Yellow journalism existed in the 1920s. It's nothing new. There will always be people that want to consume these materials and believe them.
The alarming thing are the calls for censorship.
Look at how bad the media and platforms have been about Covid. Early advice on masking, lab leak, adipose inflammation, and other fairly innocuous lines of research were censored. Imagine centrally purging such discussions.
When you censor, it isn't just the thoughts you dislike. Soon they'll censor women's health issues.
Active amplification of disinformation is just as much a threat to democracy.
Sure yellow journalism existed. But it had anything resembling the scale, scope, reach, and speed as current technology (which is why it is taking over). Trying to trivialize this new reach would be like trivializing using everyone's iPhone/Android GPS to hand out speeding tickets - sure it's the same law, but an entirely different regime when you can get a new ticket every minute.
Despite free speech laws, it has always, and under pretty much every legal system, still been illegal to utter certain types of speech, such as yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, or inciting riot. It is never absolutely free.
If all you do when any hint of managing dezinformatsyia arises is cry "everything must be free (as in speech) and anything resembling censorship is horrible", you are being too simplistic. (and leading with it's "so complicated" and moving to censorship alarms is no less simplistic.
People and companies need to be responsible for the consequences of what they spread. Wildly amplifying disinformation based on engagement, without anything resembling a moral compass is not sustainable.
> Despite free speech laws, it has always, and under pretty much every legal system, still been illegal to utter certain types of speech, such as yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, or inciting riot. It is never absolutely free.
And that sentiment—that very example, even—has been used to justify expansive restrictions on speech that nobody would or should put up with today, such as opposing the military draft.
“When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.”
Of course that sentiment (against yelling "FIRE!") has been misused, just as with any sentiment.
Similarly, the "No Censorship Ever!" sentiment is being abused to justify spreading weaponized dezinformatsiya at massive scale and speed, resulting in literally killing people (starting w/deluded COVID victims and Rohinga muslims,+++), for profit.
That is THE POINT here - that it can not be absolute in either direction, and we, as a society, must do the work of striking the right balance.
And no, it is not an argument that "there was also bad stuff before" (e.g., yellow journalism), so it must be OK now.
> Of course that sentiment (against yelling "FIRE!") has been misused, just as with any sentiment.
Except in this case, the origin of that phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a US Supreme Court Case in 1919 that upheld the prosecution of of an anti-war protestor for pamphleting against the draft. This is the approach to free speech that is being referenced when people use this phrase in argument.
> Similarly, the "No Censorship Ever!" sentiment is being abused to justify spreading weaponized dezinformatsiya at massive scale and speed, resulting in literally killing people (starting w/deluded COVID victims and Rohinga muslims,+++), for profit.
For someone arguing against absolutism, you see to think in very absolutist terms about supporters of free speech. Very few advocates of free speech advocate for no restrictions on speech.
Censorship should not be the first tool you reach to do deal with misinformation. Algorithmic censorship carries huge risks and can cause great damage, much like algorithmic amplification.
Censoring alleged misinformation and propaganda is a common and widely used tactic of authoritarian governments around the world. Normalizing that censorship makes it easier for am authoritarian leaning administration to push us in that direction. It is extremely dangerous.
> Sure yellow journalism existed. But it had anything resembling the scale, scope, reach, and speed as current technology
As a share of current events information, it was greater, often virtually monopolistic, for not just “yellow journalism” generally but often a fairly unified single viewpoint of yellow journalism. (In terms of divisiveness, the actual problem today isn't greater proportional influence of yellow journalism, but that there are alternatives, both opposing equally yellow journalism and less-yellow journalism, with widespread reach.)
> has always, and under pretty much every legal system, still been illegal to utter certain types of speech, such as yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater,
Except, you know, that despite that dicta in a case that has since been overturned (which also is widely now recognized as a travesty restricting core political speech), that was, not illegal and that it was outside the scope of protection was not justifiable based on the case law either at the time or at any point since.
I don't see how arguing that how bad yellow journalism was in the past is an argument for continuing it now. Seems a bit like saying 'slavery was bad before, so discrimination is ok now'. Both are unacceptable in sustainable society.
Perhaps a particular case was overturned, but the principle still rings true. Or, are you saying that it should really be OK for people to deliberately make verbal actions that directly result in killing other people?
The point of bringing up Schenck is that reasonable ideas can be and have been used to justify great wrongs, and thus that we shouldn’t rush into action whenever we see a problem, even if there’s a principle that rings true.
“We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.”
What killed the yellow journalism of the past? Was it added restrictions on speech? Or was it something else that we could consider before taking the drastic step of reducing freedom of speech?
>>something else that we could consider before taking the drastic step of reducing freedom of speech?
We could consider editorial responsibility - responsibility for what you amplify.
The Fairness doctrine did a not bad job while it lasted.
Edit:
I also notice everyone arguing about Shenk, and no one brings up that some speech is still illegal, e.g., incitement to riot, sedition, and a few others.
The point of the example was that nothing is absolute, or should be absolute, even freedom of speech.
Nothing; the golden age of neutral journalism people describe a decline from to today is just when the institutions of yellow journalism all got on the same page and sang in harmony from the same propaganda hymnbook.
It doesn't ring true. It's false, thats it. You are saying that even if you used an overturned century old case to justify censorship, you are still right? Why exactly? You might want it to be true but using it as a foot in the door to justify even more slippery slope restrictions just does not work very well when it's not been relevant for 50 years now.
And we lived all that time without the sky falling over, or society collapsing into more intolerance than 100 years ago. So much so that a lot of people still think that it just ought to be illegal. Doesn't that prove that we actually don't have to restrict speech or "intolerance" ? Or do you think that we are worse off in that regard that back when shouting fire in a theater was a reasonable restriction on free speech?
> I don't see how arguing that how bad yellow journalism was in the past is an argument for continuing it now.
That it is not new in either existing or the extent of it's influence of public perceptions of events outside immediate perception is a very good reason to not view the current situation as an unprecedented crisis posing an imminent existential threat to ordered society that requires slashing political freedom of expression in the hopes that it might curtail yellow journalism without creating something far worse.
> Seems a bit like saying 'slavery was bad before, so discrimination is ok now'.
No, it's more like saying the current manner of discrimination is manifestly less bad than when we had overt chattel slavery, so countermeasures that would not have been justified to deal with chattel slavery would, a fortiori, not be justified to deal with present discrimination.
Except that, of course, the kind of extreme measures that would even arguably not have been justified to address chattel slavery aren't actually on the menu for dealing with modern day discrimination, but tossing aside freedom of speech and the press to empower state censorship as a tool to combat yellow journalism is, for some reason, something people are actively campaigning for.
How much of that was people passing those things off as fact, when there wasn't the evidence to back them up? The problem is, everyone thinks they've become an epidemiologist and virologist over the last 18 months, people jump onto pre-prints that haven't been peer reviewed to push whatever narrative they want - some of the trials that claimed to show Ivermectin as a wonder drug were plagued with badly designed trial protocols, and flat out suspected fraud.
Claiming that it was definitely a lab leak because of furin clevage - saying it with certainty, is most definitely misinformation, the truth is we don't know (and may never). If people say "it could have been a lab leak" (and many people did, without being "censored") that's different.
> How much of that was people passing those things off as fact, when there wasn't the evidence to back them up?
The censors haven't held themselves to the same standards when identifying "misinformation," and they certainly jumped on studies that were terrible, such as the fraudulent hydroxychloroquine Lancet study.
> If people say "it could have been a lab leak" (and many people did, without being "censored")
And many people did with being censored (with or without scare quotes.)
Never has been strong evidence for zoonosis either, but it was brought as a near-certainty scientific consensus. The problem is that epidemiologists and virologists have zero-real knowledge on lab-leaks, claiming a false authority, when the last time they studied coronavirus or lab safety was decades back. The problem is that we don't interview biosafety experts, or that they are not allowed to speak up.
> people jump onto pre-prints that haven't been peer reviewed to push whatever narrative they want
There was an early paper on HIV inserts by an Indian institute. This paper was attacked so fiercely, that I am pretty sure GP120 will become a household name in 2022.
Ivermectin and HCQ both seem to work, but these are really bad for vaccination rates. If you can either save lives by prescribing ivermectin, or by increasing vaccination rates, the choice to suppress these prophylactics becomes justifiable.
> Claiming that it was definitely a lab leak because of furin clevage
Nobody said definitely. They raised their concern to their partners, sometimes mentioning it in an interview. Claiming SARS-2 clearly has zoonotic origin, and that anything suggesting otherwise is conspiracy theory, now that is misinformation. Yet, this made it to the Lancet and Nature, and Chinese influence agents then used these papers to suppress online debate.
> the truth is we don't know (and may never).
The truth is that it is China suppressing investigation is what led us to this state. Why would they do that? What happened to those Chinese scientists who pushed sequences to Github? What happened to the citizen journalists exposing lies and coverups?
Only China benefits from the world lacking full clarity. The misinformation campaign they embarked on was one of the grossest in history of the web. Start with these facts. Not with someone convinced all this shady behavior means they are covering up something shady.
Lab-leak proponents have been a lot more careful to allow for increasingly unlikely event of zoonosis, than proponents of a natural origin, who seem to have resorted to the clarity of religion to sustain their view.
The article is factually incorrect. For instance, the Russian journalist did not mention Silicon Valley companies nor did he intend to mean that social networks are promoting authoritarianism and waging war.
Instead, he referred multiple times to the mainstream media in Russia that is tightly controlled by the state and is acting as a propaganda device that serves short-term goals of the ruling elite, promoting war in Ukraine and anti-western sentiments along the way.
NPR took pretext of an event to present an opinion.
This should be the story itself. NPR and most other US commercial media establishments are arsonist-firefighters. Is there a link to a non-skewed story that could be shared to replace this one?
Seems like the title is based on Ressa’s quote:
"Silicon Valley's sins came home to roost in the United States on January 6 with mob violence on Capitol Hill," she said. "What happens on social media doesn't stay on social media."
npr takes every story as pretext to present opinion and dogma, and avoids stories that impede that. they've always been biased, but at least 8-10 years ago, they veered directly into outrage and propaganda, probably because they'd have lost donor funding without it. that is, their real donors, the big corps and foundations, not the little pledge drive donors. pledge drives are for collecting demographic data to attract deeper-pocketed advertisers.
it's critical to the survival of the traditional news businesses that social media remains under attack, otherwise the grip that outlets like npr has on the collective zeitgeist will weaken into irrelevance. that's what they're fighting for, not freedom of speech or journalistic integrity. it's for relevance, which translates into money and power.
One of the key criticisms of "The Algorithm" (I wouldn't really phrase it this way) is that "sharing" as we understand it today shouldn't exist. There shouldn't be a quick little button I can press on Facebook to put an article into 500 people's news feeds.
> If you can show solid evidence, or any evidence, supporting your claim, not.
There was no evidence suggesting Trump's election win was not valid. The wild delusional conspiracy theories about how Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election under Obama's nose were not evidence, mind you.
So all those people, politicians, corporations, celebrities, and "journalists" peddling the Trump Russia conspiracy theories and false claims without evidence were anti-democratic pro-authoritarian? Or will there always be some excuse when "your" side does it?
By this metric, everyone's personal opinions/worries/etc. are anti-democratic. The only pro-democratic material, with all the 'facts' and data, would be that put forth by the people with access to said information, which in this case is people working in the government.
I can think that somebody is a bad person, even suspect that is a criminal. This is a personal opinion. Not problem with it.
But If I say in a public media that a known public figure is a criminal or eats children alive for dinner, and I repeat this for months with a clear purpose of obtaining a personal benefit for me. If I do this while refusing to show any real proof of it and, when cornered by the truth, I claim that it was just my opinion and should be respected... well, this is a different issue.
We would be moving in the field of defamation. Libel can destroy lives and is not a thing to be taken lightly.
> You would say other thing if it was somebody from "your party"
Or maybe not. This is a perfect example of your opinion about a strange on internet. I really couldn't care less about if who says it is red, blue or multicolor.
> If I do this while refusing to show any real proof of it and, when cornered by the truth, I claim that it was just my opinion and should be respected... well, this is a different issue.
If that 'public figure' is the government itself, or a member thereof, then making 'false' statements was, at one point, criminalized in the Sedition Act of 1798 [1]. This was extremely unpopular, and while never directly ruled upon in the Supreme Court, is roundly assumed to be unconstitutional [2].
Making up shit about the federal government is simply a protected right of free speech in the USA.
> > You would say other thing if it was somebody from "your party"
Not sure where this is coming from, but I think you are responding to someone else.
So basically what the democrats and corporate media did from 2016 to 2020. Or is it that you/they are the deciders of exactly what constitutes bad behavior and by some incredible coincidence they always happen to define it so precisely and arbitrarily as to not be subject to it themselves?
That's a great way to not be authoritarian and anti democratic I guess, is to anoint yourself the decider of what is authoritarian and anti demicratic. Especially when you can move the goal posts around as necessary. How about inventing wild conspiracy theories, lying to voters, and recruiting your corporate media allies to spread these baseless claims that your political opponents are traitors who colluded with spooky foreign enemies to gain power?
That’s how I read it too. It’s interesting to see how platforms’ freedom to moderate as they please is being assaulted from all sides—some groups are claiming they must be forced to moderate more or be punished for what their users post, while others are claiming they must be forced to moderate less (or not at all) or be punished for what their users post.
The people calling for that have really not thought their positions through. The SV companies have a lot of flaws, but they do appear to be genuine in their belief that their censorship is helping. That is arrogant and not good enough ... but there isn't going to be a better option. The alternatives to them having control enable people who are more arrogant, less able and do more damage when mistakes inevitably get made.
I can't take "censorship" arguments seriously on 2 accounts. Firstly, information is not egalitarian: Information is better supported and more relevant than others. No one saying a baby screaming in a movie theater is being censored.
Secondly, social media has its own rules for speech almost diametrically opposed to government and academic. I regularly come across crazy claims from anti-vaxers like "the virus 2 microns. too small for masks to capture." am i being censored when my assertion that they are wrong by a factor of 10 because it's saliva that carries viruses and that they should give my voice equal time in their echo chamber?
>"the virus 2 microns. too small for masks to capture."
This is literally true; it's just incomplete given the relationship with saliva as you noted.
The solution here is to reply and spread more true knowledge.
You can cite super-narrow cases constructed to make censorship seem like a great idea. Within the limited bounds of those examples, the argument may seem to hold water. But in reality, there is no way to limit the power of censorship to the places where it's right to use. It will always be abused, and today it is being abused massively to suppress reasonable ideas from millions of people because they don't flatter the values of the people who happen to hold power.
Nobody is "saving democracy" by denying people the right to participate in the democratic process. In fact, it does quite the opposite by destabilizing the political discourse. The "solution" is to stop trying to control people.
Systemic lopsided moderation (i.e. censorship) of one political viewpoint is absolutely denying people the right to participate in the democratic process. Just because we disagree with their viewpoint does not make censorship justified, nor does it take away from the fact that it is currently happening.
>Systemic lopsided moderation (i.e. censorship) of one political viewpoint is absolutely denying people the right to participate in the democratic process.
I still see plenty of content from various political viewpoints, far left to far right, on every forum and social media platform I visit. This "systemic lopsided moderation of one political viewpoint" you're referring to doesn't really exist apart from right-wing propaganda.
And yet oddly, the entire Twitter thread that agrees with Gaea Opines, and presumably their politics, hasn't been banned. Gaea Opines, themselves, hasn't been banned. Other Instagram posts and comments more extreme than that one haven't been banned. Other Twitter comments more extreme than that one haven't been banned.
One removed comment does not an all-encompassing, democracy threatening conspiracy against a specific political side make.
Then you theory is exceptionally hard to disprove, as someone would have to come up with a huge number of individual examples to have "statistical significance".
There are also a few websites, whose entire domain is banned in Facebook Messenger. It was discussed here previously. thedonald.win is a political example of such censorship. I think The Pirate Bay links are banned in Facebook itself.
>Then you theory is exceptionally hard to disprove, as someone would have to come up with a huge number of individual examples to have "statistical significance".
It isn't my theory. The right claims the entirety of social media has been engaged in an orchestrated conspiracy to purge non-leftist speech from their platforms in favor of pushing a radical socialist agenda for years, and that this is so widespread that it threatens democracy itself. Yes, you would need to come up with a statistically significant number of examples to prove that claim. But if it's true, it should actually be easy to prove, if not impossible to deny.
Anecdotally, I haven't seen any sign of a decrease in right-wing speech on social media. At all. If anything, it's spread to places where it didn't even really exist before, like Youtube comments and this very forum, and it's thriving on the very platforms it's supposed to be banned from. And I can find accounts of leftist, Black and LGBT accounts being banned, algorithmically suppressed or arbitrarily demonetized, which runs counter to the narrative.
I stand by my comment. The vast left-wing media conspiracy isn't a thing. It's propaganda. It's lifestyle branding.
>There are also a few websites, whose entire domain is banned in Facebook Messenger. It was discussed here previously. thedonald.win is a political example of such censorship. I think The Pirate Bay links are banned in Facebook itself.
And I'd bet dollars to donuts something other than mere political speech was involved in each case. I can think of reasons why Facebook wouldn't want links to pirated software on its platform other than political bias, for instance.
if what youre saying were true, then uncensored forums would look like twitter. but obviously they look like the exact opposite. uncensored forums are full of right wing shit because it’s not allowed on twitter. obviously
If you're going to make a troll account and copypaste an argument into the same thread twice, at least try to make it a decent one.
Uncensored forums were full of right-wing shit long before Twitter was a gleam in Jack Dorsey's eye. The right-wing shit on Twitter comes from uncensored forums spilling their toxicity out into the rest of the internet, not the other way around. Uncensored forums will never look like Twitter regardless of how it or any other mainstream forum moderates, because the only people who are attracted to uncensored forums are rejects, edgelords and bigots.
> And I'd bet dollars to donuts something other than mere political speech was involved in each case. I can think of reasons why Facebook wouldn't want links to pirated software on its platform other than political bias, for instance.
You chose to ignore the part about thedonald.win, that basically disproves your point.
>You chose to ignore the part about thedonald.win, that basically disproves your point.
thedonald.win was banned for supporting the violent overthrow of the government, and before, when it was t_d, for brigading, harassment and supporting political violence.
If you want to read more about this community's well documented bad behavior, it's on wikipedia[0], or literally anywhere else on the internet.
“This "systemic lopsided moderation of one political viewpoint" you're referring to doesn't really exist apart from right-wing propaganda.”
if what youre saying were true, then uncensored forums would look like twitter. but obviously they look like the exact opposite. uncensored forums are full of right wing shit because it’s not allowed on twitter. obviously
Can you plese define what that political viewpoint is you're talking about?
Is it saying that the government should be smaller and not involved in everyday life, or is it doing things like claiming an election was stolen, which has led to real world harm (poll workers receiving death threats), or calling for violence?
These are the same social media companies that allowed, nay promoted, a Russia truther narrative that Vladmir Putin personally stole the 2016 election to install his sleeper agent in the US presidency. The same truther narrative whose architects have since been arrested for propagating it.
You didn't answer the question ... what are some examples of posts, or viewpoints that are, according to you, verboten?
And didn't the GOP helmed investigation find that there was a concerted disinformation campaign waged by Russia, as well as numerous links between people in the Trump campaign and Russian operatives?
Edit: and there are plenty of people on one side of the spectrum claiming that Biden is "in bed with China", which haven't been removed.
Clearly, in a democracy you should be allowed to argue that an election was stolen, even if the evidence for your case isn’t strong. You can also argue for astrology or homeopathy or natural cures or any other in a long list of things that I think are pretty obviously untrue and harmful if propagated.
The core difference is between arguing something, and stating something is a fact.
Just like if you offered homeopathy "medications" or natural cures and stated they are curative, you're likely to fall under jurisdiction of medical licensing authorities (notwithstanding the "health supplement" loophole in the US).
To what? People discussing and voting for their favorite candidate? Before it got censored as fake news, parts of social media were pretty damn correct on the pandemic and its origins. All of regular media followed the narrative, some afraid of the truth, because Trump may have ran with it.
> How can you have election integrity if you don't have integrity of facts?
This is about integrity/virtue of opinion. Conflate facts with opinions or political views and you lose right to talk facts. People voting in an authoritarian do not believe they are voting in an authoritarian, but an opposing voice to the evil socialist. It is poignant to defend democracy and at the same time complain of the rise of authoritarianism brought about by democracy.
In so many ways, you are then saying people are voting on the wrong people, because they do not read your newspapers, but their Facebook timelines.
Level 0 thinking, you do not even know the value of your cards. Such sophistry could only work on similar-leveled people. So if I engage, I'd be bluffing, and this is not a good idea to do with players who are basically no better or worse than random search.
Find all facts and circumstantial evidence for and against lab-leak and zoonosis. Then form your own opinion. That's my claim, and only that. That may even be an opinion worth engaging with, for as long as the "we still" in your world-view includes a couple of thousand Chinese internet trolls, and discredited conflicted scientists who despite this still seem to make it to the Lancet and NYT.
Big Tech ( well arguably only Google and Apple ) has been painting themselves as so righteous and they have now painted themselves into corners. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
I always knew the day would come for Google. I just never imagined how things changed under Tim Cook.
The problem is not that everybody can access information. The problem is that click-bait false information is pushed by ranking algorithms more and more in front of the eyes of people who are ready to believe in them. The information bubble then is making people more and more radicalized.
All the news / post / article I read on Facebook or Twitter are retweets / forwarded by people I followed. It means ultimately I am the one who is actually selectively sourcing all these information. "ranking algorithms" just rank them in better orders.
It doesn't matter how good your blackbox algorithms are. Junk in And Junk out.
It is censorship by definition. The question here is if this form of censorship is currently permitted or not permitted by law, and if it should or should not be permitted by law.
When a newspaper editor decides a story has insufficient credible sources, or lacks any of a variety of qualities that constitute good and responsible journalism, and so does not publish or broadcast it today, that is an editorial decision, it is not censorship.
When an algorithm or human decides that a story has the same qualities, or that it has insufficient 'engagement metrics', and refrains from amplifying it across millions of accounts, that is also not censorship.
By your definition, if I post something and it doesn't make good 'engagement' metrics and FB/Google/YouTube doesn't promote it, that's censorship — Nonsense— it is an editorial decision. And, restricting or boosting amplification based on a metric of sourcing, value, truth, moral compass, is also an editorial decision.
These decisions are already being made thousands of times per second. It is past time that the deciders become responsible for their decisions.
> There are also a few websites, whose entire domain is banned in Facebook Messenger. It was discussed here previously. thedonald.win is a political example of such censorship.
Besides, "no, IT is a X" is not a valid counterargument to "IT is a Y" unless "is a" is a relationship of IFF (which it is not in this case) or X and Y do not intersect (which they do).
>>I guess you missed this debacle ...entire domain is banned in Facebook Messenger... a political example of such censorship.
If you are an absolutist about free speech, you should be loudly cheering this decision. Facebook Messenger is a private company — they should be fully free to say or not say, broadcast or not broadcast, serve or not serve, anything/anyone they want. Did I miss some governmental agency ordering them to not broadcast that source or set of messages? Should HN be unable to ban bad actors?
>>Besides, "no, IT is a X" is not a valid counterargument to "IT is a Y" unless "is a" is a relationship of IFF (which it is not in this case) or X and Y do not intersect (which they do).
Not quite. It is true that an IFF relationship would establish it absolutely. If not, it's still in a fully arguable area, and my argument is not to have some govt censorship bureau, but a requirement for more responsibility, that the tech companies, who now make editorial decisions at a scale and scope that dwarfs any newspaper ever, are held as responsible for their content as any newspaper or broadcaster.
(And, if they want to go back to being a 100% straight carrier, with zero 'recommendation' engine, and preseinting only a chronological timeline of posts from your actual contacts, & similar restrictions, then they can go back to being carriers.)
> If you are an absolutist about free speech, you should be loudly cheering this decision. Facebook Messenger is a private company
What? The freedom you are talking about is the freedom of association, not the freedom of free speech.
> ...
Doesn't matter if you call this stuff "recommendation engine" or "editorial decisions", it is still censorship by definition. This is the newspeak George Carlin had a relatively known take on.
Stop calling the censorship "editorial decisions". We are not debating the "editorial decisions" part, we are debating the censorship part.
IIRC, we are talking about your complaint that Facebook Messenger banned and doesn't carry messages from some domain. That's a speech/press issue, not association.
(If you really want it to be association with which FBM is somehow interfering, where is the govt order? Otherwise, meet all you want, but where is the requirement that some other property owner host you? Are you interfering with freedom of association rights because you put up a 'No Trespassing' sign and my band of drummer and bonfire artists can't come on your land for our meetings?)
The last time I checked, any tech communication platform is owned by the stockholders and managed by the executive team. They are a non-govt entity.
As such, they have rights to publish or say, post, broadcast whatever THEY choose. Or, to not do so. Similarly, if HN finds a user abusing the forum, they are free to ban them.
Was there some govt order requiring FBM to ban the trump-related domain? If so, please post a citation.
If you have no official government action coercing the ban, it is a private decision. If that private was made by an algorithm, it was a recommendation engine or algorithmic. If it was made directly by a human, it was an editorial decision.
It seems like you are arguing AGAINST freedom of non-govt entities to say or not say, publish or not publish what they want.
It's a bit unnerving to see this stuff so often, really. Demands to censor speech you don't like, and which almost uniformly comes from your political opponents, in the name of fighting authoritarianism is blatantly contradictory. It'd startling how popular this sort of thinking has become.
The most worrisome part is that we have a perfect example in history of the casino/gaming industry being censored essentially to the point of irrelevance. Can you imagine what Las Vegas would look like if speech in the form of gaming machine design had been allowed to flourish instead of squashed?
Now even free games on an Iphone run circles around the kind of engagement a meatspace casino can garner.
Content moderators. At the very least. I'm all for free speech, but what's happening today on the Internet is not free speech in any way or form. I'm pretty certain most of what's written on popular online forums today, such as political/news subreddits is propaganda or troll warfare.
I wouldn't be surprised by this myself, but the main actors in astroturfing are usually states and corporations through bots and paid shills, not normal users.
So, if you were being serious about stopping things like that you would be specifically going after bots and shills, not opinions. That's a huge distinction to be made that I don't think you're properly addressing.
>what's happening today on the Internet is not free speech in any way or form. I'm pretty certain most of what's written on popular online forums today, such as political/news subreddits is propaganda or troll warfare.
I think so too. I don't know how people got it in their heads that they have a right to say and do whatever they want on private platforms. I think the freakout is coming from the trollers/propagandists themselves.
Censorship is if you try to print your own newsletter and the FBI comes and destroys it.
As in stop pouring gasoline on pathological behavior (attention hijacking, emotional triggering, propaganda, etc.) through dark patterns/algorithms? Or censor everyone who has heterodox opinions?
You should make a distinction here, because I think most people assume you mean censorship.
This is known as the paradox of tolerance and was figured out right after WW2 by Karl Popper, an Austrian philosopher who witnessed the rise of the Nazis.
Authoritarians use the framework of a free society to rise to power until they are strong enough to topple it. A free society must be able to defend itself against that approach, even if it might seem contrary to its own values.
Here's the way he formulated it:
> Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
You say this was “figured out” like you think it’s some kind of natural law that was discovered by scientists. It’s not. It’s a value judgement. It’s not at all clear the trade-off is worth it and the very quote you supplied argues for “intolerance of intolerance” as a kind of a last resort, once things turn violent.
Second, as a practical matter, it’s not at all clear what constitutes intolerance. If you think the state has standing to adjudicate intolerance, then I can’t imagine you’ve been paying attention to the kind of routine social errors that are labeled intolerance on social media. The notion that it’s a legitimate function of the state to weigh in on these banal disagreements is risible.
The state does not, in fact, render judgement on most of the mundane details of your everyday life. You get in disagreements, sometimes people are hateful, people say things you don’t like, and on and on, and the state has no opinion on any of it.
I am Austrian. We suffered the history. We know where this goes. This is figured out, the only alternative is the descent into fascist totalitarianism.
> the very quote you supplied argues for “intolerance of intolerance” as a kind of a last resort, once things turn violent.
As it already did on Jan 6th and in Charlottesville.
We've seen all of this before. Instead of brown shirts, we have red hats. The ideas and the approach are the same.
> Second, as a practical matter, it’s not at all clear what constitutes intolerance. If you think the state has standing to adjudicate intolerance, then I can’t imagine you’ve been paying attention to the kind of routine social errors that are labeled intolerance on social media. The notion that it’s a legitimate function of the state to weigh in on these banal disagreements is risible.
All of these minor quibbles are irrelevant. There's a violent fascist movement forming and growing stronger by the day.
The Beer Hall Putsch [0] already happened on Jan 6th, the "cultural bolshevism" [1] bogeyman has been slightly rebranded to "cultural marxism" and is being used for propaganda purposes all over the place again. A new Big Lie [2] has been set up in the form of "Trump won!". Mainstream conservatives are behaving like Von Papen. [3]
Obsta Principiis!
If we don't nip this in the bud right now, we will soon see the new version of the Enabling Act [4] and all the horrors that followed.
I understand you might lack the perspective as you most likely don't have the same history to compare it to. Please heed the warning of somebody who does. These things sneak up on you and you won't be able to realize it until it's too late. This excellent excerpt from Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free talks about this phenomenom, I implore you to read it. [5]
Yes, but either the current situation is like Germany in the 1920s or it isn't and either way it remains the case that it's what the Germans said in the late 20s, so it doesn't actually help us to know that that's what they said, since it will have been what they said even in the case where our situation is absolutely nothing like theirs.
Honestly reading the title, I assumed the article would argue the exact opposite since that's already one of the most authoritarian things Twitter et al. is doing right now.
Social media algorithms amplify whatever is most profitable to amplify. Unfortunately, amplifying sht flinging turns out to be the most profitable. Social media companies have encoded this preference into their algorithms from the very beginning and optimised - a/b tested- for profitability along the way.
Social media are deliberately hiding gems under piles of - pardon my french- sht. How do we call this? Censorship, a specific subset of censorship, or something not quite censorship but very similar? We need to know, because fighting an enemy with no name is difficult! Are there any existing words? What about "deluging"? Any other suggestions?
How do we help people survive the drowning-in-sht effect of this social media deluge? That is the key question! Agency for the social media consumer will be a key part of the answer. In human-speak: "no sht in my feed!".
If, hypothetically, there were 1/3 people who are legitimately easy to manipulate online, then in that hypothetical scenario, what would be a good response that didn’t involve censorship?
What comes to my mind is that it’s largely the algorithms fault. They hyper optimize for strong emotional reactions and not at all for truth or value. It’s the social media companies that are forcing this insane content down peoples throats, it’s not like you can hide the YouTube recommendations panel. Every time I turn off auto play, it turns itself back on (Firefox fixes this). When I turn on my vpn, the things I get targeted with are bonkers
As it says in the article you linked, this type of situation js practically the opposite of what was described in Popper's book:
"Nonetheless, alternative interpretations are often misattributed to Popper in defense of extra-judicial (including violent) suppression of intolerance such as hate speech, outside of democratic institutions, an idea which Popper himself never espoused. The chapter in question explicitly defines the context to that of political institutions and the democratic process, and rejects the notion of "the will of the people" having valid meaning outside of those institutions. Thus, in context, Popper's acquiescence to suppression when all else has failed applies only to the state in a liberal democracy with a constitutional rule of law that must be just in its foundations, but will necessarily be imperfect."
I'm not sure how Facebook posts are literal physical violence. Also, it's so weird to keep seeing this supposed paradox cited (incorrectly) ad nauseum to justify basically any infringement on free speech when it was barely a concept he wrote about in passing, with very little thought put into it by Popper himself. Even if it was used correctly, It's just a very small thought exercise written by an author almost a century ago, it's not a natural law lol.
Silicon Valley companies should censor more content?
No - that's not what they're saying.
If you want to, go read the respective acceptance speeches, in their original form. Actually the only relevant one (for this thread) is Maria Ressa's speech; Dmitry Muratov's speech didn't mention technology or the internet at all, despite what may have been implied in the NPR article.
As to Ressa's speach -- it's quite clear she wasn't advocating censorship, per se. A fair reading of what she was saying is that these companies should stop using algorithms that structurally promote hateful and inflammatory simply because it is more "engaging" -- as they have been caught doing red-handed, basically.
But that is, strictly speaking, different from advocating outright censorship of that material. In my view, quite obviously so.
Indeed. I think the actual entity to be scorned here is NPR, not the laureates. They seem to be twisting the meaning of the speech to promote some other agenda, and in one case outright fabricating the connection.
I think, it's about the opposite of censorship: selective amplification by recommendation, governed by engagement metrics.
(What would have once been a mere footnote or a tiny bar fight, is now amplified by bringing in the equivalent of entire cities to the scene. What was small becomes big, and what would have been big goes unseen. This is a manipulation of social discourse in dimensions previously unknown.)
Social media always censors in a way by promoting certain content and burying other content. It is mediated communication not direct communication, and these platforms are neither fair nor open. They haven’t been since the advent of algorithmic timelines and engagement maximization.
If the content leads to destabilizing social life for the majority, passing laws that give government control of peoples health, advocates for violence, then yeah.
Freedom from some other twats mental illness means more to me than their freedom to be a twat.
Stop oversimplifying like a child. There are real impacts to enabling systemic bias.
If you want moral relativism because maybe subjugating people out of your view is ok, why waste effort when you’re the cohort being abused?
If they were going to give their award to a truly deserving recipient it would have been the tortured and imprisoned journalist Julian Assange who is an advocate of free speech and an independent media and voices. Instead they gave the awards deliberately to censorship advocates. It's the journalistic equivalent of giving war criminals and killers of children Nobel Peace Prizes like Kissinger and Obama.
The Nobel Peace prize has become somewhat of a joke. It's been handed out by politics, with prizes handed to people who have ordered attacks on civilians time and time again.
I don't understand why one would be surprised at the recipients of the Peace Prize.
Alfred Nobel made his fortune from producing weapons and oil.
Rehabilitating the reputation of people responsible for vast numbers of deaths seems exactly appropriate for the Peace prize when that's its purpose from the beginning.
Agree completely. It is always NOT given to the deserving party based on it's prima facie claims. Of course the agenda is completely different to the stated one and hence their choice of the undeserving and oftentimes murderous vile people.
What does that have to do with the selection of Nobel winners 125 years later? Honestly, what relationship could it possibly have? Are the awards haunted?
How can you have integrity of the justice system if you don't have integrity of facts?
What you call torture, is the isolation and lack-of-stimulus we put all prisoners through. This treatment is not specific to harass Assange, but Assange and his team wants special treatment specific to Assange.
Assange is different in many ways. A journalist normally does not convince a suicidal army recruit in Iraq to search the local network for more encrypted files he and his team can crack themselves. The only country to reward such behavior with a medal would maybe be Russia.
Dumbest comment of the internet today. You think the guys that published the watergate stories just said "hey give us what you got and we'll see what we can do with it?"
At best you're blatantly astroturfing. At least have the balls to stick your opinion to your account.
Heh. Was not Watergate itself about breaking in and stealing documents?
According to US, Assange went too far by playing this kid, asking him to use his privilege to scour the network for encrypted files and hand these over. How could Manning even had known of the contents? Or that Wikileaks was safe to trust for protecting its sources and avoiding state-actor influence?
At best that was cyberpunk activism, not journalism.
It has been called torture by a large number of people, including Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. You can dispute the definition, but it has a strong basis in international law.
> A journalist normally does not convince a suicidal army recruit in Iraq to search the local network for more encrypted files he and his team can crack themselves.
Journalists do a wide variety of things, sometimes those things are unethical, that doesn't stop them from being journalists.
If torture, then you should defend that the UK is torturing prisoners. I thought that was going to be a hard sell, but then I checked the most recent thing that Nils wrote and it seems to be selling exactly that:
> #Assange’s stroke is no surprise.
> As we warned after examining him, unless relieved of the constant pressure of isolation, arbitrariness & persecution, his health would enter a downward spiral endangering his life.
> #UK is literally torturing him to death.
Prisoners face undue pressure of isolation making strokes unsurprising? Not buying it. Instead, accepting that Assange was a journalist, who was acting in a different manner than usual journalists, and now up to the courts to decide if this manner was against their laws or not. Activism as a motive may actually be a better defense, but not a defense lawyer.
Aren't governments (especially Germany and Australia for what they are doing at the moment) way more scarier than big tech? I am not scared of Google or Facebook at all. I am, however, scared of governments. Especially seeing how the pandemic was handled and how little resistance the handling got from the citizens.
Have they? Does Facebook have political dissidents locked up in prison without representation? Has Google made homosexuality illegal and robbed individuals of legal protections? Does Apple routinely break into the wrong home and shoot people eating ice cream?
They're "beholden to the voters" only in an aggregated sense. Most democracies are representative, so if there's an elite consensus around an issue, it's easy to end up in a situation where a few unpopular policies get enacted or a few popular policies don't. This is ultimately too niche of a topic for many people to be single-issue voters about.
This, and at least in the US, your choice is really between two candidates who are— in practice— virtually identical on most issues. Want to vote for a pro-privacy, anti-war, anti-monopoly, fiscally responsible, forward-thinking candidate? Great. Your candidate will get 0.0001% of the votes. The Republican and Democrat machines don’t give anyone else a chance.
> "Want to vote for a pro-privacy, anti-war, anti-monopoly, fiscally responsible, forward-thinking candidate?"
yes! that's totally me in a nutshell. i'm hoping more and more people realize the hegemony that the two-party system represents and votes against it en masse. we need more people standing up against the consolidation of power and wealth in all its forms. that's the only way we return to a healthy and dynamic society.
At least governments (in a democracy) are subject to public scrutiny and accountable to the electorate. As far as I can tell, the big tech firms aren't answerable to anyone.
You can stop using Google, Facebook, or Apple and not be a customer. You do not get this choice with your government, regardless of the electoral process.
A tracking pixel on a website doesn't make me that pixels customer, anymore than being photographed by a photographer on the street makes me their customer.
You're either a customer using their services directly, or you're the customer of one of their customers. You only have direct influence over the former, and can decide to avoid companies that fall in the latter.
People are also free to stop taking opiates, alcohol, crack, or to stop gambling. Yet these things wreck unbelievable havoc on our society because a vast swath of the human population is not psychologically, even biochemically, capable of stopping themselves from doing these things.
Human agency has its limits because humans don’t have precise rational control over their own behavior. Otherwise we’d all eat sleep and exercise flawlessly for our entire lives… and we wouldn’t keep refreshing the front page of HN every 30 minutes.
I think not. I mean, I am not scared directly of Google and Facebook, I am scared of the tools they put at the disposal of people manipulating discourse. I don't think FB nor G even _want_ to be in this discussion, but they just don't have any other choice, they would rather just rake in their big wads of cash. No, the danger comes from the way the tools are used. I have seen several people dear to me fall into some really bad beliefs that are not rational. I think that the whole "tracking" discussion's most dangerous in this aspect, it can, statistically, persuade people of things that don't make sense and don't pass the reason test. Basically, really effective propaganda. Just this time, anyone with time can access this propaganda machine. Want to destabilize a country from within? No problem, you don't even have to be be there.
So uh, why do you put Australia in your two-especially-scary-governments-in-the-world list? That seems extremely odd to me.
Sydney here. I've seen oblique mentions like this a couple of times on here recently and asked about it, as I've no idea what would inspire such a comment, but no-one answered until now. Well, for one thing, we don't have nuclear weapons pointed at anyone...
Lives for most people under authoritarian regimes is "not that bad". That is from personal experience living in Russia, my life was pretty great, as far as I can tell from coworkers/visits to China it's similar there.
And they (the governments, and many if not most citizens) will tell you that police coming to somebody's home after an online post about organizing a protest against government policies, and such, are for greater good and anyone who says otherwise is a foreign agent "spinning a narrative". Even Russia didn't prevent people from leaving, impose internal borders, or arrest people for going to a park, as far as I know :)
What an absurd comment. Really, you are implying Australia has an "authoritarian regime"?
> Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of a strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting.
Uh... 100% no, no, no, no and no. I'm not saying at all that I like our present government - our last few have been increasingly pathetic, from what I've heard, but...let's keep it slightly real, thanks.
It's a spectrum, not a boolean flag. There were many examples, my favorite was when someone wanted to organize a protest against lockdowns on Facebook, and cops came into their home. That is an action of an extremely authoritarian government. In the article I guess it falls under suppressing civil liberties and antiregime activities. Vaguely, the more of such actions a government can perform/ performs (or cannot/refrains from performing) the more (less) authoritarian it is... The fact that the majority agrees they are justified has no bearing on that whatsoever. Democracy and liberty only tend to correlate, they are not the same thing, especially recently.
> How can you have election integrity if you don't have integrity of facts?
This one is easy. There is no integrity of facts. No matter what standard you use you will have cases where reasonable people disagree. Historians argue about interpretation of facts all the time. There is no universal objective truth.
You can argue that you don't need absolute integrity and just clamp down on the fringe stuff but that just shifts the problem. You will find a boundary where reasonable people disagree about action being needed.
Election integrity actually has more to do with politicizing the elections process, which is so incredibly dangerous. The whole "ends justify the means" is a symptom of a siege mentality, which is deliberately created by those who personally benefit from it.
So what could the US do? Three things:
1. State independent commissions to run elections, draw boundaries around Congressional districts and certify elections. This should not be done by the legislature;
2. Move voting to Saturday and Sunday;
3. Make appearing at a polling place mandatory. This one is controversial. This is the system Australia has. You don't have to vote. You simply need to show up and get your name crossed off. That's it; and
4. Preferential or ranked choice voting.
Optional voting is nothing more than a tool for voter suppression. Stripping citizens of voting rights, (historically) tests on literacy to be able to vote, some districts requiring you to queue for hours to vote and so on are all designed to suppress the vote.
I don't care if someone was a felon or you think they're not informed enough (who decided that?). The absolute death of democracies is where a small minority dictates what happens to the rest of the country and that's where the US is hdeaded.
> 3. Make appearing at a polling place mandatory. This one is controversial. This is the system Australia has. You don't have to vote. You simply need to show up and get your name crossed off. That's it; and
Well the first is that it's possible to not be registered to vote. If that's the case, there's nothing you need to do. My sense was that most people are registered to vote and this seems to be backed up by AEC (Australian Electoral Commission) statistics [1].
So if you are registered, then wherever you live, you'll bein a giant book. When you show up to vote, you just tell them your name and they draw a line through it. If you're out of your district, you can still vote. You just need to fill out an absentee voting form wherever you go to. This information is collated after the fact for failures to appear or duplicates.
I believe if you fail to appear you just get mailed a fine that starts at $20 [2]. I'm not sure this enforcement is 100%. At least, I've never known anyone who has gotten one. Then again, not voting seems to be relatively uncommon.
Voting, in my experience, is straightforward and quick. It's never taken me more than 5-10 minutes. The polling places are typically schools (which you can use, because it's on a Saturday) and I've never had to wait for more than a few minutes.
But this is why mandatory appearance is so important: the AEC is then responsible for making sure there is sufficient capacity. They can't play games with making it harder or easier in particular districts. Mandatory appearance frees the AEC from any partisan traps of that particular type.
> 3. Make appearing at a polling place mandatory. This one is controversial. This is the system Australia has. You don't have to vote. You simply need to show up and get your name crossed off.
"It is not the case, as some people have claimed, that it is only compulsory to attend the polling place and have your name marked off, and this has been upheld by a number of legal decisions:
Some people (including me) see Australia's system as the forcing of an appearance of consent for the election of the same two parties. Within that system, you're not only not allowed to find all of the candidates unacceptable (and/or not to care about the outcome), but even further you're forced to rank all of the candidates. Albert Langer tried to get people to rank both major parties equally last, rather than accepting being forced to show a preference between them, and was jailed.
"During his incarceration, Albert Langer was deemed by Amnesty International to be a 'Prisoner of Conscience.'"
Australia managed to create a system even worse than FPTP. It annihilates small parties, and with their aggressive defense of it, this is obviously an intended effect. I think they just need proper runoffs if they honestly want to record people's preferences. At the absolute least, allow people to abstain from endorsing every candidate (but one, practically speaking.) Instead, millions of people who despise both the Labor and Liberal candidates have their votes recorded for one or the other every single election, under pain of fine.
Australian-style ranked choice reduces to almost exactly what we have now, but additionally artificially inflates the support of status quo incumbents.
> Make appearing at a polling place mandatory. This one is controversial. This is the system Australia has. You don't have to vote. You simply need to show up and get your name crossed off. That's it
I'd agree to that if we add a "No Acceptable Candidate" option, and if it gets the majority of the vote the parties are forced to present new candidates and try again.
> I don't care if someone was a felon or you think they're not informed enough (who decided that?).
I don't even care if somebody is currently in prison; I think every prison needs a polling place and facilities for on-site journalists/reporters who are covering what is going on inside.
If your elections could be significantly moved by the votes of prisoners, you live in a failed state.
I have seen it claimed that in the US, elections are significantly moved by the votes of prisoners, in the sense that, while prisoners may not vote, they are counted as inhabitants of the county they are imprisoned in, so they increase representation of those who can vote nearby.
Locations of prisons tend to be rural and have very different demographics from the places where prisoners would otherwise be living.
Deciding to let prisoners vote needs to be followed up by a decision on whether to let them vote as if they returned to their former home, or in the location of the prison.
The prisoners don't necessarily outnumber the locals outside, so I don't think it is a foregone conclusion that they will be able to.
But another way to look at it, is that by being counted as part of the population in the vicinity of the prison, it provides an incentive to have prisons and to incarcerate people, and it also reduces the representation of the places prisoners come from.
I mean you can't have it both ways. If a person is counted for apportionment in a particular place, that is the place they're "represented" and it must be the place their vote counts.
Democracy has always faced the problem that come elections, every living soul has one vote, but not every soul is equally equipped to be critical about information they are exposed to.
The solution is not to inhibit freedom of thought and speech, it is to teach new generations of people to be more critical.
Ultimately in the long run democracy and free societies are always more likely to triumph against authoritarian societies, because the will of the people prevents the governments from endlessly doing moronic or corruptive actions. If they do, they will get voted out in the next election cycle. Authoritarian governments don’t have that luxury, if the glorious leader decides to run against a wall year after year in full speed because they think they are right, they will and nobody dares to stop the train.
So the enemy is not disinformation, it is the gullible mind. We need to educate critical thinking, without going too deep into values. Then our societies will sort this shit out.
On a tangent, when a political entity is dismantling education of critical thought and science in school systems, you should know it’s because they know their political rule depends on people not thinking critically.
The problem here is that we're in a situation where those most gullible are sure that they are the most critical. As with everything in this weird world, "critical" has been peaked beyond recognition and turned onto itself. The word became meaningless in the online and later offline discourse. There isn't even a way to communicate the issue to those which needs education as every contingency for education has been co-opted into this ridiculous reality they (and ultimately we all) live in.
Unfortunately this reality is quite profitable.
As cliche as it may sound: we need an outside the box view on the whole thing and I don't even know who or what that could be which would look from outside this box we're trapped in.
> Democracy has always faced the problem that come elections, every living soul has one vote.
The one people, one vote, is a problem that has been 'fixed' since the start with gentle corrections and tricks. If your vote score 1 point and mine score 1000 points, then it does not matter if you are very well informed or not.
Nobel Peace prizes? The one that Obama got for drone striking Pakistani kids? Or the one that Arafat got for bombing Israeli kids? Oh no, wait, the one that Kissinger got for bombing Vietnamese kids, must be that one, right?
You're a facist who should be censored to prevent authoritarianism if you don't agree that when _we_ bomb poor brown people on the other side of the world it's for the greater good.
Each time I visit NPR to read an article, I’m always so pleased by their “text” mode (text.npr.org). It’s a joy to use, and a welcome change from the normal “modern” news websites we so often encounter, which are riddled with ads and megabytes of JS.
Keep in mind that the Nobel Prize is a political prize as much as anything else. It's there to reward certain behaviors. I can cite examples but I'd rather not be inflammatory.
This time, the committee made a decent choice. They basically took two not very well known but highly respectable journalists and shunned them from premature death by giving them the prize.
This comment section is a painful read--when it comes to "free speech" this community somehow loses all sense of nuance or introspection.
Facebook and Google "stifle free speech" every day when their algorithms pick losers.
That the tech industry is manipulating the dissemination of information at a scale never seen before is undeniable.
With that much power comes a great social responsibility, and it's clear (especially egregiously in Facebook's case--see Myanmar or covid for a more recent atrocity) that that responsibility is not taken seriously.
How many people have died needlessly in this pandemic due to misinformation spread by algorithms that reward outrage? Was yellow journalism exactly the same? Should all speech be treated equal? How should our expectations regarding speech change when someone with an axe to grind no longer has to convince someone to print physical pamphlets and pass them out to people to reach a massive audience? What kinds of processes should be in place to prevent messages that may cause imminent physical harm to people from reaching millions? Who should be in charge of those processes?
The Nobel Peace Prize awarded Barack Obama, Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger. It is a joke relic of an organization that deserves nothing but mockery.
I don't know much about this year's recipients but, per article, they seem to think that the tech companies can engage in more censorship in order to fight misinformation, and somehow this fights authoritarianism. Truly incredible stuff. If it's a true and complete representation of their views, it amplifies the need for more mockery. Who are these folks? Have they ever worked on any kind of complex system?
Has Nobel bar been lowered? I can't tell if this is a misunderstanding of the current state of the world, hypocrisy, or a combination of both.
The State (as well as traditional Media), regardless of country, is losing its power and influence. Big Tech knows more and thus is able to influence more. The USA and other "democracies" are not immune to this shift. If nothing else, Covid has swung the pendulum back a bit, or has at least delayed Big Tech's complete undermining of the long standing status quo. That status quo isn't going to surrender. So do not expect 21st Century totalitarianism to look like the 20th Century variety. No one saw it coming then, just as too few see it coming now.
I mention this book often on HN, "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" spells out the history and The Truth in a very 21st Century way.
When was the bar high for the Peace prize? It’s seemed like a misnomer for a long time. Someone else mentioned Arafat and Kissinger being notorious examples.
Ironically, these two Nobel Peace laureates are arguing for authoritarianism, in creating an elite set of gatekeepers who decide what is and isn't disinformation, and censor the latter.
>>The entire "anti-disinformation"/"anti-extremism" industry is a gigantic fraud, funded by the same tiny handful of billionaires, governments and NGOs: a scam to control discourse while feigning neutral, non-ideological goals to battle "disinformation":
My personal experience with Facebook's anti-disinformation campaign:
232 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadYellow journalism existed in the 1920s. It's nothing new. There will always be people that want to consume these materials and believe them.
The alarming thing are the calls for censorship.
Look at how bad the media and platforms have been about Covid. Early advice on masking, lab leak, adipose inflammation, and other fairly innocuous lines of research were censored. Imagine centrally purging such discussions.
When you censor, it isn't just the thoughts you dislike. Soon they'll censor women's health issues.
Censorship is a threat to democracy.
Surely you mean "people who menstruate"
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sure yellow journalism existed. But it had anything resembling the scale, scope, reach, and speed as current technology (which is why it is taking over). Trying to trivialize this new reach would be like trivializing using everyone's iPhone/Android GPS to hand out speeding tickets - sure it's the same law, but an entirely different regime when you can get a new ticket every minute.
Despite free speech laws, it has always, and under pretty much every legal system, still been illegal to utter certain types of speech, such as yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, or inciting riot. It is never absolutely free.
If all you do when any hint of managing dezinformatsyia arises is cry "everything must be free (as in speech) and anything resembling censorship is horrible", you are being too simplistic. (and leading with it's "so complicated" and moving to censorship alarms is no less simplistic.
People and companies need to be responsible for the consequences of what they spread. Wildly amplifying disinformation based on engagement, without anything resembling a moral compass is not sustainable.
And that sentiment—that very example, even—has been used to justify expansive restrictions on speech that nobody would or should put up with today, such as opposing the military draft.
“When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Schenck v. United States
Similarly, the "No Censorship Ever!" sentiment is being abused to justify spreading weaponized dezinformatsiya at massive scale and speed, resulting in literally killing people (starting w/deluded COVID victims and Rohinga muslims,+++), for profit.
That is THE POINT here - that it can not be absolute in either direction, and we, as a society, must do the work of striking the right balance.
And no, it is not an argument that "there was also bad stuff before" (e.g., yellow journalism), so it must be OK now.
Except in this case, the origin of that phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a US Supreme Court Case in 1919 that upheld the prosecution of of an anti-war protestor for pamphleting against the draft. This is the approach to free speech that is being referenced when people use this phrase in argument.
> Similarly, the "No Censorship Ever!" sentiment is being abused to justify spreading weaponized dezinformatsiya at massive scale and speed, resulting in literally killing people (starting w/deluded COVID victims and Rohinga muslims,+++), for profit.
For someone arguing against absolutism, you see to think in very absolutist terms about supporters of free speech. Very few advocates of free speech advocate for no restrictions on speech.
Censorship should not be the first tool you reach to do deal with misinformation. Algorithmic censorship carries huge risks and can cause great damage, much like algorithmic amplification.
Censoring alleged misinformation and propaganda is a common and widely used tactic of authoritarian governments around the world. Normalizing that censorship makes it easier for am authoritarian leaning administration to push us in that direction. It is extremely dangerous.
As a share of current events information, it was greater, often virtually monopolistic, for not just “yellow journalism” generally but often a fairly unified single viewpoint of yellow journalism. (In terms of divisiveness, the actual problem today isn't greater proportional influence of yellow journalism, but that there are alternatives, both opposing equally yellow journalism and less-yellow journalism, with widespread reach.)
> has always, and under pretty much every legal system, still been illegal to utter certain types of speech, such as yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater,
Except, you know, that despite that dicta in a case that has since been overturned (which also is widely now recognized as a travesty restricting core political speech), that was, not illegal and that it was outside the scope of protection was not justifiable based on the case law either at the time or at any point since.
Perhaps a particular case was overturned, but the principle still rings true. Or, are you saying that it should really be OK for people to deliberately make verbal actions that directly result in killing other people?
“We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.”
What killed the yellow journalism of the past? Was it added restrictions on speech? Or was it something else that we could consider before taking the drastic step of reducing freedom of speech?
We could consider editorial responsibility - responsibility for what you amplify. The Fairness doctrine did a not bad job while it lasted.
Edit:
I also notice everyone arguing about Shenk, and no one brings up that some speech is still illegal, e.g., incitement to riot, sedition, and a few others.
The point of the example was that nothing is absolute, or should be absolute, even freedom of speech.
Nothing; the golden age of neutral journalism people describe a decline from to today is just when the institutions of yellow journalism all got on the same page and sang in harmony from the same propaganda hymnbook.
And we lived all that time without the sky falling over, or society collapsing into more intolerance than 100 years ago. So much so that a lot of people still think that it just ought to be illegal. Doesn't that prove that we actually don't have to restrict speech or "intolerance" ? Or do you think that we are worse off in that regard that back when shouting fire in a theater was a reasonable restriction on free speech?
That it is not new in either existing or the extent of it's influence of public perceptions of events outside immediate perception is a very good reason to not view the current situation as an unprecedented crisis posing an imminent existential threat to ordered society that requires slashing political freedom of expression in the hopes that it might curtail yellow journalism without creating something far worse.
> Seems a bit like saying 'slavery was bad before, so discrimination is ok now'.
No, it's more like saying the current manner of discrimination is manifestly less bad than when we had overt chattel slavery, so countermeasures that would not have been justified to deal with chattel slavery would, a fortiori, not be justified to deal with present discrimination.
Except that, of course, the kind of extreme measures that would even arguably not have been justified to address chattel slavery aren't actually on the menu for dealing with modern day discrimination, but tossing aside freedom of speech and the press to empower state censorship as a tool to combat yellow journalism is, for some reason, something people are actively campaigning for.
Claiming that it was definitely a lab leak because of furin clevage - saying it with certainty, is most definitely misinformation, the truth is we don't know (and may never). If people say "it could have been a lab leak" (and many people did, without being "censored") that's different.
The censors haven't held themselves to the same standards when identifying "misinformation," and they certainly jumped on studies that were terrible, such as the fraudulent hydroxychloroquine Lancet study.
> If people say "it could have been a lab leak" (and many people did, without being "censored")
And many people did with being censored (with or without scare quotes.)
> people jump onto pre-prints that haven't been peer reviewed to push whatever narrative they want
There was an early paper on HIV inserts by an Indian institute. This paper was attacked so fiercely, that I am pretty sure GP120 will become a household name in 2022.
Ivermectin and HCQ both seem to work, but these are really bad for vaccination rates. If you can either save lives by prescribing ivermectin, or by increasing vaccination rates, the choice to suppress these prophylactics becomes justifiable.
> Claiming that it was definitely a lab leak because of furin clevage
Nobody said definitely. They raised their concern to their partners, sometimes mentioning it in an interview. Claiming SARS-2 clearly has zoonotic origin, and that anything suggesting otherwise is conspiracy theory, now that is misinformation. Yet, this made it to the Lancet and Nature, and Chinese influence agents then used these papers to suppress online debate.
> the truth is we don't know (and may never).
The truth is that it is China suppressing investigation is what led us to this state. Why would they do that? What happened to those Chinese scientists who pushed sequences to Github? What happened to the citizen journalists exposing lies and coverups?
Only China benefits from the world lacking full clarity. The misinformation campaign they embarked on was one of the grossest in history of the web. Start with these facts. Not with someone convinced all this shady behavior means they are covering up something shady.
Lab-leak proponents have been a lot more careful to allow for increasingly unlikely event of zoonosis, than proponents of a natural origin, who seem to have resorted to the clarity of religion to sustain their view.
Instead, he referred multiple times to the mainstream media in Russia that is tightly controlled by the state and is acting as a propaganda device that serves short-term goals of the ruling elite, promoting war in Ukraine and anti-western sentiments along the way.
NPR took pretext of an event to present an opinion.
it's critical to the survival of the traditional news businesses that social media remains under attack, otherwise the grip that outlets like npr has on the collective zeitgeist will weaken into irrelevance. that's what they're fighting for, not freedom of speech or journalistic integrity. it's for relevance, which translates into money and power.
How about: the spread of dipshit articles won't stop until dipshits stop sharing articles.
Would questioning the validity of an election be an example of it?
If you can show solid evidence, or any evidence, supporting your claim, not.
If all the proofs of foul play that you show is a model of a smoking firegun made with cheetos and a lot of proven lies. Yes, Probably.
There was no evidence suggesting Trump's election win was not valid. The wild delusional conspiracy theories about how Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election under Obama's nose were not evidence, mind you.
So all those people, politicians, corporations, celebrities, and "journalists" peddling the Trump Russia conspiracy theories and false claims without evidence were anti-democratic pro-authoritarian? Or will there always be some excuse when "your" side does it?
But If I say in a public media that a known public figure is a criminal or eats children alive for dinner, and I repeat this for months with a clear purpose of obtaining a personal benefit for me. If I do this while refusing to show any real proof of it and, when cornered by the truth, I claim that it was just my opinion and should be respected... well, this is a different issue.
We would be moving in the field of defamation. Libel can destroy lives and is not a thing to be taken lightly.
> You would say other thing if it was somebody from "your party"
Or maybe not. This is a perfect example of your opinion about a strange on internet. I really couldn't care less about if who says it is red, blue or multicolor.
If that 'public figure' is the government itself, or a member thereof, then making 'false' statements was, at one point, criminalized in the Sedition Act of 1798 [1]. This was extremely unpopular, and while never directly ruled upon in the Supreme Court, is roundly assumed to be unconstitutional [2].
Making up shit about the federal government is simply a protected right of free speech in the USA.
> > You would say other thing if it was somebody from "your party"
Not sure where this is coming from, but I think you are responding to someone else.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts#cite_n...
Saying that all elections are rigged unless my guy wins, threatening election workers, etc. -- that is authoritarian.
That's a great way to not be authoritarian and anti democratic I guess, is to anoint yourself the decider of what is authoritarian and anti demicratic. Especially when you can move the goal posts around as necessary. How about inventing wild conspiracy theories, lying to voters, and recruiting your corporate media allies to spread these baseless claims that your political opponents are traitors who colluded with spooky foreign enemies to gain power?
Secondly, social media has its own rules for speech almost diametrically opposed to government and academic. I regularly come across crazy claims from anti-vaxers like "the virus 2 microns. too small for masks to capture." am i being censored when my assertion that they are wrong by a factor of 10 because it's saliva that carries viruses and that they should give my voice equal time in their echo chamber?
This is literally true; it's just incomplete given the relationship with saliva as you noted.
The solution here is to reply and spread more true knowledge.
You can cite super-narrow cases constructed to make censorship seem like a great idea. Within the limited bounds of those examples, the argument may seem to hold water. But in reality, there is no way to limit the power of censorship to the places where it's right to use. It will always be abused, and today it is being abused massively to suppress reasonable ideas from millions of people because they don't flatter the values of the people who happen to hold power.
I still see plenty of content from various political viewpoints, far left to far right, on every forum and social media platform I visit. This "systemic lopsided moderation of one political viewpoint" you're referring to doesn't really exist apart from right-wing propaganda.
Someone just posted this in another comment thread: https://twitter.com/GaiaRiot10/status/1468787960216797190
One removed comment does not an all-encompassing, democracy threatening conspiracy against a specific political side make.
There are also a few websites, whose entire domain is banned in Facebook Messenger. It was discussed here previously. thedonald.win is a political example of such censorship. I think The Pirate Bay links are banned in Facebook itself.
It isn't my theory. The right claims the entirety of social media has been engaged in an orchestrated conspiracy to purge non-leftist speech from their platforms in favor of pushing a radical socialist agenda for years, and that this is so widespread that it threatens democracy itself. Yes, you would need to come up with a statistically significant number of examples to prove that claim. But if it's true, it should actually be easy to prove, if not impossible to deny.
Anecdotally, I haven't seen any sign of a decrease in right-wing speech on social media. At all. If anything, it's spread to places where it didn't even really exist before, like Youtube comments and this very forum, and it's thriving on the very platforms it's supposed to be banned from. And I can find accounts of leftist, Black and LGBT accounts being banned, algorithmically suppressed or arbitrarily demonetized, which runs counter to the narrative.
I stand by my comment. The vast left-wing media conspiracy isn't a thing. It's propaganda. It's lifestyle branding.
>There are also a few websites, whose entire domain is banned in Facebook Messenger. It was discussed here previously. thedonald.win is a political example of such censorship. I think The Pirate Bay links are banned in Facebook itself.
And I'd bet dollars to donuts something other than mere political speech was involved in each case. I can think of reasons why Facebook wouldn't want links to pirated software on its platform other than political bias, for instance.
not an argument
if what youre saying were true, then uncensored forums would look like twitter. but obviously they look like the exact opposite. uncensored forums are full of right wing shit because it’s not allowed on twitter. obviously
Uncensored forums were full of right-wing shit long before Twitter was a gleam in Jack Dorsey's eye. The right-wing shit on Twitter comes from uncensored forums spilling their toxicity out into the rest of the internet, not the other way around. Uncensored forums will never look like Twitter regardless of how it or any other mainstream forum moderates, because the only people who are attracted to uncensored forums are rejects, edgelords and bigots.
You chose to ignore the part about thedonald.win, that basically disproves your point.
thedonald.win was banned for supporting the violent overthrow of the government, and before, when it was t_d, for brigading, harassment and supporting political violence.
If you want to read more about this community's well documented bad behavior, it's on wikipedia[0], or literally anywhere else on the internet.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald
if what youre saying were true, then uncensored forums would look like twitter. but obviously they look like the exact opposite. uncensored forums are full of right wing shit because it’s not allowed on twitter. obviously
Is it saying that the government should be smaller and not involved in everyday life, or is it doing things like claiming an election was stolen, which has led to real world harm (poll workers receiving death threats), or calling for violence?
And didn't the GOP helmed investigation find that there was a concerted disinformation campaign waged by Russia, as well as numerous links between people in the Trump campaign and Russian operatives?
Edit: and there are plenty of people on one side of the spectrum claiming that Biden is "in bed with China", which haven't been removed.
As per your second paragraph, no, that is false. They made a small ad buy to sow bipartisan political division. Please stop promoting misinformation.
Page 16: "High Volume and Multiple Channels"
Just like if you offered homeopathy "medications" or natural cures and stated they are curative, you're likely to fall under jurisdiction of medical licensing authorities (notwithstanding the "health supplement" loophole in the US).
> How can you have election integrity if you don't have integrity of facts?
This is about integrity/virtue of opinion. Conflate facts with opinions or political views and you lose right to talk facts. People voting in an authoritarian do not believe they are voting in an authoritarian, but an opposing voice to the evil socialist. It is poignant to defend democracy and at the same time complain of the rise of authoritarianism brought about by democracy.
In so many ways, you are then saying people are voting on the wrong people, because they do not read your newspapers, but their Facebook timelines.
> are you trying to
Level 0 thinking, you do not even know the value of your cards. Such sophistry could only work on similar-leveled people. So if I engage, I'd be bluffing, and this is not a good idea to do with players who are basically no better or worse than random search.
Find all facts and circumstantial evidence for and against lab-leak and zoonosis. Then form your own opinion. That's my claim, and only that. That may even be an opinion worth engaging with, for as long as the "we still" in your world-view includes a couple of thousand Chinese internet trolls, and discredited conflicted scientists who despite this still seem to make it to the Lancet and NYT.
I always knew the day would come for Google. I just never imagined how things changed under Tim Cook.
It doesn't matter how good your blackbox algorithms are. Junk in And Junk out.
When a newspaper editor decides a story has insufficient credible sources, or lacks any of a variety of qualities that constitute good and responsible journalism, and so does not publish or broadcast it today, that is an editorial decision, it is not censorship.
When an algorithm or human decides that a story has the same qualities, or that it has insufficient 'engagement metrics', and refrains from amplifying it across millions of accounts, that is also not censorship.
By your definition, if I post something and it doesn't make good 'engagement' metrics and FB/Google/YouTube doesn't promote it, that's censorship — Nonsense— it is an editorial decision. And, restricting or boosting amplification based on a metric of sourcing, value, truth, moral compass, is also an editorial decision.
These decisions are already being made thousands of times per second. It is past time that the deciders become responsible for their decisions.
> There are also a few websites, whose entire domain is banned in Facebook Messenger. It was discussed here previously. thedonald.win is a political example of such censorship.
Besides, "no, IT is a X" is not a valid counterargument to "IT is a Y" unless "is a" is a relationship of IFF (which it is not in this case) or X and Y do not intersect (which they do).
If you are an absolutist about free speech, you should be loudly cheering this decision. Facebook Messenger is a private company — they should be fully free to say or not say, broadcast or not broadcast, serve or not serve, anything/anyone they want. Did I miss some governmental agency ordering them to not broadcast that source or set of messages? Should HN be unable to ban bad actors?
>>Besides, "no, IT is a X" is not a valid counterargument to "IT is a Y" unless "is a" is a relationship of IFF (which it is not in this case) or X and Y do not intersect (which they do).
Not quite. It is true that an IFF relationship would establish it absolutely. If not, it's still in a fully arguable area, and my argument is not to have some govt censorship bureau, but a requirement for more responsibility, that the tech companies, who now make editorial decisions at a scale and scope that dwarfs any newspaper ever, are held as responsible for their content as any newspaper or broadcaster.
(And, if they want to go back to being a 100% straight carrier, with zero 'recommendation' engine, and preseinting only a chronological timeline of posts from your actual contacts, & similar restrictions, then they can go back to being carriers.)
What? The freedom you are talking about is the freedom of association, not the freedom of free speech.
> ...
Doesn't matter if you call this stuff "recommendation engine" or "editorial decisions", it is still censorship by definition. This is the newspeak George Carlin had a relatively known take on.
Stop calling the censorship "editorial decisions". We are not debating the "editorial decisions" part, we are debating the censorship part.
(If you really want it to be association with which FBM is somehow interfering, where is the govt order? Otherwise, meet all you want, but where is the requirement that some other property owner host you? Are you interfering with freedom of association rights because you put up a 'No Trespassing' sign and my band of drummer and bonfire artists can't come on your land for our meetings?)
The last time I checked, any tech communication platform is owned by the stockholders and managed by the executive team. They are a non-govt entity.
As such, they have rights to publish or say, post, broadcast whatever THEY choose. Or, to not do so. Similarly, if HN finds a user abusing the forum, they are free to ban them.
Was there some govt order requiring FBM to ban the trump-related domain? If so, please post a citation.
If you have no official government action coercing the ban, it is a private decision. If that private was made by an algorithm, it was a recommendation engine or algorithmic. If it was made directly by a human, it was an editorial decision.
It seems like you are arguing AGAINST freedom of non-govt entities to say or not say, publish or not publish what they want.
Now even free games on an Iphone run circles around the kind of engagement a meatspace casino can garner.
The people who are being asked to use their private resources to amplify it.
That's called freedom of speech (and freedom of the press.)
So, if you were being serious about stopping things like that you would be specifically going after bots and shills, not opinions. That's a huge distinction to be made that I don't think you're properly addressing.
How exactly do you define free speech?
Censorship is if you try to print your own newsletter and the FBI comes and destroys it.
They'll be dressed up in all kinds of rationalizations, but that's the truth of it.
Until we can get people to be honest about that, there's nowhere for this conversation to go.
And would your definition reflect Instagram's definition, as seen in the following example?
https://twitter.com/GaiaRiot10/status/1468787960216797190
You should make a distinction here, because I think most people assume you mean censorship.
Authoritarians use the framework of a free society to rise to power until they are strong enough to topple it. A free society must be able to defend itself against that approach, even if it might seem contrary to its own values.
Here's the way he formulated it:
> Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Second, as a practical matter, it’s not at all clear what constitutes intolerance. If you think the state has standing to adjudicate intolerance, then I can’t imagine you’ve been paying attention to the kind of routine social errors that are labeled intolerance on social media. The notion that it’s a legitimate function of the state to weigh in on these banal disagreements is risible.
It has standing to judge everything else, but not intolerance?
> the very quote you supplied argues for “intolerance of intolerance” as a kind of a last resort, once things turn violent.
As it already did on Jan 6th and in Charlottesville.
We've seen all of this before. Instead of brown shirts, we have red hats. The ideas and the approach are the same.
> Second, as a practical matter, it’s not at all clear what constitutes intolerance. If you think the state has standing to adjudicate intolerance, then I can’t imagine you’ve been paying attention to the kind of routine social errors that are labeled intolerance on social media. The notion that it’s a legitimate function of the state to weigh in on these banal disagreements is risible.
All of these minor quibbles are irrelevant. There's a violent fascist movement forming and growing stronger by the day.
The Beer Hall Putsch [0] already happened on Jan 6th, the "cultural bolshevism" [1] bogeyman has been slightly rebranded to "cultural marxism" and is being used for propaganda purposes all over the place again. A new Big Lie [2] has been set up in the form of "Trump won!". Mainstream conservatives are behaving like Von Papen. [3]
Obsta Principiis!
If we don't nip this in the bud right now, we will soon see the new version of the Enabling Act [4] and all the horrors that followed.
I understand you might lack the perspective as you most likely don't have the same history to compare it to. Please heed the warning of somebody who does. These things sneak up on you and you won't be able to realize it until it's too late. This excellent excerpt from Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free talks about this phenomenom, I implore you to read it. [5]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Bolshevism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_von_Papen#Bringing_Hitle... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933 [5] https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
Social media algorithms amplify whatever is most profitable to amplify. Unfortunately, amplifying sht flinging turns out to be the most profitable. Social media companies have encoded this preference into their algorithms from the very beginning and optimised - a/b tested- for profitability along the way.
Social media are deliberately hiding gems under piles of - pardon my french- sht. How do we call this? Censorship, a specific subset of censorship, or something not quite censorship but very similar? We need to know, because fighting an enemy with no name is difficult! Are there any existing words? What about "deluging"? Any other suggestions?
How do we help people survive the drowning-in-sht effect of this social media deluge? That is the key question! Agency for the social media consumer will be a key part of the answer. In human-speak: "no sht in my feed!".
Serious face back on.
Have you ever seen a concise word for algorithmicly-drowning-people-in-shit-on-social-media-because-profit?
What comes to my mind is that it’s largely the algorithms fault. They hyper optimize for strong emotional reactions and not at all for truth or value. It’s the social media companies that are forcing this insane content down peoples throats, it’s not like you can hide the YouTube recommendations panel. Every time I turn off auto play, it turns itself back on (Firefox fixes this). When I turn on my vpn, the things I get targeted with are bonkers
Educate people. Replace advertisement with search tools and opt-in configurable recommendations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
That doesn't mean that companies should be free from scrutiny or consequences if they overstep.
"Nonetheless, alternative interpretations are often misattributed to Popper in defense of extra-judicial (including violent) suppression of intolerance such as hate speech, outside of democratic institutions, an idea which Popper himself never espoused. The chapter in question explicitly defines the context to that of political institutions and the democratic process, and rejects the notion of "the will of the people" having valid meaning outside of those institutions. Thus, in context, Popper's acquiescence to suppression when all else has failed applies only to the state in a liberal democracy with a constitutional rule of law that must be just in its foundations, but will necessarily be imperfect."
I'm not sure how Facebook posts are literal physical violence. Also, it's so weird to keep seeing this supposed paradox cited (incorrectly) ad nauseum to justify basically any infringement on free speech when it was barely a concept he wrote about in passing, with very little thought put into it by Popper himself. Even if it was used correctly, It's just a very small thought exercise written by an author almost a century ago, it's not a natural law lol.
No - that's not what they're saying.
If you want to, go read the respective acceptance speeches, in their original form. Actually the only relevant one (for this thread) is Maria Ressa's speech; Dmitry Muratov's speech didn't mention technology or the internet at all, despite what may have been implied in the NPR article.
As to Ressa's speach -- it's quite clear she wasn't advocating censorship, per se. A fair reading of what she was saying is that these companies should stop using algorithms that structurally promote hateful and inflammatory simply because it is more "engaging" -- as they have been caught doing red-handed, basically.
But that is, strictly speaking, different from advocating outright censorship of that material. In my view, quite obviously so.
(What would have once been a mere footnote or a tiny bar fight, is now amplified by bringing in the equivalent of entire cities to the scene. What was small becomes big, and what would have been big goes unseen. This is a manipulation of social discourse in dimensions previously unknown.)
that may not have been implied by the advocates, but that's always the take of NPR, as the mouth of the government.
Freedom from some other twats mental illness means more to me than their freedom to be a twat.
Stop oversimplifying like a child. There are real impacts to enabling systemic bias.
If you want moral relativism because maybe subjugating people out of your view is ok, why waste effort when you’re the cohort being abused?
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doctors-without-borders-bombi...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doctors-without-borders-bombi...
Alfred Nobel made his fortune from producing weapons and oil.
Rehabilitating the reputation of people responsible for vast numbers of deaths seems exactly appropriate for the Peace prize when that's its purpose from the beginning.
However, it's common to appeal to that sort of thing. How often do people belabor the absence of pedigree of the prize in economics?
Those who don't believe the award has a "spirit" shouldn't complain about it being violated.
If you don't have any expectations for the Nobel prizes, good for you!
What you call torture, is the isolation and lack-of-stimulus we put all prisoners through. This treatment is not specific to harass Assange, but Assange and his team wants special treatment specific to Assange.
Assange is different in many ways. A journalist normally does not convince a suicidal army recruit in Iraq to search the local network for more encrypted files he and his team can crack themselves. The only country to reward such behavior with a medal would maybe be Russia.
At best you're blatantly astroturfing. At least have the balls to stick your opinion to your account.
According to US, Assange went too far by playing this kid, asking him to use his privilege to scour the network for encrypted files and hand these over. How could Manning even had known of the contents? Or that Wikileaks was safe to trust for protecting its sources and avoiding state-actor influence?
At best that was cyberpunk activism, not journalism.
> At best you're blatantly astroturfing.
What's the worst you got?
It has been called torture by a large number of people, including Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. You can dispute the definition, but it has a strong basis in international law.
> A journalist normally does not convince a suicidal army recruit in Iraq to search the local network for more encrypted files he and his team can crack themselves.
Journalists do a wide variety of things, sometimes those things are unethical, that doesn't stop them from being journalists.
> #Assange’s stroke is no surprise.
> As we warned after examining him, unless relieved of the constant pressure of isolation, arbitrariness & persecution, his health would enter a downward spiral endangering his life.
> #UK is literally torturing him to death.
Prisoners face undue pressure of isolation making strokes unsurprising? Not buying it. Instead, accepting that Assange was a journalist, who was acting in a different manner than usual journalists, and now up to the courts to decide if this manner was against their laws or not. Activism as a motive may actually be a better defense, but not a defense lawyer.
Regardless of whether you think it's unethical - it's illegal.
Large companies have no accountability, and if they disrupt the democratic process, they have no consequences either.
Mark Zuckerberg is the authoritarian ruler of an extremely powerful entity that, in some countries, is more powerful than any local government.
I’ll believe that when I see FB agents smashing down doors to imprison (/kill) activists.
"They could" isn't a good argument.
yes! that's totally me in a nutshell. i'm hoping more and more people realize the hegemony that the two-party system represents and votes against it en masse. we need more people standing up against the consolidation of power and wealth in all its forms. that's the only way we return to a healthy and dynamic society.
If anything we need to create moats between big tech and gov't. ...and one of those tactics is breaking up tech monopolies/oligopolies.
https://reclaimthenet.org/google-is-building-shadow-profiles...
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/facebook-shadow-profiles/
Human agency has its limits because humans don’t have precise rational control over their own behavior. Otherwise we’d all eat sleep and exercise flawlessly for our entire lives… and we wouldn’t keep refreshing the front page of HN every 30 minutes.
Sydney here. I've seen oblique mentions like this a couple of times on here recently and asked about it, as I've no idea what would inspire such a comment, but no-one answered until now. Well, for one thing, we don't have nuclear weapons pointed at anyone...
The narrative is mostly being spun but the anti-lockdown parties in the USA trying to push their own agenda.
And they (the governments, and many if not most citizens) will tell you that police coming to somebody's home after an online post about organizing a protest against government policies, and such, are for greater good and anyone who says otherwise is a foreign agent "spinning a narrative". Even Russia didn't prevent people from leaving, impose internal borders, or arrest people for going to a park, as far as I know :)
> Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of a strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting.
Uh... 100% no, no, no, no and no. I'm not saying at all that I like our present government - our last few have been increasingly pathetic, from what I've heard, but...let's keep it slightly real, thanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism
Could you elaborate please? I’m a German citizen and do not understand what you mean by that.
""Peace, progress, human rights – these three goals are insolubly linked to one another.”
These words are a quote from the Nobel lecture of member of the Academy of Science Andrei Sakharov, a citizen of the world, a great thinker.
His wife Elena Bonner read it out here, in this place, on Thursday, December 11, 1975.
I felt an urge to repeat Sakharov’s words here, in this world-famous hall.
Why is it important today for us, for me?
The world has fallen out of love for democracy anymore.
The world has become disappointed with the power elite.
The world has begun to turn to dictatorship.
We’ve got an illusion that progress can be achieved through technology and violence, not through human rights and freedoms."
This one is easy. There is no integrity of facts. No matter what standard you use you will have cases where reasonable people disagree. Historians argue about interpretation of facts all the time. There is no universal objective truth.
You can argue that you don't need absolute integrity and just clamp down on the fringe stuff but that just shifts the problem. You will find a boundary where reasonable people disagree about action being needed.
Election integrity actually has more to do with politicizing the elections process, which is so incredibly dangerous. The whole "ends justify the means" is a symptom of a siege mentality, which is deliberately created by those who personally benefit from it.
So what could the US do? Three things:
1. State independent commissions to run elections, draw boundaries around Congressional districts and certify elections. This should not be done by the legislature;
2. Move voting to Saturday and Sunday;
3. Make appearing at a polling place mandatory. This one is controversial. This is the system Australia has. You don't have to vote. You simply need to show up and get your name crossed off. That's it; and
4. Preferential or ranked choice voting.
Optional voting is nothing more than a tool for voter suppression. Stripping citizens of voting rights, (historically) tests on literacy to be able to vote, some districts requiring you to queue for hours to vote and so on are all designed to suppress the vote.
I don't care if someone was a felon or you think they're not informed enough (who decided that?). The absolute death of democracies is where a small minority dictates what happens to the rest of the country and that's where the US is hdeaded.
The tech giants have very little to do with that.
Facts can be opinions instead.
[1] https://insiderpaper.com/facebook-court-filing-fact-checks-a...
How is this enforced?
So if you are registered, then wherever you live, you'll bein a giant book. When you show up to vote, you just tell them your name and they draw a line through it. If you're out of your district, you can still vote. You just need to fill out an absentee voting form wherever you go to. This information is collated after the fact for failures to appear or duplicates.
I believe if you fail to appear you just get mailed a fine that starts at $20 [2]. I'm not sure this enforcement is 100%. At least, I've never known anyone who has gotten one. Then again, not voting seems to be relatively uncommon.
Voting, in my experience, is straightforward and quick. It's never taken me more than 5-10 minutes. The polling places are typically schools (which you can use, because it's on a Saturday) and I've never had to wait for more than a few minutes.
But this is why mandatory appearance is so important: the AEC is then responsible for making sure there is sufficient capacity. They can't play games with making it harder or easier in particular districts. Mandatory appearance frees the AEC from any partisan traps of that particular type.
[1]: https://www.aec.gov.au/enrolling_to_vote/enrolment_stats/
[2]: https://www.elections.wa.gov.au/vote/failure-vote#:~:text=Th....
So you're saying it's true that there's no objective truth?
That's wrong. If the election is on November 2nd that is an objective fact.
"It is not the case, as some people have claimed, that it is only compulsory to attend the polling place and have your name marked off, and this has been upheld by a number of legal decisions:
"High Court 1926 – Judd v McKeon (1926) 38 CLR 380
Supreme Court of Victoria 1970 – Lubcke v Little [1970] VR 807
High Court 1971 – Faderson v Bridger (1971) 126 CLR 271
Supreme Court of Queensland 1974 – Krosch v Springbell; ex parte
Krosch [1974] QdR 107
ACT Supreme Court 1981 – O'Brien v Warden (1981) 37 ACTR 13"
https://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/Publications/voting/
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On Australia's ranked choice implementation:
Some people (including me) see Australia's system as the forcing of an appearance of consent for the election of the same two parties. Within that system, you're not only not allowed to find all of the candidates unacceptable (and/or not to care about the outcome), but even further you're forced to rank all of the candidates. Albert Langer tried to get people to rank both major parties equally last, rather than accepting being forced to show a preference between them, and was jailed.
"During his incarceration, Albert Langer was deemed by Amnesty International to be a 'Prisoner of Conscience.'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Langer
Australia managed to create a system even worse than FPTP. It annihilates small parties, and with their aggressive defense of it, this is obviously an intended effect. I think they just need proper runoffs if they honestly want to record people's preferences. At the absolute least, allow people to abstain from endorsing every candidate (but one, practically speaking.) Instead, millions of people who despise both the Labor and Liberal candidates have their votes recorded for one or the other every single election, under pain of fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langer_vote
Australian-style ranked choice reduces to almost exactly what we have now, but additionally artificially inflates the support of status quo incumbents.
I'd agree to that if we add a "No Acceptable Candidate" option, and if it gets the majority of the vote the parties are forced to present new candidates and try again.
I don't even care if somebody is currently in prison; I think every prison needs a polling place and facilities for on-site journalists/reporters who are covering what is going on inside.
If your elections could be significantly moved by the votes of prisoners, you live in a failed state.
Locations of prisons tend to be rural and have very different demographics from the places where prisoners would otherwise be living.
Deciding to let prisoners vote needs to be followed up by a decision on whether to let them vote as if they returned to their former home, or in the location of the prison.
Their vote should be able to impact the conditions of the prison
But another way to look at it, is that by being counted as part of the population in the vicinity of the prison, it provides an incentive to have prisons and to incarcerate people, and it also reduces the representation of the places prisoners come from.
The prisoners make up about 0.5% of the population of the US. That's bigger than the margins we saw in several swing states in the last few elections.
The solution is not to inhibit freedom of thought and speech, it is to teach new generations of people to be more critical.
Ultimately in the long run democracy and free societies are always more likely to triumph against authoritarian societies, because the will of the people prevents the governments from endlessly doing moronic or corruptive actions. If they do, they will get voted out in the next election cycle. Authoritarian governments don’t have that luxury, if the glorious leader decides to run against a wall year after year in full speed because they think they are right, they will and nobody dares to stop the train.
So the enemy is not disinformation, it is the gullible mind. We need to educate critical thinking, without going too deep into values. Then our societies will sort this shit out.
On a tangent, when a political entity is dismantling education of critical thought and science in school systems, you should know it’s because they know their political rule depends on people not thinking critically.
Unfortunately this reality is quite profitable.
As cliche as it may sound: we need an outside the box view on the whole thing and I don't even know who or what that could be which would look from outside this box we're trapped in.
The one people, one vote, is a problem that has been 'fixed' since the start with gentle corrections and tricks. If your vote score 1 point and mine score 1000 points, then it does not matter if you are very well informed or not.
Facebook and Google "stifle free speech" every day when their algorithms pick losers.
That the tech industry is manipulating the dissemination of information at a scale never seen before is undeniable.
With that much power comes a great social responsibility, and it's clear (especially egregiously in Facebook's case--see Myanmar or covid for a more recent atrocity) that that responsibility is not taken seriously.
How many people have died needlessly in this pandemic due to misinformation spread by algorithms that reward outrage? Was yellow journalism exactly the same? Should all speech be treated equal? How should our expectations regarding speech change when someone with an axe to grind no longer has to convince someone to print physical pamphlets and pass them out to people to reach a massive audience? What kinds of processes should be in place to prevent messages that may cause imminent physical harm to people from reaching millions? Who should be in charge of those processes?
I don't know much about this year's recipients but, per article, they seem to think that the tech companies can engage in more censorship in order to fight misinformation, and somehow this fights authoritarianism. Truly incredible stuff. If it's a true and complete representation of their views, it amplifies the need for more mockery. Who are these folks? Have they ever worked on any kind of complex system?
Nobel Committee and Governments are too centralized. It's a lot of elites and their propositions are all the same.
I discuss this with Noam Chomsky earlier this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5mI6ClPGc
And a few months before that, Noam and I had another conversation about this same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUPZ8rSESZo
The State (as well as traditional Media), regardless of country, is losing its power and influence. Big Tech knows more and thus is able to influence more. The USA and other "democracies" are not immune to this shift. If nothing else, Covid has swung the pendulum back a bit, or has at least delayed Big Tech's complete undermining of the long standing status quo. That status quo isn't going to surrender. So do not expect 21st Century totalitarianism to look like the 20th Century variety. No one saw it coming then, just as too few see it coming now.
I mention this book often on HN, "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" spells out the history and The Truth in a very 21st Century way.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw
Calling out Russia isn't bold or new. In fact, it's a dangerous distraction.
But aside from that flaw, the rest is ok.
I made my tool free this year in solidarity
https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
Like Glenn Greenwald said:
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434854149087182848
>>The entire "anti-disinformation"/"anti-extremism" industry is a gigantic fraud, funded by the same tiny handful of billionaires, governments and NGOs: a scam to control discourse while feigning neutral, non-ideological goals to battle "disinformation":
My personal experience with Facebook's anti-disinformation campaign:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734