, subjugate in Communion, etc.” By all means, disagree on the specifics - that will be more persuasive than calling him “sad”.
No, I can't, unless you assume that everyone else doing the reading is somehow more gullible or impressionable than yourself.
Did 8chan make you pick up a gun? Did 8chan turn you into a nazi?
Just because seeing something published makes you upset does not mean that publishing those things is inherently dangerous.
You need to trust the other people in your society a bit more than you do, and stop assuming most readers are ten years old.
Your conclusion is based on fear, not the millions of people who read "objectionable" things online and go "ugh" and then close the tab (and sometimes go write long-winded blog posts about how censorship is essential to prevent violence).
"The rhetoric coming from Big Tech ("we can't let people even think these bad ideas") is extremely similar to the rhetoric that came from the Catholic Church during the Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion."
Not only is the rhetoric from Big Tech not at all similar to that of the Church, the comparison to Big Tech now and Printing Press then has no merit at all really.
The Church was suppressing arcane knowledge, and controlling their access to 'God' - so to speak.
The Internet is a new form of 'hyper commons' where a race war could flame up instantly if allowed.
Understand that the Internet has absolutely nothing to do with the 'truth'. The truth comes from examination, and the legitimacy of the examiners, purveyors of information. If that legitimacy does not exist, then the truth is just whatever everyone wants it to be.
The comparison is not 'The printing press' - it's the Rwandan genocide.
In Rwanda, the driving fuel was radio. Unfettered, angry people would urge, every day, to think of the 'other' (i.e. Tutsi v. Hutu) like 'dirty cockroaches'.
Without daily, constant mass propaganda of an entire nation mesmerized and inflamed by genocidal talk radio - there would have been no genocide.
The Rwandan war was mostly not a military incursion - it was militias vs. people. It was individuals, coming out of their homes with machetes, chopping up their neighbours.
Extremism is fuelled by a nudge in either direction - as a small, populist media example, we saw this as both CNN and MSNBC leaned harder left as Trump rhetoric rose.
I'm not political - but some of the Talking Heads on Fox have been aggressively and actively promoting voting conspiracy theories about voting issues that have been very publicly debunked and rejected by the courts - but the opinionists of course avoid that part, and just push the conspiracy without at all pointing out the facts have literally been proven false.
Millions of viewers accept the conspiracy as truth.
While the comments section on Fox has been surprisingly more enlightened that normal, with somewhat of a majority even calling them out as 'Fake News' - a sizeable majority of responders are adamant the election was stolen.
At OAN and Breitbart, the comments section is vicious about the 'clear fact' that the election was stolen by Biden, and there's talk of violence.
There was quite a lot of violence in the streets during the BLM unrest, we are not in a happy situation, there are a lot of guns in America.
If for example 'some group with guns' ended up killing 'someone from some other group' - things would get out of hand fast.
If FB, and Twitter, Google and the Press did not manage information - I think it would devolve into regional, balkan like violence, like a quasi civil war very quickly.
While it's really hard sometimes to fathom how information should be controlled - the night of the election, when Donald Trump came out and claimed the election was rigged without any evidence, literally trying to overthrow the Republic on the basis of his ego ... using threats of having his, often armed supporters 'not stand down' (!!!) it became crystal clear how important information control is.
The issue contend with is how we go about it. We need transparency, regulation, independence, proportionality etc..
So Google, FB, Twitter - the 'huge' entities, need to set guidelines and probably have some way of ensuring they are enforced consistently and not selectively. The rules for what constitutes 'organizing violence' need to be clear etc..
I've never heard anyone use the Rwandan genocide as an analogy for what's going wrong with the modern web but I think you've hit the nail on the head.
It seems that the most ardent supporters of unrestricted free-speech are the most optimistic in their belief in humanity to come to a stable, moral consensus if we all just say whatever we want.
The Rwandan genocide shows the darker truth that we're just as likely to talk ourselves into horrific violence and war over arbitrary divisions. Cultural and societal pressure over what's acceptable to discuss seems like a very real, and very useful bulwark against that possibility.
Rwandan hate radio is not simply a story of unbridled free speech.
"One of the most virulent voice of hate, the newspaper Kangura, began spewing forth attacks on the RPF and on Tutsi immediately after the October 1990 invasion. It was joined soon after by other newspapers and journals that received support from officials and businessmen linked to the regime. "
"Until 1992, Radio Rwanda was very much the voice of the government and of the president himself.... Before the daily news programs, Radio Rwanda broadcast excerpts of Habyarimana’s political speeches. This national radio sometimes broadcast false information, particularly about the progress of the war, but most people did not have access to independent sources of information to verify its claims.
In March 1992, Radio Rwanda warned that Hutu leaders in Bugesera were going to be murdered by Tutsi, false information meant to spur the Hutu massacres of Tutsi."
[later Radio Rwanda becomes less partisan:]
"With the new direction at Radio Rwanda and the voice of the RPF increasingly strong, Hutu hard-liners decided to create their own station. They began planning their radio in 1992, incorporated it as Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) in April 1993, and began broadcasting in August 1993...."
"Although nominally private and opposed to Radio Rwanda, RTLM in fact was linked in a number of ways with the national radio, with other state agencies and with the MRND. RTLM was allowed to broadcast on the same frequencies as the national radio between 8am and 11am, when Radio Rwanda was not transmitting, an arrangement that encouraged listeners to see the two as linked, if not as identical. The new station also drew personnel from Radio Rwanda, including Nahimana, who played a leading role at RTLM after having been dismissed from ORINFOR, and announcer Noel Hitimana."
First - my Prof. and colleague was the Adjutant to the Chief of Staff of the UN mission (General Dallaire) during the Rwandan Genocide. I'm well informed.
Second - that the 'government' was in control of some of the radio has nothing to do with the argument - that's an example of 'political speech', particularly lacking institutional controls of the press.
The genocide was not arbitrary, of course there were leaders and those pushing for it. There were political forces moving millions of machetes into the country to be used in 'the uprising'. But when it happened, it was almost universal, like a Zombie film.
President Trump, using 'direct channels' (Twitter/FB) to spout lies about election rigging, is able to do this completely without any fact checking. He can say almost anything he wants, and a certain % will believe him. He has made veiled hints at violence.
5-10 Million people believe that the election has been rigged, and the constitution has been usurped. Those are Revolutionary terms, and they have guns.
This story reads like an election in a crappy African Republic where there is zero institutional credibility.
A 'decentralized web' mostly lacks any ability to decipher fact from truth - it's expensive, it requires integrity, transparency, oversight - which is why we have many institutions to do that right now, and it becomes a real problem when they start to bend.
It seems that the most ardent supporters of unrestricted free-speech are the most optimistic in their belief in humanity to come to a stable, moral consensus if we all just say whatever we want.
Personally, it's more that I'm pessimistic about giving governments the power to imprison people for expressing opinions that governments don't like.
The government of Quebec fined a comedian $30 000 for making a joke about a handicapped person.
I think the issue is that 'Freedom of Expression' ought to exist - it's #1 in Canada and #2 Ammendment in the US, but there's no such thing as 'unrestricted' speech, and, institutional controls are going to have to be in place.
If you're plotting with your buddies to walk into the post office and murder someone ... well I'll bet most people think your Signal channel should be snared.
If you want to call a Female Trans person a 'He' because that' what they are biologically, even if they present themselves as a She ... well, most people think that should be legal, but there are absolutely people with power who want to make that a form of hate speech.
On Twitter right now, I'm thankful that they are adding notes to indicate that specific actions of election fraud.
But they have also indicated they will ban you for 'dead naming' or 'misgendering' a Trans person.
So you know the Actress 'Ellen Page' is now trans, so 'he' is now 'Elliot Page'. Fair enough. But if you literally use the term 'Ellen Page' or refer to them as 'She' - you could be banned. Which is ridiculous.
Fair point. I wonder if my prioritization of the echo-chamber/fake news balkanization problems the web is facing now is purely because it's a more novel threat than authoritarian government overreach?
But it seems like there should be some level of compromise that can address both risks. We restrict other natural freedoms in all sorts of ways in modern society, why not free speech at all? As an example that's repeated so often it's practically a cliche: even with the second amendment in the US, citizens are still restricted from owning nuclear weapons.
A new class of weapon was invented and society decided that no matter what they said in the past, this was too powerful to treat like any other weapon until now. Seems like this new form of hyper-speech could qualify for a similar approach?
Webs of trust can help isolate the issue, in that if you can trace news back to it's source, you can weight the relevance of the news according to the weights assigned to the friend's and your own weightings combined, in that particular web of trust (eg. A Web for cooking, a Web for politics etc).
The issue then is that you're likely to get a balkanization of the webs of trust - echo chambers.
How we can support cross pollination of these webs is the issue. I don't have an answer for that, but being able to trace news sources at least helps though.
First, this is missing the point a little bit - people don't care about the truth. They actively seek out channels of bias. If everyone were so conscientious as to be seeking the truth society would have far fewer problems.
Second, there is no such thing as 'web of trust', it's an academic idea.
Third, it's unnecessary. We already have pretty good institutions.
FYI I just checked the commentary on Fox to see where there plebes minds are at this morning, and this was the 4th comment on the top article:
"The military must restore President Trump to the presidency.
Any pockets of military resistance should be dealt with.
Our country needs military law and God's chosen President, President Trump.
President Trump for life!!!!"
A few comments down:
"MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
STEALING AN ELECTION IS AN ACT OF WAR! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
STOP THE STEAL"
This kind of rhetoric is not uncommon now, and this is on a mainstream news outlet, it's only a little bit of accidental violence from words to deeds.
Yes, that was the point with the balkanisation bit. There's no grey area for debate as the echo-chambers polarise discussion.
Hence the real issue- how to persuade people to see news etc outside their usual fare. This could be simply a random post of the day on their feed, to a 'you may like' or 'the other side' on a post.
Far from being academic, webs of trust have existed since the dawn of time, for example marriage with other tribes to strengthen trust. On the web, twitter retweets are a loose example in that people retreat what they find useful, building trust between users over repeated retweets.
I don't know the answer to this btw but the current institutions don't appear to be enough, from potentially influenced elections and referenda, to trying to silence whistleblowers (Assange, Whitehouse leaks etc)
Isolating the issue though ie. Being able to verify optionally signed posts goes some way towards building better Web. Curated posts by Facebook have no indication of agenda or veracity, same as for most of twitter.
Something like Radicle or Spritely might be the way forward, more research needed :)
>how to persuade people to see news etc outside their usual fare
I'm not sure, but you actually need a place where people COULD see viewpoints outside the usual before those interested can go there.
An example of this working was the Slatestarcodex Culture War thread and its successor, The Motte.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
It turns out that there's a sizeable contingent of people who do want to talk to people on the other side, and if you build it, they will come- and be surprisingly civil to each other, given you might expect them to assault each other on the streets in other circumstances.
Of course, as mentioned in the above article, one problem with building a space where people can talk civilly about their differences is that you end up talking civilly to unpalatable folks, and people on the outside really don't like that and will try to destroy you- even if what you're seeing here, people de-escalating by talking to each other, is a miracle in the making.
The culture war and the Motte have problems, of course. I'd just like to see a Cambrian explosion of spaces with a similar ethos, to explore the design space.
> So Google, FB, Twitter - the 'huge' entities, need to set guidelines
I agree, but let me refine: Dissenting opinions in civil society are arbitrated by civil courts.
So we need the 'huge' entities to commit working together with civil society. That means they need to lobby towards their own regulation. AT&T allegedly did it in the 20th century. Lobbying for more constraints on your own company is only contradictory if the company considers itself infallible in perpetuity, i.e. a benevolent dictatorship.
> Understand that the Internet has absolutely nothing to do with the 'truth'. The truth comes from examination, and the legitimacy of the examiners, purveyors of information. If that legitimacy does not exist, then the truth is just whatever everyone wants it to be.
Ironically this sounds just like the kind of argument Thomas More would have made against Erasmus. And he’d have referred to Münster just as you refer to Rwanda.
Anyone can have their printing press. But if they want to start printing pamphlets that say 'Kill All the Celts/Jews/Lutherans/Catholics' then it's going to get taken away.
Again that's very similar to arguments made in the 16th century. "Take away the magistrate, and let loose the bridle unto the unruly multitude... virgins shall be deflowered, matrons ravished, old men slain in their beds...." Despite all this, it's hard to be sad that freedom of speech eventually won out in Northern Europe.
The truth comes from examination, and the legitimacy of the examiners,
It sounds an awful lot like you are calling for an explicitly elevated class of people, with the sole authority to interpret the literature. Sort of like a priesthood.
We have to find a new way through this problem.
Censorship is hardly "a new way." And this problem only exists if enough people pay attention to it. It's not the freedom of speech that is the problem, it's traditional media that amplify every debate instead of projecting nuance, and it's algorithms that optimize for engagement over connection.
The Ottoman Empire banned the use of the printing press for 270 years.
"This opposition to the printing press had the obvious consequences for literacy, education, and economic success. In 1800 probably only 2 to 3 percent of the citizens of the Ottoman empire were literate, compared with 60 percent of the adult males and 40 percent of the adult females in England. In the Netherlands and Germany, literacy rates were even higher. The Ottoman lands lagged far behind the European countries with the lowest educational attainment in this period, such as Portugal, where probably only around 20 percent of adults could read and write."
Low literacy in the Ottoman Empire should not be ascribed solely to the lack of the printing press. It also had to do with the standard written language used in the Empire: written Ottoman Turkish was an artificial mixture of Turkish and Persian that was specially taught to a small elite. The average Turk would not have been able to make sense of Ottoman Turkish texts even if he did become literate (in the sense of knowing the letters and being able to read things aloud).
This is why one of the concerns of Atatürk’s revolution was not just increasing printing and switching to the Latin alphabet, but also replacing the Ottoman Turkish written language with one much closer to spoken Turkish.
Based on your writing, it seems you have a level head and a good angle on world history
I am hoping that if you have any books that deal in the history east of present day Germany, present day Italy, and or south of Madrid (directly/indirectly) that you really liked or found especially engaging or informative that you might remember and graciously share what they were if it pleases you to do so.
I am at a point where I am starting to appreciate what I am "rooting for" in western Asia/northern Africa which was a step in my study of northern/western barbarian history (frankish, gaulish, Norse etc etc) that made everything more fun and interesting to learn and therefore easier for me to study and accumulate interesting information
Because you seem very reasonable, I am thinking if you liked any of those direct/indirect history books that I might like them too
If you read this comment, thank you for your time and attention. I hope that you and your loved ones are doing okay in these difficult times.
Oh, look, another omniscient person protecting all the lesser human beings from the crime of wrongthink. So virtuous, moraly superior. What would we all do without them.
One can work or not on something for whatever reason they want. Just spare us the long description of how other people are lesser human beings that should have their rights restricted for their own good, and how it's better this way.
Obviously (thought it seems not to you) free speech advocates like myself have no problems with different opinions being expressed. It doesn't mean other people have to agree with them. They can express they opposition and critique. And they don't even have to endure reading it.
In a way, I can't even understand how could you have confused the two (critique vs censorship).
I don't know who you were hoping to kid here, other than yourself, but grandly stating someone should "just spare us" their opinion you don't happen to agree with is obviously not even remotely a "critique" of anything, it's simply a call for someone to shut the fuck up, because what matters (to "us") is what you personally are willing to tolerate.
In a way, I can't even understand how you could actually need this spelled out to you, unless you simply have no grasp of what you're posting, which admittedly is what it looks like.
The OP is a long posts explaining how other people don't deserve their right to free speech and how that made them stop working on IPFS, and somehow you twist my frustration phrased as "just spare us" as saying I am trying to censor OP.
There is a difference between a critique and censorship. The person is not advocating that the hosting company of this blog post remove it from the internet, he is saying the writing added no value, so should not have been written in the first place. I would assume your down-votes are for purposefully conflating these points.
> There is a difference between a critique and censorship.
I don't say otherwise, or even refer to "critique" or "censorship" in my post, so what are you talking about?
> The person is not advocating that the hosting company of this blog post remove it from the internet
I also didn't accuse them of advocating the hosting company of this blog remove it from the internet, or even remotely hint at such, so what are you talking about?
> should not have been written in the first place
He said the author of the blog should "just spare us" their opinion.
If you want to carry on pretending you don't understand what that means I can't stop you, but next time try addressing what was actually written, not stuff you've completely made up to argue about.
The downvotes are far more likely simply because some people who love hate speech but hate free speech have more than 500 karma.
Now you want to limit their freedom of speech? Because you don't like what they say or how they say it? You're free to skip the parts you don't like and focus on the ones you find valuable.
(I was thinking whether to end this post with /s or not, and strangely, both ways provide valid context for this post; therefore, I'll end this with a Heisenberg /ß.)
Would your attitude be different if you were agreeing with what he says? I disagree with him but he's absolutely free and welcome to make such blog posts. If you don't like what you read, don't read more. Unfortunately you cannot ask for a refund of your time when reading blog posts.
> Just spare us the long description of how other people are lesser human beings that should have their rights restricted for their own good
That seems like a particularly uncharitable reading of the post. From the article:
> Many of you reading this will not agree with me, and that’s fine. I’m not going to try and change your beliefs with this blog post. Rather, I’m looking to explain why, while I respect that others might have differing opinions, I stopped doing anything that would actively advance a technology whose ethics I question. To put it in other terms: your freedom of speech isn’t my obligation to enable you and give you a platform.
The author isn't advocating making the distributed web illegal? I'm not sure what rights you think they're advocating restricting either? The article simple raises the question of if this technology would on-balance improve or harm society based on the experiences we've had with the web so far and the kind of content that can _already_ be found on IPFS.
The author says it doesn't stack up for them, and so they aren't working on it any longer. They call for others to put more thought into what they work on and how it may be used. Seems pretty reasonable.
By all means, disagree and explain why you think the scales are different than the author. But when you say something like:
> Just spare us the long description of how other people are lesser human beings
I don't know man, you clicked the link to read a personal blog. If simply reading someone's thought process as they come to a different conclusion than yours is such a sufferance for you maybe exercise some of that freedom and don't read it. As it is you're just coming across like a troll.
Hacker news discussion should be of higher quality than that.
Not exactly, he just chooses not to participate, which is fine. Many - me included - still think freedom of speech is important, so these systems need to be built, and hopefully, they will. We can also choose to participate.
The fact that they assume that decentralized web equals immutable and global by default shows ignorance. You should take a look at SSB and Radicle, if you want a different dweb than IPFS.
I can empathize with not wanting to be involved with this anymore, which is fair enough, your choice, but there are solutions to the mentioned problems.
There are social or technical solutions to the problem of "too much free speech".
There can be decentralised filters set up that can be moderated by communities like democracy. You can have curators of content that can guarantee to bring safe and healthy content to you. You can have decentralised reputation, authority and reward systems for the content creators and the validators. And so on.
While I agree this an important factor to keep in mind and I'm personally very supportive of the idea, I don't think this really addresses the author's concern, which is not too much free speech as in "too many people being chaotic neutral", but more about small radicalized groups with too much free speech as "too extreme views". You can't ban "too extreme" communities.
I'd rather have them visible than underground. If the radicals can grow, it shows that there are problems that need to be addressed. Address their core problems using reasoning, no more reasons to be radical. It's better for everyone.
The issue i find with viewpoints like this are these comments:
> In the last few years, completely unregulated online speech has given rise to fake news and conspiracy theories that have actually killed people. It’s offered a megaphone to those promoting dangerous ideas like white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other anti-LGBTQ positions, and sometimes outright Nazism. It has tilted many democracies towards right-wing populism and fascism.
Perhaps that's what people actually think and would have thought regardless of the internet? Every thing listed is well below peak popularity, and anti LGBTQ sentiment for example is the lowest it has ever been with LGBTQ view enjoying widespread grassroots and estalbishment support.
Authors like this are simply yearning for the ecstasy of ideological conformity; the dream that they will one day open their web browser and find a world of people who suddenly share their enlightened world view. Instead of criticising others, perhaps they should question their own worldview and whether it would be even remotely normal for everyone to share it.
There is nothing more likely to grow those beliefs than to ban them outright. Goebbels was prosecuted for hate crimes in Weimar Germany in 1928[0], and to say such laws were ineffective is to put it mildly.
[0] Longerich, Peter (2015). Goebbels: A Biography. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1400067510.
Decentralization of the web (has also come to?) mean that we shouldn't centralize everything to FAANG. And I think it is important to keep those notions separate.
And I don't necessarily see how decentralized has that much to do with the issues described regarding IPFS. The issue there was more with it being more anonymous and resilient. And I do agree with the author on the downsides, I haven't really been a fan of IPFS but it is a neat idea.
Though I do believe that keeping internet open and away from google et al. is paramount.
Let me tell you a story of a society which built a liberated but centralized information system.
The main TV and radio stations uncritically report the progress of an unprovoked foreign war until one night, one man on one station uncharacteristicaly editorializes against it.
Media organizations through their leiason with foreign intelligence report falsely the atrocities of one side of a conflict, ensuring support for the other side which is actually committing atrocities.
The most heralded media organization in the nariona suppresses a story through an election which provides irrefutable proof that the state executive is running an illegal spying operation against the citizenry.
Is this Soviet Russia? Communist China? Tito's Yugoslavia? No, it is the United States prior to ubiquitous internet news.
Respectively I refer to Walter Cronkite's turn against the Vietnam war at the Tet Offensive, the misinformation campaign levied at the Nicoroguan Sandinistas and the New York Times decision to hold the warrantless wiretapping story until after the 2004 election.
I'm not sure that is a better world. I'm not sure if we aren't just looking at trade-offs, moderated media having its flaws and virtues, unmoderated having its own.
It is no wonder we shrink at the trials and tribulations of unmoderated information. They are new. But I think there is a tendency recently to overlook the costs our gatekeepers previously imparted to our society.
People like that will returns us to the dark ages, every year propaganda for censorship is getting stronger and if in the past censorship was limited to actually published works, this time around it will be ubiquitous.
as if the regular web doesn't make illicit activity easier. as if the telephone doesn't make illicit activity easier.
as if the telegram doesn't make illicit activity easier
as if the printing press doesn't make illicit activity easier
as if the trained pigeon doesn't make illicit activity easier
as if the ink quill doesn't make illicit activity easier
as if the smoke signal doesn't make illicit activity easier
the man is shell shocked, needs a break, thank you for your service, lets keep moving forward!
"Islamophobia", that term which criminalizes religion criticism ... Can't wait to live in a world where blasphemy is forbidden again !
I guess nowadays: diversity is great, except for opinions. Can't wait to see the left crashing itself trying to compose with opposed sides, against homophoby on one hand and against islam criticism on the other, but islam is like christianism and probably other religions: homophobic.
Oh, shouldn't I be allowed to state that anymore ? Funny world you want to live in, but I guess that's what it is when you get confused and believe that your CS degree is worth a pol sci or law degree.
This is the Quran saying that husbands should beat those of their wifes who are disobedient, and that's just the tip of the iceberg, I could go on and on on about the Quran: I'm Algerian.
Sorry for the victims of my "islamophobia", but it's nothing compared to what the victims of islamic violence have been through.
I don't dispute that some Muslims' practices are incompatible with modern liberalism. But it can be unfair to judge a religion by the worst parts of its holy texts. Here's 1 Samuel 15:
7 And Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to Shur, that is over against Egypt.
8 And he took Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword.
9 But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them: but every thing that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly....
10 Then came the word of the Lord unto Samuel, saying,
11 It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king: for he is turned back from following me, and hath not performed my commandments. And it grieved Samuel; and he cried unto the Lord all night.
and then Samuel tells Saul:
18 And the Lord sent thee on a journey, and said, Go and utterly destroy the sinners the Amalekites, and fight against them until they be consumed.
19 Wherefore then didst thou not obey the voice of the Lord, but didst fly upon the spoil, and didst evil in the sight of the Lord?
So here we have the Israelites slaughtering an entire population. But God is angry with them, because they did not also slaughter all the cattle.
Would it be fair to make that a summary of modern Christianity?
Christianity revolves around the fact that Jesus replaced the Old Testament with an entirely new one, and his teachings in some cases directly contradicted what the Old Testament says. It's not really fair to judge Christianity by version 1 of their book when Christian teaching about morality derives from version 2. That's why they're called Christians.
Sure. But they keep plenty - like the Ten Commandments. And many are, at least nominally, committed to the idea that the Bible is the Word of God, including the OT.
Anyway, it’s indeed my point that it’s not fair to judge Christianity (or other religions) by every part of their holy text, so I think we agree.
You're missing a bit of the back story and context with that passage, by the way. For example, Exodus 17 verse 8:
"The Amalekites came and attacked the Israelites at Rephidim."
and earlier in the chapter you quoted, verse 2:
"This is what the LORD of Hosts says: ‘I witnessed what the Amalekites did to the Israelites when they ambushed them on their way up from Egypt."
It's not unreasonable to imagine that the Amalekites might have intended to carry out a genocide against the Israelites (something which the Israelites seem to have been uniquely disproportionately targeted with in history), and that an omniscient God might have known that putting an end to the Amalekites would be the most peaceful solution in the long run.
As for the cattle, perhaps God didn't want the Israelites to make a huge profit from their defensive war, lest they be tempted to start some other wars to profit more.
People who nominally think a text is infallible often in fact pay attention very differentially to different parts of it. That’s why few modern fundamentalists own slaves or stone disabled people who enter church. Perhaps you can ding them for inconsistency.... Meanwhile, many Muslims and Christians are not literalists in that sense.
> That’s why few modern fundamentalists own slaves or stone disabled people who enter church. Perhaps you can ding them for inconsistency....
I don't know of any religions which require adherents to own slaves, so it is not inconsistent for a fundamentalist to not own any. (In particular, Christians are commanded to obey the laws of their country[0], in general, so owning slaves would be inconsistent).
Also, I don't know why you think churchgoers would have a problem with disabled people. Jesus healed the sick, and didn't stone anyone. Perhaps you're thinking of the story of the woman caught in adultery, whom Jesus saved from being stoned.[1]
That doesn't sound correct. Perhaps you're mixing up the rules for tithing cattle[0] in Deuteronomy 15 with the rules for approaching Mount Sinai[1] in Exodus 19.
> 2:193 Fight them until there is no more disbelieving of Islam and until all worship is for Allah alone.
> 4:47 Jews and Christians, believe in Islam before we destroy your faces and twist them toward their backs and curse you.
Now that's actual hate speech right there in the Quran, but that's perfectly fine "for the sake of diversity" right ?
If you were to censor "muslims are terrorists"... then you would have to censor the Quran itself, which says so many worse things about women, queers, and disbelievers including those of your family. Censoring the Quran would be islamophobic, right ?
> 9:23 Do not take your fathers or your brothers as allies if they have preferred not to believe in Islam.
That's criminalizing freedom of thought, going against the core principles of Universal Human Rights Declaration.
Anyway, Quran verses are cited during prayers, and not just the ones that abide by your Kufr standards, FYI.
Samuel Paty, a story where "muslims against islamophobia" feed islamic terrorists: drawings of the prophet ARE islamophobic according to them for sure. And don't worry about Taqiya BTW.
Sorry for the victims of islamophobia, but it's nothing compared to what victims of islamic violence have been through, so, guess who I'm crying for.
You want to censor hate speech, this could be respectable if you were to apply it to both sides, and not "just the islamophobic side".
We left our islamic countries for your civilized countries to be free, we have worked hard to integrate and become worthy citizen because we value your culture above theirs, don't betray us now!
True. Controlling human thought at scale can be useful though. It stops my 8-y/o from watching what he shouldn't. There's a balancing act between FAANGs, and the wild west where you can go looking for things without being hand-held.
The mistake, I believe, is absolutism. If you're a Replublican everything Democrat is bad. Maybe there's a future in which the best parts of opposing sides meet to create a happy place?
Everything is a balancing act. Some FAANG is good. Some distributed web is good. Where on that scale we live is our choice. Choice is good. And sometimes, very occasionally, the illusion of choice is good.
You can't have 'some' distributed web. Either you have somebody who can censor, or you don't.
You can't have somebody only able to censor some things or only a little thing.
If there was a way to censor child porn and nothing else, I would be running a Freenet node and be quite happy to do so. Unfortunately that is not possible.
Wasn't clear, sorry. Facebook censors things, Freenet doesn't. That doesn't mean there's no place for Facebook, and it doesn't mean there's no place for Freenet.
> Controlling human thought at scale can be useful though. It stops my 8-y/o from watching what he shouldn't.
Surely what you actually want is categorising of human thought at scale, and then you deciding which categories of ideas are suitable for your 8-y/o to be exposed to (and which categories of ideas you are comfortable being exposed to).
Allowing a few entities to control human thought at scale is likely to produce a world that is bad for everyone, including 8-y/o's.
I wonder if there will ever be an answer to this question, at least in regards to free services on the internet[0].
Centralized services will always have incentives that are orthogonal to their users, because anyone who isn't paying for a product with cash is "paying" by allowing their data to be harvested. They may provide strong moderation at their discretion, but that will never be one-size-fits-all (see: the bipartisan section 230 repeal arguments in the US) - there's not a balance here that people won't find a way to politicize.
Federated protocols create perverse incentives to lock in users so they can't switch providers and to differentiate their service from neighbours using non-standard protocol deviations. These moves create insular communities where self-hosted participants are left out to dry through entirely defensible actions such as spam prevention systems (like big email providers junking/refusing to deliver mail from "untrustworthy" sources). Even relatively new protocols are wrestling with this problem - Matrix recently put out a document discussing a federated reputation system for servers to judge other servers. This will inevitably turn them into pseudo-centralized protocols, like email is today.
Decentralized protocols, like the ones in the article, are filled with all the people who've been banned from the centralized servers and kicked out by federated server admins. It's not surprising to me in the least that decentralized servers host objectionable content; without any meaningful form of network-wide moderation you have no way to cut out the bad actors from your network's discovery mechanisms. Anything approaching network-wide moderation would rely on some kind of network topology approaching a federated system.
I think part of it might be that humans are just inherently horrible. Not all of us, and not all the time, but enough to ruin the experience for everyone. I suppose it was easier when our ancestors lived in tribes of a couple of hundred individuals, but now that the entire globe is a text message away we're coming to grips with the fact that there's far more "objectionable" material out there than we previously thought. As with other problems of human nature, I don't think the problem or the resulting solution will come from tech alone. Rather, I imagine it'll take society as a whole a few decades to come to grips with the fact that everything is public for everyone, and power in the real world doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot on the internet.
[0] Paid services obviously have a different calculus ascribed to them, but with the way the internet has evolved there's a prerequisite discussion to be had about whether paid services will be able to catch on in the world today. Social networks, for example, rely on network effects, which are (to my understanding) a non-starter if your service isn't free. This is especially true if prices aren't adjusted for the developing world where people have even less discretionary income than in, say, California.
I disagree with the author: tucking away our head from the future is not how we deal with the challenges of such future. We need new perspectives and ideas to cope with the unknown.
Imagine a world where you can create a blog and write anything, even discuss ideas against the "status quo". That's the world the OP lives now and he's arguing against it.
The "status quo" in the dark ages was: bigotry, fanaticism, supremacism, conspiratorial theories, anti-science, slavery, and so on. At this time, writing anything against the masses beliefs would lead to persecution and death. People died trying to educate others and at the same time others extremist ideas were born but the society learned to ignore them. The good ideas were victorious.
Remember: On May 10, 1933 around 25,000 books from 34 university towns in Germany were burned! Some of those books were unique, their ideas will never be known by society.
If you go back in time, 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years back, whatever, the society always approved horrendous ideas and few people fought back. You should never trust the "status quo" or the "justice warriors" of the internet, as they could easily be on the wrong side of history. The access to information is the solution not the problem.
In my opinion, asking for censorship shows no respect for the ones that died trying to change the world.
There has been a trend among the progressives lately to scoff at freedom of speech as something that stands in the way of progress and majoritarian rule. Which is kinda amusing, given all the fights over it on campuses etc back in the day, that were in many cases about the rights to publicly express those political opinions that are now mainstream on the left.
But what's especially worrying is that some people do remember, and dismiss it anyway, because it "had served its purpose". That is - they explicitly say that it was never an actual principle, but merely the means to enable their propaganda when they were not in a position of power to ensure that they'd be heard. Now that they are, they don't want that tool to fall into the hands of those who "oppose progress". Same thing goes for due process rights, and some other long-held left liberal principles. Indeed, the very word "liberal" is becoming a slur further on the left, and specifically so because they see it as an ideology that protects their enemies. Much of that rhetoric is hard to distinguish from Soviet propaganda of old (take a look at question 42 here to see what I mean: https://archive.org/details/USSR100QuestionsAnswers1986/page...).
And while it's tempting to dismiss all this as some random internet rants that don't matter, it's hard to continue doing that when even ACLU is forced into changing their long-held stance to appease the social pressure and demands of newer members, and when their events are shut down by protesters chanting "liberalism is white supremacy".
There is some weird playing the victim card here as social networks try and clean pure play disinformation campaigns on their networks. Nothing is perfect and there will be missed but there is clearly a intent towards reality rather than lies.
It's kind of the point of the lies and subjugation that cast this as a liberal conspiracy where its just a matter of not getting it right 100% of the time ( which is not possible )
Indeed, ACLU has long done so - this is why I said "even ACLU". But this particular article is misleading - they certainly did change their take on free speech after post-Charlottesville criticism from the left. It kinda dodges the issue by saying, "well, there are conflicts between rights sometimes, so we just issued a guidance on how to resolve them" - but the point is that the guidance is different from ACLU's past consistent stance.
I've been working on a decentralized discussion platform for the past 2 years or so. My view is that the issues that the OP is concerned about arise from an absence of functioning reputation and trust systems. After all, fake news and conspiracy content proliferates on centralized platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
While these platforms do moderate some of the worst content, they are reluctant and the problem is too large for them to solve. Only a decentralized approach to trust and reputation will scale well enough to regulate decentralized content. I believe it is the decentralized platforms that will solve this problem first - they need to, while the centralized platforms will continue muddle on with half measures.
I agree that it seems like the problem is more a lack of reputation and trust than decentralization. But how do we build trust in a decentralized network the size of the human population? How do I know if this username on my screen is publishing in good faith without some kind of transitive trust?
I might trust someone my real-world friends trust when it comes to local gossip. If I want trustworthy national news my only recourse seems to be to go through a centralized journalism institute. But which one? Well I'll probably look at what people around are looking at.
If there's a national broadcaster or dominant cable news channel in my country I'll probably look at that, but if I don't like what I see I may be biased to go search out another institution that I find more agreeable. Then you get things like Macedonian teens running sites dressed up to look like US-based newspapers posting straight-up bullshit because there's always a market telling people what they want to hear.
How can we build a decentralized system to overcome people's biases and laziness? People are going to gravitate to sources their friends and family use, and collectively to sources that fit their preexisting beliefs. It's no wonder we're in this situation where people are struggling to agree on reality.
>> Only a decentralized approach to trust and reputation will scale well enough to regulate decentralized content
But what if a decentralized network of trust collectively agree that covid is a hoax and the Earth is flat? I'm not sure if the (de)centralization of the underlying technology really has an impact on that problem.
Transitive trust / Web-of-Trust is the solution I think. You do need to find one trustworthy entry point to such a web of trust, maybe a journalist or a news source that you trust. Once you trust one node in a network that is providing trust ratings of other nodes, you start to have some footing to judge content and authors.
Within this network, you may have a pocket of users who espouse Flat earth theory, but I believe if you were to rely on such users for trust ratings, the picture of the world created would be so incoherent, it would simply be unbearable.
> Within this network, you may have a pocket of users who espouse Flat earth theory, but I believe if you were to rely on such users for trust ratings, the picture of the world created would be so incoherent, it would simply be unbearable.
I'm not sure I understand your pessimism. Are you legitimately concerned that, unchecked, flat earthers might actually "turn" the entire population? If everyone agrees that the earth is flat it may as well be so.
If the concern is that some people will hold mistaken beliefs then I am not sure there is a technological or sociological solution to the problem. I believe there will be people holding mistaken beliefs regardless of whether the world's information channels are "decentralized" but I agree with your parent's poster that a decentralized approach is the only approach that does not come with a high probability that the majority will be coerced or gaslit into holding false beliefs at some point in time.
> I'm not sure I understand your pessimism. Are you legitimately concerned that, unchecked, flat earthers might actually "turn" the entire population?
Not at all, but the fact is that these beliefs are growing at all thanks to the web. There are always going to be some people with completely illogical fringe beliefs. Conspiracy theories were always a thing. It's just not that despite the quality of these conspiracy theories dropping (seriously...the Earth is flat? That hasn't been a topic of debate for a loooong time), their reach and number of adherents are going up. That seems like a pretty clear regression in our society. We shouldn't be complacent about regression.
> ... a decentralized approach is the only approach that does not come with a high probability that the majority will be coerced or gaslit into holding false beliefs at some point in time.
But I don't understand how decentralized tech is somehow going to be more immune to this than the current web, which is already decentralized in most ways. Anyone can host a blog on their PC and publish what they want. We thought the blogosphere was the start of this golden age. But people aren't techies, they choose to centralise with providers like Google for gmail (email is a federated, decentralized protocol!) and Facebook for social media.
If IPFS takes off, what makes it immune from people going with the same massive provider all their friends and family are on? There's no hard barrier stopping everyone from moving off Google and Facebook tomorrow with the current web, but they won't. The big players understand this, that's why Google pays Apple billions a year to make Google the default search engine. That's all it takes to ensure everyone keeps using Google. Competition is literally a click away, people just don't click.
That said, I do support the decentralization efforts. It seems like an improvement over the current technology. I just don't buy into the hype that it's going to cure any of the problems we're seeing now. Our problem is less one of censorship, more overload of bots and bad actors.
> If everyone agrees that the earth is flat it may as well be so.
Except that it's a real, measurable regression in our knowledge as a species. I get the point you're making but that doesn't give me comfort, hence the pessimism.
Personally I am not worried that flat-earthers will turn all of us, so I am not uncomfortable, but I agree that such a regression would be quite unpalatable.
Rather, I believe that the majority of people will continue to understand the earth as "round" and will be more likely to believe the (also minority) science pedants when they say "actually, it's more slightly egg-shaped" than they will the ravings of someone who does not believe in satellites.
The beautiful trick of decentralization is not that it has any ability to prevent wrong-information from being disseminated, but that it ensures that correct-information will be disseminated regardless of any co-existing propaganda campaign to the contrary. In a centralized censorable system this guarantee cannot be met.
I believe that as long as correct-information is available the majority of humans will eventually find consensus with it.
I am not convinced that fringe ideas like flat-earthism are necessarily growing or that they would be doing so because of the web. It is likely that the web is just exposing, for the first time, the true extant of the population that is willing to accept fringe theories which while I agree is a disconcertingly large percentage, still does not seem to be the majority of people.
That said, roughly half the people I talk to still seem to fully accept and believe in some sort of literal sky god and roughly a third still seem to take in earnest the existence of actual ghosts, luck, karma, or other such poorly supported meta-think as obvious truths. But I believe this number is way way down from 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1000 years ago... I believe more people are finding consensus with actual truth due in large part to the awesome power of decentralized messaging systems we've built to date starting with language and so far culminating at the internet and the nascent social and technical overlays that are being built on-top of it.
The web already provides this: people or groups can publish under semi-stable names, linked to their real identity or not, and people can hyperlink to each other's content. The link graph is the web of trust and Google famously uses it to rank content. What is it really missing?
I guess theoretically and in some ways in practice. But I’m thinking more along the lines of “search through the web only returning results bookmarked with 2 degrees of trust” or something like that. Where each of the nodes are not documents but are identities- which may often tie 1:1 to a human
Isn't that basically newspapers? Journalists post articles and links to indicate they're at least interesting if not trustworthy, and usually under their own name. Webs of trust never worked for cryptography though.
At the very least, people would need a reliable way of indicating whether the site they are linking to is one they are endorsing or criticising, and there would need to be some clever crawler that can calculate a trustworthiness score from this graph for each page you visit.
Presumably this would be implemented as a browser extension. It could also recommend similar pages with a higher score, and maybe highly scored pages that offer a different perspective on the same topic as the page you are reading.
Google let's you link to a page without transmitting PageRank. There's no notion of transmitting negative rank because of course that would be horribly abused by competitors trying to sink each others sites.
I think the web is pretty good as a decentralised systems for ideas. A lot of basic stuff isn't exploited though. For instance a simple way to set up networks of caching proxies and point browsers towards them, so sites can survive ddos attacks and be fully anonymised would be good. CDNs like cloudflare provide that today but tools for smaller scale equivalents would be great.
Right now, on Twitter, I can have a list of people I follow. I assume this is something like saying I "trust" them in some way.
I get a feed full of stuff from them, and stuff they've re-tweeted ie said explicitly that they trust, etc.
The whole "social network" thing really is approximately the same shape as an explicitly reified "web of trust". I would not expect the results to be terribly different, other than the added effort of having additional explicit system entities to manage.
Decouple "trust" from "authentic". "web of trust" is almost a misnomer. The root problem is verified identity, aka authenticity. Whereas trust implies a judgment about the content.
The ability to confirm provenance of speech, that a known person claims the words spoken, would be very useful. Completely independent of fact checking, agreement, truthiness.
People using the system to say things that I don't like, won't be "solved" by letting everyone have the system help them find whoever they tell it they trust.
Using a trust / reputation system to prevent wrongthink means it has to be a centralized reputation system, where anyone too far from the median (or who the Cabal doesn't like, if you design it to not trust the general userbase) gets shut down.
Also, why would a decentralized system be able to have a stronger effect that the efforts Twitter and Facebook are currently taking to flag or block wrongthink? If those efforts are "half measures", what sort of "full measure" would this reputation system impose? And if it's really distributed, how would that be imposed?
I disagree with the author in very strong terms - but only with their premises, not with their conclusions. The conclusions are accurate - if you believe that the ability to censor public discourse is necessary to maintain a stable and desirable society, then of course IPFS and similar projects are counter-productive.
(FWIW it's refreshing to actually see this being argued openly and honestly, instead of the usual "of course we support free speech, but ..." tripe.)
The parade of horribles presented as evidence is not particularly convincing, though, although bias (either way) can make a big difference here. But while we're at it, since the blog post mentioned the Christchurch shooting in 8chan context as an example of the case where censorship would be desirable, I want to talk about the censorship that happened after - specifically, the attempts to take down copies of the terrorist's manifesto that were floating around. NZ apparently had some emergency legal powers to criminalize distribution outright, which is bad enough. But the real mess was Australia; they didn't have any legal pretext to ban it, but there was a strong social consensus - among people who make decisions, anyway - that "somebody ought to do something".
So, the Australian ISPs made a synchronized private effort to censor it, to the point of domain-blocking several large forums where the manifesto was posted and not removed by the local admins (because it didn't violate their lax rules, nor local laws!), while the government caught up on legislation. Effectively, it was a private censorship cartel, and the citizens that didn't like the outcome had no recourse - not even the usual democratic mechanisms to repeal the laws etc, since there were no laws involved. This is the kind of stuff that the present non-decentralized structure of the Internet makes possible, and the inherent power makes it a near certainty that it'll be abused eventually, whether for cynical political suppression or a do-gooder witch hunt. I'd rather take my risks with more decentralization - some parts might stink more than others, but at least I'll have a choice.
Knuth writes in the beginning of The Art of Computer Programming that he will deliberately lie to the reader, to further her understanding of the main subject.
> if you believe that the ability to censor public discourse is necessary to maintain a stable and desirable society
I understand this can make sense, when reading capacity of each individual is limited
I think this is actually very insightful. What if we agree with Knuth, and we add "but only sporadically and in a limited way"? That's a much more subtle and interesting line of thought.
When you get a advance warning about a "lie", is it really still a lie? Although I would argue that even if it is, the warning is enough for you to establish consent to be lied to, so it's not actually harming you. Real censorship is different.
Of course, the real problem with censorship is that whoever ends up in charge of it, automatically gets immense political power - including the ability to suppress opposition to censorship, thus perpetuating the arrangement. I would argue that the only reason why we haven't seen more abuses of that yet is because the Internet infrastructure was not originally designed to make such large-scale censorship easy, and as this changes more towards centralization, censorship will be more pervasive and more oppressive, as well. Countries where the government could mandate infrastructure tailored to censorship (e.g. China) are a good example. Now, some argue that, so long as functioning democracy is retained, it doesn't matter, because any such censorship in a democracy would be majoritarian in nature, and thus it's a fundamentally different and justifiable case, but one only has to look at historical moral panics in various democracies to see the flaw in this argument.
You are conflating censorship with moderation (a.k.a self-censorship), particularly by stating that "there were no laws involved". eg. If you have kids in a school and someone makes innuendo to do significant major harm to that school you have the RIGHT to remove that post even if it's not legally required. The "private censorship cartel" you speak of may have just been a precautionary reflex to stop future litigation or even widescale boycott of one's online service, which is a direct democracy, since you mention democratic mechanisms.
Fwiw, the Australian who carried out the act in question here in NZ did so because Australia had banned the specific weapons used after the Hobart massacre. We here in NZ hadn't experienced such a massacre and were slow to act. He was easily able to legally acquire the weapons here that may have been very hard to acquire at home, thus the Australian problem was "exported" to a softer target in a near jurisdiction. I expect the early online reaction in Australia may have been tacit acknowledgement of this fact.
Censorship is restriction on others' flow of information. Legal censorship by governments is only one of its many forms, and private censorship has a very long history. What the ISPs did in Australia was very much censorship, since Internet users in the country were locked out from several websites, even if they wanted to access the content there.
I also don't think that justification matters all that much - indeed, the whole point is that, just because the majority of the population might want to censor something, that doesn't make such censorship any more inherently legitimate. The laws against "gay propaganda" in Russia are similarly supported by the majority of the population, but they're no less wrong and oppressive for that. .
> "Censorship is restriction on others' flow of information."
There was nothing stopping people emailing the manifesto to each other privately using any archive formats. That is different from having to provide a free soapbox for supporters of the manifesto. Just as you have the right to block someone commenting on your Twitter posts. The ISPs are businesses and have legal terms and conditions to remove anything. That is not censorship. Here in NZ it became illegal to transfer the manifesto, but primarily the video which was deemed offensive under existing censor laws.
> "The laws against "gay propaganda" in Russia are similarly supported by the majority of the population, but they're no less wrong and oppressive for that."
If the Russian example you give is supported by the majority then that is by definition democratic, even though propaganda created that public sentiment in the first place. Should propaganda (manifestos of hate in this case) be censored? Your own example suggests "yes it should".
> If the Russian example you give is supported by the majority then that is by definition democratic, even though propaganda created that public sentiment in the first place. Should propaganda (manifestos of hate in this case) be censored? Your own example suggests "yes it should".
Not at all. If you give governments powers to censor people, sooner or later you will have someone in power that will use those tools maliciously against their own populace.
Therfore you don't allow a government (or anyone else for that matter) to censor except in very specific circumstances e.g. when the content is considered obscene (child pornography being an example).
That why it is important that everyone has a right to speak their mind, even if it highly objectionable.
There was nothing, yes. But if Austalian mail providers joined the fray, the same excuse would apply to them as well. At what point does it become "genuine" censorship on your scale? Even in China, there are ways to get past the firewall, so if the ability to pass information somehow is sufficient to have freedom of speech, then China has that.
The Russian example doesn't work out the way you think it does, though. Yes, it's by definition democratic, and it's also oppressive - but saying that the propaganda that led to its popularity should be censored to prevent such laws amounts to saying that democracy is a sham, because people should only be allowed (by whom?) to hold "safe" opinions. If that argument were made openly - that we should abandon democracy in favor of rule by the enlightened elite, because people just can't be trusted to make the right choices unconstrained - I'd still disagree, but that would be a different conversation. But advocating censorship of political propaganda for the purpose of maintaining the illusion of democracy is just hypocritical.
My actual takeaway from that story is simply that nobody should have the power to do such things on a large scale. In a more decentralized political system, there can still be localized hotspots of oppression - but they don't suddenly apply to tens of millions of people at once, and with no easy way to escape.
I wonder if that applied to sites like drive.google.com... If you are going to censor, you should treat all the players equally. The annoyance from customers when google doesn't work after all is small price to pay right?
I like that people write about this kind of things, as it shows they care about the direction they are walking towards. The essay is more an exposition of uncertainty and personal preference than actual arguments, but it's a good start to get more people talking about it. So let's do that.
I'd like to focus on one point: when you have millions of people interconnected, even "radical" ideas can find a place and resonate with others, and even become amplified. Gwern's "the melancholy of subculture society" [0] might be a good introduction to the topic. This is not inherently good or bad. We might be afraid of nazis of whatever, but the same dynamics also benefit oppressed groups and minorities for whom anonymity and this opportunity to connect with other people in similar situations is highly beneficial. I recently watched a video where Diana Fleischman presented this argument in favor of anonymity: without it, there might be no escape from certain totalitarian and manipulative regimes. Now, you might pick a side if you want. The truth is that we see examples of both in today's world. You might say that education could help with extremist views, so we shouldn't give up on decentralized, anonymous, uncensorable networks. You might say the same about totalitarian regimes or centralized monopolistic powers.
From a practical perspective, I think a good start is to acknowledge that decentralized and uncensorable networks already have good proofs of concept, and that in the future they will indeed become accessible to everyone. The question is not whether they will become mainstream or not, but what are the challenges we have to prepare ourselves for in case they do become mainstream. And to do that we need a deeper understanding of the dynamics of these small groups, and, in general, of online interaction. And again, this is already happening, even if decentralized networks could make this even more common. So I think the best path forward is to start educating people on the "dark sides" of online interaction: how the lack of eye contact and physical presence allows you to express yourself with less consideration of others (they can't punch you back even if you are rude), how echo chambers work, how extremist views are amplificated online because it's almost the only medium where they can expand through (and how that's not an accurate reflection of the average perspective on a topic), how conversation is highly decontextualized, how addiction, FOMO and infinite scroll impair our attention and might even induce a feeling or sense of detemporalization in our lives, etc. Summarizing, how online conditioning makes us act as different creatures than in real life, and the need to be able to tell those creatures appart, both in others and ourselves. Of course, real life has its own share of conditioning too. What's even the real you. Have fun.
Now this is the kind of comment I was hoping to find in this thread.
I'd like to highlight what I think is one of the more insidious "challenges we have to prepare ourselves for": bad-faith communicators.
I have faith in the ability of people to have a meaningful discussion given that all participants are taking part in "good faith". That is, I am trying to convey an honestly held idea or question using language to you, and you are trying to parse that communication in a manner to grasp my intended meaning. This is the hard problem in all communication as language is inexact and none of us perfect. But if we all buy in to this system, it's amazing at how well it works at building consensus and fostering useful debate. This good faith buy-in lies at the heart of functional democracy.
We all know that it's harder to communicate over the web. As OP mentioned, lack of eye contact and physical presence reduces the available bandwidth we have to get our point across. But the fact that we can talk to so many more people than before seems to make up for the deficiencies.
But we're seeing more and more bad-faith actors abusing this system. They don't want to explain a point so that it can be discussed and debated. They want to implant a thought or idea in an audience in order to alter behaviour in a way that benefits them. We're seeing nation states conducting manipulative campaigns against their rivals' (or their own) population. If you're a democratic nation this kind of campaign is tantamount to an attack against you (it's degrading your nation's capability to make the best decisions it can, doing real harm). But even if you're not a democracy, having a foreign nation convince your population something like COVID isn't real causes real-world harm to you.
Combined with our highly connected social media networks these attacks are growing increasingly effective. How does anyone fight this?
I'm somewhat cynical that education will turn out to be the solution. Is there really any way to train a population to spot and negate bad-faith communication with such proficiency that these attacks are nullified? When nations start hitting each other hard enough to do real damage, but not enough to unilaterally wipe each other out, my bet is that they're going to fall back to the historical solution for balancing power: demarcating zones of control, ie "borders".
...and this is why, despite sharing the same concerns as the author of the article, I think I still come down on supporting the decentralized web. We're in a unique point of human history where we can communicate irrespective of borders, and I would hate to lose that capability because of hordes of trolls. Maybe if we just keep the UX real shit we can avoid another eternal September? (only half joking)
I actually have a reversed view of what you say about good/bad faith. I think bad-faith communicators are a group small enough that if enough people actually had the ability to have meaningful discussions (which requires being able to focus on the communicative intent behind the words), then bad-faith communicators would be left without targets. I don't think the biggest obstacle to meaningful discussion is a lack of good faith or excess of bad faith or available technologies, but rather that communication is hard and most people suck at it, making it basically a game of confusion. I mean, for most topics we only come up with "rational" arguments in order to try to validate our own perspectives, but rarely think rationally about them. We have feelings and impressions, accumulated through our life experience, which help us develop our "intuition"... and I value intuition very highly, but it's also very often very wrong, and I personally find that almost everyone practices communication as a very lousy rationalization game of attaching bad arguments to honest intuitions. Large scale consensus is not possible under this situation, and in my opinion, changing this requires far more than good faith.
I don't agree with this article. Every tech can be used for the right and the wrong. The fact something is used in a bad way should not prevent us from building the tech so we can reap the benefits of the good uses it can offer.
One example for a decentralized web benefit that I see promising: wouldn't it be just amazing if you had something like Facebook, but all the posts were not owned by Facebook? Just think of the possibilities to use your own UI, have your own recommendation algorithm etc... This can be amazing. I deeply want something like. However it cannot be done as long as the data is owned by Facebook.
On a purely technical note, something being "fully decentralized" would usually imply low reach. To amplify voices a platform has to be conceptually centralized enough to allow for a common experience. Which comes with the ability to impose rules. People may disagree on what the rules should be, but the great majority do want some.
The notion of huge swaths of people being sucked into some totally anonymous decentralized platform with no rules and nobody in charge sounds implausible.
What are some p2p platforms and techs that have the best content / productive uses? BitTorrent, email, Mastodon, DNS, WebRTC and Tor come to mind for me. What makes them different?
They don't try to be entirely decentralized. Or entirely centralized. They balance between both. DNS still requires registrars and root servers if you want the whole world to be able to find you, but works just fine as well without those bits if you are fine with having a smaller community and can run a private root.
Ultimately I tend to think societies do best when the forces of aggregation and disaggregation can balance each other out and optimise for each other's strengths and weaknesses.
Imagining Marconi or Alexander Graham Bell storming off in a huff because someone said shit they don't like using their technology. Technology which obviously has been used for far more horrible things collectively than the internet or .... IPFS.
This attitude, however popular it may be among the coddled infants of current year, is a form of barbarism. Being threatened by ideas is hilariously insecure unless you believe your ethical and ontological system is a network of lies. Hell current year ding dongs fall apart into a froth at the mere writing of words -let alone the formation of them into something resembling ideas.
FWIIW IPFS is amazing, and fortunately doesn't need the contributions of such people to thrive.
Murdering people for holding the wrong opinions (see e.g [0]) is not something unique for coddled infants. Charlemagne did it, every tyrant in the world has and continue to do it, the inquisition did it. The 30 years war was, at least on the surface, a war about which version of Christianity leaders were allowed to believe in.
It idea that you should not murder people who disagreed with you, if you had the ability to do so, is an enlightenment idea, which still has not been fully embraced by most people.
In addition the complaint in the article was that it would encourage other people to do bad things, not that the author felt threatened by the words themselves but by what they might cause another third party to do.
My personal solution to that is to punish the person who did the crime, bringing back medieval torture executions in public if that is required to prevent people from doing these things.
> It has tilted many democracies towards right-wing populism and fascism.
Surely the obvious counterargument to this is that a fully centralized web tilts democracies towards left-wing communism and censorship-enabled dystopias.
Right now a small group of left-wing zealots at Facebook/Twitter/Google can erase a person from the web. Is that good?
Do technologists want to enable this?
Mass bans are happening right now on twitter, often with no reason given and terms of service that allow a privileged few to exercise unlimited and arbitrary censorship.
The very fact that people who are politically on the left are calling for an end to decentralized tech is evidence that their side has a systematic advantage at the most powerful censorship agents in the centralized web. This post, and others like it, is an admission and a justification for why decentralization is necessary. If such posts instead merely talked about apolitical crimes like child abuse or scams, then I think the justification for decentralization would be much weaker.
this isnt even about the tech. He just doesn't want free speech/unrestricted speech because he's afraid others who don't share his views might be convincing in their argument. People like him are exactly the reason these technologies are so important. He hasen't lived in counties where they shutdown the internet on will to prevent people from getting information, or outright jailed people for saying anything negative about the patriarch on the internet.
I think there is merit to his argument in the sense that we don’t know what will happen.
We didn't anticipate any schmuck having a global platform and their fellow schmucks being able to vote. Seriously, our founding fathers did not anticipate this when only literate land owners could vote, and our ideology is based on that.
It is accurate that we don't have a society that factors in the ramifications of that either, only our brainwashing of the free speech ideology.
His conclusion may not be the accurate one, but we can acknowledge that neither extreme of restricted speech or completely hands off of technology is the answer for our future.
486 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadYet, in the long run, societies that embraced this chaotic power did better than those that tried to repress it.
Will the same be true this time?
The scale of the Internet's "printing power" is already millions of times bigger than that of the renaissance printing press.
I'm just not really sure about the omnipresence of the Internet. Too much of a good thing, you know; the sheer volume of information is insane, usually unless someone actively and awarely combats it. Then there comes the questions of whether and how much pieces of that information are meritorious and beneficial.
True, but much of that "printing power" benefits the behemoths through their central nodes on the network.
If everyone's not locked down device were also acting as shared consensus/validation on crypto transactions with payouts (instead of ledgers at banks and ZIRP account payouts), partial distributed file storage (instead of on AWS/Azure/GCP), etc, then a lot of the benefits the behemoths have would decrease (while the benefits non- behemoths have increase). I think this will be the case in the long run as the costs go down, knowledge of implementing such capabilities go up and the incentives to move in this direction go up, but getting to such a state can happen outside of our lifetimes.
I think we are still in the power-building stages. There is no real alternative to Facebook/YouTube/etc. yet. But say, 30 years from now, there probably will be. Combined with increasing governmental hostility, we'll probably see a deeply fractured internet, undercut by a (semi-illegal) totally open one.
Civil society, in theory, is supposed to be about keeping civil with people that you have fundamental disagreements with - so that society can function. That has morphed into one highly religious in tone, in which it's not merely enough to tolerate other people - you have to convert them, and if they refuse to comply, excommunicate (deplatform) them.
Because it gets to the point where it becomes young adults planning mass shootings on the Internet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...
The problem is that there is no such thing as "freedom of speech" it's BS, there is a right to have an opinion, but some opinions are crimes and should never become speech, let alone be public
Corollary: public speech must be granted to everyone, because it's in the US Constitution, but you should not use it to badmouth the US
No. The US does not criminalize thought, and doing so would be tyranny.
you should not use it to badmouth the US
Also No. The very purpose of freedom of speech and the press is to maintain channels for criticism and change.
That's why nobody takes Americans seriously and they need so many guns to get attention
Fascism is a crime in Italy, it's in the Constitution
Nazism is a crime in Germany as well
They are not opinions, they are crimes
Of course not for the US that saved lots of them and brought them home
Or supported them when they literally destroyed South America instating far right dictatorships...
> The very purpose of freedom of speech and the press is to maintain channels for criticism and change
Says the country where every year tens of mass shooting episodes happen and never changed anything to prevent them, despite being the only place in the developed World where it happens and an insurmountable amount of criticism
Do you mind if I don't buy your BS?
Did you ever lived outside of it?
Not as an occupant of course, because that's what usually Americans living abroad do
The point is to prove that "freedom of speech" said by American corporations is ridiculous and nobody should believe it, on the contrary, everybody should start to worry
That's the point you are missing.
> whatever you're doing isn't making the world better.
Imagine what a nation founded to avoid taxation and that became a superpower by securing resources in half of the World by starting wars or supporting dictators that committed genocides is doing to make the World better...
We've asked you many times not to do this and have had to ban you many times. If it happens again, we will ban your main account as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Hard disagree here. Unless you're using some definition of crime I've never heard of, opinions can never be crimes in the US.
Even the advocacy of violence is constitutionally protected speech here.
Looks like 99% of the mass shootings are organized by young people and 99% of them happens in the US (in the west)
(I just realized that both happened mere blocks of my residence at the time. Maybe if I become homeless we will be able to prevent these horrific events)
> men running trucks over people in Christmas markets like in Berlin?
This is one of those events that we can consider extremely rare.
Nobody can prevent the actions of some lone wolf
Anyway, the point is that we can not solve social issues with technological solutions. You are just acting on the symptoms but still never going to get a cure. Block a "cancerous" open site, and crazy sick people are just continue to do what they do in a darker corner of the net.
Like a few times in a century, not hundreds times in a year, every year, sir.
Closing social networks is not a technological solution, it's political.
Public speech must not be controlled by private entities
Unless you are the US and don't understand it.
Crazy people with their forums for crazy people have no ability to target hundreds of millions of people through paid ads
Please, try to understand it, because it's really not that hard
There's a reason why every developed country in the World strictly controls firearms but not knifes
There's a reason why the only "developed" country where mass shootings happen all the time is the only developed country that refuses to strictly control firearms
It's the most evident proof of Einstein law of insanity
This is part where we disagree. Not that I am defending that private entities should "control" public speech, but rather that this control is circunstancial. Remove Facebook and Twitter (and every big media conglomerate as well, FOX, CNN, NBC) all you want, people will still look for groups that share their views and messages that confirm their biases.
This is not just a guess. I am seeing this first-hand with the people looking into leaving Twitter and joining Mastodon. Go to /r/mastodon and you will see me arguing with every one that comes with the idea that different instances mean different "communities" and "interests".
Also, consider the alternative. The article is saying that we shouldn't want a decentralized web. Who would you propose to "control" public speech? If not private companies and if not smaller groups, the only alternatives left is, guess what, Big State and tyrants
Those places didn't weaponize their feelings and weaknesses against them to sell them ads
Want to make a global social network?
The State should be able to control them (every single state they operate in) and their decisions should be held accountable in court
The SN banned you?
They should have human support to solve the issues and a judge could overrule the decision, while now they are black holes
I trust the State, more than Facebook, if someone doesn't they shouldn't impose their decisions on other groups, including other countries
It's weird to read that people living in countries where the police can arrest you for not stepping out of the car or saying to a police officer to f*ck off defend the right to wear swastikas or private companies keeping public speech hostage in the name of freedom
Decentralised web can exists only among many small actors, when there are a few behemoth that control everything, of course segregation is gonna be the most obvious response: Russian internet, Chinese internet and let's hope European internet soon.
This can be said of every media company. Every newspaper, magazine (low-brow or high brow), radio, TV station, cable TV company.
Every. Single. One.
> I trust the State, more than Facebook.
It doesn't matter who you trust more. It matters who you are able to disengage from. We as individuals and as groups can choose to keep Facebook of our lives. Can the Chinese say the same from the CCP?
> segregation is gonna be the most obvious response (...) let's hope European Internet
So, you are so afraid of Facebook's "control" of the internet that you would actively advocate to put in the hands of tyrants and kleptocrats?
Either you don't understand the concept of "decentralized web" or you are just fucking with me.
No.
It can't.
How can you even believe something so ridiculous?
> It matters who you are able to disengage from.
It matters that the State is not profit based and is under public control.
Chinese are more free than many Americans
I would strongly prefer to be Chinese than black in USA
But what baffles me more are people always bringing up CCCP without even knowing about the different positions in the communist space (that people like you often confuse with socialism)
For example you even ignore the existence of the Sino-Soviet split of 1956
> o, you are so afraid of Facebook's "control" of the internet that you would actively advocate to put in the hands of tyrants and kleptocrats?
It's definitely true that arguing with stupid people is a useless waste of energy.
And no matter how bad it is, it is still better than State-owned media, which bypasses the whole marketing mechanisms and just relies on the ruling power to keep the very same type of public control through fear and intimidation.
Regarding China and freedom: tell me if you prefer to be Black in the US or a Uighur in a concentration camp. Afterwards tell me which people gets to more or less manipulated by their media.
Nope.
That's an American centric view, there are other markets outside of US and they don't operate in the same way at all.
> Regarding China and freedom: tell me if you prefer to be Black in the US or a Uighur in a concentration camp
Maybe you don't realise it, but your answer represent everything's wrong in US and why people don't believe in US BS anymore.
Black people in US aren't even considered Americans, nobody ever answered to me "they are not black, they are Americans"
Nobody ever challenged the idea that black people in US are lesser people in the first place
nobody!
In fact to find something worse you had to resort to bringing up concentration camps, while I simply said. "I would prefer to be Chinese that black in USA"
I stand on my idea
concentration camps < being black in USA < being Chinese in China
I don't know where you are from, but as someone who grew up in Brazil, lived in the US for ~5 years and now has 7 years in both Northern and Southern Europe and close relationships in the Middle East: globalization is real. Someone autistic like you may not notice due to subtle differences to adapt to local cultures and local flavors, but the message everywhere is to get people to measure themselves by what they consume and to stimulate consumption by creating needs where there are none.
It's, as the same implies, a spectrum.
I've lived in the US, New York, Los Angeles and Columbus Ohio for a brief period.
(I also lived in Berlin and Barcelona, but that doesn't really count as a radically different experience for an European)
I have strong northern African looks, but am still white and loved every moment in the US.
But the devil is in the details, I could not ignore that when my friends there told me that some neighborhood was dangerous it really was dangerous, not dangerous as we usually mean it when we say it in Italy.
I could not ignore the staggering amount of homicides reported in the news.
This year LA will surpass 300 homicides in a year, Italy has 12 times the population of LA and there were "only" 270 homicides last year.
I could not ignore that the police is scary there and you should not talk to them or engage in any way.
I swear I notice a difference when I see one.
Having said that.
Globalization is real, but the media here are not trying to exploit my weaknesses to sell me ads, they are putting ads on their products, generic ads, not "I know who you are and I know you're gonna like this" ads.
I'm ok with the first kind, not so much with the latter.
The point of decentralised web is a misguiding one.
The decentralised web is the web!
Everyone can build their own website and host it at home on a raspberry PI on their connection.
That's what made the web a novelty that could (hopefully) spread culture and knowledge.
The dicotomy between centralised and decentralised web was born because the web has been taken away from people and transformed in a targeted ads delivery machine by the same companies that sell ads (FB, Twitter, Instagram and most of all Google, they sell ads as a primary business)
They are fighting to get screen attention so that they can deliver even more ads to the people.
And when we say ads we are not simply talking about product advertisement, we are talking about political ads used to radicalise the debate, that the same companies selling ads control, thanks to the network effect.
And since the majority of companies doing it are American, I blame the USA that let them do it
As paradoxical as it might sound China doesn't need to sell ads to people to convince the people to support this or that position, because there is no alternative position.
They rely on good old State propaganda, which existed for centuries ans has been studied for decades and is a well understood topic.
At the end of the day, media that doesn't turn society into idiots that undermine national interests has its virtues and maybe preferrable. That was once the case with tame free media before much of it turned into divisive reality TV. Similarly you can have dangerous state media that whip up nationalist frenzy, cause sectarian violence etc, or you could have boring ass state media and manage civic engagement for political serenity. All media are manipulated, all narratives shaped, blatantly manipulating media for serenity to a knowing population self-fulfilling properties. People stop giving a shit about politics, and politicians end up government instead of campaigning. Prerequisite is having a good system for selecting competent leadership in the first place.
This is not unambiguously endorsing state media as good, but decline of free media in many places is simply that bad. Some countries still have passable public broadcasting, but for how long, and whether commercial pivot for ads + anxiety is terminal transition.
For Uyghurs: under the most delusional estimates, Chinese Uyghurs still have less lifetime chance of being in a indoctrination camp than US blacks in US prison industrial complex. For much shorter sentences. After they'll be coerced to work in vocational program for more pay, even adjusted for exchange rate. Not US prison labour moving covid bodies tier coerced labour, but actual useful jobs designed to transition into society instead of recidivate back into for profit prisons. China actually wants to integrate minorities instead of exclude, even at extreme costs. So I suppose the answer is, it's better to be a Chinese Uyghur in a few generations after they've been sinicized and integrated than a Black American in 20 years who will still be getting executed on the street and fighting equal treatment.
Take the Hong Kong situation. If "highinfo/curious" chinese people in mainland China look at it and just repeat the Party line of "they are just troublemakers" instead of supporting them as loudly and as effectively as they can, then all this awareness of being fed propaganda is as good as nothing.
I mean, you are actually parroting the bullshit about concentration camps being about "integrating minorities". Minorities that are being tortured and brainwashed into submission are not "integrated", just destroyed while keeping a shell of the people to show around.
Maybe mainlanders don't deem HK worthy of protection. Mainlanders cared about pollution, they protested, government responded. They lost their shit at poor safety due to rapid development (aviation, high speed rail, food, medicine), the government responded. They were disgruntled over pork prices. The government responded. Chinese society skews old, conservative and anti LGBT. Government unfortunately responded. Unprecedented MeToo trials happening right now. Government responding. Sufficiently significant issues that elicit widespread attention gets addressed, Chinese people advocate for themselves all the time.
> fed propaganda
Fact is pork prices is literally a bigger problem to mainlanders than plight of privileged HKers with historic acrimonious relationship. This is a well understood dynamic, suggesting HKers would have ever got mainstream mainland support because of propaganda and not bad blood is exactly the kind of anglosphere illiteracy on China I'm talking about. ProHK / pro liberal reform voices exist but not much. Why? HK protestors from mainland perspective: young, nativist, disillusioned but privileged individuals who spread shit about mainlanders on social media for years... Yeah, I just described alt-right. Is it any surprise they got minimal support. Lots of mainland diaspora in the west with access to both side of the story, did meaningful numbers come out to support HK? No, they had access to both sides of the story, they just knew better.
>integration
Of course the goal is integration, CCP is not spending tremendous resources to be cruel for shits and giggles. If Han knew how much was going into XJ they'd protest, due to costs not human rights. Like people everywhere, the public would rather the minorities rot than take disproportionate resources. But unlike democracies, CCP can actually ignore public sentiment. Some in this generation will be a shell, their descendants will be integrated. It's ugly, but things move fast in Chinese 5 year plans. None of this long arc of justice nonsense. It's not right, but history will judge relative wrongness compared to locking up 1/4 of black Americans or trapping indigenous peoples in backwater reserves forever.
Weird and revealing double standard you got there, comparing "Chinese" as a collective to "many" Americans.
I can think of "many" Chinese who are much, much, much less free than nearly all Americans. Can you? Or do those folks not count.
> It's definitely true that arguing with stupid people is a useless waste of energy.
Indeed.
Chinese are collectively more or less in the same situation, they are ethnically mostly the same people and live under the same rules, Americans are not.
Few very reach Americans enjoy all the freedom power can buy, everyone else either comply or suffer the consequences
You really did not know?
> Chinese who are much, much, much less free than nearly all Americans
Nope.
I don't believe in the kind of freedom Americans believe to possess
It's simply a different kind of tyranny
Unless you mean the freedom to be shot in the streets.
For example: there are 700 people in jail every 100k citizens in USA, they are only 115 in China.
In 2008 USA had the 25% of the global World jail population
And you know why?
Because the private prison system in USA is highly profitable
USA has the lowest life expectancy of the whole west and it's only one year longer than China, despite being the country with the highest spending per capita in healthcare in the entire globe.
Is this the freedom you're talking about?
So no, USA is not a benchmark for anything good, including the exercise of free speech, which is only a lame excuse to not take action against extremists propaganda
> Indeed
So sometimes you experience moments of lucidity when you see yourself for what you really are?
That must hurt!
LOL. You "know" just enough to remain comfortable in your ideology, and your self-imposed media echo chamber is more than happy to feed that "knowledge" to you.
If you think you are credible outside your tribe... don't quit your day job. You're just as delusional as the people whose speech you wish to control, and hence provide an abject illustration of why we don't want state control of our speech.
And don't feel bad that China is still behind the US in so many ways, there will be a Great Leap Forward very soon!
Of course having elected a madmen you rose to the top of everything that's ridiculous, but still not at the level of things we really care about
There is no "media echo chamber" on the contrary, the media are quite aligned to being US allies no matter what, because US have always bought friendships with good money
On the other hand there are real situations you probably don't know about, being American and ignorant, that actually happen involving Americans here that if they happened on US soil, USA would have started a war
I can name just a few: Sigonella,Cermis, Ustica
But I can also name the many military bases on our soil that all the girls know toa void because if some American soldier rapes you, nobody will pay
And it happens a lot more than you imagine
But all in all the question remains: if the World average jail population is 156 people every 100k citizen, how is it possible that a country that has 5 times that should be considered more free?
Can you explain how the US prison system is better than the Norway's one and why we all should copy it?
Please.
Also, I don't wish to control anyone's speech, I know that it's hard to understand, but I simply don't want to let the control in the hands of American mega corporations, which, history proves, have never operated in good faith out of the kindness of their hearts, but only to keep spoiling poor people for their profit
And besides that, who cares if some troublemakers are killed off? The Han "collective" is not bothered by such minor things as individual rights and due process
They only kill their presidents, the brothers of the dead presidents, political activists who only wanted fair treatment for the minorities and of course regular citizens
https://www.salon.com/2010/04/07/assassinations_2/
They only kill people in other countries by starting wars on fake news or support Nazi dictatorships all over the world
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...
can you tell me anyway why in US there are still 700 people in jail every 100k while in Italy they are 112, the European average is 127 and the World average is 156?
Do you really believe that China has 15 million people in jail while they secretly killed 86 million (assuming they have the same rate of incarceration of the US) of them to not look bad in comparison to USA?
Do you really believe you can go from 700 to 115 by hiding the deaths?
Aere you really THAT stupid?
Second, you seem to be the under the impression that I defend the things done by the US State. I do not. It is precisely because I do not like the US State that I do not want to give it more power than it already has. In fact, it has been quite a bit amusing to see your cognitive dissonance of talking about all the horrible things that the US Government has done and yet you want me and everyone else to "Trust the State" with social media. It's almost as amusing as the cognitive dissonance you show when you say you want to take things out of control of "private entities" and put them to the control of the state that you so clearly (and justifiably) loathe.
> Do you really believe you can go from 700 to 115 by hiding the deaths?
Take just the million Uighur in "re-education centers" and call the thing by what it really is - a concentration camp - and suddenly this number already goes up quite a bit.
However, what you are failing to understand is that there is no point in comparing a country that has established (however flawed) democratic institutions with a country whose authoritarian rulers have unchecked powers. The numbers are meaningless if the masses are subjected to tyranny and indoctrinated to never question the authority of the leaders.
Can you tell me who wrote this and brought up political assassination?
Because I'm sure it wasn't me.
> Have you ever considered the possibility that China has "less people in prison" because their government just kills any dissident and "troublemaker" without any semblance of due judicial process?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25316054
> Take just the million Uighur in "re-education centers"
You mean like the Mexican kids kept in cages while their parents were being deported for the simple fact of being Mexicans?
How many people suffered because of this thing I will link here for the nth time?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...
And that's only one of many
What about this?
> effects of the Gulf War and over a decade of economic sanctions have resulted in the deaths of 500,000 children due to malnutrition, diarrhea, and other preventable diseases.
(The gulf war was started on a lie, fabricated by the US government)
I get it, you don't like the US State. Me neither.
You don't like Facebook. Guess what? Neither do I.
The point of our disagreement is that you seem to believe that people do only bad things because Big Bad American companies are manipulating them. And your solution is to destroy them by executive order and give all this power to... the US State!
The cognitive dissonance is so strong you simply refuse to acknowledge this point every time I mentioned, and you prefer to distill more diatribes against the US.
I am not interested in more diatribes against the US government. I dislike it and distrust it already to know that I don't want it to have more power. What I want to understand is what do you propose besides measures only seen in totalitarian dystopias.
Whataboutism is not what you think it is
If you ask, you might not like the answer.
Get over it.
> The cognitive dissonance is so strong you simply refuse to acknowledge this point every time I mentioned, and you prefer to distill more diatribes against the US.
Only because they did wrong, repeatedly.
Would you hire a pedophile as a kid educator?
> What I want to understand is what do you propose besides measures only seen in totalitarian dystopias.
Isn't the US government using the same measures only seen in totalitarian dystopias?
Assange, Mannings, Snowden and the poor Aaron Swartz are victims of which government?
For the simple fact that they exposed what the US government did.
Aaron Swartz only released public material to the public...
You can argue about solutions once you address the problem.
But what would you do to address the problem?
Keep bombing other countries?
Or ban people for saying out loud what's evident?
Freedom of speech
But not on HN
Because freedom of speech is valued only when they agree with you?
What's the difference between silencing what you don't like and totalitarian dystopias?
Funny
This website has rules about what you can say and what you can't say.
Nobody thinks it hinders the freedom of speech
But if someone says that it's not different from what totalitarian dystopias do, their karma goes below the level allowed to post anymore
So, I ask you, is freedom of speech an absolute value or is it not?
Who decides which rule enable better debates or it's censorship?
What does it mean whataboutism when someone addresses the elephant in the room: some country acted in a criminal way, exactly like other countries did, in a different way, but unilaterally deciding whatis good and what isn't anyway?
Am I allowed or not to exercise my freedom of speech right here on HM or am I not?
Why the fact that HN doesn't allow freedom of speech in a broad way makes it different from actors that deny the same right to others?
If I can't say what I want and are punished when I do it, what makes USA better than China in this regards?
Wouldn't it be better if it was the US State to protect the freedom of the people to express their opinions instead of some private company?
If you think about it China doesn't want people to talk about politics in the same way HN don't.
Where I come from challenging the status quo is a virtue, not a defect.
And that's probably how much different we are and the reason why you will never understand freedom, which is not granted, it's something you must fight for.
Bombing other countries it's not fighting for their freedom, it's imposing your own single point of view.
To answer your question: what I would do?
I would never put the public speech under private companies control.
Because that's what totalitarian dystopias do.
I live in a democracy and believe that being scared of the State that incarnates the democracy (what people chose to govern them) is no better than dictatorships.
Perhaps the ones you hear about are “ethnically mostly the same people”, but that's not actually true.
I will rephrase this way
"92% of Chinese people are part of the Han ethnic group but that doesn't mean that they are mostly the same people... oh no wait! IT DOES!"
You do know that saying bad things about $CountryX doesn't prove good things about $CountryY, and vice versa, right?
Are you jocking right?
1/15 is about 7%, did I say or did I not that ~92% of the people in China are from Han ethnic group?
92+7 = 99 so yeah, there are mostly the same people in China
I never said that the other ethnic minorities are uniformly distributed or that they do not exist.
For example anybody would say that in Italy the population is mainly formed by Italians.
And that would be true even though Italians in Italy have dropped to around 90% of the total.
Less than the Han in China.
As a slight tangent, Britain actually does strictly control knives - a short folding non-locking penknife is the only knife that can be carried in public without good reason, and “self defence” is considered never a good reason, and the penknife can still get you arrested if you happen to have it on you in an inappropriate place (bar, nightclub, sports event, etc).
But that's about carrying them, not owning them
The point is that you can buy a butcher knife or a chopper from IKEA but not a rifle gun
For obvious reasons
So you didn't notice they happened blocks away from you when they happened?
In other words, he's not arguing against the claim that a lot of mass shootings are organized by young people and that most of them happens in the Us.
He's saying that young adult planning those attacks on the internet is miniscule.
It is not
Unless you have proof that they only talk in person and through rotary phones
Being killed in a mass shooting in the US is only approximately one order of magnitude more likely than getting struck and killed by lighting in the US.
Free speech has never been free, some limitations has always existed. So I'm not sure what observable consequences you are talking about.
Free speech is not gratis.
It needs care.
https://youtu.be/BiqDZlAZygU
The real issue is echo chambers, and getting people to voluntarily cross- pollinate their bubbles. Censoring actually makes this issue worse though.
The action of that central power will be called censorship.
You could also try to have some guarantee of interoperability to reduce network effects and thus make the market effect weaker and reduce the selection for virality. That seems like something we could try.
Yet I don't see anyone calling for further control of The New York Times or implementing restrictions on the corporate media.
When racists (or similar "undesirables") share a larger platform they've kinda got to be on their best behaviour, they can't be too obvious instead they've got to be subtler and in doing so they likely attract more people to their cause because susceptible people tip toe in their direction gradually.
If they're all forced out onto their own platforms because of "muh free speech" the users won't tolerate being policed and so the absolute worst comes out and anyone stumbling across the community is going to be repelled fairly quickly.
There are two problems with this. The first is that it works both ways. If you expel all the heretics then your site becomes a cesspool of groupthink that immediately repels anyone who has had so much as a conversation with someone from the other side, because you'll be saying things that are transparently wrong to anyone who has had any real-world contact with the subject matter and be unable to correct yourself because anyone who spots the error fears being ejected for pointing it out.
And the second is that the version of the opposition on their best behavior for doing recruitment doesn't actually disappear, it just ends up in separate places. Your opponents will have their home base which is full of their own obviously wrong groupthink, but there will also continue to exist places where moderates gather.
Which means you have a new problem. The place where moderates gather will still have the subtle extremism you were trying to eject, but now, because your population hasn't been exposed to it, they're more susceptible to it. They're unvaccinated. So now you have to not only eject the extremists but also the moderates, because anyone who starts listening to the moderates may start to realize that some parts of the things your own extremists say aren't exactly true. Which puts them at high risk of switching to the other team. And you've already turned the other team into a coalition of crazy extremists. But ejecting the moderates turns your team into a coalition of crazy extremists, which is likewise quite ungood.
We choose our social circles and the material we consume in real life it's not unsurprising this happens online as well. These broad platforms like twitter, reddit e.t.c. aren't any more immune to this than offline.
Someone on that forum posts the following statement. "The concept of white privilege is anti-Semitic because the subset of white people who are doing better than black people are disproportionally Jewish."
The factual component is true, it's not obviously spam, so the moderators leave it there. But what happens when people on the left read that?
It pits members of the same coalition against each other. If you're black you start wondering whether Jewish privilege is a term you should start employing, but you're not likely to be pleased with the response if you do, and that may leave a bad taste in your mouth. If you're Jewish you feel attacked and suddenly nervous about a popular tenet of your party's platform. If you're a non-Jewish white Democrat who has never been exposed to anything like this before, you're primed to receive some outright Nazi propaganda next.
Statements like that need to be encountered for the first time in an environment where the problems with them can be analyzed thoughtfully and without vitriol or recriminations, because otherwise, when they are encountered, they create internal conflicts and push people into the arms of the opposition.
If you ban them from your filter bubble, that is not the context in which they'll be first encountered.
"Statements like that need to be encountered for the first time in an environment where the problems with them can be analyzed thoughtfully and without vitriol or recriminations, because otherwise, when they are encountered, they create internal conflicts and push people into the arms of the opposition."
This will never happen in social media. Unless in some highly highly moderated forum setup for the purpose, which is its own filter bubble and in which expertise of the participants can be ascertained.
Any forum like that essentially excludes most of the general public.
But then those people bring the heresy into the rest of their lives and get thumped by the mob for crimethink when they bring it up. And then once they're declared an enemy by their own tribe they seek refuge in the opposition.
The psychological effect of terrorism is at least as significant.
And the worst part of it all is how SJWs all claim to be against collonialism and how they want to defend diversity, yet don't realize how the ideology is spreading around the world turning everything into an echo chamber of myopic morals.
That's a bit sad.
Did 8chan make you pick up a gun? Did 8chan turn you into a nazi?
Just because seeing something published makes you upset does not mean that publishing those things is inherently dangerous.
You need to trust the other people in your society a bit more than you do, and stop assuming most readers are ten years old.
Your conclusion is based on fear, not the millions of people who read "objectionable" things online and go "ugh" and then close the tab (and sometimes go write long-winded blog posts about how censorship is essential to prevent violence).
Not only is the rhetoric from Big Tech not at all similar to that of the Church, the comparison to Big Tech now and Printing Press then has no merit at all really.
The Church was suppressing arcane knowledge, and controlling their access to 'God' - so to speak.
The Internet is a new form of 'hyper commons' where a race war could flame up instantly if allowed.
Understand that the Internet has absolutely nothing to do with the 'truth'. The truth comes from examination, and the legitimacy of the examiners, purveyors of information. If that legitimacy does not exist, then the truth is just whatever everyone wants it to be.
The comparison is not 'The printing press' - it's the Rwandan genocide.
In Rwanda, the driving fuel was radio. Unfettered, angry people would urge, every day, to think of the 'other' (i.e. Tutsi v. Hutu) like 'dirty cockroaches'.
Without daily, constant mass propaganda of an entire nation mesmerized and inflamed by genocidal talk radio - there would have been no genocide.
The Rwandan war was mostly not a military incursion - it was militias vs. people. It was individuals, coming out of their homes with machetes, chopping up their neighbours.
Extremism is fuelled by a nudge in either direction - as a small, populist media example, we saw this as both CNN and MSNBC leaned harder left as Trump rhetoric rose.
I'm not political - but some of the Talking Heads on Fox have been aggressively and actively promoting voting conspiracy theories about voting issues that have been very publicly debunked and rejected by the courts - but the opinionists of course avoid that part, and just push the conspiracy without at all pointing out the facts have literally been proven false.
Millions of viewers accept the conspiracy as truth.
While the comments section on Fox has been surprisingly more enlightened that normal, with somewhat of a majority even calling them out as 'Fake News' - a sizeable majority of responders are adamant the election was stolen.
At OAN and Breitbart, the comments section is vicious about the 'clear fact' that the election was stolen by Biden, and there's talk of violence.
There was quite a lot of violence in the streets during the BLM unrest, we are not in a happy situation, there are a lot of guns in America.
If for example 'some group with guns' ended up killing 'someone from some other group' - things would get out of hand fast.
If FB, and Twitter, Google and the Press did not manage information - I think it would devolve into regional, balkan like violence, like a quasi civil war very quickly.
While it's really hard sometimes to fathom how information should be controlled - the night of the election, when Donald Trump came out and claimed the election was rigged without any evidence, literally trying to overthrow the Republic on the basis of his ego ... using threats of having his, often armed supporters 'not stand down' (!!!) it became crystal clear how important information control is.
The issue contend with is how we go about it. We need transparency, regulation, independence, proportionality etc..
So Google, FB, Twitter - the 'huge' entities, need to set guidelines and probably have some way of ensuring they are enforced consistently and not selectively. The rules for what constitutes 'organizing violence' need to be clear etc..
We have to find a new way through this problem.
It seems that the most ardent supporters of unrestricted free-speech are the most optimistic in their belief in humanity to come to a stable, moral consensus if we all just say whatever we want.
The Rwandan genocide shows the darker truth that we're just as likely to talk ourselves into horrific violence and war over arbitrary divisions. Cultural and societal pressure over what's acceptable to discuss seems like a very real, and very useful bulwark against that possibility.
"One of the most virulent voice of hate, the newspaper Kangura, began spewing forth attacks on the RPF and on Tutsi immediately after the October 1990 invasion. It was joined soon after by other newspapers and journals that received support from officials and businessmen linked to the regime. "
"Until 1992, Radio Rwanda was very much the voice of the government and of the president himself.... Before the daily news programs, Radio Rwanda broadcast excerpts of Habyarimana’s political speeches. This national radio sometimes broadcast false information, particularly about the progress of the war, but most people did not have access to independent sources of information to verify its claims.
In March 1992, Radio Rwanda warned that Hutu leaders in Bugesera were going to be murdered by Tutsi, false information meant to spur the Hutu massacres of Tutsi."
[later Radio Rwanda becomes less partisan:]
"With the new direction at Radio Rwanda and the voice of the RPF increasingly strong, Hutu hard-liners decided to create their own station. They began planning their radio in 1992, incorporated it as Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) in April 1993, and began broadcasting in August 1993...."
"Although nominally private and opposed to Radio Rwanda, RTLM in fact was linked in a number of ways with the national radio, with other state agencies and with the MRND. RTLM was allowed to broadcast on the same frequencies as the national radio between 8am and 11am, when Radio Rwanda was not transmitting, an arrangement that encouraged listeners to see the two as linked, if not as identical. The new station also drew personnel from Radio Rwanda, including Nahimana, who played a leading role at RTLM after having been dismissed from ORINFOR, and announcer Noel Hitimana."
Source: https://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda/Geno1-3-10.htm
Second - that the 'government' was in control of some of the radio has nothing to do with the argument - that's an example of 'political speech', particularly lacking institutional controls of the press.
The genocide was not arbitrary, of course there were leaders and those pushing for it. There were political forces moving millions of machetes into the country to be used in 'the uprising'. But when it happened, it was almost universal, like a Zombie film.
President Trump, using 'direct channels' (Twitter/FB) to spout lies about election rigging, is able to do this completely without any fact checking. He can say almost anything he wants, and a certain % will believe him. He has made veiled hints at violence.
5-10 Million people believe that the election has been rigged, and the constitution has been usurped. Those are Revolutionary terms, and they have guns.
This story reads like an election in a crappy African Republic where there is zero institutional credibility.
A 'decentralized web' mostly lacks any ability to decipher fact from truth - it's expensive, it requires integrity, transparency, oversight - which is why we have many institutions to do that right now, and it becomes a real problem when they start to bend.
Personally, it's more that I'm pessimistic about giving governments the power to imprison people for expressing opinions that governments don't like.
The government of Quebec fined a comedian $30 000 for making a joke about a handicapped person.
I think the issue is that 'Freedom of Expression' ought to exist - it's #1 in Canada and #2 Ammendment in the US, but there's no such thing as 'unrestricted' speech, and, institutional controls are going to have to be in place.
If you're plotting with your buddies to walk into the post office and murder someone ... well I'll bet most people think your Signal channel should be snared.
If you want to call a Female Trans person a 'He' because that' what they are biologically, even if they present themselves as a She ... well, most people think that should be legal, but there are absolutely people with power who want to make that a form of hate speech.
On Twitter right now, I'm thankful that they are adding notes to indicate that specific actions of election fraud.
But they have also indicated they will ban you for 'dead naming' or 'misgendering' a Trans person.
So you know the Actress 'Ellen Page' is now trans, so 'he' is now 'Elliot Page'. Fair enough. But if you literally use the term 'Ellen Page' or refer to them as 'She' - you could be banned. Which is ridiculous.
But it seems like there should be some level of compromise that can address both risks. We restrict other natural freedoms in all sorts of ways in modern society, why not free speech at all? As an example that's repeated so often it's practically a cliche: even with the second amendment in the US, citizens are still restricted from owning nuclear weapons.
A new class of weapon was invented and society decided that no matter what they said in the past, this was too powerful to treat like any other weapon until now. Seems like this new form of hyper-speech could qualify for a similar approach?
The issue then is that you're likely to get a balkanization of the webs of trust - echo chambers. How we can support cross pollination of these webs is the issue. I don't have an answer for that, but being able to trace news sources at least helps though.
First, this is missing the point a little bit - people don't care about the truth. They actively seek out channels of bias. If everyone were so conscientious as to be seeking the truth society would have far fewer problems.
Second, there is no such thing as 'web of trust', it's an academic idea.
Third, it's unnecessary. We already have pretty good institutions.
FYI I just checked the commentary on Fox to see where there plebes minds are at this morning, and this was the 4th comment on the top article:
"The military must restore President Trump to the presidency.
Any pockets of military resistance should be dealt with.
Our country needs military law and God's chosen President, President Trump.
President Trump for life!!!!"
A few comments down:
"MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
STEALING AN ELECTION IS AN ACT OF WAR! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
STOP THE STEAL"
This kind of rhetoric is not uncommon now, and this is on a mainstream news outlet, it's only a little bit of accidental violence from words to deeds.
Far from being academic, webs of trust have existed since the dawn of time, for example marriage with other tribes to strengthen trust. On the web, twitter retweets are a loose example in that people retreat what they find useful, building trust between users over repeated retweets.
I don't know the answer to this btw but the current institutions don't appear to be enough, from potentially influenced elections and referenda, to trying to silence whistleblowers (Assange, Whitehouse leaks etc)
Isolating the issue though ie. Being able to verify optionally signed posts goes some way towards building better Web. Curated posts by Facebook have no indication of agenda or veracity, same as for most of twitter.
Something like Radicle or Spritely might be the way forward, more research needed :)
https://spritelyproject.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25313010
It turns out that there's a sizeable contingent of people who do want to talk to people on the other side, and if you build it, they will come- and be surprisingly civil to each other, given you might expect them to assault each other on the streets in other circumstances. Of course, as mentioned in the above article, one problem with building a space where people can talk civilly about their differences is that you end up talking civilly to unpalatable folks, and people on the outside really don't like that and will try to destroy you- even if what you're seeing here, people de-escalating by talking to each other, is a miracle in the making.
The culture war and the Motte have problems, of course. I'd just like to see a Cambrian explosion of spaces with a similar ethos, to explore the design space.
I agree, but let me refine: Dissenting opinions in civil society are arbitrated by civil courts.
So we need the 'huge' entities to commit working together with civil society. That means they need to lobby towards their own regulation. AT&T allegedly did it in the 20th century. Lobbying for more constraints on your own company is only contradictory if the company considers itself infallible in perpetuity, i.e. a benevolent dictatorship.
Ironically this sounds just like the kind of argument Thomas More would have made against Erasmus. And he’d have referred to Münster just as you refer to Rwanda.
If you used your 'free press' to attack a local Prince, he would have you killed, so what are you even talking about?
'Banning all books' is something different than 'banning people trying to overthrow the government'.
It sounds an awful lot like you are calling for an explicitly elevated class of people, with the sole authority to interpret the literature. Sort of like a priesthood.
We have to find a new way through this problem.
Censorship is hardly "a new way." And this problem only exists if enough people pay attention to it. It's not the freedom of speech that is the problem, it's traditional media that amplify every debate instead of projecting nuance, and it's algorithms that optimize for engagement over connection.
"This opposition to the printing press had the obvious consequences for literacy, education, and economic success. In 1800 probably only 2 to 3 percent of the citizens of the Ottoman empire were literate, compared with 60 percent of the adult males and 40 percent of the adult females in England. In the Netherlands and Germany, literacy rates were even higher. The Ottoman lands lagged far behind the European countries with the lowest educational attainment in this period, such as Portugal, where probably only around 20 percent of adults could read and write."
(excerpt from Why Nations Fail)
This is why one of the concerns of Atatürk’s revolution was not just increasing printing and switching to the Latin alphabet, but also replacing the Ottoman Turkish written language with one much closer to spoken Turkish.
Based on your writing, it seems you have a level head and a good angle on world history
I am hoping that if you have any books that deal in the history east of present day Germany, present day Italy, and or south of Madrid (directly/indirectly) that you really liked or found especially engaging or informative that you might remember and graciously share what they were if it pleases you to do so.
I am at a point where I am starting to appreciate what I am "rooting for" in western Asia/northern Africa which was a step in my study of northern/western barbarian history (frankish, gaulish, Norse etc etc) that made everything more fun and interesting to learn and therefore easier for me to study and accumulate interesting information
Because you seem very reasonable, I am thinking if you liked any of those direct/indirect history books that I might like them too
If you read this comment, thank you for your time and attention. I hope that you and your loved ones are doing okay in these difficult times.
Edit: hilarious this is being so heavily downvoted, when it's exactly what the poster was doing. Did I offend a HN VIP?
In a way, I can't even understand how could you have confused the two (critique vs censorship).
In a way, I can't even understand how you could actually need this spelled out to you, unless you simply have no grasp of what you're posting, which admittedly is what it looks like.
Yeah, whatever.
I don't say otherwise, or even refer to "critique" or "censorship" in my post, so what are you talking about?
> The person is not advocating that the hosting company of this blog post remove it from the internet
I also didn't accuse them of advocating the hosting company of this blog remove it from the internet, or even remotely hint at such, so what are you talking about?
> should not have been written in the first place
He said the author of the blog should "just spare us" their opinion.
If you want to carry on pretending you don't understand what that means I can't stop you, but next time try addressing what was actually written, not stuff you've completely made up to argue about.
The downvotes are far more likely simply because some people who love hate speech but hate free speech have more than 500 karma.
HTH
(I was thinking whether to end this post with /s or not, and strangely, both ways provide valid context for this post; therefore, I'll end this with a Heisenberg /ß.)
I am going to re-read the article to see if I can recognize your interpretation of it.
That seems like a particularly uncharitable reading of the post. From the article:
> Many of you reading this will not agree with me, and that’s fine. I’m not going to try and change your beliefs with this blog post. Rather, I’m looking to explain why, while I respect that others might have differing opinions, I stopped doing anything that would actively advance a technology whose ethics I question. To put it in other terms: your freedom of speech isn’t my obligation to enable you and give you a platform.
The author isn't advocating making the distributed web illegal? I'm not sure what rights you think they're advocating restricting either? The article simple raises the question of if this technology would on-balance improve or harm society based on the experiences we've had with the web so far and the kind of content that can _already_ be found on IPFS.
The author says it doesn't stack up for them, and so they aren't working on it any longer. They call for others to put more thought into what they work on and how it may be used. Seems pretty reasonable.
By all means, disagree and explain why you think the scales are different than the author. But when you say something like:
> Just spare us the long description of how other people are lesser human beings
I don't know man, you clicked the link to read a personal blog. If simply reading someone's thought process as they come to a different conclusion than yours is such a sufferance for you maybe exercise some of that freedom and don't read it. As it is you're just coming across like a troll.
Hacker news discussion should be of higher quality than that.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt
- https://radicle.community/
There are social or technical solutions to the problem of "too much free speech".
There can be decentralised filters set up that can be moderated by communities like democracy. You can have curators of content that can guarantee to bring safe and healthy content to you. You can have decentralised reputation, authority and reward systems for the content creators and the validators. And so on.
This idea is also being actively worked on by the Matrix project:
https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix...
> In the last few years, completely unregulated online speech has given rise to fake news and conspiracy theories that have actually killed people. It’s offered a megaphone to those promoting dangerous ideas like white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other anti-LGBTQ positions, and sometimes outright Nazism. It has tilted many democracies towards right-wing populism and fascism.
Perhaps that's what people actually think and would have thought regardless of the internet? Every thing listed is well below peak popularity, and anti LGBTQ sentiment for example is the lowest it has ever been with LGBTQ view enjoying widespread grassroots and estalbishment support.
Authors like this are simply yearning for the ecstasy of ideological conformity; the dream that they will one day open their web browser and find a world of people who suddenly share their enlightened world view. Instead of criticising others, perhaps they should question their own worldview and whether it would be even remotely normal for everyone to share it.
There is nothing more likely to grow those beliefs than to ban them outright. Goebbels was prosecuted for hate crimes in Weimar Germany in 1928[0], and to say such laws were ineffective is to put it mildly.
[0] Longerich, Peter (2015). Goebbels: A Biography. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1400067510.
Consistent with the fact we all know that the noisiest advocates of "free speech" in 2020 think the term simply means far-right/hate speech.
And I don't necessarily see how decentralized has that much to do with the issues described regarding IPFS. The issue there was more with it being more anonymous and resilient. And I do agree with the author on the downsides, I haven't really been a fan of IPFS but it is a neat idea.
Though I do believe that keeping internet open and away from google et al. is paramount.
The main TV and radio stations uncritically report the progress of an unprovoked foreign war until one night, one man on one station uncharacteristicaly editorializes against it.
Media organizations through their leiason with foreign intelligence report falsely the atrocities of one side of a conflict, ensuring support for the other side which is actually committing atrocities.
The most heralded media organization in the nariona suppresses a story through an election which provides irrefutable proof that the state executive is running an illegal spying operation against the citizenry.
Is this Soviet Russia? Communist China? Tito's Yugoslavia? No, it is the United States prior to ubiquitous internet news.
Respectively I refer to Walter Cronkite's turn against the Vietnam war at the Tet Offensive, the misinformation campaign levied at the Nicoroguan Sandinistas and the New York Times decision to hold the warrantless wiretapping story until after the 2004 election.
I'm not sure that is a better world. I'm not sure if we aren't just looking at trade-offs, moderated media having its flaws and virtues, unmoderated having its own.
It is no wonder we shrink at the trials and tribulations of unmoderated information. They are new. But I think there is a tendency recently to overlook the costs our gatekeepers previously imparted to our society.
the man is shell shocked, needs a break, thank you for your service, lets keep moving forward!
I guess nowadays: diversity is great, except for opinions. Can't wait to see the left crashing itself trying to compose with opposed sides, against homophoby on one hand and against islam criticism on the other, but islam is like christianism and probably other religions: homophobic.
Oh, shouldn't I be allowed to state that anymore ? Funny world you want to live in, but I guess that's what it is when you get confused and believe that your CS degree is worth a pol sci or law degree.
"brown people are terrorist" is racism, not islamophobia, so, terrible example.
But yeah, Islam is the worst religion we have here in Europe, I'm queer and feminist: of course I'm "islamophobic".
ٱلرِّجَالُ قَوَّٰمُونَ عَلَى ٱلنِّسَآءِ بِمَا فَضَّلَ ٱللَّهُ بَعْضَهُمْ عَلَىٰ بَعْضٍ وَبِمَآ أَنفَقُوا۟ مِنْ أَمْوَٰلِهِمْ فَٱلصَّٰلِحَٰتُ قَٰنِتَٰتٌ حَٰفِظَٰتٌ لِّلْغَيْبِ بِمَا حَفِظَ ٱللَّهُ وَٱلَّٰتِى تَخَافُونَ نُشُوزَهُنَّ فَعِظُوهُنَّ وَٱهْجُرُوهُنَّ فِى ٱلْمَضَاجِعِ وَٱضْرِبُوهُنَّ فَإِنْ أَطَعْنَكُمْ فَلَا تَبْغُوا۟ عَلَيْهِنَّ سَبِيلًا إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ كَانَ عَلِيًّا كَبِيرًا
This is the Quran saying that husbands should beat those of their wifes who are disobedient, and that's just the tip of the iceberg, I could go on and on on about the Quran: I'm Algerian.
Sorry for the victims of my "islamophobia", but it's nothing compared to what the victims of islamic violence have been through.
7 And Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to Shur, that is over against Egypt.
8 And he took Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword.
9 But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them: but every thing that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly....
10 Then came the word of the Lord unto Samuel, saying,
11 It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king: for he is turned back from following me, and hath not performed my commandments. And it grieved Samuel; and he cried unto the Lord all night.
and then Samuel tells Saul:
18 And the Lord sent thee on a journey, and said, Go and utterly destroy the sinners the Amalekites, and fight against them until they be consumed.
19 Wherefore then didst thou not obey the voice of the Lord, but didst fly upon the spoil, and didst evil in the sight of the Lord?
So here we have the Israelites slaughtering an entire population. But God is angry with them, because they did not also slaughter all the cattle.
Would it be fair to make that a summary of modern Christianity?
Anyway, it’s indeed my point that it’s not fair to judge Christianity (or other religions) by every part of their holy text, so I think we agree.
"The Amalekites came and attacked the Israelites at Rephidim."
and earlier in the chapter you quoted, verse 2:
"This is what the LORD of Hosts says: ‘I witnessed what the Amalekites did to the Israelites when they ambushed them on their way up from Egypt."
It's not unreasonable to imagine that the Amalekites might have intended to carry out a genocide against the Israelites (something which the Israelites seem to have been uniquely disproportionately targeted with in history), and that an omniscient God might have known that putting an end to the Amalekites would be the most peaceful solution in the long run.
As for the cattle, perhaps God didn't want the Israelites to make a huge profit from their defensive war, lest they be tempted to start some other wars to profit more.
Why? If you think a text is unfallible, don't you deserve to be judged for the worst parts of that text?
I don't know of any religions which require adherents to own slaves, so it is not inconsistent for a fundamentalist to not own any. (In particular, Christians are commanded to obey the laws of their country[0], in general, so owning slaves would be inconsistent).
Also, I don't know why you think churchgoers would have a problem with disabled people. Jesus healed the sick, and didn't stone anyone. Perhaps you're thinking of the story of the woman caught in adultery, whom Jesus saved from being stoned.[1]
[0] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Peter+2%3A13-...
[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+8%3A1-11&v...
[0] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+15%...
[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+19%3A12-...
Edit: clarification
Do you think that the Quran which has gone unreformed for centuries abides by your progressist standards ? What a joke. http://reformingislam.org/quran-verses-inciting-terrorism/
> 2:193 Fight them until there is no more disbelieving of Islam and until all worship is for Allah alone.
> 4:47 Jews and Christians, believe in Islam before we destroy your faces and twist them toward their backs and curse you.
Now that's actual hate speech right there in the Quran, but that's perfectly fine "for the sake of diversity" right ?
If you were to censor "muslims are terrorists"... then you would have to censor the Quran itself, which says so many worse things about women, queers, and disbelievers including those of your family. Censoring the Quran would be islamophobic, right ?
> 9:23 Do not take your fathers or your brothers as allies if they have preferred not to believe in Islam.
That's criminalizing freedom of thought, going against the core principles of Universal Human Rights Declaration.
Anyway, Quran verses are cited during prayers, and not just the ones that abide by your Kufr standards, FYI.
Samuel Paty, a story where "muslims against islamophobia" feed islamic terrorists: drawings of the prophet ARE islamophobic according to them for sure. And don't worry about Taqiya BTW.
Sorry for the victims of islamophobia, but it's nothing compared to what victims of islamic violence have been through, so, guess who I'm crying for.
You want to censor hate speech, this could be respectable if you were to apply it to both sides, and not "just the islamophobic side".
We left our islamic countries for your civilized countries to be free, we have worked hard to integrate and become worthy citizen because we value your culture above theirs, don't betray us now!
I agree about as much with the progressive agenda as I agree with the quaran. I was asking a question, not advocating a belief.
I am, for what it is worth, a classic liberal.
The mistake, I believe, is absolutism. If you're a Replublican everything Democrat is bad. Maybe there's a future in which the best parts of opposing sides meet to create a happy place?
Everything is a balancing act. Some FAANG is good. Some distributed web is good. Where on that scale we live is our choice. Choice is good. And sometimes, very occasionally, the illusion of choice is good.
You can't have somebody only able to censor some things or only a little thing.
If there was a way to censor child porn and nothing else, I would be running a Freenet node and be quite happy to do so. Unfortunately that is not possible.
Surely what you actually want is categorising of human thought at scale, and then you deciding which categories of ideas are suitable for your 8-y/o to be exposed to (and which categories of ideas you are comfortable being exposed to).
Allowing a few entities to control human thought at scale is likely to produce a world that is bad for everyone, including 8-y/o's.
Centralized services will always have incentives that are orthogonal to their users, because anyone who isn't paying for a product with cash is "paying" by allowing their data to be harvested. They may provide strong moderation at their discretion, but that will never be one-size-fits-all (see: the bipartisan section 230 repeal arguments in the US) - there's not a balance here that people won't find a way to politicize.
Federated protocols create perverse incentives to lock in users so they can't switch providers and to differentiate their service from neighbours using non-standard protocol deviations. These moves create insular communities where self-hosted participants are left out to dry through entirely defensible actions such as spam prevention systems (like big email providers junking/refusing to deliver mail from "untrustworthy" sources). Even relatively new protocols are wrestling with this problem - Matrix recently put out a document discussing a federated reputation system for servers to judge other servers. This will inevitably turn them into pseudo-centralized protocols, like email is today.
Decentralized protocols, like the ones in the article, are filled with all the people who've been banned from the centralized servers and kicked out by federated server admins. It's not surprising to me in the least that decentralized servers host objectionable content; without any meaningful form of network-wide moderation you have no way to cut out the bad actors from your network's discovery mechanisms. Anything approaching network-wide moderation would rely on some kind of network topology approaching a federated system.
I think part of it might be that humans are just inherently horrible. Not all of us, and not all the time, but enough to ruin the experience for everyone. I suppose it was easier when our ancestors lived in tribes of a couple of hundred individuals, but now that the entire globe is a text message away we're coming to grips with the fact that there's far more "objectionable" material out there than we previously thought. As with other problems of human nature, I don't think the problem or the resulting solution will come from tech alone. Rather, I imagine it'll take society as a whole a few decades to come to grips with the fact that everything is public for everyone, and power in the real world doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot on the internet.
[0] Paid services obviously have a different calculus ascribed to them, but with the way the internet has evolved there's a prerequisite discussion to be had about whether paid services will be able to catch on in the world today. Social networks, for example, rely on network effects, which are (to my understanding) a non-starter if your service isn't free. This is especially true if prices aren't adjusted for the developing world where people have even less discretionary income than in, say, California.
The "status quo" in the dark ages was: bigotry, fanaticism, supremacism, conspiratorial theories, anti-science, slavery, and so on. At this time, writing anything against the masses beliefs would lead to persecution and death. People died trying to educate others and at the same time others extremist ideas were born but the society learned to ignore them. The good ideas were victorious.
Remember: On May 10, 1933 around 25,000 books from 34 university towns in Germany were burned! Some of those books were unique, their ideas will never be known by society.
If you go back in time, 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years back, whatever, the society always approved horrendous ideas and few people fought back. You should never trust the "status quo" or the "justice warriors" of the internet, as they could easily be on the wrong side of history. The access to information is the solution not the problem.
In my opinion, asking for censorship shows no respect for the ones that died trying to change the world.
But what's especially worrying is that some people do remember, and dismiss it anyway, because it "had served its purpose". That is - they explicitly say that it was never an actual principle, but merely the means to enable their propaganda when they were not in a position of power to ensure that they'd be heard. Now that they are, they don't want that tool to fall into the hands of those who "oppose progress". Same thing goes for due process rights, and some other long-held left liberal principles. Indeed, the very word "liberal" is becoming a slur further on the left, and specifically so because they see it as an ideology that protects their enemies. Much of that rhetoric is hard to distinguish from Soviet propaganda of old (take a look at question 42 here to see what I mean: https://archive.org/details/USSR100QuestionsAnswers1986/page...).
And while it's tempting to dismiss all this as some random internet rants that don't matter, it's hard to continue doing that when even ACLU is forced into changing their long-held stance to appease the social pressure and demands of newer members, and when their events are shut down by protesters chanting "liberalism is white supremacy".
Meanwhile, here's what non-authoritarian socialists thought about something similar going on 70 years ago: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Let me introduce you to the quote by Recep Tayyip Erdogan:
"Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off."
No wonder that these birds of a feather stick together.
There is some weird playing the victim card here as social networks try and clean pure play disinformation campaigns on their networks. Nothing is perfect and there will be missed but there is clearly a intent towards reality rather than lies.
It's kind of the point of the lies and subjugation that cast this as a liberal conspiracy where its just a matter of not getting it right 100% of the time ( which is not possible )
While these platforms do moderate some of the worst content, they are reluctant and the problem is too large for them to solve. Only a decentralized approach to trust and reputation will scale well enough to regulate decentralized content. I believe it is the decentralized platforms that will solve this problem first - they need to, while the centralized platforms will continue muddle on with half measures.
I might trust someone my real-world friends trust when it comes to local gossip. If I want trustworthy national news my only recourse seems to be to go through a centralized journalism institute. But which one? Well I'll probably look at what people around are looking at.
If there's a national broadcaster or dominant cable news channel in my country I'll probably look at that, but if I don't like what I see I may be biased to go search out another institution that I find more agreeable. Then you get things like Macedonian teens running sites dressed up to look like US-based newspapers posting straight-up bullshit because there's always a market telling people what they want to hear.
How can we build a decentralized system to overcome people's biases and laziness? People are going to gravitate to sources their friends and family use, and collectively to sources that fit their preexisting beliefs. It's no wonder we're in this situation where people are struggling to agree on reality.
>> Only a decentralized approach to trust and reputation will scale well enough to regulate decentralized content
But what if a decentralized network of trust collectively agree that covid is a hoax and the Earth is flat? I'm not sure if the (de)centralization of the underlying technology really has an impact on that problem.
Within this network, you may have a pocket of users who espouse Flat earth theory, but I believe if you were to rely on such users for trust ratings, the picture of the world created would be so incoherent, it would simply be unbearable.
I wish I had your optimism... :(
If the concern is that some people will hold mistaken beliefs then I am not sure there is a technological or sociological solution to the problem. I believe there will be people holding mistaken beliefs regardless of whether the world's information channels are "decentralized" but I agree with your parent's poster that a decentralized approach is the only approach that does not come with a high probability that the majority will be coerced or gaslit into holding false beliefs at some point in time.
Not at all, but the fact is that these beliefs are growing at all thanks to the web. There are always going to be some people with completely illogical fringe beliefs. Conspiracy theories were always a thing. It's just not that despite the quality of these conspiracy theories dropping (seriously...the Earth is flat? That hasn't been a topic of debate for a loooong time), their reach and number of adherents are going up. That seems like a pretty clear regression in our society. We shouldn't be complacent about regression.
> ... a decentralized approach is the only approach that does not come with a high probability that the majority will be coerced or gaslit into holding false beliefs at some point in time.
But I don't understand how decentralized tech is somehow going to be more immune to this than the current web, which is already decentralized in most ways. Anyone can host a blog on their PC and publish what they want. We thought the blogosphere was the start of this golden age. But people aren't techies, they choose to centralise with providers like Google for gmail (email is a federated, decentralized protocol!) and Facebook for social media.
If IPFS takes off, what makes it immune from people going with the same massive provider all their friends and family are on? There's no hard barrier stopping everyone from moving off Google and Facebook tomorrow with the current web, but they won't. The big players understand this, that's why Google pays Apple billions a year to make Google the default search engine. That's all it takes to ensure everyone keeps using Google. Competition is literally a click away, people just don't click.
That said, I do support the decentralization efforts. It seems like an improvement over the current technology. I just don't buy into the hype that it's going to cure any of the problems we're seeing now. Our problem is less one of censorship, more overload of bots and bad actors.
> If everyone agrees that the earth is flat it may as well be so.
Except that it's a real, measurable regression in our knowledge as a species. I get the point you're making but that doesn't give me comfort, hence the pessimism.
Rather, I believe that the majority of people will continue to understand the earth as "round" and will be more likely to believe the (also minority) science pedants when they say "actually, it's more slightly egg-shaped" than they will the ravings of someone who does not believe in satellites.
The beautiful trick of decentralization is not that it has any ability to prevent wrong-information from being disseminated, but that it ensures that correct-information will be disseminated regardless of any co-existing propaganda campaign to the contrary. In a centralized censorable system this guarantee cannot be met.
I believe that as long as correct-information is available the majority of humans will eventually find consensus with it.
I am not convinced that fringe ideas like flat-earthism are necessarily growing or that they would be doing so because of the web. It is likely that the web is just exposing, for the first time, the true extant of the population that is willing to accept fringe theories which while I agree is a disconcertingly large percentage, still does not seem to be the majority of people.
That said, roughly half the people I talk to still seem to fully accept and believe in some sort of literal sky god and roughly a third still seem to take in earnest the existence of actual ghosts, luck, karma, or other such poorly supported meta-think as obvious truths. But I believe this number is way way down from 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1000 years ago... I believe more people are finding consensus with actual truth due in large part to the awesome power of decentralized messaging systems we've built to date starting with language and so far culminating at the internet and the nascent social and technical overlays that are being built on-top of it.
Is anyone working on systems like this right now? Any projects come to mind?
Presumably this would be implemented as a browser extension. It could also recommend similar pages with a higher score, and maybe highly scored pages that offer a different perspective on the same topic as the page you are reading.
I think the web is pretty good as a decentralised systems for ideas. A lot of basic stuff isn't exploited though. For instance a simple way to set up networks of caching proxies and point browsers towards them, so sites can survive ddos attacks and be fully anonymised would be good. CDNs like cloudflare provide that today but tools for smaller scale equivalents would be great.
https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix...
I get a feed full of stuff from them, and stuff they've re-tweeted ie said explicitly that they trust, etc.
The whole "social network" thing really is approximately the same shape as an explicitly reified "web of trust". I would not expect the results to be terribly different, other than the added effort of having additional explicit system entities to manage.
The ability to confirm provenance of speech, that a known person claims the words spoken, would be very useful. Completely independent of fact checking, agreement, truthiness.
Using a trust / reputation system to prevent wrongthink means it has to be a centralized reputation system, where anyone too far from the median (or who the Cabal doesn't like, if you design it to not trust the general userbase) gets shut down.
Also, why would a decentralized system be able to have a stronger effect that the efforts Twitter and Facebook are currently taking to flag or block wrongthink? If those efforts are "half measures", what sort of "full measure" would this reputation system impose? And if it's really distributed, how would that be imposed?
(FWIW it's refreshing to actually see this being argued openly and honestly, instead of the usual "of course we support free speech, but ..." tripe.)
The parade of horribles presented as evidence is not particularly convincing, though, although bias (either way) can make a big difference here. But while we're at it, since the blog post mentioned the Christchurch shooting in 8chan context as an example of the case where censorship would be desirable, I want to talk about the censorship that happened after - specifically, the attempts to take down copies of the terrorist's manifesto that were floating around. NZ apparently had some emergency legal powers to criminalize distribution outright, which is bad enough. But the real mess was Australia; they didn't have any legal pretext to ban it, but there was a strong social consensus - among people who make decisions, anyway - that "somebody ought to do something".
So, the Australian ISPs made a synchronized private effort to censor it, to the point of domain-blocking several large forums where the manifesto was posted and not removed by the local admins (because it didn't violate their lax rules, nor local laws!), while the government caught up on legislation. Effectively, it was a private censorship cartel, and the citizens that didn't like the outcome had no recourse - not even the usual democratic mechanisms to repeal the laws etc, since there were no laws involved. This is the kind of stuff that the present non-decentralized structure of the Internet makes possible, and the inherent power makes it a near certainty that it'll be abused eventually, whether for cynical political suppression or a do-gooder witch hunt. I'd rather take my risks with more decentralization - some parts might stink more than others, but at least I'll have a choice.
> if you believe that the ability to censor public discourse is necessary to maintain a stable and desirable society
I understand this can make sense, when reading capacity of each individual is limited
Of course, the real problem with censorship is that whoever ends up in charge of it, automatically gets immense political power - including the ability to suppress opposition to censorship, thus perpetuating the arrangement. I would argue that the only reason why we haven't seen more abuses of that yet is because the Internet infrastructure was not originally designed to make such large-scale censorship easy, and as this changes more towards centralization, censorship will be more pervasive and more oppressive, as well. Countries where the government could mandate infrastructure tailored to censorship (e.g. China) are a good example. Now, some argue that, so long as functioning democracy is retained, it doesn't matter, because any such censorship in a democracy would be majoritarian in nature, and thus it's a fundamentally different and justifiable case, but one only has to look at historical moral panics in various democracies to see the flaw in this argument.
Fwiw, the Australian who carried out the act in question here in NZ did so because Australia had banned the specific weapons used after the Hobart massacre. We here in NZ hadn't experienced such a massacre and were slow to act. He was easily able to legally acquire the weapons here that may have been very hard to acquire at home, thus the Australian problem was "exported" to a softer target in a near jurisdiction. I expect the early online reaction in Australia may have been tacit acknowledgement of this fact.
Transparency: I'm an Australian in Christchurch.
I also don't think that justification matters all that much - indeed, the whole point is that, just because the majority of the population might want to censor something, that doesn't make such censorship any more inherently legitimate. The laws against "gay propaganda" in Russia are similarly supported by the majority of the population, but they're no less wrong and oppressive for that. .
There was nothing stopping people emailing the manifesto to each other privately using any archive formats. That is different from having to provide a free soapbox for supporters of the manifesto. Just as you have the right to block someone commenting on your Twitter posts. The ISPs are businesses and have legal terms and conditions to remove anything. That is not censorship. Here in NZ it became illegal to transfer the manifesto, but primarily the video which was deemed offensive under existing censor laws.
> "The laws against "gay propaganda" in Russia are similarly supported by the majority of the population, but they're no less wrong and oppressive for that."
If the Russian example you give is supported by the majority then that is by definition democratic, even though propaganda created that public sentiment in the first place. Should propaganda (manifestos of hate in this case) be censored? Your own example suggests "yes it should".
Not at all. If you give governments powers to censor people, sooner or later you will have someone in power that will use those tools maliciously against their own populace.
Therfore you don't allow a government (or anyone else for that matter) to censor except in very specific circumstances e.g. when the content is considered obscene (child pornography being an example).
That why it is important that everyone has a right to speak their mind, even if it highly objectionable.
The Russian example doesn't work out the way you think it does, though. Yes, it's by definition democratic, and it's also oppressive - but saying that the propaganda that led to its popularity should be censored to prevent such laws amounts to saying that democracy is a sham, because people should only be allowed (by whom?) to hold "safe" opinions. If that argument were made openly - that we should abandon democracy in favor of rule by the enlightened elite, because people just can't be trusted to make the right choices unconstrained - I'd still disagree, but that would be a different conversation. But advocating censorship of political propaganda for the purpose of maintaining the illusion of democracy is just hypocritical.
My actual takeaway from that story is simply that nobody should have the power to do such things on a large scale. In a more decentralized political system, there can still be localized hotspots of oppression - but they don't suddenly apply to tens of millions of people at once, and with no easy way to escape.
I'd like to focus on one point: when you have millions of people interconnected, even "radical" ideas can find a place and resonate with others, and even become amplified. Gwern's "the melancholy of subculture society" [0] might be a good introduction to the topic. This is not inherently good or bad. We might be afraid of nazis of whatever, but the same dynamics also benefit oppressed groups and minorities for whom anonymity and this opportunity to connect with other people in similar situations is highly beneficial. I recently watched a video where Diana Fleischman presented this argument in favor of anonymity: without it, there might be no escape from certain totalitarian and manipulative regimes. Now, you might pick a side if you want. The truth is that we see examples of both in today's world. You might say that education could help with extremist views, so we shouldn't give up on decentralized, anonymous, uncensorable networks. You might say the same about totalitarian regimes or centralized monopolistic powers.
From a practical perspective, I think a good start is to acknowledge that decentralized and uncensorable networks already have good proofs of concept, and that in the future they will indeed become accessible to everyone. The question is not whether they will become mainstream or not, but what are the challenges we have to prepare ourselves for in case they do become mainstream. And to do that we need a deeper understanding of the dynamics of these small groups, and, in general, of online interaction. And again, this is already happening, even if decentralized networks could make this even more common. So I think the best path forward is to start educating people on the "dark sides" of online interaction: how the lack of eye contact and physical presence allows you to express yourself with less consideration of others (they can't punch you back even if you are rude), how echo chambers work, how extremist views are amplificated online because it's almost the only medium where they can expand through (and how that's not an accurate reflection of the average perspective on a topic), how conversation is highly decontextualized, how addiction, FOMO and infinite scroll impair our attention and might even induce a feeling or sense of detemporalization in our lives, etc. Summarizing, how online conditioning makes us act as different creatures than in real life, and the need to be able to tell those creatures appart, both in others and ourselves. Of course, real life has its own share of conditioning too. What's even the real you. Have fun.
[0] https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society
I'd like to highlight what I think is one of the more insidious "challenges we have to prepare ourselves for": bad-faith communicators.
I have faith in the ability of people to have a meaningful discussion given that all participants are taking part in "good faith". That is, I am trying to convey an honestly held idea or question using language to you, and you are trying to parse that communication in a manner to grasp my intended meaning. This is the hard problem in all communication as language is inexact and none of us perfect. But if we all buy in to this system, it's amazing at how well it works at building consensus and fostering useful debate. This good faith buy-in lies at the heart of functional democracy.
We all know that it's harder to communicate over the web. As OP mentioned, lack of eye contact and physical presence reduces the available bandwidth we have to get our point across. But the fact that we can talk to so many more people than before seems to make up for the deficiencies.
But we're seeing more and more bad-faith actors abusing this system. They don't want to explain a point so that it can be discussed and debated. They want to implant a thought or idea in an audience in order to alter behaviour in a way that benefits them. We're seeing nation states conducting manipulative campaigns against their rivals' (or their own) population. If you're a democratic nation this kind of campaign is tantamount to an attack against you (it's degrading your nation's capability to make the best decisions it can, doing real harm). But even if you're not a democracy, having a foreign nation convince your population something like COVID isn't real causes real-world harm to you.
Combined with our highly connected social media networks these attacks are growing increasingly effective. How does anyone fight this?
I'm somewhat cynical that education will turn out to be the solution. Is there really any way to train a population to spot and negate bad-faith communication with such proficiency that these attacks are nullified? When nations start hitting each other hard enough to do real damage, but not enough to unilaterally wipe each other out, my bet is that they're going to fall back to the historical solution for balancing power: demarcating zones of control, ie "borders".
...and this is why, despite sharing the same concerns as the author of the article, I think I still come down on supporting the decentralized web. We're in a unique point of human history where we can communicate irrespective of borders, and I would hate to lose that capability because of hordes of trolls. Maybe if we just keep the UX real shit we can avoid another eternal September? (only half joking)
One example for a decentralized web benefit that I see promising: wouldn't it be just amazing if you had something like Facebook, but all the posts were not owned by Facebook? Just think of the possibilities to use your own UI, have your own recommendation algorithm etc... This can be amazing. I deeply want something like. However it cannot be done as long as the data is owned by Facebook.
The notion of huge swaths of people being sucked into some totally anonymous decentralized platform with no rules and nobody in charge sounds implausible.
This attitude, however popular it may be among the coddled infants of current year, is a form of barbarism. Being threatened by ideas is hilariously insecure unless you believe your ethical and ontological system is a network of lies. Hell current year ding dongs fall apart into a froth at the mere writing of words -let alone the formation of them into something resembling ideas.
FWIIW IPFS is amazing, and fortunately doesn't need the contributions of such people to thrive.
It idea that you should not murder people who disagreed with you, if you had the ability to do so, is an enlightenment idea, which still has not been fully embraced by most people.
In addition the complaint in the article was that it would encourage other people to do bad things, not that the author felt threatened by the words themselves but by what they might cause another third party to do.
My personal solution to that is to punish the person who did the crime, bringing back medieval torture executions in public if that is required to prevent people from doing these things.
But this is not just about feelings.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade
Then its a good thing people that support World Authorianism , wealth redistrubtion, group rights and censorship are not working on
Clearnet Tor IPFS
Go work for Zionist operated publishers like
fakebook
lbry
twatter
censortube
wiki
Surely the obvious counterargument to this is that a fully centralized web tilts democracies towards left-wing communism and censorship-enabled dystopias.
Right now a small group of left-wing zealots at Facebook/Twitter/Google can erase a person from the web. Is that good?
Do technologists want to enable this?
Mass bans are happening right now on twitter, often with no reason given and terms of service that allow a privileged few to exercise unlimited and arbitrary censorship.
The very fact that people who are politically on the left are calling for an end to decentralized tech is evidence that their side has a systematic advantage at the most powerful censorship agents in the centralized web. This post, and others like it, is an admission and a justification for why decentralization is necessary. If such posts instead merely talked about apolitical crimes like child abuse or scams, then I think the justification for decentralization would be much weaker.
The nodes can have software that lets them know a pin has been flagged and they can decide what to do automatically or manually.
We didn't anticipate any schmuck having a global platform and their fellow schmucks being able to vote. Seriously, our founding fathers did not anticipate this when only literate land owners could vote, and our ideology is based on that.
It is accurate that we don't have a society that factors in the ramifications of that either, only our brainwashing of the free speech ideology.
His conclusion may not be the accurate one, but we can acknowledge that neither extreme of restricted speech or completely hands off of technology is the answer for our future.