Facebook did this back in December too before admitting a "mistake" and reversing it. Get it together please FB.
I tried to see what the SWP comments on covid were. They seem pretty mainstream (not covid denialism). Ironically their "demands" from December are now government policy...
I'm not sure where I stand on Facebook's (etc) right to remove legal content, but I would like a requirement for any platform to specifically state why they removed content. Too often things are taken down for no reason and get put back up based on twitter outrage rather than any logical basis. YouTube are getting infamous for this...
I think that would be fine as an initial reason. Having had that back in Dec, you'd think they would put SWP on a safe list? Who knows, I guess. And that's the problem, not so much the taking down as the taking down with zero reason or discussion...
This is how the right has been feeling for a while. This is nothing new behaviour-wise for Facebook, the only difference is this gets more favourable media attention.
There are some big open questions for us as a society on this.
I don't approve of calls for violence and I thought Facebook etc were doing well at free speech until the last year or two. It seems like no one is happy with that anymore.
Please, don't draw a false equivalency between a major political party that does not play host to violent rhetoric, on the one hand, and groups that where plans (very real, actionable, and actioned-on plans!) to subvert the government are incubated, on the other.
Put another way--let's not turn sedition into another us-vs-them political game. That's how democracy ends.
The SWP is not by any stretch of the imagination a major political party.
ETA: to quantify that a bit, in the 2010 General Election the SWP ran as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. Nationally that coalition received 0.04% of votes cast. I can't find any indication that they even put up any candidates in subsequent elections.
Does this actually affect the correctness of their point?
Acting like a reaction to a politically charged breach of the capitol building is equivalent to a page sharing views about COVID and workers rights getting removed?
It actually feels absurd to type that sentence out...
I was correcting what looked like a significant misapprehension about the subject of the thread, not arguing for a comparison.
Although I can't see anything in throwaways885's comment to suggest that they were talking about the post-Capitol-breach purges. If anything, "for a while" suggests the opposite.
The "this gets more favourable media attention." definitely implies they're referring to the flurry of media attention towards alt-right removals we've been seeing
And my point is it's not really a "significant misapprehension" at all, at least not significant to their point.
They could be a party of one guy in his underwear and the point would still stand
Per the sibling comment to yours, no, they aren't referring to that. "The point" is attacking a strawman.
As a general takeaway, "It actually feels absurd to type that sentence out..." can be a useful warning sign that you're projecting an absurd interpretation onto a reasonable statement instead of applying the Principle of Charity.
The sibling comment is confirming my interpretation, that they were referring to the deplatforming!
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The deplatforming thing that ramped up in 2018 has overwhelmingly been about things like white-supremacy and neo-nazis... so it hit the alt-right very hard.
This is like conservative politicians complaining their followers are being deplatformed when Twitter decides to take a harder stance against white supremacy in the wake of an attack on our capitol which featured the alt-right/ neo-Confederates/ neo-Nazis... you're not confirming what you think you're confirming.
The conservatives is not being targeted per se, but it just so happens a lot of neo-nazis are conservatives. Take it as you will.
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They're also ignoring the fact the "deplatforming thing" has recently kicked into high gear because of a certain set of events
This would be like someone from the Branch Davidians saying "We've always felt persecuted" in March 1993.. there were, but also a little thing happened with 4 ATF agents the month before!
That's the point being brought up, those events are very relevant if you're talking about deplatforming today. You don't brush such a major occurrence under the rug if you're arguing in good faith.
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Even them saying it ramped up in "around 2018" is disingenuous. It ramped up with Trump and his actions.
And there was as a lot of gnashing of teeth over if that was right, if Trump was actually building a hateful support base or if this was just political lynching...
And then the Capitol breach occurred and removed all doubt and now we see it accelerating.
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Also you read the sibling comment, you should have realized it makes the last part of your comment complete non-sequitur... sometimes it's a useful sign the argument being made just lacking self-awareness
Yep when those rioters broke into the capital building and rummaged through nancy pelosi's office we were very close to that guy in the bearskin becoming our king.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. The rioters should stick to non-seditious activities like burning down police stations and declaring autonomous zones in the middle of major cities.
There is no false equivalency. Deplatforming is wrong, left or right, rich or poor. Disenfranchised people not having a voice is a cause of radicalisation and violence. If you don't believe me then talk to the Black community in America.
I defended Parler in another thread and I'll defend the SWP here, despite not particularly liking either group.
I'm black. I don't believe hate speech deserves a platform.
And you're insulting me and black people everywhere trying to create equivalence between Parler being deplatformed for deciding to not moderate hate speech insofar as it didn't amount to a civil tort... and the systematic oppression of black people based on their skin color.
As someone who used to watch the BBC, but stopped in the last year or two, the BBC has for the last 30 years been more interested in giving a positive voice to right-wing movements than it has been left-wing.
See: how Farage was treated by the BCC, versus Corbyn
Right, the victim in this case self-reporting it is "favorable media attention", unlike the mostly false whinging from the right, which only gets repeated national legislative attempts in the US and endless media repeat on national outlets.
Are their some good examples of censorship from before the last 2 weeks I can cite?
It might help a more friendly discussion too, people are already down voting randomly it seems...
I remember when Joe Rogan went to Spotify and there was something of a backlash inside the company. I vaguely remember some of his episodes (discussing trans athletes rights) weren't hosted for a while.
> "content got flooded with reports and our automated system took it down"
I assume this plays a role. I really like facebook meme groups, but every single one inevitably gets "zucced" because of overzealous reports by people who genuinely don't get the problem. They even moderate themselves now to avoid reports.
Yes, it seems unlikely this is deliberate. The SWP is about as likely to forment a revolution or incite violence as Judi Dench. They're a bunch of harmless eccentrics.
Quite literally. The only vaguely-'revolutionary' thing the SWP have done in the last 10 years is provide protest signs for movements that other, more influencial groups of people started.
According to the article, it was not just the page that was removed. That could have been a mistake, I suppose. But Facebook also banned "dozens of leading SWP activists". That sounds like a very deliberate action to me.
To me that sounds even more like an algorithm at work, and quite possibly one more concerned with identifying possible fake accounts than identifying political violence
(Relevant context: the SWP is tiny and inconsequential, but very active in coordinating its [unlikely to be violent] messaging and inflating its importance. Nobody would know who its "dozens of leading activists" were to target them. And its local group pages are still up and easily discoverable by searching, so if it was a deliberate action to silence the party it would be a very sloppy one)
That's irrelevant, because a private company can't be compelled to support someone else's speech against their will. If you don't like it, then take political action.
Edit: For those unaware, this is the devil's advocate take. HN has been remarkably pro-corporate censorship lately, and only a matter of weeks later its coming back to bite pro-censorship advocates.
I'm mostly tired of this take, especially by technologists.
First off: you're right. You can't compel a private company to support speech. But the entirety of political discourse happens online now. There's a clear and prevailing interest that free speech can happen online, at scale.
Honestly, the market will take care of it: who's comfortable hosting their content on the platform any more? They've alienated the right and the left.
At the end of the day/century, FB is just a random internet site/app. Discourse is online, yes, but the zeitgeist left FB years ago. Zuck's fate will catch up with him fast, now that their network effect has broken, or is close to doing so.
It's already over. FB/IG/WhatsApp are all clearly dead, in the Grahamian sense.
Sure, but you're also missing the downstream consequences/chilling effects. Maybe you're right insofar as it should motivate people to create new platforms, but with even the cloud operators willing to deep-six a business... well I don't know about you but I can't afford to host a social media site with hundreds of thousands of users in my basement anymore – not to mention the credit cards, banks, and payment services now willing to kickban anyone they don't like...
Well, in a capitalistic society with government oversight, you can expect the strong arm of government to lay the ban hammer on them. Participate in our society and be governed by the rules of our nation. As a capitalist fanboy I cant wait for the sanctioning to happen.
You're assuming, rather uncharitably, that people in favor of "private entities cannot be compelled to host the speech of others" only support that point of view because it serves other political stances they hold, rather than as a general principle.
A site is free to ban all left-wing groups, all right-wing groups, all centrist groups, all groups with an 'e' in their names, all hate groups, or all of the above. Others are free to react to those bans accordingly, and choose whether to associate/support/host the site or not.
That argument falls flat when a huge majority of speech goes through the platforms of 2 or 3 companies. "Big" tech doesn't even begin to convey the scale we're talking about here.
One problem with moderating content in this way is that it makes it clearer and clearer that they no longer need the protections provided by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
It's not injurious to them to moderate content, clearly, since they are doing it.
By pulling this crap and especially by doing it algorithmically they are pushing the internet in a difficult direction.
I don't understand the argument here. It's not injurious to them to moderate content because they have §230. §230 isn't there to protect online publishers from the court of public opinion; that's impossible. It's there to protect them from libel lawsuits.
If §230 went away, and Facebook continued moderating, they would be liable if anyone posted defamatory content to Facebook -- something which surely happens on a constant basis.
no - the reason that 230 exists is because it was argued effectively that the task of moderating content was too great, to the point that it be an undue burden to internet companies.
If that is not currently the case and these companies can effectively moderate the content on their networks without driving themselves out of business with the cost, well, they don't have the justification for 230's exemption anymore.
You appear to hold some very idiosyncratic beliefs about section 230. It does not provide immunity or any other benefit to a publisher that doesn't perform moderation. Such a publisher was already immune under preexisting law.
It provides immunity to publishers who (1) publish user-generated content, and (2) perform moderation on some of that content. They are free to do their moderation without being required to moderate everything posted to their site.
It's still quite obviously true that Facebook is not able to moderate everything posted to its website. What are you trying to say?
>It provides immunity to publishers who (1) publish user-generated content, and (2) perform moderation on some of that content. They are free to do their moderation without being required to moderate everything posted to their site.
It doesn't. It outlines that internet companies ARE NOT PUBLISHERS. As a result, they aren't liable for the things that people or other companies publish on their platforms.
>It does not provide immunity or any other benefit to a publisher that doesn't perform moderation. Such a publisher was already immune under preexisting law.
They weren't immune under preexisting law, they were actually liable as they could be treated as the publisher of any content on their platform. The reason the exception was carved out was because it was considered detrimental to the development of the internet and the free spread of ideas on the internet if websites were forced to moderate content completely.
It's actually a very interesting exception, too, because in effect this means companies like facebook are not held liable for publishing things on their platform, just so long as they didn't create the things they publish. It also provides them immunity to perform any kind of moderation they like.
The problem is that this exception was built for the prior internet. It depended on and was intended to build up the idea of personal control over content, where a person could decide what content they did and did not want to see online. That's why they were required to have a message telling users they can get parental controls and blockers.
>It's still quite obviously true that Facebook is not able to moderate everything posted to its website. What are you trying to say?
That's not obvious. I run ads on Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other platforms; there is moderation before publishing for every ad I post. It's not perfect and often has problems, but it exists and it's expanding.
The problem is that they want it both ways. They want to be able to silence those whom they find objectionable AND hide behind the legal protections of Sec 230 the rest of the time.
Not trying to take a stand in the argument of whether the companies should be allowed to use the "private platform" excuse to get rid of any content they don't like, but I disagree with your analogy specifically.
>I assume I can also beat my children as long as I do it inside my private house?
Beating children is illegal for anyone by law already. Removing something spray painted on your walls or deciding what books people get to discuss in your own book club isn't illegal, and neither should it be. I hope you understand the nuance here, and why it makes your analogy flawed.
Ah yes, the law. Lets Remove Section 230 protection for Facebook, so folks can now sue them. After all, the original justification for 230 was that they have no capability to moderate their users. That is clearly no longer true today.
No, they have to keep with laws of the countries they operate in.
In difference to the US:
- some countries clearly differentiate between private and cooperate
- have proper free speech laws which are not limited to government inference into free speech but free speech itself
- have laws about discrimination and protection of political organizations which does not allow you to arbitrary "block" people
etc.
I don't know about UK law. But I'm pretty sure this would have been unlawful in Germany, and potentially all of EU (due to EU wide regulation, but while I'm pretty sure about Germany I'm less so about EU wide regulations).
Not if it discriminates on protected characteristics, in UK law. This isn't, but you can easily imagine many of the countries it operates in hjaving multiple laws that restrict its freedom to block whatever it likes. Some protect registered political parties (like the SWP) freedom of speech I think even (but not thre UK AFAIK).
This isn't their first 'mistake' to shut them down. Unless of course Facebook believes that this group has broken their rules which resulted them on getting shut down.
Regardless, Facebook is a private platform and can shut down whoever they want. Mistake or not.
> Regardless, Facebook is a private platform and can shut down whoever they want. Mistake or not.
No.. I mean yes in the US but not necessary in other countries.
Not all countries free speech and anti discreminatory laws which are as weak as in the US (the US free speech law is just about government interference in free speech but not free speech itself).
In Germany this would have been in violation with multiple laws as far as I know.
How much of your own code even has a precise enough purpose that the spec of what it's supposed to do is shorter than the length of the code? Such that you could even in theory formally verify that the implementation is in some sense "correct"?
For that matter.... how much of your code has a precise enough purpose that the spec of what it's supposed to do can be written down in formal language at all?
And actually... how much of your code has a precise enough purpose that the spec of what it's supposed to do can be written down in ENGLISH at all?
I don't think something like an "extremism filter" can ever be implemented in a bug-free way, because I don't think there's a precise enough definition of what "bug-free" would even mean.
The problem of people blaming bad outcomes on "the algorithm" is real, and organizations should take responsibility for misclassifications generated by code that they own and operate.
It's unhelpful to pretend like engineers and the organizations they work for have zero agency.
However, it's equally unhelpful to pretend like buggy behavior aligns with the intent of the engineer/organization.
When software goes wrong, the company that decided to create and operate that software for profit is responsible for whatever negative impact that software might have, regardless of whether these problems were foreseen.
(And in the case of automated moderation, the software getting something wrong really should be considered foreseen consequence anyway. Facebook knew, or should have known, that these systems would have false positives.)
I don't think mens rea is particularly relevant when it comes to the actions of corporations. It's not at all clear to me what it would mean for a corporation to have intent.
We could certainly say a 'corporation intended' to do something if we found an email from the CEO commanding it, that much is trivial. But what if we think of a corporation as a 'slow AI' or 'China brain'? Might the corporation, viewed that way, have intent that transcends the individual thoughts and desires of the constituent employees? The system may be structured in a way that rewards low level employees for doing things the individual executives would never consider acceptable (for instance, 'lying to the executives'), and which the low level employees don't think is a good idea either. With all the humans personally opposed to some business practice, it might still occur due to the structure of the system. If we personify that system, we could perhaps say the system itself has a will of its own, with objectives alien to any of the humans involved.
A harsh example far worse than Facebook: the Functionalism-Intentionalism debate (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism–intentionalism...) At the end of the day, does it really matter? Whether you subscribe to functionalism or intentionalism in that case, the horrible end result is the same and people need to be held accountable for it.
> I don't think mens rea is particularly relevant when it comes to the actions of corporations. It's not at all clear to me what it would mean for a corporation to have intent.
But we do distinguish in regulated engineering disciplines. A contractor that intentionally uses shoddy materials in a bridge or tunnel is treated differently from a contractor who simply fails to implement legally required QC is treated different from a contractor who implemented legally required QC but laid bad concrete due to operator error that wasn't captured by that legal requirement.
> At the end of the day, does it really matter?
Yes, and the reason it matters is immediate when you try to answer the following questions.
> Whether you subscribe to functionalism or intentionalism in that case, the horrible end result is the same and people need to be held accountable for it.
1. Held accountable how?
2. Toward what end?
--
Facebook has good engineers, but they're not gods. It is not possible to write a perfect -- or perhaps even passably good -- "political extremism" filter.
Shifting blame from "the algorithm" to "the engineers" or "the corporation" completely misses the whole fucking point: there is no spec for "perfectly functional political extremism filter". 0.000% of the people calling for "politically neutral moderation" have any god damn clue how to define the thing that are asking for, even in a natural language, let alone a language precise enough to implement.
Just look at the rhetoric used. People blame in passive voice "corporations" and "engineers", while criticizing others for using passive voice to blame "the algorithm". I'm not saying that we don't need a base level of QC and corporate responsibility. I even think Software people should be folded into Professional Engineering with all of the personal responsibility that entails! But we need to be very realistic about the fact that engineers are not Gods who can Solve Politics.
Hell, even if you erase inherent political tension this is still an impossible task. Can you write down a filter that's perfectly biased toward liberal speech? No.
So, again, Held accountable how? Toward what end? Unless your answer is "purposefully kill all social media including HN", mens rea matters.
In the case of the Nazis, the answers are 1. Executed. 2. Justice. For Facebook, I think executions should be off the table, but the second answer is the same.
Facebook's engineers aren't gods, I get that. Knowing their engineers aren't gods, Facebook proceeded to use them to create imperfect but profitable systems anyway. Systems they knew or should have known would harm society while enriching their shareholders. This is facebook's crime. If they couldn't create moderation systems that operate well at a massive scale, they never should have operated at that scale in the first place. They couldn't, should have known they couldn't, but tried anyway.
Again, I view this as a passive voice excusing of responsibility for direct political action in exactly the same way that some people view "the algorithm" as a passive voice excusing of responsibility.
The president pro tempore of the US senate was a Segrationist in 2001. Literally, segregationists of the US Senate outlived pets.com
If any component of your blame or solution to the state of western politics includes the words "social media", ... good fucking luck.
> Again, I view this as a passive voice excusing of responsibility for direct political action
You are mistaken. Neither intentionalists nor functionalists excuse the responsibility of anybody, least of all the organization's leadership. To both, the organization and its leaders are to be held responsible for the actions of the organization. The functionalist model does not absolve anybody of guilt.
If you want to see the hazard of demanding proof of intention, look no further than the travesty of justice that occurred in the wake of Enron. Every last Enron executive should have been jailed, but prosecutors had a hell of a time getting any of them convicted of anything because of this misguided obsession with proving intent. And nobody from Arthur Anderson went to prison, for the same reason.
Obsession with intent allows the guilty to trot out the "we didn't mean for this to happen, we're all just idiots." excuse. Without a smoking gun email, that excuse is hard to conclusively disprove. The antidote to that is strict liability; saying that their intentions are irrelevant and punishing them anyway.
Reminder, this is my point: "When software goes wrong, the company that decided to create and operate that software for profit is responsible for whatever negative impact that software might have, regardless of whether these problems were foreseen."
I understand your sentiment. I expect this will not solve the underlying issues and will indeed create more issues in the long run: with that rule, interpreted strictly, only established multi-billion/trillion dollar companies will be able to assume the liability and risk of insuring software against “negative impact”. The bar “careful or you may go to jail / be financially ruined” would be too high for most SME or open-source developers to clear.
Take medical software as an example: a highly regulated space, that very few SMEs and approximately ZERO open-source projects can afford to enter.
And even in that space, strict liabilities are restricted to the software’s *intended use*. As long as the manufacturer has taken steps to clearly indicate what is appropriate use / misuse of the software, the manufacturer is NOT liable if the software is misused by the user. At that point, the liability shifts to the user of the software instead.
An in-between approach would be GDPR-style regulations that define what is and is not appropriate to do, with proportional penalties for failing to do that: intended vs unintended failure; penalties proportional to company income so it can hurt small and big companies alike without outright killing them on the first few strikes. However there is a cost even to that: such regulations do block valid innovation and they tend to expand and get more complex year over year.
> That doesn't mean that computer systems behave the way that we intend them to behave, or even that we really fully understand our own intent!
Sure. Neither do children, nor pets, nor farm animals, nor automated control systems.
The common thread connecting these examples is: people who are responsible for managing children/animals/PID controllers bear responsibility for the action of these systems, whatever the actions are. Same reasoning should apply to algorithms: don't deploy them unless you're prepared to be held accountable for what they end up doing.
People generally misunderstand Hanlon's Razor. It's immaterial if someone is evil or just stupid, the only thing that matters is that they should not be making decisions about other people.
(Charles Williams' All Hallows' Eve is an extended meditation about just that.)
They were making a decision, but it’s not malice because they’re incapable of foreseeing the outcomes of their decisions. In either case, they shouldn’t be in charge of anything important.
Often these are machine learning models which are not explicitly programmed and do act on their own.
It could easily be a model that takes in features such as "has an admin banned this page" or "has an overwhelming number of users reported this page" and then based on that it identifies problematic keywords that it uses to ban pages.
And then it relies on humans to manually interject when the model fails as it sometimes will.
Why not put the 1% largest pages up for manual review? I think it there is some merit to the idea that they are sometimes made overly broad to give cover for some actions by blaming them on the automated system and ignoring pleas for reinstation.
The law and the rest of society does not have to accomodate unpredictable and buggy ML models -in fact its the other way round. We are bot obligated to suffer damage just because FB relies on ML.
Somehow, the big players have managed to convince us to suck up the damage.
Correctly moderating Facebook, blocking recalled/bogus/questionable goods on Amazon, or keeping Google's search index pruned of scams and misinformation, are fundamentally problems that requires armies of trained humans, well-thought-out and transparent process, and potentially independent or state oversight to keep it all on the rails.
It's much cheaper for them to buy racks of servers, and occasionally shrug their shoulders and blame algorithms. I'm amazed that legislatures throughout the world have been willing to accept that behaviour for so long. It's not like the problems can be explained away with "it's an insignificant business with no political or commercial influence", or "it's a 6-month-old startup firm that made beginner mistakes because they couldn't afford to do things properly".
Break them all up. Even in a world without Google and Facebook, enterprising nerds will be encoding H.265 via smoke signals to ensure we get our cat videos.
It's the same old story. Private companies in their all too often myopic view of wealth creation (falsely equating it with "making money", optimizing KPIs) push forward and extract gains from society and society gets to pick up the pieces if shit goes wrong as there must be myriads of examples for by now. It's not always obvious like with oil spills, or water pollution for instance.
Thinking of Amazon for instance, they pretty much destroyed small local vendors who did much more than just sell goods. They were also access points to local community and culture and raised diversity.
Similar story with Google and Facebook and online news outlets.
It's a question of balance of power. The interplay of society and corporations is not a one way street. Corps offer services to society while they also rely on it for resources and infrastructure and to give it legitimacy and protect its assets.
Among Big Tech firms I believe Microsoft was one of the first to understand and incorporate this and so they self-corrected. Facebook is really late to the party in this regard and I hope in a couple of years we will be able to see the situation with more sober eyes.
> Somehow, the big players have managed to convince us to suck up the damage.
Not always. The GDPR has some decent provisions against overuse of machine learning, for example (it is just a shame it is basically unenforceable against global megacorps, and otherwise so shit as a set of law). We should not accept it, and I don;t think this is a fight that is lost. It is fine to use ML, as long as you are prepared to suffer the consequences of the mistakes of your models that you do not check. This is an important principle.
> Even in a world without Google and Facebook, enterprising nerds will be encoding H.265 via smoke signals to ensure we get our cat videos.
Damn right. These are important. I'm concerned this statement isn't entirely serious. While I hope not to have to resort to similar to that, I will if I have to. Cat videos are important damn it.
Facebook purged a lot of libertarian and militia pages throughout November and December as a part of a concentrated 'anti extremism' campaign. They're overeager, but they also deliberately target groups in waves.
Leftist pages with any tact have been somewhat insulated from the purges, but the liberals no longer need them, and the conservatives never liked them. They're getting the same treatment as the right now.
Not yet, but FB's incentive structure is anti-left (they're a corporation natch) and their head of public policy is a hardcore Republican that worked for the GWB administration and energy companies.
How is the incentive structure anti-left? I suppose suspending Trump's account qualifies as "anti-left" these days. Zuckerberg openly stating he supported Black Lives Matter? Anti-left. Facebook deleting PragerU content for "hate speech" before getting reprimaneded? Anti-left. Zuckerberg personally assisting Pete Buttigieg around primary season? ANTI LEFT, I SAY! DIDN'T YOU HEAR HE SAT AT A DINNER TABLE WITH CONSERVATIVES? HE'S ANTI-LEFT!
Both Conservatives and Liberals claim Facebook is biased towards the other side, so you're going to have to do a hell of a lot better, and produce some actual, bonafide evidence their "incentive structure is anti-left" besides witchhunting and saying one of their upper middle-managers is a hardcore republican.
Care to let us know about the political leanings of Sheryl Sandberg and Chris Cox, who are actually in the C-Suite? Or would you prefer to cherry pick someone in upper middle management who is a staunch republican, which according to you seems to be some kind of heinous crime. Not to mention you're cherry-picking someone who reports to someone who reports to someone etc... who reports to Sheryl Sandberg (COO).
They are either liberal or conservative or they wouldn't be allowed in corporate management. Socialists and anarchists are antithetical to capitalism. Likewise, they have started banning far-right conservatives that are destabilizing to the system.
Facebook's current allegiance is to pleasing the entrenched state apparatus so they won't get broken up.
The grandparent's example is a poor indicator of the political leaning of Facebook's executive team. VP of U.S. Public Policy is a euphemism for Head Lobbyist and now that the Democrats control both the Presidency and Congress, I would not be surprised if the current guy is fired and replaced with someone with deep ties to the Democrat party.
Honestly, I'd be happy to see all political groups - left or right - expunged from Facebook. Politics and social media clearly do not mix, as this year has demonstrated all too brutally well.
Maybe if you advocated for 'no politics on facebook', it would sound better.
Social media has given voice to marginalized groups, and people seemingly fear that voice. It's something to take a look at, rather than sweep it under the rug with bans.
If by “marginalized” we mean “radicals”, then yes. If we mean “minorities”, then you’re probably just propagating the myths that minorities hold far-left-wing views. On the contrary, while minority views skew left-wing, only a minority of minorities hold far-left beliefs and there’s a lot more political diversity among minorities than there is between minority and majority groups. For example, “defund the police” is a popular left-wing mantra, but only a minority of black Americans favor it.
"radicals" that brought us the 40 hour work week. That brought us birth control. That brought us voting rights for all.
All of these were "radical" at their time. The only reason they're not anymore is because they have become mainstream. Maybe you should check your assumptions about how life is and read some history of how we got here.
"defund the police" is something that has been vocalized for decades, if not centuries. You should ask yourself what has lead up in your education to accept state monopoly on violence, especially when that violence is enacted unfairly against certain minorities. What makes you think that is "normal", but people wanting cops to be less of a massive force in society are "radical".
Anywhere people are, there is also politics. An argument could be made for getting rid of social media entirely, but as long as people are using social media, politics follow.
The problem is when people are able to be blocked/filtered out, so then all rational/reasonable voices are lost from the conversations. If these irrational people had to filter through rational/reasoned long-form and short responses, I'd be curious to know what the outcome would be.
This is the idea that among a group the reasonable voices will prevail. Seen elsewhere:
>One unintended consequence of crushing speech on the right is that sane righties lose the ability to talk lunatics out of crazy. Back in the old days, I had many conversations talking sense into conspiracists from Rothschild to contrails. They listened to me because I’m credible in a way CNN is not. Now, instead, I shut up. I fear we’re about to embark on an unfortunate experiment to rediscover why, precisely, free speech has for 300 years been considered a bedrock necessity for a civilized society.
It’s entirely this. It’s not just “now I shut up” though, it’s ”I had no idea there was a group planning on doing xyz, because they were mad about abc, never heard anything about that in my Facebook timeline!”
The reasonable voices are either not participating because they have been “nudged” not to, or they are afraid of the consequences of being open and honest about their ideas. Let’s not pretend the upvote/downvote systems aren’t SPECIFICALLY for this.
I deleted my Facebook on January 1st as a New Years resolution and honestly have never felt mentally better.
I just text friends directly and share pictures with people I know would like them.
I spend less time checking my phone which adds up to more time to do other things or just staying more on task in general.
Try it! If you don’t want to delete all social media, start by deleting all your accounts except the one you use the most to _connect with others_ (not to read news or get opinions). It’s 100% worth it
As a less dramatic version of this, just go through and purge your friends list. Also aggressively block / hide / unfollow any "shared" things you come across.
For example, on Facebook you can hide something dumb someone shares, and then as part of that process, there is an option to "Hide everything shared from this page".
If you spend a half hour going through and doing that, suddenly your feed is much less spammy.
I've been part of several "general-purpose" internet communities that tried having a "no politics" rule. It never, ever works. You can almost make it work if your community is a) dedicated to a single topic, like Hacker News and b) has sufficient human moderation. So hobby forums and subreddits can maybe get away with it, but Facebook - no way.
You can almost make it work if your community is a) dedicated to a single topic, like Hacker News
On any political issue you can easily predict with 100% accuracy whether it will be net up or downvoted on here. And tech is inherently political these days so there’s no escaping it.
Would you like to start a group that attempts to expunge all political groups from Facebook? A collection of people all holding a particular societal stance who want to further that stance, in an effort for their collective resources and voice to be used in that furtherance?
Private mommy groups often have "no politics" rules that the admins genuinely believe they are enforcing, and yet those same groups are anti-vax cess pools. In some you can even find absolutely brutal rants about elected officials such as school board members, which, again, group admins believe are "not political".
So. Not sure what "banning all political groups" would even mean.
Well I actually align with this opinion My politics are certainly by US standards left wing. I supported the recent right wing purge on social media because I thought it was their right to do so, and I support the right of FB to ban whoever they want.
The one thing that must not be censored is the internet itself. If someone wants to wants to throw up a pro Neo-Nazi site on their own server, that must be allowed to stand.
Hypothetical: If I want to print a neo-Nazi newspaper:
- Printing services can refuse to print my newspaper.
- Shipping companies can refuse to deliver my newspaper.
- Heck, my landlord could boot me out of my home for being a neo-Nazi.
Is the internet any different? Datacenters and CDNs = Printing services, ISPs = shipping companies.
I always find it funny that holocaust denial is not allowed, yet half the holocaust is never to be called the holocaust.
In the west it's said that only Jews were ever to be exterminated.
Yet the first work camps were for socialists, the first death camps were hospitals for the disabled, the first extermination camps were for Russian pows and extermination camps murdered 6 million Slavs, Gypsies and homosexuals. There's even a little book written by Hitler himself that details what will happen to the Slavs once he won.
But somehow the official line that it's only Jews that were targeted is not holocaust denial.
To be fair, the article does make a distinction, saying the other parts weren't part of the holocaust, necessitating a different name for everything else.
It doesn't deny that other stuff happens, it just defines the holocaust as not including them.
Personally, I never knew the scale of the non-holocaust parts of the holocaust era until reading this today, and I expect it's because of the narrow scope of the term's definition. So I'm sympathetic to konjin's view even though it's just a question of definitions instead of a question of facts.
"We need to use the cast system of the Nazis to classify their genocides. A Jew could never be a citizen of any nation, just like the Nazis said."
If you died in a camp you died in a camp.
The only reason why this is even an issue today is that it admitting that Slavs were a target in the holocaust would give legitimacy to Poland, Russia and Belarus being western-skeptic, given that they experienced literal genocide within living memory. And that in Europe the systemic racism against Roma is still acceptable and mainstream.
This shut down story is another tale in the impending international regulation, and maybe breaking up, of what is comically called 'big tech' ('big' does not begin to describe the sizes involved, the naivety is staggering).
As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control.
And then what? Decentralized systems, and The Dark Web, will grow.
Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal.
You can still (I think) go into a corner shop and get a SIM for cash in the UK which gives you access to online data. Can probably even top up the data allowance with cash too. Get a second hand phone for cash from someone like CEX and you're pretty much anonymous, I think (barring opsec snafus.)
Yes but I can take my laptop to my friend's place and use their internet, seemingly as someone who lives in that house. I think OP is talking more so about an ID (like driver's license type of thing) to use the internet. So that one might be able to say person X visited site Y (again, we have something similar to that now, but not exactly)
You're just paying for a service that needs to know your address in order to function. Nobody will even check your id.
Alternatively, you can use free wifi or a burner SIM with data. That possibility is not the case in every country, nor will it necessarily remain open in the future.
Government issued currency is required to pay them, which requires a job, which requires.
It’s gate keeping all the way down, it’s already here.
Everyone was all “ooo 1984! Scurry! Let’s build a Brave New World to combat it!”
Really though at this point, aside from science what industrial discovery is there?
We’re still just “flock building” like splinter religions.
This syntax or that, still an ARM or x86 chip with known limitations.
Programming to our imaginations delight is great as an art. Industrializing it is just pandering to speculative economics. “Bet you can’t!” “Bet I can!”
Round n round we go; HR and accounting filtering for the right kind of compliance.
Sure fear the government.
I fear humanity. It’s insane and clearly intent on its destruction
All my ISP can see are the entry points I communicate with. Today I can tunnel all my traffic through my own VPN mesh, someone else's VPN mesh, open proxies, private proxies and I can reach most sites. That is how I operate today. If that becomes illegal to do, then I would be an outlaw and would have to write a song about it. My band of merry outlaws would travel the countryside, giving anonymous internet to everyone.
Require? Illegal? ID is not required to use the internet, nor is it illegal to do so without. I can, or at least could before covid, go to the local public library and use their wifi with no questions asked. That's a government provided service, not some sketchy edge case like 'sharing your social security number with your friends'.
That is a business relationship, where a personal license to access the Internet refers to a government grant for use. Those are drastically different from each other.
Super interesting that you mention this. I was just thinking the other day about what an absolute dumpster fire "the internet" is due to anonymity (obviously that's not the _only_ reason, but it's a non-trivial reason). This idea that "Let's give people the ability to be anonymous, and somehow, that's gonna make us all bond together and be better" is pretty hilarious in hindsight. Anonymity seems to just bring the worst out of people (that's not a tech problem, that's a human/culture problem). I would personally love to see a "web" where you have to comment...as your public self. Post messages...as your public self (not just on an individual platform level). So on and so forth.
I 1000% agree that eventually people will need some type of unique identifier to operate on the internet. And I'll take it a little further and say that in the future, anonymity will be reserved for the wealthy primarily.
> I would personally love to see a "web" where you have to comment...as your public self.
Isn't this Facebook? Granted I'm sure not every single profile is "verified" with an actual ID, but lack of anonymity doesn't seem to stop as many people as you'd think.
Suppose that you had to have a RealID, or the equivalent for your country, to post on Facebook? Or at least be visible beyond a few close friends. Comments?
There are also a bunch of people using other peoples names, this has real world consequences, as impersonated John Doe might not get a next job because the employer will scan FB and find awful posts written in their name. Hell, pictures of inactivated accounts are regularly snatched to make impersonations better, nothing new here.
Yep, Twitter and Facebook defeat the hypothesis that discourse is improved when people are forced to post under their real identity.
It only discourages the most sane people from participating thus it boosts the signal of the remaining crazies. Anyone who doesn't yet realize this just needs to join some local Facebook groups.
You don't know my name in the street and I don't know yours. We manage to be perfectly civil to each other.
And my reputation does not follow between groups either. I can even have completely distinct friend groups for different activities. Nobody at boxing class knows anybody I work with and the people that hang out with me at a bar can be a completely new set all over. I could even use different names in all these groups! :O
Yet we're all perfectly civil.
The same works online. I choose to use `swizec` everywhere, but is `ralston3` the same as `@r_ralston3` on twitter? Who knows. Does it matter? Not in the least. Look at us being perfectly fine fellows to each other.
On the other hand, you have to show government ID to walk into a bar and yet people are kicked out for bad behavior all the time.
Maybe it’s because you can’t get your ass kicked by being uncivil on the internet anonymously?
People are kicked out of bars for being assholes and it’s because they have been drinking their inhibitions are lowered and judgement of consequences is disrupted. Similarity to anonymous assholes on the Internet - their inhibitions are lowered because there’s no consequence.
I don’t think we should require names use or prohibit anonymous contributions. But the culture of the internet is pretty bad in this regard today when millions of anonymous people spend millions of hours getting riled up at shit posts from anonymous people.
Pseudonymity and anonymity are not the same thing.
Pseudonyms that are not trivially created and discarded can build reputation and will generally behave themselves (see Urbit’s approach to this problem).
Anonymous accounts incentivize awful behavior (see 4chan).
Real life is different because you’re not truly anonymous in person - you’re recognizable most of the time and identifiable. There are also more in person norms and social constraints.
The exception to this in real life might be mobs, where the chaos and confusion can provide some anonymity and well - people in mobs don’t behave that well either.
I think a lot of it comes down to social norms. From what I remember, 4chan was almost boringly pleasant outside /b/. Because the norm and moderation were towards thoughtful posting.
On the other hand pseudonymous reddits with the norm of knee jerk responses and political twitter are awful. Because that’s the encouraged norm.
This very site is a good counterpoint to your distinction. HN allows for easy creation of anonymous accounts, and doesn't do much to help you track who says what. And yet some people, by choosing to stick to their handle over time, build a reputation. And yet, even the anonymous people mostly behave, and we end up with a civil community.
Personally, I think the important factors for maintaining a civil community is a focus on civility, some overt selection of topics (vs. having a group that's about everything), and a lot of moderation work in the background that prevents the decay of standards. Social norms, unfortunately, don't maintain themselves.
Most HN accounts are pseudonymous with the occasional anonymous throw away for something specific.
HN also has great moderation (thanks DanG) and a strict set of rules which helps.
If HN was truly anonymous (everyone posted under anon accounts) I think it would decay and I’m not sure DanG would be able to save it.
I do think Urbit’s approach to this (low cost to creating an ID) is a really good one for handling this problem and the general problem of spam decentralized, and at scale.
> Anonymity seems to just bring the worst out of people (that's not a tech problem, that's a human/culture problem).
I used to believe that for a while, up until I started using Facebook. Then I experienced that people under their real names are just the same as the anonymous crowd. All it takes is to view the comments under any news article, or visit a group for regular people dealing with regular things.
That's why I stick to niche, focused communities - like HN. There you can find some semblance of civilization. The "general" Internet takes away whatever faith in humanity I have left.
There's something about commenting on-line in general, that seems to bring the worst out of people. My hypothesis is that you have to have a certain set of values around civility and rationality to be able to interact with other people on-line in a sane way. Without it - and I think most people haven't developed these values - it's just a mess. Why it doesn't happen so much in meatspace? I think it's a combination of social customs, taboos, and having more control over participating in conversations with random strangers.
I agree with everything you've said, but I'd also offer "evolutionary adaptation" as a reason not to be a dick to people who are close enough to physically attack.
>This idea that "Let's give people the ability to be anonymous, and somehow, that's gonna make us all bond together and be better" is pretty hilarious in hindsight.
I get irritated by this logic. I don't think many people are arguing that anonymous access makes us more likely to get along. There are lots of areas where we have the freedom to do something, that access objectively makes things worse in terms of social cost, but we keep it because it's what is right. Installing a breathalyzer lockout device on every new car sold would decrease drunk driving. There's a few religious sects that could be eliminated that would overnight reduce the amount of vile rhetoric in the world. We all make choices as to how much regulation we deem acceptable in daily life. Many of us see no valid reason to permanently tie online access to personal identification.
Maybe modern societies need to stop pretending we want anything to do with each other. This idea of unity or tolerance only exists because we continue to act like we somehow are supposed to like each other or sacrifice for each other. But why?
Why can’t we just leave each other alone and let people be free? Minimize the politics of it all and stop pretending we care a single bit about each other.
Yes we live in a society but maybe our shared goal is to be left alone to live our lives with the ones we care about. We just seem to be pushing each other to the limits of what’s considered broadly acceptable and it’s creating more and more hate.
You and your op are both idiots, pardon my wording.
People don't care: real names, real faces on Facebook, yet they still act as raging lunatics.
The old, actually anonymous internet 20+ years ago was much better.
EDIT: clarification: anonymity is not what's causing the dumpster fire, it's the people, and the companies driving them into vicious circles to get more attention - and thus, advertisement time and money - out of them.
>I would personally love to see a "web" where you have to comment...as your public self. Post messages...as your public self (not just on an individual platform level). So on and so forth.
That's Facebook though. And in my anecdotal experience the only reason most of my friends group has ever used Facebook is to post in private groups and events and use messenger. Scarcely any wall posts, very few posts in public groups. No opinions or politics whatsoever. Maybe the odd activist sharing some "wear a mask" message.
Those who engage in public discourse under their own names on the platform are by and large kind of ... strange.
Using your actual name for everything would be an amazing tool for building up a profile on you. Either you lay out your hobbies, interests and political standings for the whole world to see or you stop participating in those communities and discussions. And the profile won't be about only you, but your employer as well. If a load of engineers at X start posting more about tech Y or methodology Z you can deduce internal workings from that.
>Anonymity seems to just bring the worst out of people (that's not a tech problem, that's a human/culture problem). I would personally love to see a "web" where you have to comment...as your public self. Post messages...as your public self (not just on an individual platform level). So on and so forth.
I'm going to guess you're liberal and think the 'storming' of the capital was the political event of the decade on par with 9/11.
Yet it was all organized in the open on facebook using real names.
Curious how using real names did not stop anyone.
People are willing to do things they believe in that are detrimental to themselves. That is after all why the US exists.
Anonymity is a way for people to say that they want to blow up parliament and get feedback on why it's a good or bad idea before doing it.
It is very confusing to me why the US, a country that hasn't had a real genocide since the 1860s, is taking advice on speech regulation from countries whose last genocide was in the 1940s.
Its not anonymity that fuels the problem, its proximity.
When someone has to drive 1,000 miles to try to beat someone up for using fighting words, people are far more brazen in their rhetoric.
This is why, as I've posted before here on HN, I always use my real name in my communications. Because I expect to be held accountable for what I say, and how I say it, and I'm willing to accept the consequences.
This sounds like a great way to take away what may be the only outlet to feel some sense of belonging for a gay teen in a fundamentalist religious family in a deeply conservative part of the world.
What makes you think the future will be so dystopian? In Western countries such as the United States citizens have a high level of political participation and awareness of various issues. If the government attempts to unilaterally throttle the Internet there will be such a large uproar that our political leaders will be overturned on the next election. Plus, the newly voted-in Democratic leadership has a policy of advocating for the freedom of the web. So your fears of a dystopian, throttled Internet seem unfounded to me.
I'm not sure what makes you believe this. The voter turnout for the 2020 election was merely 62%, and that was a record high. American voters being more aware of various issues is another myth. Look at how quickly a politician that straight up denied facts made it to the highest office in the land.
Political leaders in the US are not really all that beholden to their voters, and very frequently strive to push self-serving agendas ($) over the needs of the public.
As dystopian as it sounds, we're already well on our way toward the Balkanization of the internet. Russia and China have their own firewalls bearing down on global network access. Many other authoritarian countries are following suit. It's going to be hard to stop that train regardless of if/how Facebook or Google are regulated.
We shouldn't confuse a throttled Internet with a fractured, balkanized one.
I've yet to see a strong political movement on something that actually matters. Everything is half-assed and the major movements all fail. Look at Bernie, the Wall Street bailout, China buying out our mortgages, the war on: Iraq, Afghanistan. And these are just recent memory. The will of the American people has been long controlled. Now they only care what the oligarchs tell them to like unions, universal healthcare, living wages, parental leave, a free internet are either un-capitalistic or communistic.
I am an American, and I don't feel like my will is being controlled... It is important to understand that everybody has a unique life situation and makes their own choices. Elon Musk hasn't been able to implant Neuralinks in our heads yet. I think the rebuke of Donald Trump in swing states like Georgia really shows that any attempt by an established group to clutch onto power is always going to be a gamble. It took the collective will of the people and real grassroots effort to overcome the obstacles elites put up there.
What I mean is that things are really out of our control. The government decided to move manufacturing out and there was nothing we were able to do about it. Colleges decided to raise their prices to obscene levels and there was really nothing we could do about it. The banks did whatever they wanted, we bailed them out and we really didn't have any say in the matter. The healthcare industry keeps charging us the highest prices in the world and we do nothing about it. The list goes on and on.
Trump's only real selling point was "I'm not the establishment". People rejected him for all kinds of reasons, but "disrupt the entrenched power" wasn't one of them.
Way to be dismissive. I bet you would have said the same thing to people a decade ago who thought the government was using the Internet to spy on them.
The idea of pervasive monitoring and dragnet surveillance was very much an implausible tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory in the minds of the general public until the Snowden revelations came out. Everyone knew that we were surveilling terrorists, particularly since 9/11, but they weren't aware that the NSA/GCHQ were doing things like compromising major communications platforms of domestic companies and exfiltrating and storing data indiscriminately in case it became useful in the future.
The decentralized web is the world wide web, and the decentralized tech you're referring to is just a shrunken facsimile of the real thing. Facebook is just the most popular "node" on the decentralized web, if the masses switched over to some ActivityPub social network history would just repeat itself whenever the most popular node bans someone popular.
That's like claiming that digital money can't be fully decentralized. And it indeed wasn't possible until Satoshi figured it out. There's no obvious reason to believe that a fully distributed social network isn't also possible. A requirement would be that any individual would have full agency for all operations on the network. Once you've got one agent that has special power over another agent, it's lost.
What Satoshi has actually proven is that the cliche is true: you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, if by "nothing" you mean "nothing that's a major crime."
Bitcoin is mostly a speculative tool and what few transactions happen on the blockchain are dominated by drugs and other contraband.
Society doesn't hold together at all unless people are smacked back into line when they act antisocially. No amount of technology can change that fundamental truth; ostracism and silence are core to human nature.
What does that have to do with anything I said? The point was that something previous claimed not possible was actually technically feasible. Completely unrelated to its morals, use cases, or value proposition. Do you now understand my point?
I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it doesn't change anything with respect to operators removing content. A "website" is just what we call a node accessible via the http protocol.
My point was in my original comment. Let me rephrase it to help you understand. Before cryptocurrency, all ledgers were stored in a central database where the admin of that DB could modify or delete anyone's currency. I assume you understand how cryptocurrency works, but to reiterate, the DB is distributed, and if anyone deletes a particular transaction on their server, they will be out of sync with the rest, and their copy rejected as invalid.
Some sort of distributed validation mechanism could conceivably be created which avoids any single point of control for a piece of content. And in fact you could use the BTC blockchain as a proof of concept - post a message with your transaction that gets encoded in the blockchain. It now becomes impossible to delete or modify. It is essentially uncensorable. You could delete it from your copy of the blockchain, but the real blockchain is the consensus of all nodes, not your particular copy.
>Decentralized systems, and The Dark Web, will grow.
>Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal.
Garlic routing provides plausible deniability. ISPs can't know for sure that you are using I2P, for instance, or what you are using it for. Sure, they could force every ISP to ban all encrypted P2P connections. And we could start setting up mesh networks that would subsequently be brought down by authorities. But here's the real question: how much abuse will people tolerate in the name of "security"? What will happen when a majority realizes that these measures are intended to control and suppress them while the elite keeps acting with ever-increasing impunity?
I think we can expect legislation to be drawn up soon. They try it every couple of years anyway, now they'll use the lawmaker's fear of another Capital Insurrection attempt to finally get it passed... the same way they used 911 to punch other holes in the 4th Amendment.
You are absolutely correct. It bothers me to this day that "I want my weed" is a bigger reason for stepping back on the War on Drugs than "I am tired of police murdering people in no-knock warrants for entire streets with zero repercussions." I don't understand it, and it makes me sad sometimes just thinking about it.
Yeah, I was waiting in line with a black guy and a white guy walks in with a blue line mask. Black guy didn't notice but man, what a way to flip off your fellow man with merely your presence. It's to hard these days to even imagine walking in someone shoes even if the narrative is being announced on a blowhorn.
I mean, newspapers have escaped regulation for a hell of a long time - in the UK Leveson was defanged and the "part 2" that would have enacted real change was quietly dropped.
The UK has strong libel laws[1], which I can only assume act as a counter-weight, so that's a bad example really as it's more complicated than you make out.
[1] far too strong in fact as far as I understand it
Doesn't stop stories designed to provoke outrage and generate clicks and shares in online form - e.g. "look at this asylum seeker who's got an 8 bed house in Knightsbrige and a bazillion pounds in benefits ... GRRRRR"
Even when said stories are patently false and designed to enrage and inflame public opinion.
See also all the papers who escaped any real consequences for hacking the voicemail of a murdered child (as well as various celebrities).
OP is saying the regulations would be at the international level. So, I am going to have to buy a UN license to use the internet? How is that enforced? If not, then it's up to individual countries to make their citizens buy a pass to get online? That doesn't seem enforceable either.
> Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal.
Sadly, given the actions of Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and Google, that is a preferred option to the current state today. Ironically we will have more freedom in that state.
Are you sure that you have an accurate assessment of how bad things are currently vs how bad they would become in a world where access to the Internet was strictly controlled by governments and anonymous/pseudonymous communications were forbidden? Don't you think that the risks in the second scenario are in a different category to the risks in the first one? While being sent to Facebook Jail could limit your social life, it pales besides the threat of Federal Prison.
This is a contrived fantasy, or a realistic question?
We have a system of justice, you get to defend youself, judged by your peers and posting general BS about politics is not a crime.
Youtube, on the other hand, will ban your channel without any recourse, so if you are earning a living from it, you kids might be on the street because something in a mysteruous machine learning algorithm got triggered.
Read the comments that I was responding to, if it's not clear to you. The GP described this scenario as being realistic, and the parent comment said that this seemed preferable to Big Tech acting without extensive regulation.
> We have a system of justice ...
That's irrelevant here, and there are probably far more people who are likely to lose their livelihoods if they post unpopular stuff about politics under their real name. I think that political content creators on YouTube supporting their family through money from their advertising program are an extreme edge-case, and they can always move to a new platform, whereas people in the former category would risk their non-political day-jobs and this would have a broader chilling effect across society at large.
And tell me how the solution to this problem could possibly be to give the government access to and control over the internet activity of every member of the population? What kind of dystopian nightmare would we be trying to create? Do you think that access to this level and breadth of data is likely to make future governments more or less authoritarian? Do you think it might attract more authoritarian figures into politics? Of course governments can surveil people currently, but in relatively limited numbers or with the cooperation of service providers, but I can't imagine people seriously thinking that this would be a good idea, or maybe they haven't thought through its practical implications.
"there are probably far more people who are likely to lose their livelihoods if they post unpopular stuff about politics under their real name.'
I do not see how that is true outside of US, unless we are talking about seriously extremist stuff
"they can always move to a new platform"
Like what? What platform has at least 10% market share as alternative to YouTube?
"Of course governments can surveil people currently, but in relatively limited numbers"
Millions of people is 'limited numbers'?
The liberty you are talikng about was already lost to corporates, the survalience state is alrwady here. you have no ability to escape phone providers selling your date and no knowledge of them doing it.
At least governments can be held accountable at the voting booth, a monopolistic company can't.
There was a really good quote adressing monopolies:
"If we will not accept kings and tyrants over over lives, then we shall not accept a king over necceseties of life"
I see that you've moved on from doubting that anyone had been discussing this as a potential scenario, to defending it.
> I do not see how that is true outside of US
It's true amongst much of the Anglosphere. And of course China, Russia I imagine, most of the Middle East, Africa, the rest of Asia, and South America. So the vast majority of the world's population. And if people can't speak anonymously or pseudonymously, it's going to have a huge chilling effect on free expression online. By the way, look around the world to see just how much the definition of "really extremist stuff" can vary.
I didn't suggest that moving to a platform outside of the Big Tech hegemony was necessarily easy, but I did suggest that it was possible. We're in the early days of the consumer revolt against Facebook/Youtube, but if people are suitably motivated to move to other platforms, those other platforms will grow and develop. And it's a whole lot easier to move to a different tech platform than it is to move to a different country, or to change the law when you're in a political minority.
Governments can really only properly surveil people who are taking active measures to conceal their activities in relatively small numbers. They can get a certain amount of information and metadata about the majority of the population who use popular platforms and services, but there has been a tendency in recent years to encrypt everything and then to collaborate with the security services of particular countries.
> The liberty you are talikng about was already lost to corporates, the survalience state is alrwady here. you have no ability to escape phone providers selling your date and no knowledge of them doing it.
If I'm concerned about Alexa hearing my private conversations, I can unplug her. I get to decide whether the potential risk to my privacy is worth the benefits of using particular products and services. I can ask my friends not to livestream me on Facebook when they walk into my house. There's loads of popular technology that I'm perfectly free not to use, or to seek out alternatives. The fact that so many people choose the easiest, shiniest option is their decision, and their problem, and you don't get to make that my problem. It's both untrue and it's also a complete non-sequitur to say that we're already living voluntarily in a corporate surveillance state and then to say that we might as well therefore make it into a government-controlled surveillance state, and to replace terms and conditions with laws, and account cancellations and bans with criminal penalties.
> At least governments can be held accountable at the voting booth
In practice, this only tends to happen in countries where people are relatively free to do things on the Internet without the government tracking and controlling their activity. There's a causal link here.
> a monopolistic company can't.
Facebook will only continue to be the pre-eminent social network as long as vast numbers of people choose to continue to use it. You, personally, can hold it to account by not using it any more, but you have no right to stop other people from using it if they want to.
> There was a really good quote adressing monopolies: "If we will not accept kings and tyrants over over lives, then we shall not accept a king over necceseties of life"
To suggest that Facebook is a necessity of life really highlights what a position of privilege we're in. Perhaps people who are trying to advance that kind of argumentation need to have a good, hard look at what the "needs" and the "wants" really are in their life. I'd also recommend that you read some of the Austrian economists to find out what a real monopoly would actually look like, and why it is that you're unlikely to encounter one.
Based on the freedom I have with using phone, electricity, water, roads, and other public infrastructure, absolutely I am sure. Twitter, Apple, and Facebook have showed their hand. I want no part of that future.
Yes, true. It's more the illegal-to-access-internet-anonymously part that concerns. Overreach is usually declared 'in the name of security/crime' reasons. A paid licence for more privileged access has also been mooted, but I can't recall where I read that.
>As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control.
How did the US government take back any control from newspaper barons? I honestly cannot think of anything.
Well this is an outrage ... Oh, it's the SWP. They've arguably done more to damage left wing politics in the UK than any number of police infiltrators. They're both incompetent, annoying, and persistent.
Would be useful to know what post got them banned, but the content moderation is completely opaque.
It's a positive thing for these ejections to be across the political spectrum, because it makes the demand for distributed moderation come from across the political spectrum.
I hope that demand congeals on support for an open blogging protocol, such that people can very easily post once and direct it to multiple platforms or any listener. If this becomes popular enough, and posts aren't owned by a particular platform, the big platforms lose their power to control the conversation.
Generally agreed, although I think that only really applies to control at the social-network level, not to control exerted via e.g. Chrome or DNS or your ISP.
Didn't Mozilla recently-ish put out a statement about possibly having a black-list of sorts to remove bad sites / "think of the children"? On mobile so can't search for it but surely someone here remembers the link.
The statement was vague and ambiguous and touched a lot of raw nerves, but coming as it did on the heels of major layoffs at Mozilla it felt a bit like Mitchell Baker pulling a "roll hard left and die".
As long as the same types of ejectable communications are being published across the political spectrum. I assume the SWP was calling for violence against the government or various officials?
> It's a positive thing for these ejections to be across the political spectrum, because it makes the demand for distributed moderation come from across the political spectrum.
It's a positive thing for these ejections to be across the political spectrum, because it de-politicizes censorship, and folks on one side of the spectrum cheering for the other side begin to realize that censorship is always a scope creep issue.
I'm a little worried in a few years it will only be safe to put up recipes and tell people happy birthday on social media, everything else will be too controversial
Reminds me of the idea that discussing salary didn’t used to be an issue; but now is considered rude and taboo. We don’t talk about salary because it isn’t “safe”.
On the otherhand, I agree with other people here that maybe feeling like it isn’t “safe” to discuss things will lead to more open and free places to communicate.
Discussing salary has effects beyond someone being offended. The taboo on salary tilts the table in favor of employers at the expense of the employed. In particular it enables lowballing of employees.
Sorry, "Happy Birthday" is an imperialist imposition of western cultural values. It also mocks the elderly. Such micro-aggressions are no longer permitted on our platform. You have been "fact-checked" and given your first and last warning and a temporary ban of 90 days.
I've treated Facebook like that for years now, reinforced by the occasional observation that it's a bad idea not to. Even discussing the academic evidence for face mask efficacy was a bit of a minefield back in March of last year. I was actually excluded from a massive national FB group over it. Wasn't even a heated discussion, just a single post with a reasoned argument and some referenced papers.
Any debate or discussion of importance I do either either pseudonymously, or in private forums with only people I know are capable of discussing, disagreeing and having an open mind to surprising viewpoints.
Honestly, this stuff drives wealth disparity. I can't even discuss investment strategies in these public forums without risking personal attacks.
Recipes are an infringement of intellectual property. In order to protect recipe creators we need to make sure that the streaming-recipe platforms are regulated.
I understand that the likes of Facebook are making a lot of money from political advertising. They're not going to stop it on their own without a severe change of heart. Those in power that have manipulates voters through social media certainly aren't going to push for it.
What I'm seeing is a lot of "we should regulate things so that facebook isn't allowed to censor things I like but is obligated to censor things I don't like".
If people reacted to censorship in a principled way, we wouldn't be where we are today.
And then you posting your counter narrative - even if it's truth and reason - will result in you being ban/blocked from their threads. We're going to start to have big in-person forums where a person's truth and reason can't be quickly silenced so the potential mob will be smaller than otherwise.
If people reacted to censorship in a principled way, nobody would use Facebook. It's an inherently censorious platform. The whole argument is about regulating or influencing Facebook's patterns of censorship.
Or.... The media companies just like to have the middle-of-the-road, dont-rock-the-boat-too-much parties who will kowtow to them and give the masses the ILUSION of political choice.
Middle doesn't have to mean 100% pro-establishment or pro-status-quo. And the illusion of choice applies to the falsely compressed, single-issue, single-axis left/right extremes, too.
> Middle doesn't have to mean 100% pro-establishment or pro-status-quo.
You are confusing centrist parties with "middle-of-the-road" parties which by axiomatic definition mean the mainstream parties.
> And the illusion of choice applies to the falsely compressed, single-issue, single-axis left/right extremes, too.
It is not an illusion if the media is massively invested on who wins. Vanilla Republican vs Vanilla Democrat = Illusion of Choice,it does not matter who wins, the media wont care and the status quo will be maintained. Trump vs Vanilla Democrats = Choice matters, media will align with the Democrats to maintain the status-quo. Vanilla Republicans vs Bernie Sanders, Choice matters, media will align with the Republicans to maintain the status-quo.
It it if it only applies to one side and in a form that the other side approves of, and that was the point of the example you replied to. If it was your example, "I want them for me and mine" then there wouldn't be a problem (or this problem, there'll always be problems).
It possible that the only sensible option is to ban all political groups from these platforms.
The reason is that ultimately no one what's to have extreme polar opinions on these sites, but it's going to be very difficult to determine that in a non partisan manner.
Though also to be fair it might be difficult to truely flag all political groups.
This assumes that there is a political spectrum and that all parts of it have equal power. The SWP have miniscule political clout. In general the left (not the liberal center often mislabeled as "left" in the USA) has few institutions and less power. The most likely outcome is the consolidation of censorship in the hands of Republican/Democratic censors. Left-wingers will be welcome to post to ten followers at a time on Mastodon.
There really is only one obvious response to this: Facebook, Google etc are common carriers, not allowed to censor. They should also be broken up given their massive size which enables them to drive policy which affects them.
Nah, I don’t want a platform for Nazis or white supremecists or paedophiles or heroine dealers. If that makes me a bad person in other people’s eyes then I’m fine with that.
> I hope that demand congeals on support for an open blogging protocol
One of the biggest takeaways from the past 25 years of "the internet" is that critical-mass-achieving walled gardens are the ticket to unicorndom, and that's the only kind of solution that VC dollars are chasing. I don't think there's a way for someone to make a self-sustaining alternative open platform in this "market."
“Communism” is a class of philosophies with shared traits.
> Socialism is basically a flawed materialization of that utopistic philosophy.
“Socialism”, in general, is a class of philosophies of which “Communism” is a more specific subset.
In specifically Marxist Communism, “Socialism” is also a named stage on the route to acheivement of the desired end-state at which the philosophy is aimed.
OTOH.
They feel they have the power and self imprimatur to manage speech as they see fit, but now also activists are telling them to shut this or that voice they disagree with.
Because I remember when all this was starting up two decades ago there were a lot of pressures to block this or that. Maybe hate speech, or maybe you crossed RIAA, or maybe you were of dark complexion and Middle East descent and nobody could tell what your arabic said but it defenitely had to be dangerous.
So it became pretty customary to have corporations bring content down when asked to do so and this recent wave of deplatforming is just extension.
Basically, that's what happens when you start to compromise on principles and choose the easy path.
Instead of letting people exercise their free speech and using existing laws to chase people for when they are impinging on somebody elses rights, we chose to compromise and asked companies to do this without due process.
And that was beginning of the slippery slope which now suddenly got much steeper than before.
While the RIAA is problematic, it was done under plausible cover of law. So, I understand following criminal laws and such.
As for foreign locales, I think the solution is to operate locally like a Mazda or a PepsiCo has to do. Have locals manage your local ops, of course reporting to HQ.
But now they decided to enter the unwieldily realm of figuring out intent of speech and whether it’s crossed moral lines or ethical lines or political lines.
That’s just impossible and sets them up for failure.
They deserve this failure.
They want to dictate TO THE WORLD right and wrong speech UNIFORMLY. That’s utterly ridiculous.
So China or Venezuela or Iran said mean things. So what! At least we know what they’re thinking and if serious enough take proper measures. It should not be FB or TWTTR who decide these things.
Digging themselves into a regulation hole is one thing. But they're digging the rest of us into that hole with them as they refuse to stop. The regulations applied to them will affect all of us as well.
Nah, they can't refuse to stop. We just need strong enough coalition of countries. Not sure if US is going to do it but EU certainly will. And once laws are in place all those deplatformed organizations will pop up again pretty quickly.
After a few months of using Facebook years ago it was pretty clear how toxic such an environment was. I really don't know how people have continued to support Facebook over the years.
I still keep in touch with friends and family and most all of those services I use to communicate are benign, unlike Facebook. Unfortunately "vote with your wallet" (or attention, time, content creation, whatever) just doesn't work the way it's portrayed to work and now we have critical masses in these businesses that create governance through their corporate policies and practices.
Regulatory capture requires politicians to follow their lobbyists, and not react against everything they say because FB et. al. have become public relations poison.
It's interesting to see how social media reacts to this. The same people that were cheering on conservatives being purged are now crying over how Antifa and socialists doesn't get a free pass.
Does anyone know of any good study where participants are asked their opinion on a quote before and after they are told which ideological leader said it?
I'd argue this is a good thing. Facebook is not immortal. Every user that Facebook alienates is a win. Already many non-technical people have been moving to Signal after Facebook's new privacy policy.
Sadly, Signal is not the ideal solution either. When I started with the internet, there were countless free/non free email providers, and now nearly everything is gmail, outlook, yahoo, qq, and a few more big ones. We're playing the same with messaging, whereas in reality what we'd need is federated providers, competing with their client software which can all write to each other - see SMS and email.
I was talking with my wife that somehow people are OK with a borrowed (rented?) identity for so many things. xyz@gmail.com, +00-00 on whatsapp, etc, and there as only a few wanting to be mail@this-is-my-home-on-the-internet.me, though this is a very different topic.
For me, an intermediate step to a lot of worlds I like better than this one, is for a diverse ecosystem of messengers to compete on security, openness, and guarantees of not surveilling/monetizing users.
In the last weeks I've had all my WhatsApp groups of "normal people" start discussing alternative messengers on exactly these terms. They've looked into Viber, Telegram, SMS, Signal, and others. So i'm happy with that.
Matrix.org - built on matrix, a federated, but somewhat fat protocol -, or one of conversations.im, quicksy.im, blabber.im, www.jabber.de, etc, all built on xmpp.
EDIT the point with these is tricky, because they are not all-in-one solutions. People these days tend to think that an app/program == the service, but this is so not the case. I've tried telling people they could use other programs to access gmail, but it was like talking to a wall, and this is serious issue in this - the instant messenger - case as well. I have no idea how to tell people that it's possible to use _something else_ as an interface. Somehow most of them understand that there are different browsers to access the internet, but they don't apply this thinking to other protocols and services. Hence recommendations for services who provide their "own" apps, conversations being the root, quicksy and blabber being derivatives.
> We're playing the same with messaging, whereas in reality what we'd need is federated providers, competing with their client software which can all write to each other - see SMS and email.
True, but nothing particularly good seems to exist yet. It has to solve the problem of end-to-end encryption in a way that users can manage to not lose their keys too easily, which is a hard problem. It only has to solve this, when email did not (at least in an easily usable way for most people) because it already exists in messaging, but that doesn't stop it not being well solved holding back the situation.
Anything that uses an open source client is a meaningful step better than WhatsApp, because it is easier to make and maintain a bridge from something better, like Matrix, IMHO. At least recently, I did not think Matrix was easy enough to use and stable enough to recomend to people, but them moving to something with an open source client, is better than nothing IMHO.
I'm not convinced Signal is better than Telegram, as an alternative, since Telegram is so much easier to use if you don't care about end-to-end encryption (most users don't sadly), and basically as easy to use (but much less trustworthy) if you do. I'm not sure which is better TBH, but I expect more people will stay off WhatsApp if they try Telegram than if they only try Signal, which is an advantage of recomending that (though I'm not sure it out-weighs the advantage of there being less end-to-end encryption).
> They are demanding to be reinstated immediately.
LOL. You were using someone else's website - Zuck's, to be specific. If you demand that he allows you to post on his site, could I make demands to post on your site?
I'm actually glad these are finally happening. People need to learn to go back running their own services, under their own domain, owned (bought or leased) hardware, etc.
The current "social" media + cloud everything is a bad road, but apparently this - the shutdowns - is the only way to get out of this swamp.
Agreed except for the cloud part. Buying your own hardware, configuring and maintaining it is a high bar for most people, even technical people.
But we do need distributes systems and we need a lot of competition in the hosting space (it’s not terrible now for lost things if they’re small but big services may have problems).
> If you demand that he allows you to post on his site, could I make demands to post on your site?
Facebook is the Internet equivalent of a public accommodation[1]. It is not Zuckerberg's personal home, it is a place open to the public to conduct business. If Facebook is going to set conditions that some members of the public are allowed and not others, it should be clear what those conditions are and when they are and are not met.
That said, I do agree that people should flee these places where they're at the mercy of whatever algorithm or ideological fad that takes over the current employees or whatever. But insofar as they aren't we should regulate it the same way we regulate (in the US) hotels, restaurants, and other public-facing businesses to ensure that the whole public has a fair chance to use them.
>If you demand that he allows you to post on his site, could I make demands to post on your site?
Of course you could. Whether you would have a good case is another question.
If you're implying an equivalence between the two situations I think what you're missing is that Facebook and the SWP's websites are very different kinds of website. Facebook is a social media website[1] that hosts various kinds of communities, whereas the SWP's website is a website specific to the SWP.
No idea. When I said "Whether you would have a good case is another question" I wasn't talking about a legal argument - I was just talking about whether or not you'd be able to make a compelling argument likely to affect actual change.
These discussions always end in the same way. "But they are a PRIVATE COMPANY they have the right to do that!" Fuck that.
Who is working on decentralized content distribution? We need decentralized free software versions of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube so that not a single actor has veto power over what content is allowed. Something like torrents, but without torrent sites (which are single points of failure).
There's FreeNet, but it's crap and contains child porn. We need something new that ensures the right of Socialist parties (and Nazi parties too, for that matter) to spread their legal propaganda, but can't be used for pedophiles to distribute child porn. Technically, it can't be impossible to create something like that. People have tons of bandwidth and disk space to spare so that shouldn't be a problem either.
The only way you're getting a decentralised system without child porn at all is to allow some moderation. Decentralized consensus-based moderation can probably be relied on to shut down child porn distribution, but soon you're going to run into the problem that large numbers of people signing up to use the service hate Nazis and/or BLM just as much...
Tim Berner’s Lee and the Solid project have a good answer to these issues I think. Everyone owns their posts and likes and comments and friends etc. Any new platform can spin up and instantly compete because they just have to make your data more useful to you. It’d be like you owning all your music online and Spotify is just an interface, if you don’t like it you can jump to Apple Music. Or make your own or download some random app off the web that does what you want. The reason a new social network can’t just compete with Facebook is because they have all the data, if the data could stay with us then new platforms offering news ways of interfacing would be popping up all over the place. https://solidproject.org/
That sounds like an improvement for sure but it looks like it just shifts the problem to pod providers and hosts. If the web was all pods then the Socialist Workers Party could just as well end up in a situation similar to Parler's in the end.
The hope is pod hosts would compete, some could be free and mine your data for ads etc, others could pay and focus on privacy. If that doesn’t work you host your own pod server, as long as it has an address that can be reached by the web that’s all that’s needed.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 384 ms ] threadI tried to see what the SWP comments on covid were. They seem pretty mainstream (not covid denialism). Ironically their "demands" from December are now government policy...
https://swp.org.uk/schools-are-not-safe/
I'm not sure where I stand on Facebook's (etc) right to remove legal content, but I would like a requirement for any platform to specifically state why they removed content. Too often things are taken down for no reason and get put back up based on twitter outrage rather than any logical basis. YouTube are getting infamous for this...
I don't approve of calls for violence and I thought Facebook etc were doing well at free speech until the last year or two. It seems like no one is happy with that anymore.
Put another way--let's not turn sedition into another us-vs-them political game. That's how democracy ends.
ETA: to quantify that a bit, in the 2010 General Election the SWP ran as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. Nationally that coalition received 0.04% of votes cast. I can't find any indication that they even put up any candidates in subsequent elections.
Acting like a reaction to a politically charged breach of the capitol building is equivalent to a page sharing views about COVID and workers rights getting removed?
It actually feels absurd to type that sentence out...
Although I can't see anything in throwaways885's comment to suggest that they were talking about the post-Capitol-breach purges. If anything, "for a while" suggests the opposite.
And my point is it's not really a "significant misapprehension" at all, at least not significant to their point.
They could be a party of one guy in his underwear and the point would still stand
As a general takeaway, "It actually feels absurd to type that sentence out..." can be a useful warning sign that you're projecting an absurd interpretation onto a reasonable statement instead of applying the Principle of Charity.
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The deplatforming thing that ramped up in 2018 has overwhelmingly been about things like white-supremacy and neo-nazis... so it hit the alt-right very hard.
This is like conservative politicians complaining their followers are being deplatformed when Twitter decides to take a harder stance against white supremacy in the wake of an attack on our capitol which featured the alt-right/ neo-Confederates/ neo-Nazis... you're not confirming what you think you're confirming.
The conservatives is not being targeted per se, but it just so happens a lot of neo-nazis are conservatives. Take it as you will.
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They're also ignoring the fact the "deplatforming thing" has recently kicked into high gear because of a certain set of events
This would be like someone from the Branch Davidians saying "We've always felt persecuted" in March 1993.. there were, but also a little thing happened with 4 ATF agents the month before!
That's the point being brought up, those events are very relevant if you're talking about deplatforming today. You don't brush such a major occurrence under the rug if you're arguing in good faith.
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Even them saying it ramped up in "around 2018" is disingenuous. It ramped up with Trump and his actions.
And there was as a lot of gnashing of teeth over if that was right, if Trump was actually building a hateful support base or if this was just political lynching...
And then the Capitol breach occurred and removed all doubt and now we see it accelerating.
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Also you read the sibling comment, you should have realized it makes the last part of your comment complete non-sequitur... sometimes it's a useful sign the argument being made just lacking self-awareness
I defended Parler in another thread and I'll defend the SWP here, despite not particularly liking either group.
And you're insulting me and black people everywhere trying to create equivalence between Parler being deplatformed for deciding to not moderate hate speech insofar as it didn't amount to a civil tort... and the systematic oppression of black people based on their skin color.
It's disgusting you'd stoop so low to try that.
The "favourable media attention" you are talking about is here the Socialist Workers' Party reporting about itself on its own website.
I'd wager the BBC will not cover this at all, in contrast to acres of free promotion for Parler etc.
See: how Farage was treated by the BCC, versus Corbyn
Related: https://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/research/rese...
Are their some good examples of censorship from before the last 2 weeks I can cite?
It might help a more friendly discussion too, people are already down voting randomly it seems...
I remember when Joe Rogan went to Spotify and there was something of a backlash inside the company. I vaguely remember some of his episodes (discussing trans athletes rights) weren't hosted for a while.
I assume this plays a role. I really like facebook meme groups, but every single one inevitably gets "zucced" because of overzealous reports by people who genuinely don't get the problem. They even moderate themselves now to avoid reports.
The Socialist Workers Party is the largest revolutionary group in Britain
My guess is that tag line is causing automated take down issues.
(Relevant context: the SWP is tiny and inconsequential, but very active in coordinating its [unlikely to be violent] messaging and inflating its importance. Nobody would know who its "dozens of leading activists" were to target them. And its local group pages are still up and easily discoverable by searching, so if it was a deliberate action to silence the party it would be a very sloppy one)
It doesn't matters.
You are as much responsible for decisions done by your algorithms as you are for decisions done by people.
If you can not guarantee that algorithms work in the parameters of moral and law you can not use them.
It is that simple.
Edit: For those unaware, this is the devil's advocate take. HN has been remarkably pro-corporate censorship lately, and only a matter of weeks later its coming back to bite pro-censorship advocates.
First off: you're right. You can't compel a private company to support speech. But the entirety of political discourse happens online now. There's a clear and prevailing interest that free speech can happen online, at scale.
At the end of the day/century, FB is just a random internet site/app. Discourse is online, yes, but the zeitgeist left FB years ago. Zuck's fate will catch up with him fast, now that their network effect has broken, or is close to doing so.
It's already over. FB/IG/WhatsApp are all clearly dead, in the Grahamian sense.
A site is free to ban all left-wing groups, all right-wing groups, all centrist groups, all groups with an 'e' in their names, all hate groups, or all of the above. Others are free to react to those bans accordingly, and choose whether to associate/support/host the site or not.
It's not injurious to them to moderate content, clearly, since they are doing it.
By pulling this crap and especially by doing it algorithmically they are pushing the internet in a difficult direction.
If §230 went away, and Facebook continued moderating, they would be liable if anyone posted defamatory content to Facebook -- something which surely happens on a constant basis.
If that is not currently the case and these companies can effectively moderate the content on their networks without driving themselves out of business with the cost, well, they don't have the justification for 230's exemption anymore.
It provides immunity to publishers who (1) publish user-generated content, and (2) perform moderation on some of that content. They are free to do their moderation without being required to moderate everything posted to their site.
It's still quite obviously true that Facebook is not able to moderate everything posted to its website. What are you trying to say?
It doesn't. It outlines that internet companies ARE NOT PUBLISHERS. As a result, they aren't liable for the things that people or other companies publish on their platforms.
>It does not provide immunity or any other benefit to a publisher that doesn't perform moderation. Such a publisher was already immune under preexisting law.
They weren't immune under preexisting law, they were actually liable as they could be treated as the publisher of any content on their platform. The reason the exception was carved out was because it was considered detrimental to the development of the internet and the free spread of ideas on the internet if websites were forced to moderate content completely.
It's actually a very interesting exception, too, because in effect this means companies like facebook are not held liable for publishing things on their platform, just so long as they didn't create the things they publish. It also provides them immunity to perform any kind of moderation they like.
The problem is that this exception was built for the prior internet. It depended on and was intended to build up the idea of personal control over content, where a person could decide what content they did and did not want to see online. That's why they were required to have a message telling users they can get parental controls and blockers.
>It's still quite obviously true that Facebook is not able to moderate everything posted to its website. What are you trying to say?
That's not obvious. I run ads on Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other platforms; there is moderation before publishing for every ad I post. It's not perfect and often has problems, but it exists and it's expanding.
I assume I can also beat my children as long as I do it inside my private house?
>I assume I can also beat my children as long as I do it inside my private house?
Beating children is illegal for anyone by law already. Removing something spray painted on your walls or deciding what books people get to discuss in your own book club isn't illegal, and neither should it be. I hope you understand the nuance here, and why it makes your analogy flawed.
In difference to the US:
- some countries clearly differentiate between private and cooperate
- have proper free speech laws which are not limited to government inference into free speech but free speech itself
- have laws about discrimination and protection of political organizations which does not allow you to arbitrary "block" people
etc.
I don't know about UK law. But I'm pretty sure this would have been unlawful in Germany, and potentially all of EU (due to EU wide regulation, but while I'm pretty sure about Germany I'm less so about EU wide regulations).
I can't find any specifics on the position they hold, but the UK is pretty much in line with the US on mask mandates and lockdowns in hotspots.
This isn't their first 'mistake' to shut them down. Unless of course Facebook believes that this group has broken their rules which resulted them on getting shut down.
Regardless, Facebook is a private platform and can shut down whoever they want. Mistake or not.
No.. I mean yes in the US but not necessary in other countries.
Not all countries free speech and anti discreminatory laws which are as weak as in the US (the US free speech law is just about government interference in free speech but not free speech itself).
In Germany this would have been in violation with multiple laws as far as I know.
Looks to just be an over-eager moderation engine.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-dorset-55215949
Computing systems are do not act on their own. That the system did this was because it was allowed to, or more accurately, told to.
This is true.
> Computing systems are do not act on their own.
That doesn't mean that computer systems behave the way that we intend them to behave, or even that we really fully understand our own intent!
How much of your own code have you formally verified? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification)
How much of your own code even has a precise enough purpose that the spec of what it's supposed to do is shorter than the length of the code? Such that you could even in theory formally verify that the implementation is in some sense "correct"?
For that matter.... how much of your code has a precise enough purpose that the spec of what it's supposed to do can be written down in formal language at all?
And actually... how much of your code has a precise enough purpose that the spec of what it's supposed to do can be written down in ENGLISH at all?
I don't think something like an "extremism filter" can ever be implemented in a bug-free way, because I don't think there's a precise enough definition of what "bug-free" would even mean.
The problem of people blaming bad outcomes on "the algorithm" is real, and organizations should take responsibility for misclassifications generated by code that they own and operate.
It's unhelpful to pretend like engineers and the organizations they work for have zero agency.
However, it's equally unhelpful to pretend like buggy behavior aligns with the intent of the engineer/organization.
(And in the case of automated moderation, the software getting something wrong really should be considered foreseen consequence anyway. Facebook knew, or should have known, that these systems would have false positives.)
But also, "the computer was told to do the buggy thing" is misleading because it suggests mens rea.
We could certainly say a 'corporation intended' to do something if we found an email from the CEO commanding it, that much is trivial. But what if we think of a corporation as a 'slow AI' or 'China brain'? Might the corporation, viewed that way, have intent that transcends the individual thoughts and desires of the constituent employees? The system may be structured in a way that rewards low level employees for doing things the individual executives would never consider acceptable (for instance, 'lying to the executives'), and which the low level employees don't think is a good idea either. With all the humans personally opposed to some business practice, it might still occur due to the structure of the system. If we personify that system, we could perhaps say the system itself has a will of its own, with objectives alien to any of the humans involved.
A harsh example far worse than Facebook: the Functionalism-Intentionalism debate (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism–intentionalism...) At the end of the day, does it really matter? Whether you subscribe to functionalism or intentionalism in that case, the horrible end result is the same and people need to be held accountable for it.
But we do distinguish in regulated engineering disciplines. A contractor that intentionally uses shoddy materials in a bridge or tunnel is treated differently from a contractor who simply fails to implement legally required QC is treated different from a contractor who implemented legally required QC but laid bad concrete due to operator error that wasn't captured by that legal requirement.
> At the end of the day, does it really matter?
Yes, and the reason it matters is immediate when you try to answer the following questions.
> Whether you subscribe to functionalism or intentionalism in that case, the horrible end result is the same and people need to be held accountable for it.
1. Held accountable how?
2. Toward what end?
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Facebook has good engineers, but they're not gods. It is not possible to write a perfect -- or perhaps even passably good -- "political extremism" filter.
Shifting blame from "the algorithm" to "the engineers" or "the corporation" completely misses the whole fucking point: there is no spec for "perfectly functional political extremism filter". 0.000% of the people calling for "politically neutral moderation" have any god damn clue how to define the thing that are asking for, even in a natural language, let alone a language precise enough to implement.
Just look at the rhetoric used. People blame in passive voice "corporations" and "engineers", while criticizing others for using passive voice to blame "the algorithm". I'm not saying that we don't need a base level of QC and corporate responsibility. I even think Software people should be folded into Professional Engineering with all of the personal responsibility that entails! But we need to be very realistic about the fact that engineers are not Gods who can Solve Politics.
Hell, even if you erase inherent political tension this is still an impossible task. Can you write down a filter that's perfectly biased toward liberal speech? No.
So, again, Held accountable how? Toward what end? Unless your answer is "purposefully kill all social media including HN", mens rea matters.
In the case of the Nazis, the answers are 1. Executed. 2. Justice. For Facebook, I think executions should be off the table, but the second answer is the same.
Facebook's engineers aren't gods, I get that. Knowing their engineers aren't gods, Facebook proceeded to use them to create imperfect but profitable systems anyway. Systems they knew or should have known would harm society while enriching their shareholders. This is facebook's crime. If they couldn't create moderation systems that operate well at a massive scale, they never should have operated at that scale in the first place. They couldn't, should have known they couldn't, but tried anyway.
The president pro tempore of the US senate was a Segrationist in 2001. Literally, segregationists of the US Senate outlived pets.com
If any component of your blame or solution to the state of western politics includes the words "social media", ... good fucking luck.
You are mistaken. Neither intentionalists nor functionalists excuse the responsibility of anybody, least of all the organization's leadership. To both, the organization and its leaders are to be held responsible for the actions of the organization. The functionalist model does not absolve anybody of guilt.
If you want to see the hazard of demanding proof of intention, look no further than the travesty of justice that occurred in the wake of Enron. Every last Enron executive should have been jailed, but prosecutors had a hell of a time getting any of them convicted of anything because of this misguided obsession with proving intent. And nobody from Arthur Anderson went to prison, for the same reason.
Obsession with intent allows the guilty to trot out the "we didn't mean for this to happen, we're all just idiots." excuse. Without a smoking gun email, that excuse is hard to conclusively disprove. The antidote to that is strict liability; saying that their intentions are irrelevant and punishing them anyway.
Reminder, this is my point: "When software goes wrong, the company that decided to create and operate that software for profit is responsible for whatever negative impact that software might have, regardless of whether these problems were foreseen."
Take medical software as an example: a highly regulated space, that very few SMEs and approximately ZERO open-source projects can afford to enter.
And even in that space, strict liabilities are restricted to the software’s *intended use*. As long as the manufacturer has taken steps to clearly indicate what is appropriate use / misuse of the software, the manufacturer is NOT liable if the software is misused by the user. At that point, the liability shifts to the user of the software instead.
An in-between approach would be GDPR-style regulations that define what is and is not appropriate to do, with proportional penalties for failing to do that: intended vs unintended failure; penalties proportional to company income so it can hurt small and big companies alike without outright killing them on the first few strikes. However there is a cost even to that: such regulations do block valid innovation and they tend to expand and get more complex year over year.
There is no easy way out here that I can see...
Sure. Neither do children, nor pets, nor farm animals, nor automated control systems.
The common thread connecting these examples is: people who are responsible for managing children/animals/PID controllers bear responsibility for the action of these systems, whatever the actions are. Same reasoning should apply to algorithms: don't deploy them unless you're prepared to be held accountable for what they end up doing.
(Charles Williams' All Hallows' Eve is an extended meditation about just that.)
And in this case, it appears that they aren’t.
It could easily be a model that takes in features such as "has an admin banned this page" or "has an overwhelming number of users reported this page" and then based on that it identifies problematic keywords that it uses to ban pages.
And then it relies on humans to manually interject when the model fails as it sometimes will.
That were programmed to make decision no one understands and to act on their own.
Correctly moderating Facebook, blocking recalled/bogus/questionable goods on Amazon, or keeping Google's search index pruned of scams and misinformation, are fundamentally problems that requires armies of trained humans, well-thought-out and transparent process, and potentially independent or state oversight to keep it all on the rails.
It's much cheaper for them to buy racks of servers, and occasionally shrug their shoulders and blame algorithms. I'm amazed that legislatures throughout the world have been willing to accept that behaviour for so long. It's not like the problems can be explained away with "it's an insignificant business with no political or commercial influence", or "it's a 6-month-old startup firm that made beginner mistakes because they couldn't afford to do things properly".
Break them all up. Even in a world without Google and Facebook, enterprising nerds will be encoding H.265 via smoke signals to ensure we get our cat videos.
Thinking of Amazon for instance, they pretty much destroyed small local vendors who did much more than just sell goods. They were also access points to local community and culture and raised diversity.
Similar story with Google and Facebook and online news outlets.
It's a question of balance of power. The interplay of society and corporations is not a one way street. Corps offer services to society while they also rely on it for resources and infrastructure and to give it legitimacy and protect its assets.
Among Big Tech firms I believe Microsoft was one of the first to understand and incorporate this and so they self-corrected. Facebook is really late to the party in this regard and I hope in a couple of years we will be able to see the situation with more sober eyes.
Not always. The GDPR has some decent provisions against overuse of machine learning, for example (it is just a shame it is basically unenforceable against global megacorps, and otherwise so shit as a set of law). We should not accept it, and I don;t think this is a fight that is lost. It is fine to use ML, as long as you are prepared to suffer the consequences of the mistakes of your models that you do not check. This is an important principle.
> Even in a world without Google and Facebook, enterprising nerds will be encoding H.265 via smoke signals to ensure we get our cat videos.
Damn right. These are important. I'm concerned this statement isn't entirely serious. While I hope not to have to resort to similar to that, I will if I have to. Cat videos are important damn it.
Leftist pages with any tact have been somewhat insulated from the purges, but the liberals no longer need them, and the conservatives never liked them. They're getting the same treatment as the right now.
3124 pages affected
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Kaplan
Both Conservatives and Liberals claim Facebook is biased towards the other side, so you're going to have to do a hell of a lot better, and produce some actual, bonafide evidence their "incentive structure is anti-left" besides witchhunting and saying one of their upper middle-managers is a hardcore republican.
Care to let us know about the political leanings of Sheryl Sandberg and Chris Cox, who are actually in the C-Suite? Or would you prefer to cherry pick someone in upper middle management who is a staunch republican, which according to you seems to be some kind of heinous crime. Not to mention you're cherry-picking someone who reports to someone who reports to someone etc... who reports to Sheryl Sandberg (COO).
Facebook's current allegiance is to pleasing the entrenched state apparatus so they won't get broken up.
Maybe if you advocated for 'no politics on facebook', it would sound better.
Social media has given voice to marginalized groups, and people seemingly fear that voice. It's something to take a look at, rather than sweep it under the rug with bans.
All of these were "radical" at their time. The only reason they're not anymore is because they have become mainstream. Maybe you should check your assumptions about how life is and read some history of how we got here.
"defund the police" is something that has been vocalized for decades, if not centuries. You should ask yourself what has lead up in your education to accept state monopoly on violence, especially when that violence is enacted unfairly against certain minorities. What makes you think that is "normal", but people wanting cops to be less of a massive force in society are "radical".
Indeed. I've had a simple model in mind for a while:
This makes sense to me, but I get the feeling very few other people see "politics" this way.>One unintended consequence of crushing speech on the right is that sane righties lose the ability to talk lunatics out of crazy. Back in the old days, I had many conversations talking sense into conspiracists from Rothschild to contrails. They listened to me because I’m credible in a way CNN is not. Now, instead, I shut up. I fear we’re about to embark on an unfortunate experiment to rediscover why, precisely, free speech has for 300 years been considered a bedrock necessity for a civilized society.
It’s entirely this. It’s not just “now I shut up” though, it’s ”I had no idea there was a group planning on doing xyz, because they were mad about abc, never heard anything about that in my Facebook timeline!”
The reasonable voices are either not participating because they have been “nudged” not to, or they are afraid of the consequences of being open and honest about their ideas. Let’s not pretend the upvote/downvote systems aren’t SPECIFICALLY for this.
I just text friends directly and share pictures with people I know would like them.
I spend less time checking my phone which adds up to more time to do other things or just staying more on task in general.
Try it! If you don’t want to delete all social media, start by deleting all your accounts except the one you use the most to _connect with others_ (not to read news or get opinions). It’s 100% worth it
going to leave soon too
For example, on Facebook you can hide something dumb someone shares, and then as part of that process, there is an option to "Hide everything shared from this page".
If you spend a half hour going through and doing that, suddenly your feed is much less spammy.
On any political issue you can easily predict with 100% accuracy whether it will be net up or downvoted on here. And tech is inherently political these days so there’s no escaping it.
/s
So. Not sure what "banning all political groups" would even mean.
Yet I simultaneously agree with both you and George.
The one thing that must not be censored is the internet itself. If someone wants to wants to throw up a pro Neo-Nazi site on their own server, that must be allowed to stand.
That rings hollow. Your datacenter, ISP, CDN or registrar will boot you.
- Printing services can refuse to print my newspaper. - Shipping companies can refuse to deliver my newspaper. - Heck, my landlord could boot me out of my home for being a neo-Nazi.
Is the internet any different? Datacenters and CDNs = Printing services, ISPs = shipping companies.
Sorry, had to get that out.
A partial list:
The displacement of European peoples. Holocaust revisionism. Boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
In the west it's said that only Jews were ever to be exterminated.
Yet the first work camps were for socialists, the first death camps were hospitals for the disabled, the first extermination camps were for Russian pows and extermination camps murdered 6 million Slavs, Gypsies and homosexuals. There's even a little book written by Hitler himself that details what will happen to the Slavs once he won.
But somehow the official line that it's only Jews that were targeted is not holocaust denial.
How is this the official line? Jews were the primary target but I’ve never ever seen anything ‘official’ claim they were the only ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
I don't think you can get more of the zeitgeist than the first sentence of a wiki article.
Nobody is denying other shit happened though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Definition
It doesn't deny that other stuff happens, it just defines the holocaust as not including them.
Personally, I never knew the scale of the non-holocaust parts of the holocaust era until reading this today, and I expect it's because of the narrow scope of the term's definition. So I'm sympathetic to konjin's view even though it's just a question of definitions instead of a question of facts.
"We need to use the cast system of the Nazis to classify their genocides. A Jew could never be a citizen of any nation, just like the Nazis said."
If you died in a camp you died in a camp.
The only reason why this is even an issue today is that it admitting that Slavs were a target in the holocaust would give legitimacy to Poland, Russia and Belarus being western-skeptic, given that they experienced literal genocide within living memory. And that in Europe the systemic racism against Roma is still acceptable and mainstream.
As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control.
And then what? Decentralized systems, and The Dark Web, will grow.
Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal.
Change either variable, to a "normal" hotel/office/home or a public VPN, and the connection can become very unreliable, if it works at all.
(with apologies to William Gibson)
I mean you already do. What do you call a signing up to an ISP?
Alternatively, you can use free wifi or a burner SIM with data. That possibility is not the case in every country, nor will it necessarily remain open in the future.
I don't remember for my current place but I know that when I first moved to the US I needed a credit check to get internet access in my home.
It’s gate keeping all the way down, it’s already here.
Everyone was all “ooo 1984! Scurry! Let’s build a Brave New World to combat it!”
Really though at this point, aside from science what industrial discovery is there?
We’re still just “flock building” like splinter religions.
This syntax or that, still an ARM or x86 chip with known limitations.
Programming to our imaginations delight is great as an art. Industrializing it is just pandering to speculative economics. “Bet you can’t!” “Bet I can!”
Round n round we go; HR and accounting filtering for the right kind of compliance.
Sure fear the government.
I fear humanity. It’s insane and clearly intent on its destruction
That is a business relationship, where a personal license to access the Internet refers to a government grant for use. Those are drastically different from each other.
Super interesting that you mention this. I was just thinking the other day about what an absolute dumpster fire "the internet" is due to anonymity (obviously that's not the _only_ reason, but it's a non-trivial reason). This idea that "Let's give people the ability to be anonymous, and somehow, that's gonna make us all bond together and be better" is pretty hilarious in hindsight. Anonymity seems to just bring the worst out of people (that's not a tech problem, that's a human/culture problem). I would personally love to see a "web" where you have to comment...as your public self. Post messages...as your public self (not just on an individual platform level). So on and so forth.
I 1000% agree that eventually people will need some type of unique identifier to operate on the internet. And I'll take it a little further and say that in the future, anonymity will be reserved for the wealthy primarily.
Isn't this Facebook? Granted I'm sure not every single profile is "verified" with an actual ID, but lack of anonymity doesn't seem to stop as many people as you'd think.
It only discourages the most sane people from participating thus it boosts the signal of the remaining crazies. Anyone who doesn't yet realize this just needs to join some local Facebook groups.
The culture of a site is largely determined by engineering and moderation decisions made by its owners. Nothing more.
And my reputation does not follow between groups either. I can even have completely distinct friend groups for different activities. Nobody at boxing class knows anybody I work with and the people that hang out with me at a bar can be a completely new set all over. I could even use different names in all these groups! :O
Yet we're all perfectly civil.
The same works online. I choose to use `swizec` everywhere, but is `ralston3` the same as `@r_ralston3` on twitter? Who knows. Does it matter? Not in the least. Look at us being perfectly fine fellows to each other.
On the other hand, you have to show government ID to walk into a bar and yet people are kicked out for bad behavior all the time.
Huh? People get "censored" all the time on this site due to incivility.
Edit: I misread the parent comment, sorry :)
There are no real-world consequences for being an anonymous jerk online, so you are comparing apples and oranges.
> On the other hand, you have to show government ID to walk into a bar and yet people are kicked out for bad behavior all the time.
That's because under the influence of alcohol, one stops caring as much about real world consequences.
Being anon online is (somewhat) like being a drunk in a bar (for some people).
Your examples here have proven the opposite of what you were trying to say.
People are kicked out of bars for being assholes and it’s because they have been drinking their inhibitions are lowered and judgement of consequences is disrupted. Similarity to anonymous assholes on the Internet - their inhibitions are lowered because there’s no consequence.
I don’t think we should require names use or prohibit anonymous contributions. But the culture of the internet is pretty bad in this regard today when millions of anonymous people spend millions of hours getting riled up at shit posts from anonymous people.
Pseudonyms that are not trivially created and discarded can build reputation and will generally behave themselves (see Urbit’s approach to this problem).
Anonymous accounts incentivize awful behavior (see 4chan).
Real life is different because you’re not truly anonymous in person - you’re recognizable most of the time and identifiable. There are also more in person norms and social constraints.
The exception to this in real life might be mobs, where the chaos and confusion can provide some anonymity and well - people in mobs don’t behave that well either.
I think a lot of it comes down to social norms. From what I remember, 4chan was almost boringly pleasant outside /b/. Because the norm and moderation were towards thoughtful posting.
On the other hand pseudonymous reddits with the norm of knee jerk responses and political twitter are awful. Because that’s the encouraged norm.
Personally, I think the important factors for maintaining a civil community is a focus on civility, some overt selection of topics (vs. having a group that's about everything), and a lot of moderation work in the background that prevents the decay of standards. Social norms, unfortunately, don't maintain themselves.
HN also has great moderation (thanks DanG) and a strict set of rules which helps.
If HN was truly anonymous (everyone posted under anon accounts) I think it would decay and I’m not sure DanG would be able to save it.
I do think Urbit’s approach to this (low cost to creating an ID) is a really good one for handling this problem and the general problem of spam decentralized, and at scale.
https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/urbit-id/
I used to believe that for a while, up until I started using Facebook. Then I experienced that people under their real names are just the same as the anonymous crowd. All it takes is to view the comments under any news article, or visit a group for regular people dealing with regular things.
That's why I stick to niche, focused communities - like HN. There you can find some semblance of civilization. The "general" Internet takes away whatever faith in humanity I have left.
There's something about commenting on-line in general, that seems to bring the worst out of people. My hypothesis is that you have to have a certain set of values around civility and rationality to be able to interact with other people on-line in a sane way. Without it - and I think most people haven't developed these values - it's just a mess. Why it doesn't happen so much in meatspace? I think it's a combination of social customs, taboos, and having more control over participating in conversations with random strangers.
I agree with everything you've said, but I'd also offer "evolutionary adaptation" as a reason not to be a dick to people who are close enough to physically attack.
I get irritated by this logic. I don't think many people are arguing that anonymous access makes us more likely to get along. There are lots of areas where we have the freedom to do something, that access objectively makes things worse in terms of social cost, but we keep it because it's what is right. Installing a breathalyzer lockout device on every new car sold would decrease drunk driving. There's a few religious sects that could be eliminated that would overnight reduce the amount of vile rhetoric in the world. We all make choices as to how much regulation we deem acceptable in daily life. Many of us see no valid reason to permanently tie online access to personal identification.
Why can’t we just leave each other alone and let people be free? Minimize the politics of it all and stop pretending we care a single bit about each other.
Yes we live in a society but maybe our shared goal is to be left alone to live our lives with the ones we care about. We just seem to be pushing each other to the limits of what’s considered broadly acceptable and it’s creating more and more hate.
What is that, if not tolerance?
People don't care: real names, real faces on Facebook, yet they still act as raging lunatics.
The old, actually anonymous internet 20+ years ago was much better.
EDIT: clarification: anonymity is not what's causing the dumpster fire, it's the people, and the companies driving them into vicious circles to get more attention - and thus, advertisement time and money - out of them.
That's Facebook though. And in my anecdotal experience the only reason most of my friends group has ever used Facebook is to post in private groups and events and use messenger. Scarcely any wall posts, very few posts in public groups. No opinions or politics whatsoever. Maybe the odd activist sharing some "wear a mask" message.
Those who engage in public discourse under their own names on the platform are by and large kind of ... strange.
Using your actual name for everything would be an amazing tool for building up a profile on you. Either you lay out your hobbies, interests and political standings for the whole world to see or you stop participating in those communities and discussions. And the profile won't be about only you, but your employer as well. If a load of engineers at X start posting more about tech Y or methodology Z you can deduce internal workings from that.
I think you can have platforms that encourage civilized discussion w/o needing to link that to a real name. (HN is a great example of that, in fact!)
And conversely, even a platform with real names attached can still end up being extremely uncivil (e.g. Facebook).
There's also a long (pre-internet) history of people publishing good stuff anonymously, for one reason or another.
I'm going to guess you're liberal and think the 'storming' of the capital was the political event of the decade on par with 9/11.
Yet it was all organized in the open on facebook using real names.
Curious how using real names did not stop anyone.
People are willing to do things they believe in that are detrimental to themselves. That is after all why the US exists.
Anonymity is a way for people to say that they want to blow up parliament and get feedback on why it's a good or bad idea before doing it.
It is very confusing to me why the US, a country that hasn't had a real genocide since the 1860s, is taking advice on speech regulation from countries whose last genocide was in the 1940s.
Anonymity is what gives foreign journalists the freedom to leak content their governments would execute them for.
Anonymity protects marginalised groups and it is essential to protecting democracy and freedom.
When someone has to drive 1,000 miles to try to beat someone up for using fighting words, people are far more brazen in their rhetoric.
This is why, as I've posted before here on HN, I always use my real name in my communications. Because I expect to be held accountable for what I say, and how I say it, and I'm willing to accept the consequences.
But I’m sure it’s fine. /s
https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Re...
Political leaders in the US are not really all that beholden to their voters, and very frequently strive to push self-serving agendas ($) over the needs of the public.
As dystopian as it sounds, we're already well on our way toward the Balkanization of the internet. Russia and China have their own firewalls bearing down on global network access. Many other authoritarian countries are following suit. It's going to be hard to stop that train regardless of if/how Facebook or Google are regulated.
We shouldn't confuse a throttled Internet with a fractured, balkanized one.
Biden is pro-MPAA/RIAA.
http://techrights.org/2020/11/09/biden-riaa-and-mpaa/
The new war on drugs would be coming.
Bitcoin is mostly a speculative tool and what few transactions happen on the blockchain are dominated by drugs and other contraband.
Society doesn't hold together at all unless people are smacked back into line when they act antisocially. No amount of technology can change that fundamental truth; ostracism and silence are core to human nature.
I see your point - Bitcoin does exactly what it claims to do - but it is not a feasible replacement for money.
Some sort of distributed validation mechanism could conceivably be created which avoids any single point of control for a piece of content. And in fact you could use the BTC blockchain as a proof of concept - post a message with your transaction that gets encoded in the blockchain. It now becomes impossible to delete or modify. It is essentially uncensorable. You could delete it from your copy of the blockchain, but the real blockchain is the consensus of all nodes, not your particular copy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol
Note that the D language forums are on NNTP. For those that might dismiss NNTP as obsolete, may I present:
https://forum.dlang.org/
>Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal.
Garlic routing provides plausible deniability. ISPs can't know for sure that you are using I2P, for instance, or what you are using it for. Sure, they could force every ISP to ban all encrypted P2P connections. And we could start setting up mesh networks that would subsequently be brought down by authorities. But here's the real question: how much abuse will people tolerate in the name of "security"? What will happen when a majority realizes that these measures are intended to control and suppress them while the elite keeps acting with ever-increasing impunity?
[1] far too strong in fact as far as I understand it
Even when said stories are patently false and designed to enrage and inflame public opinion.
See also all the papers who escaped any real consequences for hacking the voicemail of a murdered child (as well as various celebrities).
Sadly, given the actions of Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and Google, that is a preferred option to the current state today. Ironically we will have more freedom in that state.
We have a system of justice, you get to defend youself, judged by your peers and posting general BS about politics is not a crime.
Youtube, on the other hand, will ban your channel without any recourse, so if you are earning a living from it, you kids might be on the street because something in a mysteruous machine learning algorithm got triggered.
> We have a system of justice ...
That's irrelevant here, and there are probably far more people who are likely to lose their livelihoods if they post unpopular stuff about politics under their real name. I think that political content creators on YouTube supporting their family through money from their advertising program are an extreme edge-case, and they can always move to a new platform, whereas people in the former category would risk their non-political day-jobs and this would have a broader chilling effect across society at large.
And tell me how the solution to this problem could possibly be to give the government access to and control over the internet activity of every member of the population? What kind of dystopian nightmare would we be trying to create? Do you think that access to this level and breadth of data is likely to make future governments more or less authoritarian? Do you think it might attract more authoritarian figures into politics? Of course governments can surveil people currently, but in relatively limited numbers or with the cooperation of service providers, but I can't imagine people seriously thinking that this would be a good idea, or maybe they haven't thought through its practical implications.
I do not see how that is true outside of US, unless we are talking about seriously extremist stuff
"they can always move to a new platform"
Like what? What platform has at least 10% market share as alternative to YouTube?
"Of course governments can surveil people currently, but in relatively limited numbers"
Millions of people is 'limited numbers'?
The liberty you are talikng about was already lost to corporates, the survalience state is alrwady here. you have no ability to escape phone providers selling your date and no knowledge of them doing it.
At least governments can be held accountable at the voting booth, a monopolistic company can't.
There was a really good quote adressing monopolies: "If we will not accept kings and tyrants over over lives, then we shall not accept a king over necceseties of life"
> I do not see how that is true outside of US
It's true amongst much of the Anglosphere. And of course China, Russia I imagine, most of the Middle East, Africa, the rest of Asia, and South America. So the vast majority of the world's population. And if people can't speak anonymously or pseudonymously, it's going to have a huge chilling effect on free expression online. By the way, look around the world to see just how much the definition of "really extremist stuff" can vary.
I didn't suggest that moving to a platform outside of the Big Tech hegemony was necessarily easy, but I did suggest that it was possible. We're in the early days of the consumer revolt against Facebook/Youtube, but if people are suitably motivated to move to other platforms, those other platforms will grow and develop. And it's a whole lot easier to move to a different tech platform than it is to move to a different country, or to change the law when you're in a political minority.
Governments can really only properly surveil people who are taking active measures to conceal their activities in relatively small numbers. They can get a certain amount of information and metadata about the majority of the population who use popular platforms and services, but there has been a tendency in recent years to encrypt everything and then to collaborate with the security services of particular countries.
> The liberty you are talikng about was already lost to corporates, the survalience state is alrwady here. you have no ability to escape phone providers selling your date and no knowledge of them doing it.
If I'm concerned about Alexa hearing my private conversations, I can unplug her. I get to decide whether the potential risk to my privacy is worth the benefits of using particular products and services. I can ask my friends not to livestream me on Facebook when they walk into my house. There's loads of popular technology that I'm perfectly free not to use, or to seek out alternatives. The fact that so many people choose the easiest, shiniest option is their decision, and their problem, and you don't get to make that my problem. It's both untrue and it's also a complete non-sequitur to say that we're already living voluntarily in a corporate surveillance state and then to say that we might as well therefore make it into a government-controlled surveillance state, and to replace terms and conditions with laws, and account cancellations and bans with criminal penalties.
> At least governments can be held accountable at the voting booth
In practice, this only tends to happen in countries where people are relatively free to do things on the Internet without the government tracking and controlling their activity. There's a causal link here.
> a monopolistic company can't.
Facebook will only continue to be the pre-eminent social network as long as vast numbers of people choose to continue to use it. You, personally, can hold it to account by not using it any more, but you have no right to stop other people from using it if they want to.
> There was a really good quote adressing monopolies: "If we will not accept kings and tyrants over over lives, then we shall not accept a king over necceseties of life"
To suggest that Facebook is a necessity of life really highlights what a position of privilege we're in. Perhaps people who are trying to advance that kind of argumentation need to have a good, hard look at what the "needs" and the "wants" really are in their life. I'd also recommend that you read some of the Austrian economists to find out what a real monopoly would actually look like, and why it is that you're unlikely to encounter one.
A lot of users IDs are already tied to their ISP. A simple date/timestamp and a IP address would probably identify the majority of users (in the US).
Yes, true. It's more the illegal-to-access-internet-anonymously part that concerns. Overreach is usually declared 'in the name of security/crime' reasons. A paid licence for more privileged access has also been mooted, but I can't recall where I read that.
How did the US government take back any control from newspaper barons? I honestly cannot think of anything.
Would be useful to know what post got them banned, but the content moderation is completely opaque.
I hope that demand congeals on support for an open blogging protocol, such that people can very easily post once and direct it to multiple platforms or any listener. If this becomes popular enough, and posts aren't owned by a particular platform, the big platforms lose their power to control the conversation.
This feels like the start of a very long road.
The statement was vague and ambiguous and touched a lot of raw nerves, but coming as it did on the heels of major layoffs at Mozilla it felt a bit like Mitchell Baker pulling a "roll hard left and die".
It's a positive thing for these ejections to be across the political spectrum, because it de-politicizes censorship, and folks on one side of the spectrum cheering for the other side begin to realize that censorship is always a scope creep issue.
On the otherhand, I agree with other people here that maybe feeling like it isn’t “safe” to discuss things will lead to more open and free places to communicate.
Any debate or discussion of importance I do either either pseudonymously, or in private forums with only people I know are capable of discussing, disagreeing and having an open mind to surprising viewpoints.
Honestly, this stuff drives wealth disparity. I can't even discuss investment strategies in these public forums without risking personal attacks.
In your opinion, how is it going to happen?
What I'm seeing is a lot of "we should regulate things so that facebook isn't allowed to censor things I like but is obligated to censor things I don't like".
If people reacted to censorship in a principled way, we wouldn't be where we are today.
You are confusing centrist parties with "middle-of-the-road" parties which by axiomatic definition mean the mainstream parties.
> And the illusion of choice applies to the falsely compressed, single-issue, single-axis left/right extremes, too.
It is not an illusion if the media is massively invested on who wins. Vanilla Republican vs Vanilla Democrat = Illusion of Choice,it does not matter who wins, the media wont care and the status quo will be maintained. Trump vs Vanilla Democrats = Choice matters, media will align with the Democrats to maintain the status-quo. Vanilla Republicans vs Bernie Sanders, Choice matters, media will align with the Republicans to maintain the status-quo.
I might entertain an emotional desire for the other side to be censored sometimes. But a good moderator? I want them for me and mine.
I care about 'my side' making strong, principled arguments with actionable policy outcomes, and not advancing weaker ones.
It it if it only applies to one side and in a form that the other side approves of, and that was the point of the example you replied to. If it was your example, "I want them for me and mine" then there wouldn't be a problem (or this problem, there'll always be problems).
The reason is that ultimately no one what's to have extreme polar opinions on these sites, but it's going to be very difficult to determine that in a non partisan manner.
Though also to be fair it might be difficult to truely flag all political groups.
There really is only one obvious response to this: Facebook, Google etc are common carriers, not allowed to censor. They should also be broken up given their massive size which enables them to drive policy which affects them.
One of the biggest takeaways from the past 25 years of "the internet" is that critical-mass-achieving walled gardens are the ticket to unicorndom, and that's the only kind of solution that VC dollars are chasing. I don't think there's a way for someone to make a self-sustaining alternative open platform in this "market."
“Communism” is a class of philosophies with shared traits.
> Socialism is basically a flawed materialization of that utopistic philosophy.
“Socialism”, in general, is a class of philosophies of which “Communism” is a more specific subset.
In specifically Marxist Communism, “Socialism” is also a named stage on the route to acheivement of the desired end-state at which the philosophy is aimed. OTOH.
> In specifically Marxist Communism, “Socialism” is also a named stage on the route to acheivement of the desired end-state
part; Eastern Europe had some fun with this route to achievement on that the Socialist stage.
They feel they have the power and self imprimatur to manage speech as they see fit, but now also activists are telling them to shut this or that voice they disagree with.
They made this bed themselves.
Well they shut down the former president of the USA. They clearly have nothing to fear.
I mean it is true they did it. But they got help.
Because I remember when all this was starting up two decades ago there were a lot of pressures to block this or that. Maybe hate speech, or maybe you crossed RIAA, or maybe you were of dark complexion and Middle East descent and nobody could tell what your arabic said but it defenitely had to be dangerous.
So it became pretty customary to have corporations bring content down when asked to do so and this recent wave of deplatforming is just extension.
Basically, that's what happens when you start to compromise on principles and choose the easy path.
Instead of letting people exercise their free speech and using existing laws to chase people for when they are impinging on somebody elses rights, we chose to compromise and asked companies to do this without due process.
And that was beginning of the slippery slope which now suddenly got much steeper than before.
As for foreign locales, I think the solution is to operate locally like a Mazda or a PepsiCo has to do. Have locals manage your local ops, of course reporting to HQ.
But now they decided to enter the unwieldily realm of figuring out intent of speech and whether it’s crossed moral lines or ethical lines or political lines.
That’s just impossible and sets them up for failure.
They deserve this failure.
They want to dictate TO THE WORLD right and wrong speech UNIFORMLY. That’s utterly ridiculous.
So China or Venezuela or Iran said mean things. So what! At least we know what they’re thinking and if serious enough take proper measures. It should not be FB or TWTTR who decide these things.
I still keep in touch with friends and family and most all of those services I use to communicate are benign, unlike Facebook. Unfortunately "vote with your wallet" (or attention, time, content creation, whatever) just doesn't work the way it's portrayed to work and now we have critical masses in these businesses that create governance through their corporate policies and practices.
Zuckerberg also donated north of $400 million.
This is the trouble with censorship. Where do you stop?
Public libraries can exercise censorship. Private libraries and bookstores excercise right to property.
Does anyone know of any good study where participants are asked their opinion on a quote before and after they are told which ideological leader said it?
We need better alternatives, not better Facebook.
I was talking with my wife that somehow people are OK with a borrowed (rented?) identity for so many things. xyz@gmail.com, +00-00 on whatsapp, etc, and there as only a few wanting to be mail@this-is-my-home-on-the-internet.me, though this is a very different topic.
For me, an intermediate step to a lot of worlds I like better than this one, is for a diverse ecosystem of messengers to compete on security, openness, and guarantees of not surveilling/monetizing users.
In the last weeks I've had all my WhatsApp groups of "normal people" start discussing alternative messengers on exactly these terms. They've looked into Viber, Telegram, SMS, Signal, and others. So i'm happy with that.
EDIT the point with these is tricky, because they are not all-in-one solutions. People these days tend to think that an app/program == the service, but this is so not the case. I've tried telling people they could use other programs to access gmail, but it was like talking to a wall, and this is serious issue in this - the instant messenger - case as well. I have no idea how to tell people that it's possible to use _something else_ as an interface. Somehow most of them understand that there are different browsers to access the internet, but they don't apply this thinking to other protocols and services. Hence recommendations for services who provide their "own" apps, conversations being the root, quicksy and blabber being derivatives.
True, but nothing particularly good seems to exist yet. It has to solve the problem of end-to-end encryption in a way that users can manage to not lose their keys too easily, which is a hard problem. It only has to solve this, when email did not (at least in an easily usable way for most people) because it already exists in messaging, but that doesn't stop it not being well solved holding back the situation.
Anything that uses an open source client is a meaningful step better than WhatsApp, because it is easier to make and maintain a bridge from something better, like Matrix, IMHO. At least recently, I did not think Matrix was easy enough to use and stable enough to recomend to people, but them moving to something with an open source client, is better than nothing IMHO.
I'm not convinced Signal is better than Telegram, as an alternative, since Telegram is so much easier to use if you don't care about end-to-end encryption (most users don't sadly), and basically as easy to use (but much less trustworthy) if you do. I'm not sure which is better TBH, but I expect more people will stay off WhatsApp if they try Telegram than if they only try Signal, which is an advantage of recomending that (though I'm not sure it out-weighs the advantage of there being less end-to-end encryption).
LOL. You were using someone else's website - Zuck's, to be specific. If you demand that he allows you to post on his site, could I make demands to post on your site?
I'm actually glad these are finally happening. People need to learn to go back running their own services, under their own domain, owned (bought or leased) hardware, etc.
The current "social" media + cloud everything is a bad road, but apparently this - the shutdowns - is the only way to get out of this swamp.
Well put.
But we do need distributes systems and we need a lot of competition in the hosting space (it’s not terrible now for lost things if they’re small but big services may have problems).
Facebook is the Internet equivalent of a public accommodation[1]. It is not Zuckerberg's personal home, it is a place open to the public to conduct business. If Facebook is going to set conditions that some members of the public are allowed and not others, it should be clear what those conditions are and when they are and are not met.
That said, I do agree that people should flee these places where they're at the mercy of whatever algorithm or ideological fad that takes over the current employees or whatever. But insofar as they aren't we should regulate it the same way we regulate (in the US) hotels, restaurants, and other public-facing businesses to ensure that the whole public has a fair chance to use them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_accommodations_in_the_U...
Of course you could. Whether you would have a good case is another question.
If you're implying an equivalence between the two situations I think what you're missing is that Facebook and the SWP's websites are very different kinds of website. Facebook is a social media website[1] that hosts various kinds of communities, whereas the SWP's website is a website specific to the SWP.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_networking_service
Are there any laws that differentiate between "public" and "private" websites?
Who is working on decentralized content distribution? We need decentralized free software versions of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube so that not a single actor has veto power over what content is allowed. Something like torrents, but without torrent sites (which are single points of failure).
There's FreeNet, but it's crap and contains child porn. We need something new that ensures the right of Socialist parties (and Nazi parties too, for that matter) to spread their legal propaganda, but can't be used for pedophiles to distribute child porn. Technically, it can't be impossible to create something like that. People have tons of bandwidth and disk space to spare so that shouldn't be a problem either.
But that is anti-socialist!