It all comes down to the relationship between social media and freedom of expression.
If we view social media as simply a private service, then these companies have the right to do whatever they want. Businesses have the right to refuse service for any reason.
But if we view social media as a utility similar to telephones, then free expression should be protected. People can say whatever they want over phone and text.
I lean towards the latter. Social media has become the new public square/agora/forum. Yes, its still owned by private enterprise, but it's basically the new town hall at this point.
> A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
When the government is colluding with private industry to suppress opposing views on social media, you really have to wonder if the word "violent" is even needed in this definition anymore.
It's the definition of a mixed economy (mixing socialism and capitalism), aka the basis of modern liberalism: an slowly but always expanding top down control of the market, while the rest of the market is generally free.
I do, as well, but I don't think that the companies that run Social media should be let off the hook (which they say they should).
Utilities are regulated monopolies. In exchange for a monopoly status, they need to abide by some pretty strict standards (like regulated pricing and service maintenance), and are forced to work with entities that they would normally avoid.
Things like open APIs, algorithm access (that could be classified, but should be accessible to folks that are accountable to the consumers, etc.).
Not a simple structure. What we have now, is pretty haphazard, and has grown organically. The current utility/public infrastructure setup is the result of hundreds of years of disasters, ripoffs, successes, and learning.
Not sure if we have to go through it all again, or if there is a possibility of taking learning from current municipal structure, and apply it here.
Depends. Someone needs to be held Accountable. It would reflect the government. If the government sucks, then social media is probably only one of many things that could be corrupted. It's a lot more likely that corrupting the legal system would be more destructive.
I honestly think the worst thing we could do to social media is treat it like the telephone service.
Have people used telephones recently? The network is so infiltrated by scam artists (and the tooling to remove them from the network is so toothless) that it's functionally one giant attack vector against the most vulnerable telephone users these days. The fact that Google is trumpeting adding AI to a phone to detect when you are getting scammed is indicative of how badly the network has been poisoned by the lack of anyone's ability to regulate access.
We already know what an unfettered free-expression network looks like. It looks like telephone and email. It's a scammer's playground.
Yes. This is exactly the argument the EFF makes. Utility-style regulation involves the government picking winners who become unresponsive monopolies. Notice how OpenAI is eager to be regulated. They know that means they win. That's the opposite of what we need the FAANGS et al. to become. And personally, I don't want the government telling me how to moderate my network.
The EFF recommendation is anti-trust enforcement to insure these services don't hold American communications hostage. We must attack their moats to enable smaller competitors to have at more level playing field.
The problem is social media is inherently anti competitive. It relies on network effects, so you have to either limit their size or use utility style regulation.
I don't see how any of this is difficult. Ban illegal content, period. Not that that's hard, it already is.
And leave the rest alone. Gore/graphic content -> filter with a toggle for those that want to view it. Bullying -> does it cross the line into an actual law being broken, if so, then ban it. Makes sensitive people nervous, uncomfortable and angry -> leave it be, but if you really wanna go far stick a sentiment analysis thingie on it and allow people to selectively filter it below their own threshold. There is so much that can be done simply, without breaching anyone's freedoms and without teetering into Orwellian 1984 conspiracy territory about wide-scale mind control and opinion shifting.
The problem comes when people naturally express themselves, it makes <insert group here> uncomfortable and it inconveniently bubbles up the rankings. E.g. I bet you right now that 20% of the entire american internet population simply doesn't like Biden and would mock him for his, probably innocent, old-age antics. But if that opinion were to "manifest" into some sort of catchy "Biden is old and sucks" hashtag or meme that needs reporting, well that's uncomfortable for TPTB, or the elites, or the media or whatever you wanna call it, and must be stopped. The internet is the ultimate direct-democracy tool we have right now, and it's being manipulated precisely because it breaks "representative" democracy.
Another uncomfortable topic: trans people in sports. It will absolutely blow up in one direction if people were organically allowed to organize and find others with similar viewpoints. Instead, they're banned, scared into shutting up, shadow-banned, or worse cancelled and doxxed.
I'm all for private ownership as I'm an Libertarian/AnCap. But long story short, we have a flawed world right now, and to make it better right now, we have to work within it and that means making a completely arbitrary line. One that optimizes freedom whilst balancing the abuse, because it's clear to everyone not drinking the koolaid that social media is being used to affect public opinion.
We've crossed the boundary of pure private ownership of anything many years ago. Heck, I don't even have private ownership of my own body, so a say in a highly influential component of our society is a small price to pay to keep the evil at bay.
> Another uncomfortable topic: trans people in sports. It will absolutely blow up in one direction if people were organically allowed to organize and find others with similar viewpoints. Instead, they're banned, scared into shutting up, shadow-banned, or worse cancelled and doxxed.
There is a huge amount of discussion of the problem of males in female sports on Twitter, plus also on smaller forums like Mumsnet and Ovarit. Some of it amongst leading athletes and sports science researchers. People of similar viewpoints are organising, despite the attempts to shut them down on other forums.
It's working too: various sports bodies have made changes within the past couple of years that walk back their previous broken policies of male inclusion. It does seem that the needle is slowly but surely moving back towards fairness for female athletes. Though there is still a lot of work to be done.
I do think the trans issue in general is a good example of this shadowboosting. It's a very niche thing that seems to be everywhere for some reason, and despite most people not giving a shit or not supporting it, the Internet gives off a wildly different impression of the world.
Nobody shares pronouns in daily life, yet most people I know working in an office have to use them in emails and such (and they use exactly what you would expect based on their name)
>> but it's basically the new town hall at this point. ... then free expression should be protected.
IF its the "new town hall" then were gonna have a fuck ton of rules. You're not "Free" to scream fire in a crowded building, you cant make up crisis actors and expect NOT to get sued to death....
The protection of freedom of expression exists. No one is stoping you from hosting your own platform based on what ever nonsense you make up. I dont have to give you a box to stand on, no one does. Thats not how it ever worked.
We already have setup NOSTR and the fediverse that interoperate with each other. Many of us have set very simple rules to comply with the first amendment and legal precedent around it which is say anything as long as it is not illegal such as directing imminent harm on someone.
>No one is stoping you from hosting your own platform based on what ever nonsense you make up.
They actually are. CloudFlare will block you, Visa will refuse payments, Google will delist you, Apple app store will delist your app, and you'll be subject to endless legal harassment from activists if your site allows people to communicate substantially out of line with the San Francisco progressive bloc.
I think where we have to be careful with going toward the latter idea is that not all social media platforms are general purpose, and that free expression includes a lot of unwanted content (spam, scams, off-topic posts, etc).
Free expression isn’t something that can be realistically protected when a social media platform has an explicit purpose, code of conduct, and/or ideals.
For example, an LGBTQ social media network has to be able to ban anti-LGBTQ content and users. Hacker News needs to be able to remove non-tech industry-related off-topic posts. /r/pcgaming needs to be able to remove posts about mobile gaming. Spam and unwanted self-promotion is often removed by moderators of social media outlets. Moderation is key to a workable social media experience.
There’s also a lot of 100% legal free expression that platforms have to be able to choose not to host. Pornography is an common example.
The thing that makes this topic difficult is that social media isn’t really pure person-to-person speech (e.g. like a person on soapbox) and it also isn’t really pure curated media (e.g. a television channel or news website published by an editor). It’s like a hybrid of the concepts.
Private enterprise is bounded by considerations of the common good. So it is reasonable to regulate private enterprise when it becomes an essential service or utility, or has a huge impact on the common good.
4chan exists. It's really the online "free speech zone" some people seem to be pining for.
I've moderated some large subreddits in the past, and am a strong free speech supporter, but I'm also actually perfectly happy not dealing with people spamming the n-word in every forum they can find because they're legally entitled to. "Congress shall make no law" really does mean congress. Unlike telephones, if the forums are open to the public, then so some decorum is needed.
There are also people that are terminally online that learn exactly how to take down content. Features like flag and report are not used by normal users but by people often trying to push an agenda and silence opposing viewpoints.
Low-karma users and users who have been explicitly flagged as problem children. You can ask to have the flag lifted (but I haven't, because it keeps me honest and focused ;) ).
Nah I think the parent is talking about something different. I have decent karma, my account is old, and I can post as much as I like, except when I’m having a lot of back-and-forth in the same thread/comment section and discussing contentious things. Eventually I’ll get hit with HN’s passive-aggressive form of shadowbanning someone from a discussion: “you’re posting too much, slow down.”
The law to ban tiktok was passed because the Chinese government has direct control over the content shown to users.
All the talk about privacy and data collection were mostly to muddy the waters by bringing in all tech to the conversion, and divert attention from solely tiktok ("Everyone does it so why focus on tiktok?!"). It's still a threat, I'm not trying to minimize it, but tiktok was banned primarily because of who controls the content delivered, not who is collecting the data.
I saw Mark Cuban advocating for any platform which shows content to children to be required to publish their algorithm. IMO it is the most logical approach to the entire discussion.
I'm not opposed to "open algorithm requirements" on social media sites, but the chattering about them is starting to remind me of back when we thought real-name requirements might fix toxic behavior online, until YouTube and Facebook implemented them and found that, no, they absolutely do not: people will happily be despicable under their real names too. It seems to me like something people are desperately grasping for in the naive hope that there's a quick-and-easy fix to the endemic problems of human nature.
X/Twitter does now publish their algorithm, and it hasn't made it any less of a shithole.
I agree. Most people just want the quick and easy fix regardless of efficacy. Make them show the algorithm, some other entity will review it for you and tell you if you should be outraged or not, you continue using the site while complaining about the changes that need to happen. The most effective method is to severely limit or elimate your own (or kids) usage. But creating your own standards and standing by them seem to be out of favor these days (integrity and self control). It's all about FOMO and consumption.
The problem is the "algorithm" should be a timestamp reverse sorted list of whoever they follow.
They will make less ad money and engagement will go down because we won't be training children to become 5 second scrollers, but this doesn't seem like an issue to me.
This would be a horrible experience. Do you only view hackernews through the "new" feed? Or do you prefer to view the front page that has had an "algorithm" applied.
How would new content discovery happen in your proposed world?
I am in my 40s, so certainly not too young. Depending on how you define social media, they have had sort order besides 'latest posts first' for about as long as listing sites have existed.
There is no sarcasm; does anyone genuinely only browse sites like hackernews by viewing the 'new' page? That is what the comment is advocating, that the only view should be the new page, with submissions listed by post date only.
If discovery is by a separate page dedicated to popular stuff, how is that any better? Whatever 'algorithm' is used to create that page would have the same problems that people are complaining about; why would putting it on a different page change anything? That is sort of how things are currently; you can view a feed by 'latest first' or by the 'algorithm'. You can choose either one, but most people prefer the algorithm version because it curates.
People WANT curation. You can argue with the particular type of curation, but I think the concept itself is pretty universally desired.
Yea maybe our definitions are just different, because I wouldn't call HN a social media site. It's a content aggregator to me, with some social features, like Reddit or Slashdot.
Look at Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, I believe there is a desire for a less algorithmic approach on those sites, hence all the uproar about the algorithms and shadow banning. Reverse chronological ordering from people you follow was the standard before, and a feature before revenue mattered as much. You curated your own feed by following people, not by a black box
I think HN fits the standard definition of a social media site:
> Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks.
Hacknews is one virtual community. The whole point of visiting the site is to aggregate content and read and make comments about that content.
Reddit and slashdot are also both social media sites.
Hacker News doesn't publish anything. It's based on Arc Forum, but YCombinator has made numerous undocumented changes and it may as well be a proprietary fork at this point.
Also a part of HN's "algorithm" is literally the mods manually adjusting things, and you can't publish that.
The comment I replied to said that the only algorithm should be sorted by reverse post date, so it doesn't matter that the algorithm is published or not.
This specific thread is about children. Children might also want to drink alcohol but we have laws against that.
If there's a need to provably ensure kids are not being influenced by algorithm, I think my solution works. Making social media less engaging for children is something I'm fine with. Adults can have whatever experience they want.
I don't, but this is what this topic is about. Open another one and I can share my opinions about that. I don't even think "publishing algorithms" is feasible, so my point is if you want to do this for adults, I disagree, if you want to do it for children, I don't disagree, but would rather just simplify the experience for them because its easier to prove the mechanism.
Did you read Project Texas goals? I don't think there's a better way to do it. I don't know insider details but when I heard Shou Zi Chew explain it and I read the plan, I think it'd be easy for the US to have the assurances it needs.
Just out of curiosity, what do people mean when they say "publish the algorithm"? A poster-sized UML diagram? A million lines of spaghetti code saying "if foo > 11.78 then bar += 2.6"? An exhaustive design document exactly specifying the entire ranking system (which absolutely does not exist at any company)? The ranking signals the algorithm operates on?
They should have to publish everything required to independently reproduce the recommendations, given a user's inputs. If their code is spaghetti that makes this neigh impossible, that's their problem and they shouldn't be in business.
Meaning if I record my own inputs, I should be able to recreate the suggestions I see using the published software. This doesn't mean the inputs of other users are exposed to me, but it does imply that "the algorithm" can only use data that is either publicly exposed or is my own inputs.
>but it does imply that "the algorithm" can only use data that is either publicly exposed or is my own inputs.
That seems pretty restricting given that even the most basic recommendation would try to cluster users based on interests and use that to recommend stuff (eg. Amazon's "customers who viewed this item also bought..." from decades ago).
You assume recommendation systems are mostly code. AI models depend mostly on data, not code, and AFAIK we can see activation functions for neurons but nobody actually can explain in->out for the global thing.
I'm a bit more optimistic: the CI/CD pipeline can include adversarial model(s) which probes for the worst behavior. We already have codebases of sufficient complexity that attacks can be inserted into the software supply chain.
Obviously, this becomes an arms race. The usual strategy is to add random checks, friction to contribution and severe-enough punishments for offenders (lifetime RL bans, etc.)
> Just out of curiosity, what do people mean when they say "publish the algorithm"?
In whatever form it takes such that a regulator can scrutinise it. If that seems arduous or impacts the social media business model, too bad. Nothing of value will have been lost. I am not typically a person who favours over regulation, even my views on AI are likely too liberal for HN, but on the matter of social media impacting children, I'm all in for regulation.
Sounds good in theory but how many people are actually qualified to interpret those algorithms? Average Joe on facebook is going to believe it does what ever Bob tells him it does.
> Sounds good in theory but how many people are actually qualified to interpret those algorithms?
Enough researchers, at enough institutions with sufficiently diverse motives, that if multiple of them identify a problem and agree about it, Joe can make a reasonably confident assessment that there's probably something there.
Knowing the algorithm doesn't help much... you wouldn't know the data that is going into the algorithm, and you would have no way of proving they were actually using said algorithm.
I feel like this sort of idea is one of those that sounds great until you actually start to think about it.
If you publish your algorithm, you are giving interested parties the instruction manual on how to game it; spammers and propagandists can use that algorithm to make sure their content gets to the top.
Instruction manuals make it easy to game it but people can still game it without an instruction manual. This seems similar to the idea of security through obscurity. The same argument could be made about linux, right?
Letting people see into it could make it easier for people to learn how to game the system but it could also make the system harder to game in the first place.
The "security by obscurity is bad" mentality works in cases where issues are easy to fixed when identified. Most bugs fit in this category. It's doubtful this applies to recommendation algorithms. If you know which factors are most important in making a post go viral, and a bad actor exploits this, how are you supposed prevent them from doing so?
The algorithm isn’t really the problem if the content itself isn’t made accessible. The moderators could just remove content they disagree with and that’s more than enough power.
The engagement ranking done to keep you hooked is probably not that interesting.
It's not just media outlets. Chinese Communist Party officials are directly embedded in all of their large corporations and can override regular management decisions. We have no visibility into exactly what they're doing but from a security perspective we have to assume the worst.
In the US, the government has control over the content too, it just so happens that it mostly concerns itself with combatting certain moral vices (from prostitution to bootleg fireworks) - although to be fair, it also lightly pressured big tech into combatting political "misinformation".
In China, the same mechanisms exist, except the controls on speech are much tighter and the punishments more severe. Every other tech company operating there has a story of officials showing up with demands or threatening employees. I worked at two places where this happened. In addition, most businesses operate as formal or quasi-formal public-private partnership, where the CCP has officials within the corporate management structure. Again, ask anyone who tried to start a foreign-owned business in China.
You can make a reasonable argument that having an oppressive and geopolitically adversarial foreign government effectively in control of the most popular youth social media platform in the country is not great. Or you can make a reasonable free-trade argument. Free trade works only if all participants follow the rules; if Western social media can't operate on their market, they don't get to operate on ours.
There are things to dislike about the US government, but I really don't get the contrarian takes on TikTok. China is objectively worse and its government's legitimacy and lasting power is built in the bodies of tens of millions of victims. We're not getting along right now. This doesn't require cynicism to explain.
No - and certainly not on any appreciable or meaningful scale.
The bill's proponents claim that intelligence agencies have found proof of this, and that the proof is classified and therefore cannot be shown to the public. (If you're over the age of 30, you're almost certainly getting early 2000s flashbacks reading that sentence).
> Is this the only media outlet this applies to?
No. The ban applies to TikTok, but as pointed above, not to Chinese (or Russian) state media, which do directly control the content shown to users.
But what is rarely addressed in this conversation is why the American people should be more scared of the Chinese government owning this type of service compared to an American billionaire who is widely regarded to have some sort of personality disorder and a drug problem? If these services are too powerful when abused and too opaque for us to even know they are being abused, then they all need to have much more stringent regulation on them and not just ban the foreign one.
> But what is rarely addressed in this conversation is why the American people should be more scared of the Chinese government owning this type of service compared to an American billionaire who is widely regarded to have some sort of personality disorder and a drug problem?
Last I checked, Elon Musk hadn't sent hundreds of Uighur women to rape camps to be "reeducated". He hasn't harvested organs from undesirables while they were still alive (for freshness) all that much either. I don't praise the United States government as saints and superheroes or anything like that, but to be unwilling to admit that there are still stark differences between the two countries probably means you wore a Che t-shirt in college and might even be wearing one now if your company permits casual dress.
These are reasons to cut off China entirely, not just lazily shutting down/forcing the sale of TikTok. But by taking on TikTok the government can pretend it did something about the threat from the Chinese government, I guess.
Arguing the American government has some level of moral superiority over the Chinese government doesn't address my question. As an American, what threat does the Chinese government's control of TikTok pose to me that Musk's control of Twitter doesn't? TikTok isn't going to force me into a reeducation camp or steal my organs. Yet the accusations of them manipulating public opinion for their own benefit could just as easily be leveled at Musk.
>Yet the accusations of them manipulating public opinion for their own benefit could just as easily be leveled at Musk.
I think that the parent point cedes this point, and argues that Musk's benefits, incentives, and morality are more favorable to that of the Chinese government.
Musk isn't interest in mono-racial communist ethno state being the worlds top super power.
An American civil war is high, if not at the top, of China's wish list. Yeah, they would feel the crunch, but would be able to cement unrivaled global power if the US unraveled.
The Chinese government could order TikTok to downrank / not show content that criticizes the CCP. The US government could not order FB to downrank content that criticizes the Democrats.
What's stopping the US government from doing exactly that? Btw, a court order is not very "direct". Easier to have your buddy call his buddy who happens to be the ceo of Facebook...
ByteDance is headquartered in China, a repressive country where they throw you in prison or worse if you don't obey the government. If the Communist Party told them to meddle with the algorithm to the advantage of China and harm of the USA, for example, they would have to obey, or else suffer the consequences.
> because the Chinese government has direct control over the content shown to users.
So what? Why are Elon Musk and Sundar Piachi allowed direct control of what they show me but Shou Zi Chew isn’t? Is it due to governmental involvement? Imagine if the BBC broadcast direct to Americans!
Or are we, somehow, collectively, of the opinion China is an enemy of some variety? If so, what variety? And what weird peacetime rivalry are we having?
Let's not be naive. Despite our ongoing trade ties, the Chinese Communist Party is the enemy of Western civilization in every way short of actual shooting. We shouldn't be enabling them.
I don't think it's good that cabal of media and tech executives has so much concentrated control over public discourse. But there is a huge qualitative difference between them and a hostile foreign power.
> The law to ban tiktok was passed because the Chinese government has direct control over the content shown to users.
If that was the case, chinese state media ( where the chinese government actually has direct control over the content ) would be banned. But they are not banned.
> Ok, TikTok has the illusion of being content-neutral and just a fair algorithm
Does it? And what does that even mean? Are there any other "content-neutral" and "fair" algorithms that you're aware of at other social media companies?
> we have no reason to believe it is unbiased.
Not only is that not how argument works, it's a bizarre bar that only tiktok has to leap to do business. We have every reason to believe that any and all commercial algorithms for selecting and prioritizing content to display to users are not "content-neutral," nor "fair" for every possible definition of fair.
It is a claim or assumption that the Chinese government has direct control. NATO's sixth arena of operation, cognitive warfare, did not have as much direct control over the dials to employ weapons of mass deletion.
Mitt Romney has also said the TikTok ban was in part due to support for Palestinians in the current Gaza war[1]. So it seems to be a bit of both: limiting Chinese influence and trying to control the narrative about international conflict.
>limiting Chinese influence and trying to control the narrative about international conflict
I think those are two sides of the same coin. If you read the whole quote in context[1], it seems equally likely that he was trying to imply that tiktok (the platform, not just the userbase) has a pro-palestinian bias, possibly due to the Chinese government. If it's the users who pro-palestinian, it would make little sense to ban the platform, because those users would still be pro-palestinian and migrate elsewhere. Reddit has a similar pro-palestinian bias, but it hasn't attracted similar scrutiny, presumably because no one suspects it of being controlled by the chinese government.
With a little imagination we can pull that string quite far.
If TikTok can change public opinion then they must have speech right? How do they have speech without speaking? They have speech by filtering and weighing things a specific way. If you can speak without speaking then how does Section 230 come into play? If platforms can speak and have opinions and affect public opinion then whey do they get Section 230 protections? Should the algorithms be open sourced and transparent (or banned) since they have so much power?
It raises a lot of questions that we have put off answering. I think the (distant) relevance of Section 230 makes big tech scared to talk about it since that's their cash-cow.
>If you can speak without speaking then how does Section 230 come into play? If platforms can speak and have opinions and affect public opinion then whey do they get Section 230 protections?
Section 230 exists specifically to allow platforms to "have opinions and affect public opinion." Liability resides with the accounts making the content, not the platform. It would be impossible to have any degree of free expression on the internet if platforms were legally liable for everything posted there, or if they could be sued over every moderation decision they make.
>It raises a lot of questions that we have put off answering.
We haven't put off answering anything. We have the answers. Platforms are allowed to moderate content. They're allowed to filter and present content in whatever way they want. They're allowed to have a bias. There is no gray area here, no matter how badly people want there to be one.
Sure. But there is also a gaping hole of regulation in this area. They can strongly sway public opinion with their algorithms? That sounds dangerous- let's regulate that as we do other forms of media. Then we see droves of nerds come out about how sacred the dang internet is and all of that and it shall never be regulated unless you're a fascist.
In a free society, particularly the US where mistrust of the government and status quo narrative is baked into the culture, the ability to "sway public opinion" is a feature, not a bug. And on social media that ability is held primarily by the public. Not in the sense of social media being a public forum, but no true public forum does or arguably can exist on the internet anyway. Notwithstanding conspiracies about deepfakes and false flags and fears of "algorithms" and "Chinese mind control," social media is the only real balancing force against corporate and government propaganda that there is. Even with its faults I think it would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater to just have the government regulate it, which in essence would mean severely limiting the free speech rights of both the platforms and the people who use them.
I know people think that government regulating social media means some kind of laissez-faire free for all where all legal speech will be allowed without consequence (which would be even less moderation than you find on 4chan) but that is very much not how it would go.
> The law to ban tiktok was passed because the Chinese government has direct control over the content shown to users.
Counterpoint: The law to ban tiktok was languishing after the US government got complete access to tiktok moderation, only still pushed by local anti-China grandstanders who ran on it when the government was busy extorting tiktok in order to get that access. The reason it passed now was to suppress the speech of Americans talking about the leveling of Gaza.
> All the talk about privacy and data collection were mostly to muddy the waters by bringing in all tech to the conversion, and divert attention from solely tiktok
Because an anti-tiktok law is a bill of attainder and completely unconstitutional (as I was once downvoted into oblivion for mentioning.) Generalizing the bill passes that constitutional hurdle, and if upheld allows the state to end-run around the 1st Amendment and ban speech at will. The bill would be useless if it didn't silence Americans, and all people will do after a tiktok ban is migrate to another speech platform. It's important to be able to silence speech everywhere.
> tiktok was banned primarily because of who controls the content delivered, not who is collecting the data.
The US doesn't care about tiktok, and has full access to ban whatever it likes. The US cares about silencing you.
> The law to ban tiktok was passed because the Chinese government has direct control over the content shown to users
Perhaps that's the real reason. But if so, why can't the US government just require Tiktok to push content that aligns with US interests? Say for every 3 videos a user watches, they are then required to watch a US army recruitment ad, or an VOA anti-China propaganda clip, or Uncle Sam telling them that there's a high chance they just watched foreign propaganda (think tobacco package warning messages). I'm pretty sure that Tiktok would find this acceptable as the cost of doing business, and that China wouldn't care — plenty of anti-China content already exists on Tiktok.
Of course I'm not seriously suggesting this. But I'm saying that if control over content is the real motivating concern, why wouldn't a solution like this be considered viable?
> I don't think TikTok or the US would find it acceptable. It is too heavy handed
It's less heavy handed than banning outright, though.
> The suggestion doesn't restrict how much anti-US propaganda gets pushed.
Good point. Let me refine my suggestion so as to require that TikTok prohibit all anti-US content: sophisticated AI algorithms would be put in place to ensure that content that doesn't align with US interests is not allowed. This will make the suggestion even more heavy-handed, but note that, once again, it's still less heavy-handed than banning outright.
That proposal is not compatible with US propaganda strategy. The US does not have a ministry of propaganda to design AI algorithms, or provide the pre-requisite adds for TikTok. It isnt set up to oversee the internal workings of the company algorithm.
Instead, it relies on US citizens embedded in US companies to push US ideals in social media. When it does presumably conduct social engineering attacks, it does it through bots and buying adds on platforms.
Last, I don't think the US government expecting to have to actually ban Tiktok. I think it is expecting to win, and get to have it's cake and eat it too. This would be the least heavy handed option.
The screenshot is illustrative/fake, from the next tweet in linked thread:
>although the above article is fake (hence my phrasing as a 'hypothetical' and the article being dated in the future in 2024!), it's feasible to build this as a weekend project at this point, so it won't remain fake for very long now!
Given what we know about how people can end up radicalized in echo chambers with like-minded humans, auto-ensconcing outliers in an echo chamber of fake respondents agreeing with them sounds like a recipe for fomenting a lot of stochastic terrorism.
But what if they love arguing? That might train the extremists to be better at arguing their point until they manage to convince the bots or at least make some headway. A free adversarial neural network to improve persuasion skills at scale.
There might actually be a The Good Place effect. The universe is filled with counter-intuitive mechanisms, but it's hard to tell just how densely filled with them because that's also counter-intuitive.
The desire to quietly move people into a fictional bubble to "neutralize" them, of managing people without them knowing it, and keeping them busy so they don't do something you don't want them to do. It's like having a physically unfit student demand very aggressively to be put on the football team, and instead of telling him he doesn't make the cut because you're afraid he might pull out a gun, you put some VR goggles on him and run Madden and tell him he's been accepted. (Some would call this tactic a symptom of the feminization of management.)
Of course, a person in a bubble like that might actually become more radicalized. And if a person discovers he's been had by looking at, say, his friend's Reddit version, he might become angry enough to do something, angrier even than if he had just been told "no", because now he's been made a fool.
This article explains why HN (Dang) should stop using this practice. I used a "shadowbanned" account for potentially years on this site without realizing I had been banned. An email to Dang and he was gracious to reinstate me but I feel like a jackass for talking to myself for god knows how long. According to a study by Yale SOM, shadow banning can shift users’ opinions and increase polarization by selectively muting and amplifying posts in ways that appear neutral. This subtle control over collective opinions makes it difficult for users to realize they are being censored, underscoring the need for transparency and better regulation.
I suspect that there's a risk of psychological harm when people are exposed to shadow banning. Having to constantly ask yourself "Am I real? Can other people see me?" is not healthy or normal behavior, but after being shadowbanned on a particular site you start having to do it constantly.
"just" be paranoid? A health person's reaction to a weak response is probably to assume, with some humility, that others didn't appreciate their comment so much. We're talking here about how the social media platform _ought to behave._
FWIW I browse with show dead and most shadow banned accounts deserve it for their abrasive style and lack of substance. It sucks to be collateral damage though, I sympathize.
But is it a person who is abrasive and insubstantial, or is a comment? I have certainly been both those things many times, but I'm not like that all the time. (Haha, though some would disagree.) The trouble is, you can't "ban" a comment, since it is a one-off, but you can ban the person making it, and the level of effort needed to clean up comments instead of commenters is many orders of magnitude.
> but I feel like a jackass for talking to myself for god knows how long.
I'm the only one I know smart enough to appreciate my own wit. If I had realized you other people were reading my comments all along, it might've made me shy.
FWIW, Hacker News doesn't pretend to be a general-information forum, and I think they're well within their rights (practically and morally) to shape conversation to meet the goals of the space.
This space has a published agenda and those who don't toe that line can go elsewhere; it's a very big Internet out there.
My reply to you is not to do with the sentiment about opinions / polarization.
At one time I moderated two large and growing forums - wordpress.org/.com - and there was an ability to shadowban.
You post to a forum, as a mod I see your post and I ban you (for whatever reason)
You understandably get angry
You make a new account, post again and react angrily to the ban in your post
I have no option but to ban you again
We end up in a circle
This is not good for you or me.
If though I shadowban your anger does not rise, you do not make lots of new accounts and I do not create more work for us both.
For me the key here is that shadowbanning is okay for an established user who one day went off the rails. Let them rant, check their later posts, and remove that shadowban when the calm has returned. But you must check.
For new users, just ban, block and use tools to autoblock going forward.
I was a mod on a growing subreddit for almost 10 years. Sometimes a shadow-banned user would post. As a mod we could see the post. We would let the post be published but would also reply along the lines of "You are shadowbanned by the reddit admins. This is how you check [give info] and this is how you appeal [give info]."
Blanket shadowbanning is a bad thing.
Such bans must be reviewed.
Unfortunately the manipulation of opinions is exactly what the moderation/censorship schemes on major social media platforms resulted in. Shadowbanning is just one problematic tool among many. I’m glad to see studies exploring this, but I feel like it was also an obvious reality for years, and nothing was or has been done about it. Those engaging in censorship and mass manipulation don’t care because they are helping their political goals, even if it is unethical.
Personally I don’t think the platforms being private matters - at their scale the big social media platforms are public squares, and should be regulated like that. Or maybe treated like a phone carrier or utility, where even if they’re private they’re subject to regulation that forces them to provide service to all customers.
I'm wondering what it's going to take for people to realize that most of their online fora (present company included) aren't the great Greek philosophical salons of yore; they're bored people on the Internet trading quips for serotonin hits.
The amount of accurate information you find online is probably worse than what you find talking to people IRL, but we seem to insist on treating it as a truth source instead of a game people are playing with each other.
Yes, but the problem is throughout all of history you could only talk to so many people IRL in a day... (same with newspapers, etc.)
Now you can consume nearly unlimited opinions in a day so whatever it is we think about the accuracy of information online, it's shaping impressionable minds faster than biology and society can cope.
> Personally I don’t think the platforms being private matters - at their scale the big social media platforms are public squares, and should be regulated like that.
Malls and shopping centers in California are treated as public squares for 1st amendment purposes. It's unclear why Facebook et al aren't given the same treatment, at least in California. (Note this is California, not Federal, law.)
Counter-counterpoint: effective moderation doesn't require shadowbanning, and the ever increasing amount of chan-level garbage that gets moderated here demonstrates that shadowbanning doesn't make HN good, it just sweeps the bad under the rug.
You can turn on 'showdead' you settings to see flagged comments. I don't always agree with how HN is moderated (or with the decisions fellow HN users make about flagging), but the majority of flagged comments are exactly the kind of thing you'd expect.
"the researchers built a simulation of a real social network"
I just find this to be such a large detail that it's hard to gloss over. What are the assumptions of this model in the simulation? How accurate is the model? How did you evaluate that accuracy? How sensitive are the results to the model's parameters?
It's disappointing to me that 10+ hours after this post your comment or one like it isn't (even close to) the top one. The article doesn't explain, AT ALL, how their model works. Does tik tok "shadow ban" the way they model? Does any social network?
I assume all trending/recommended nudges on centrally controlled platforms are psychological operations. I see the absence of them on decentralized protocols such as NOSTR or the fediverse to be a feature.
I take issue with this experiment's use of the term "shadowbanning". The simulation they describe tested the effects of showing a tweet to others based on the viewers' preferences.
> the network might choose to show the content of a moderate user to a relatively right-leaning connection ... but block that same content from the timeline of a left-leaning connection
That's not shadowbanning because the tweet is still being shown to some people. That's normal algorithmic sorting with down ranking. A true shadowban would result in a tweet not being shown to anybody. What they describe is more like de-listing from the global timeline but still being shown to followers. Now you're just talking about search bubbles.
What's strange is they describe this as "neutral".
> At first blush, the banning appears to impact every user more or less equally.
How is that equal? What the viewer sees depends on their cohort. It's the same kind of manipulation that we've known about for years. The unique issue with a shadowban is how it affects the creator. Specifically a shadowban is intended to counteract ban evasion using multiple accounts. If you're going to make a conclusion about whether or not shadowbanning should be allowed it should be done by comparing silent versus explicit bans.
Just another way your opinions are being silently influenced.
It's bad enough that 'news' sources are now totally politically biased. Social media platforms, search engines, entertainment providers, etc. are in on it too.
Kudos to anyone who works to keep a level perspective. It's not easy.
191 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadIf we view social media as simply a private service, then these companies have the right to do whatever they want. Businesses have the right to refuse service for any reason.
But if we view social media as a utility similar to telephones, then free expression should be protected. People can say whatever they want over phone and text.
I lean towards the latter. Social media has become the new public square/agora/forum. Yes, its still owned by private enterprise, but it's basically the new town hall at this point.
> A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
https://www.wordnik.com/words/fascism
When the government is colluding with private industry to suppress opposing views on social media, you really have to wonder if the word "violent" is even needed in this definition anymore.
Utilities are regulated monopolies. In exchange for a monopoly status, they need to abide by some pretty strict standards (like regulated pricing and service maintenance), and are forced to work with entities that they would normally avoid.
Things like open APIs, algorithm access (that could be classified, but should be accessible to folks that are accountable to the consumers, etc.).
Not a simple structure. What we have now, is pretty haphazard, and has grown organically. The current utility/public infrastructure setup is the result of hundreds of years of disasters, ripoffs, successes, and learning.
Not sure if we have to go through it all again, or if there is a possibility of taking learning from current municipal structure, and apply it here.
Have people used telephones recently? The network is so infiltrated by scam artists (and the tooling to remove them from the network is so toothless) that it's functionally one giant attack vector against the most vulnerable telephone users these days. The fact that Google is trumpeting adding AI to a phone to detect when you are getting scammed is indicative of how badly the network has been poisoned by the lack of anyone's ability to regulate access.
We already know what an unfettered free-expression network looks like. It looks like telephone and email. It's a scammer's playground.
The EFF recommendation is anti-trust enforcement to insure these services don't hold American communications hostage. We must attack their moats to enable smaller competitors to have at more level playing field.
And leave the rest alone. Gore/graphic content -> filter with a toggle for those that want to view it. Bullying -> does it cross the line into an actual law being broken, if so, then ban it. Makes sensitive people nervous, uncomfortable and angry -> leave it be, but if you really wanna go far stick a sentiment analysis thingie on it and allow people to selectively filter it below their own threshold. There is so much that can be done simply, without breaching anyone's freedoms and without teetering into Orwellian 1984 conspiracy territory about wide-scale mind control and opinion shifting.
The problem comes when people naturally express themselves, it makes <insert group here> uncomfortable and it inconveniently bubbles up the rankings. E.g. I bet you right now that 20% of the entire american internet population simply doesn't like Biden and would mock him for his, probably innocent, old-age antics. But if that opinion were to "manifest" into some sort of catchy "Biden is old and sucks" hashtag or meme that needs reporting, well that's uncomfortable for TPTB, or the elites, or the media or whatever you wanna call it, and must be stopped. The internet is the ultimate direct-democracy tool we have right now, and it's being manipulated precisely because it breaks "representative" democracy.
Another uncomfortable topic: trans people in sports. It will absolutely blow up in one direction if people were organically allowed to organize and find others with similar viewpoints. Instead, they're banned, scared into shutting up, shadow-banned, or worse cancelled and doxxed.
Why can’t I start my own social media website about cars where any topics that aren’t related to car culture and discussion are not allowed?
Your line is illegality, but my line as the owner of the social media network might be something else. Is private ownership banned now?
We've crossed the boundary of pure private ownership of anything many years ago. Heck, I don't even have private ownership of my own body, so a say in a highly influential component of our society is a small price to pay to keep the evil at bay.
There is a huge amount of discussion of the problem of males in female sports on Twitter, plus also on smaller forums like Mumsnet and Ovarit. Some of it amongst leading athletes and sports science researchers. People of similar viewpoints are organising, despite the attempts to shut them down on other forums.
It's working too: various sports bodies have made changes within the past couple of years that walk back their previous broken policies of male inclusion. It does seem that the needle is slowly but surely moving back towards fairness for female athletes. Though there is still a lot of work to be done.
IF its the "new town hall" then were gonna have a fuck ton of rules. You're not "Free" to scream fire in a crowded building, you cant make up crisis actors and expect NOT to get sued to death....
The protection of freedom of expression exists. No one is stoping you from hosting your own platform based on what ever nonsense you make up. I dont have to give you a box to stand on, no one does. Thats not how it ever worked.
They actually are. CloudFlare will block you, Visa will refuse payments, Google will delist you, Apple app store will delist your app, and you'll be subject to endless legal harassment from activists if your site allows people to communicate substantially out of line with the San Francisco progressive bloc.
Free expression isn’t something that can be realistically protected when a social media platform has an explicit purpose, code of conduct, and/or ideals.
For example, an LGBTQ social media network has to be able to ban anti-LGBTQ content and users. Hacker News needs to be able to remove non-tech industry-related off-topic posts. /r/pcgaming needs to be able to remove posts about mobile gaming. Spam and unwanted self-promotion is often removed by moderators of social media outlets. Moderation is key to a workable social media experience.
There’s also a lot of 100% legal free expression that platforms have to be able to choose not to host. Pornography is an common example.
The thing that makes this topic difficult is that social media isn’t really pure person-to-person speech (e.g. like a person on soapbox) and it also isn’t really pure curated media (e.g. a television channel or news website published by an editor). It’s like a hybrid of the concepts.
I've moderated some large subreddits in the past, and am a strong free speech supporter, but I'm also actually perfectly happy not dealing with people spamming the n-word in every forum they can find because they're legally entitled to. "Congress shall make no law" really does mean congress. Unlike telephones, if the forums are open to the public, then so some decorum is needed.
This only applies to low-karma users, I can post here all day long.
edit: the greentext user is now flagged to oblivion, but not by me
All the talk about privacy and data collection were mostly to muddy the waters by bringing in all tech to the conversion, and divert attention from solely tiktok ("Everyone does it so why focus on tiktok?!"). It's still a threat, I'm not trying to minimize it, but tiktok was banned primarily because of who controls the content delivered, not who is collecting the data.
X/Twitter does now publish their algorithm, and it hasn't made it any less of a shithole.
They will make less ad money and engagement will go down because we won't be training children to become 5 second scrollers, but this doesn't seem like an issue to me.
How would new content discovery happen in your proposed world?
Content discovery was word of mouth or a separate page dedicated to popular stuff.
There is no sarcasm; does anyone genuinely only browse sites like hackernews by viewing the 'new' page? That is what the comment is advocating, that the only view should be the new page, with submissions listed by post date only.
If discovery is by a separate page dedicated to popular stuff, how is that any better? Whatever 'algorithm' is used to create that page would have the same problems that people are complaining about; why would putting it on a different page change anything? That is sort of how things are currently; you can view a feed by 'latest first' or by the 'algorithm'. You can choose either one, but most people prefer the algorithm version because it curates.
People WANT curation. You can argue with the particular type of curation, but I think the concept itself is pretty universally desired.
Look at Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, I believe there is a desire for a less algorithmic approach on those sites, hence all the uproar about the algorithms and shadow banning. Reverse chronological ordering from people you follow was the standard before, and a feature before revenue mattered as much. You curated your own feed by following people, not by a black box
> Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks.
Hacknews is one virtual community. The whole point of visiting the site is to aggregate content and read and make comments about that content.
Reddit and slashdot are also both social media sites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
An ad hominem attack doesn't seem necessary to prove your point (speaking as someone who actually is old enough to remember).
There are definitely people in the tech field who have only (or mostly) experienced algorithmic based feeds.
Also a part of HN's "algorithm" is literally the mods manually adjusting things, and you can't publish that.
> How would new content discovery happen in your proposed world?
Seconding other posts—entirely fine, like it did before that kind of garbage.
If there's a need to provably ensure kids are not being influenced by algorithm, I think my solution works. Making social media less engaging for children is something I'm fine with. Adults can have whatever experience they want.
So they also have to give up all their user data?
Meaning if I record my own inputs, I should be able to recreate the suggestions I see using the published software. This doesn't mean the inputs of other users are exposed to me, but it does imply that "the algorithm" can only use data that is either publicly exposed or is my own inputs.
All that would be very hard/impossible to recreate in order to test the algorithm.
That seems pretty restricting given that even the most basic recommendation would try to cluster users based on interests and use that to recommend stuff (eg. Amazon's "customers who viewed this item also bought..." from decades ago).
To make things worse, for 99% of people things might look normal but for 1% it may show a large skew. The net can have memorized this.
Obviously, this becomes an arms race. The usual strategy is to add random checks, friction to contribution and severe-enough punishments for offenders (lifetime RL bans, etc.)
Expert opinions welcome - I'm a tourist.
In whatever form it takes such that a regulator can scrutinise it. If that seems arduous or impacts the social media business model, too bad. Nothing of value will have been lost. I am not typically a person who favours over regulation, even my views on AI are likely too liberal for HN, but on the matter of social media impacting children, I'm all in for regulation.
Enough researchers, at enough institutions with sufficiently diverse motives, that if multiple of them identify a problem and agree about it, Joe can make a reasonably confident assessment that there's probably something there.
If you publish your algorithm, you are giving interested parties the instruction manual on how to game it; spammers and propagandists can use that algorithm to make sure their content gets to the top.
Letting people see into it could make it easier for people to learn how to game the system but it could also make the system harder to game in the first place.
The engagement ranking done to keep you hooked is probably not that interesting.
Was this actually proven in specific incidents?
Is this the only media outlet this applies to?
(I'm sure it is; there have been plenty of people disappeared https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/19/china-disappea... , but I'd just like to have a little evidence rather than do an Iraq war again)
In the US, the government has control over the content too, it just so happens that it mostly concerns itself with combatting certain moral vices (from prostitution to bootleg fireworks) - although to be fair, it also lightly pressured big tech into combatting political "misinformation".
In China, the same mechanisms exist, except the controls on speech are much tighter and the punishments more severe. Every other tech company operating there has a story of officials showing up with demands or threatening employees. I worked at two places where this happened. In addition, most businesses operate as formal or quasi-formal public-private partnership, where the CCP has officials within the corporate management structure. Again, ask anyone who tried to start a foreign-owned business in China.
You can make a reasonable argument that having an oppressive and geopolitically adversarial foreign government effectively in control of the most popular youth social media platform in the country is not great. Or you can make a reasonable free-trade argument. Free trade works only if all participants follow the rules; if Western social media can't operate on their market, they don't get to operate on ours.
There are things to dislike about the US government, but I really don't get the contrarian takes on TikTok. China is objectively worse and its government's legitimacy and lasting power is built in the bodies of tens of millions of victims. We're not getting along right now. This doesn't require cynicism to explain.
No - and certainly not on any appreciable or meaningful scale.
The bill's proponents claim that intelligence agencies have found proof of this, and that the proof is classified and therefore cannot be shown to the public. (If you're over the age of 30, you're almost certainly getting early 2000s flashbacks reading that sentence).
> Is this the only media outlet this applies to?
No. The ban applies to TikTok, but as pointed above, not to Chinese (or Russian) state media, which do directly control the content shown to users.
Last I checked, Elon Musk hadn't sent hundreds of Uighur women to rape camps to be "reeducated". He hasn't harvested organs from undesirables while they were still alive (for freshness) all that much either. I don't praise the United States government as saints and superheroes or anything like that, but to be unwilling to admit that there are still stark differences between the two countries probably means you wore a Che t-shirt in college and might even be wearing one now if your company permits casual dress.
I think that the parent point cedes this point, and argues that Musk's benefits, incentives, and morality are more favorable to that of the Chinese government.
An American civil war is high, if not at the top, of China's wish list. Yeah, they would feel the crunch, but would be able to cement unrivaled global power if the US unraveled.
How is the Chinese government's control over TikTok content any more "direct" than the US government's control over Facebook content?
As for the US, we have documented evidence of US corporations cooperating with the US government for spying and propaganda efforts.
The US has 4x as many prisoners per capita than China, and Assange is still in captivity.
Let that sink in. (not in a musk way)
So what? Why are Elon Musk and Sundar Piachi allowed direct control of what they show me but Shou Zi Chew isn’t? Is it due to governmental involvement? Imagine if the BBC broadcast direct to Americans!
Or are we, somehow, collectively, of the opinion China is an enemy of some variety? If so, what variety? And what weird peacetime rivalry are we having?
I don't think it's good that cabal of media and tech executives has so much concentrated control over public discourse. But there is a huge qualitative difference between them and a hostile foreign power.
If that was the case, chinese state media ( where the chinese government actually has direct control over the content ) would be banned. But they are not banned.
Does it? And what does that even mean? Are there any other "content-neutral" and "fair" algorithms that you're aware of at other social media companies?
> we have no reason to believe it is unbiased.
Not only is that not how argument works, it's a bizarre bar that only tiktok has to leap to do business. We have every reason to believe that any and all commercial algorithms for selecting and prioritizing content to display to users are not "content-neutral," nor "fair" for every possible definition of fair.
[1] https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...
I think those are two sides of the same coin. If you read the whole quote in context[1], it seems equally likely that he was trying to imply that tiktok (the platform, not just the userbase) has a pro-palestinian bias, possibly due to the Chinese government. If it's the users who pro-palestinian, it would make little sense to ban the platform, because those users would still be pro-palestinian and migrate elsewhere. Reddit has a similar pro-palestinian bias, but it hasn't attracted similar scrutiny, presumably because no one suspects it of being controlled by the chinese government.
[1] https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-mccain-i... (search for "SENATOR ROMNEY: A small parenthetical point, which is some wonder why")
Instagram apologises for adding ‘terrorist’ to some Palestinian users profiles bios [1]
Facebook violated rights of Palestinian users, report finds [2]
Activists: Google, Apple ‘Erasing Palestine’ from Geographic Apps [3]
[1] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/instagram-meta-palesti...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/technology-middle-east-israel-858...
[2] https://themedialine.org/by-region/activists-google-apple-er...
If TikTok can change public opinion then they must have speech right? How do they have speech without speaking? They have speech by filtering and weighing things a specific way. If you can speak without speaking then how does Section 230 come into play? If platforms can speak and have opinions and affect public opinion then whey do they get Section 230 protections? Should the algorithms be open sourced and transparent (or banned) since they have so much power?
It raises a lot of questions that we have put off answering. I think the (distant) relevance of Section 230 makes big tech scared to talk about it since that's their cash-cow.
Section 230 exists specifically to allow platforms to "have opinions and affect public opinion." Liability resides with the accounts making the content, not the platform. It would be impossible to have any degree of free expression on the internet if platforms were legally liable for everything posted there, or if they could be sued over every moderation decision they make.
>It raises a lot of questions that we have put off answering.
We haven't put off answering anything. We have the answers. Platforms are allowed to moderate content. They're allowed to filter and present content in whatever way they want. They're allowed to have a bias. There is no gray area here, no matter how badly people want there to be one.
I know people think that government regulating social media means some kind of laissez-faire free for all where all legal speech will be allowed without consequence (which would be even less moderation than you find on 4chan) but that is very much not how it would go.
Counterpoint: The law to ban tiktok was languishing after the US government got complete access to tiktok moderation, only still pushed by local anti-China grandstanders who ran on it when the government was busy extorting tiktok in order to get that access. The reason it passed now was to suppress the speech of Americans talking about the leveling of Gaza.
> All the talk about privacy and data collection were mostly to muddy the waters by bringing in all tech to the conversion, and divert attention from solely tiktok
Because an anti-tiktok law is a bill of attainder and completely unconstitutional (as I was once downvoted into oblivion for mentioning.) Generalizing the bill passes that constitutional hurdle, and if upheld allows the state to end-run around the 1st Amendment and ban speech at will. The bill would be useless if it didn't silence Americans, and all people will do after a tiktok ban is migrate to another speech platform. It's important to be able to silence speech everywhere.
> tiktok was banned primarily because of who controls the content delivered, not who is collecting the data.
The US doesn't care about tiktok, and has full access to ban whatever it likes. The US cares about silencing you.
Perhaps that's the real reason. But if so, why can't the US government just require Tiktok to push content that aligns with US interests? Say for every 3 videos a user watches, they are then required to watch a US army recruitment ad, or an VOA anti-China propaganda clip, or Uncle Sam telling them that there's a high chance they just watched foreign propaganda (think tobacco package warning messages). I'm pretty sure that Tiktok would find this acceptable as the cost of doing business, and that China wouldn't care — plenty of anti-China content already exists on Tiktok.
Of course I'm not seriously suggesting this. But I'm saying that if control over content is the real motivating concern, why wouldn't a solution like this be considered viable?
The suggestion doesn't restrict how much anti-US propaganda gets pushed.
I don't think TikTok or the US would find it acceptable. It is too heavy handed
It's less heavy handed than banning outright, though.
> The suggestion doesn't restrict how much anti-US propaganda gets pushed.
Good point. Let me refine my suggestion so as to require that TikTok prohibit all anti-US content: sophisticated AI algorithms would be put in place to ensure that content that doesn't align with US interests is not allowed. This will make the suggestion even more heavy-handed, but note that, once again, it's still less heavy-handed than banning outright.
Instead, it relies on US citizens embedded in US companies to push US ideals in social media. When it does presumably conduct social engineering attacks, it does it through bots and buying adds on platforms.
Last, I don't think the US government expecting to have to actually ban Tiktok. I think it is expecting to win, and get to have it's cake and eat it too. This would be the least heavy handed option.
https://twitter.com/nearcyan/status/1532076277947330561
Yeah, it could definitely happen.
is that proven? how did they find about that?
is it reddit doing it, or is it other users?
EDIT: ok so that's a fake screenshot, the users says it is... sorry but this is misleading.
he says hypothetical, and then makes a fake screenshot with the NYT on it, that's really disingenuine.
twitter gonna twitter
>although the above article is fake (hence my phrasing as a 'hypothetical' and the article being dated in the future in 2024!), it's feasible to build this as a weekend project at this point, so it won't remain fake for very long now!
Oh wait, that’s what the internet already is.
[edit] tried a totally different internet connection with different local network. Same result.
also, why would the AIs give only praise? they could also be mean and evil; would that be "hellbanning"?
Of course, a person in a bubble like that might actually become more radicalized. And if a person discovers he's been had by looking at, say, his friend's Reddit version, he might become angry enough to do something, angrier even than if he had just been told "no", because now he's been made a fool.
I'm the only one I know smart enough to appreciate my own wit. If I had realized you other people were reading my comments all along, it might've made me shy.
This space has a published agenda and those who don't toe that line can go elsewhere; it's a very big Internet out there.
At one time I moderated two large and growing forums - wordpress.org/.com - and there was an ability to shadowban.
You post to a forum, as a mod I see your post and I ban you (for whatever reason) You understandably get angry You make a new account, post again and react angrily to the ban in your post I have no option but to ban you again We end up in a circle This is not good for you or me.
If though I shadowban your anger does not rise, you do not make lots of new accounts and I do not create more work for us both.
For me the key here is that shadowbanning is okay for an established user who one day went off the rails. Let them rant, check their later posts, and remove that shadowban when the calm has returned. But you must check. For new users, just ban, block and use tools to autoblock going forward.
I was a mod on a growing subreddit for almost 10 years. Sometimes a shadow-banned user would post. As a mod we could see the post. We would let the post be published but would also reply along the lines of "You are shadowbanned by the reddit admins. This is how you check [give info] and this is how you appeal [give info]."
Blanket shadowbanning is a bad thing. Such bans must be reviewed.
Personally I don’t think the platforms being private matters - at their scale the big social media platforms are public squares, and should be regulated like that. Or maybe treated like a phone carrier or utility, where even if they’re private they’re subject to regulation that forces them to provide service to all customers.
The amount of accurate information you find online is probably worse than what you find talking to people IRL, but we seem to insist on treating it as a truth source instead of a game people are playing with each other.
Now you can consume nearly unlimited opinions in a day so whatever it is we think about the accuracy of information online, it's shaping impressionable minds faster than biology and society can cope.
Malls and shopping centers in California are treated as public squares for 1st amendment purposes. It's unclear why Facebook et al aren't given the same treatment, at least in California. (Note this is California, not Federal, law.)
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/pruneyard-shopping-c...
I do have them visible
And I 100% don't agree, most of them are just against the grain opinions. And some are spam, I guess.
I just find this to be such a large detail that it's hard to gloss over. What are the assumptions of this model in the simulation? How accurate is the model? How did you evaluate that accuracy? How sensitive are the results to the model's parameters?
> the network might choose to show the content of a moderate user to a relatively right-leaning connection ... but block that same content from the timeline of a left-leaning connection
That's not shadowbanning because the tweet is still being shown to some people. That's normal algorithmic sorting with down ranking. A true shadowban would result in a tweet not being shown to anybody. What they describe is more like de-listing from the global timeline but still being shown to followers. Now you're just talking about search bubbles.
What's strange is they describe this as "neutral".
> At first blush, the banning appears to impact every user more or less equally.
How is that equal? What the viewer sees depends on their cohort. It's the same kind of manipulation that we've known about for years. The unique issue with a shadowban is how it affects the creator. Specifically a shadowban is intended to counteract ban evasion using multiple accounts. If you're going to make a conclusion about whether or not shadowbanning should be allowed it should be done by comparing silent versus explicit bans.
It's bad enough that 'news' sources are now totally politically biased. Social media platforms, search engines, entertainment providers, etc. are in on it too.
Kudos to anyone who works to keep a level perspective. It's not easy.