The issue is - as ever - what 'harmful information' is and who gets to define and police that. The EU is overly confident in it's benevolent paternalism; I hope that US Gov has greater humility
That's moral subjectivism, which is objectively wrong ;)
Seriously though, even if there exist risks, the goal is improvement, not perfection. There are people who specialize in things like this, moral philosophers for instance. It's actually possible to know things in this space.
But which one of your friends or relatives would you appoint as the person who gets to determine what you say on any topic?
Do masks work? How about the vaccine, did it stop you from getting it? Did it stop you from spreading it? Did the lock down last 2 weeks. Was 2 months long enough. Would people leave their bluetooth on, so the tracking app could work? Were the tracking apps secure? Did the tracking apps that cost Australia 100mil actually work?
The experts all said yes and they also all said no.
What is hate speech? Is saying Picnic hate speech?
Not all of those juxtapositions are equal, but let's not go into that.
I think it's a bit defeatist and therefore wrong to say that because some people who claim to be experts are giving lousy advice we should stop using experts. I think the way forward is to teach better and more impartial experts, not stop using experts altogether.
Harmful and hateful, as distinct from false. Even true information gets censored if someone decides it qualifies as either of those terms. Plus all the false positives, as social media gets penalized for accidentally leaving those up, but faces no consequences for over-censoring.
In practice they will outsource this to some "best practices" "private" (government approved) censor to avoid liability.
Social medias prime feature is broadcast capability. For free.
In other forms of media (books, newspapers, radio, tv, phones/sms, chat, email) if you try to broadcast your important thoughts to everyone on the planet you get a giant bill.
Speech was free. But Broadcast capability was not.
The unintented main feature of social media is broadcast being free. And the main unanswered question is why should it be free?
If all the neurons in your brain were broadcasting simultaneously to every other neuron the only outcome is seizures.
The EU has not answered this.
It has instead told the platforms they will be held responsible for seizures.
Someone has to come up with better answers about how we all coordinate broadcasting. Otherwise we will keep seeing scary and shocking seizures.
One could also call it "moderation", if one wanted to use less loaded terms.
Is it censorship when dang calls you out and threatens a ban for starting a flamewar? Is it censorship when a spammer gets banned? What about gmail's spam filter? Is that automated censorship?
The bill sets up a system where content legal in one area can be banned because it's illegal in another. Even if it's not directly censorious (it is), nations like Hungary have already had their governments state they intend to abuse such bills for the purpose of cross-border censorship.
> For a long time people said that deleting comments on social media wasn't censorship because it was done by private companies, and I agreed.
I feel like that is bad reasoning. If the state is a democratic one, wouldn't a democratically elected censor/moderator (pick your framing, it's the same thing) be better than one that is accountable only to investors?
No because I can leave a social network and go to some other website or publisher that allows me to publish whatever I want. The worst thing that can happen is that they delete my comments.
You can't escape the state. If they don't like what you post they'll beat you up and put you behind bars. Not good.
Regarding your "democratically appointed censor" point, freedom of speech means that I should not be a slave to whatever the status quo is.
Sure, you can leave Twitter and Meta and post on some Mastodon server nobody knows about, but if you do that, your reach collapses and you've been effectively silenced.
> You can't escape the state.
You can, by moving countries. I've done it four times in my life.
> Tell that to all the people (especially women) living right now in Afghanistan, North Korea or Cuba
Okay sure, but this was specifically qualified with a "If the state is a democratic one".
> Out of curiosities, what are those four countries and did you also acquire their citizenship?
I'd rather not dox myself too much, but they were two EU countries, the US and the UK. As a union citizen, I can move freely between countries in the EU; I went to the US on a specialty worker visa. I never acquired any citizenships other than my country of birth.
Sure let’s debate what version we have to live with, but not whether we should continue the experiment in the first place. Social media isn’t inevitable. We could just say no thanks and move on. It’s not too late (yet) imo for society to choose to say no thank you. There will come a day when it becomes completely inconceivable to have a society without it, but even the fact that you could consider it not being there proves we aren’t at that point yet.
> The difference between less harmful and more harmful cancer could be the difference between life and death.
This is a strange analogy. Of course some forms of cancer are more treatable than others, especially when detected early, but the best "treatment" for cancer is to avoid it in the first place.
There's no realistic, sensical way to move people from getting getting more harmful forms of cancer to to less harmful forms of cancer. In fact, it would be absolutely absurd to try somehow to encourage people to get less harmful forms of cancer. All of the encouragement should be directed at avoiding behaviors that lead to cancer.
22 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 61.2 ms ] threadSeriously though, even if there exist risks, the goal is improvement, not perfection. There are people who specialize in things like this, moral philosophers for instance. It's actually possible to know things in this space.
But which one of your friends or relatives would you appoint as the person who gets to determine what you say on any topic?
Do masks work? How about the vaccine, did it stop you from getting it? Did it stop you from spreading it? Did the lock down last 2 weeks. Was 2 months long enough. Would people leave their bluetooth on, so the tracking app could work? Were the tracking apps secure? Did the tracking apps that cost Australia 100mil actually work?
The experts all said yes and they also all said no.
What is hate speech? Is saying Picnic hate speech?
I think it's a bit defeatist and therefore wrong to say that because some people who claim to be experts are giving lousy advice we should stop using experts. I think the way forward is to teach better and more impartial experts, not stop using experts altogether.
Humility from the US? Surely you jest.
On the other hand, the US is highly resistant to government regulation, because our politicans are bought and sold by those who would be regulated.
In practice they will outsource this to some "best practices" "private" (government approved) censor to avoid liability.
In other forms of media (books, newspapers, radio, tv, phones/sms, chat, email) if you try to broadcast your important thoughts to everyone on the planet you get a giant bill.
Speech was free. But Broadcast capability was not.
The unintented main feature of social media is broadcast being free. And the main unanswered question is why should it be free?
If all the neurons in your brain were broadcasting simultaneously to every other neuron the only outcome is seizures.
The EU has not answered this.
It has instead told the platforms they will be held responsible for seizures.
Someone has to come up with better answers about how we all coordinate broadcasting. Otherwise we will keep seeing scary and shocking seizures.
Is it censorship when dang calls you out and threatens a ban for starting a flamewar? Is it censorship when a spammer gets banned? What about gmail's spam filter? Is that automated censorship?
Now it is the state mandating censorship. Can we call a spade a spade?
I feel like that is bad reasoning. If the state is a democratic one, wouldn't a democratically elected censor/moderator (pick your framing, it's the same thing) be better than one that is accountable only to investors?
You can't escape the state. If they don't like what you post they'll beat you up and put you behind bars. Not good.
Regarding your "democratically appointed censor" point, freedom of speech means that I should not be a slave to whatever the status quo is.
> You can't escape the state.
You can, by moving countries. I've done it four times in my life.
Out of curiosities, what are those four countries and did you also acquire their citizenship?
Okay sure, but this was specifically qualified with a "If the state is a democratic one".
> Out of curiosities, what are those four countries and did you also acquire their citizenship?
I'd rather not dox myself too much, but they were two EU countries, the US and the UK. As a union citizen, I can move freely between countries in the EU; I went to the US on a specialty worker visa. I never acquired any citizenships other than my country of birth.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/10/15/64-of-ame...
https://socialmediavictims.org/mental-health/self-esteem/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7905185/
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/social-media-profound-risk...
https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/teachers-union-issue...
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/study-social-m...
Sure let’s debate what version we have to live with, but not whether we should continue the experiment in the first place. Social media isn’t inevitable. We could just say no thanks and move on. It’s not too late (yet) imo for society to choose to say no thank you. There will come a day when it becomes completely inconceivable to have a society without it, but even the fact that you could consider it not being there proves we aren’t at that point yet.
(Posted on social media).
The difference between less harmful and more harmful cancer could be the difference between life and death.
I think any steps towards a more human friendly platforms are welcome. Kind of like the "boil a frog" thing, but in the opposite direction.
This is a strange analogy. Of course some forms of cancer are more treatable than others, especially when detected early, but the best "treatment" for cancer is to avoid it in the first place.
There's no realistic, sensical way to move people from getting getting more harmful forms of cancer to to less harmful forms of cancer. In fact, it would be absolutely absurd to try somehow to encourage people to get less harmful forms of cancer. All of the encouragement should be directed at avoiding behaviors that lead to cancer.
And the metaphor is apt to my original point.