We all know what no content moderation spirals down into, and that content moderation is a very hard problem to address ("solve" is definitely the wrong word IMO). I am torn between the idea that a company should be able decide how they want to moderate their own platform, and the contradictory feeling that I don't trust them.
Thinking about the idea of legislation to prevent platforms from all moderation doesn't feel right to me personally, so to those that do hold that opinion I am curious:
1. If we can't even regulate ISP's as dumb pipe utilities, then how would it be possible to do it with social media platforms? Would it be contradictory to legislate platforms this way while _not_ also applying the same logic to ISP's?
2. Emerging social media platforms that specifically don't moderate, or decide to moderate _differently_, are in a unique position to benefit from the many users who don't like the major platforms' moderation practices. If these competing platforms suddenly gain in popularity, would there still be a need for regulation if users have a real choice?
We are in a bind. More than ever we need trustworthy authorities to help us navigate the world's information as no one, no matter how educated or smart, can be expected to parse through the ocean of information we now have access to every day.
Unfortunately it has become obvious that no such authorities exist. The President lies. The Governors lie. The NYT lies. The WHO lies. CNN lies. Fox lies. The smart, young, well healed people that run tech lie (though for our own good, of course). Your Facebook feed lies. Not just little lies and not just a few. Big lies, multitudes of them, lies used as levers, attempting to advance conflicting and rarely benign agendas. There is a furious cacophony of bullshit, every day, from every channel, trying to sell us things that are neither good nor true.
If there is any unifying experience these days in America is confusion. No one knows what is going on, no one knows what the truth really is, we just react to whatever meme manages to get past our jaded weariness. The old ways to make sense of the world no longer work.
We need Journalism. Real Journalism, not the putrid husk of it we have today but the kind of Journalism that the political class fears and that the people trust. I cannot think of anything more important right now. Nothing will be fixed in this country until we have our eyes and ears back.
> Unfortunately it has become obvious that no such authorities exist. The President lies. The Governors lie. The NYT lies. The WHO lies. CNN lies. Fox lies.
So, just like it's always been?
> The old ways to make sense of the world no longer work.
What were those old ways? From what I recall, the "old ways" was to believe lies fed to you, which caused all kinds of problems - not very different from today. Lies about women, gays, people of other races, people of other religions, people of other ethnicities, people of certain professions, etc. Looking at history through perhaps a tinted lens, these were all common problems in the "old days" - the only difference is that now it's a bit harder to hide them. To an extent, some of the tumult you see today is due to people realizing that being lied to was common and the norm, coupled with the ability to have a platform to counter what they perceive as lies. That a lot of this "countering" is likely as misinformed as the original lies is sad, but not surprising. I cannot say, though, that accepting lies from authority as people generally did in the past was "better".
> If there is any unifying experience these days in America is confusion. No one knows what is going on, no one knows what the truth really is, we just react to whatever meme manages to get past our jaded weariness. The old ways to make sense of the world no longer work.
I think we're in agreement about what is going on. My stance is that I don't think "the old ways to make sense of the world" was good - especially not when you were on the receiving end of things, and pretty much all of society around you acted as if the problems didn't exist, or dismissively justified them.
> We need Journalism. Real Journalism
We've always had it, and still do, or we've never had it, and never will, depending on how you view the glass.
Journalism, in the traditional sense, has its place, but will never "solve" this problem. There never has been a model of journalism that satisfies all of:
1. Covers a wide variety of topics well
2. Can find "bias-free" funding (i.e. nonreliance on ads, etc).
You'll get instances of journalism that do a really good job by having a very narrow focus (e.g. Pro Publica), or you'll get stuff like the NYT (which as you said "lies").
We definitely need journalism, but we'll never solve the problem just with it. I don't think we'll ever "solve" this problem, given that in our thousands of years of history, we never solved it.
The old ways of making sense of the world consisted, for the most part, of listening to institutions and people whose integrity, though not perfect, was far greater than it is today. CNN wasn't always the hyper-partisan POS it is today. The NYT used be a real newspaper. Same for the Post. There has not been a Walter Cronkite for decades.
I think its self-evident that journalism has changed, dramatically and for the worst as the Internet became widespread, and we have nothing to replace it with. This is happening at a time when information has been weaponized to an exquisite level with most of us not even aware we are under attack. So, no, I do not think this is business as usual, and while I agree good Journalism is not sufficient to solve our problems I do believe it is a necessary first step.
I think the funding problem is real, but solvable. There is a great hunger out there for honest reporting and there are plenty of people with both the resources and the integrity to help bootstrap a credible effort.
> CNN wasn't always the hyper-partisan POS it is today. The NYT used be a real newspaper. Same for the Post. There has not been a Walter Cronkite for decades.
If you can come up with a way/study that has a good way of measuring the quality of an outlet, and showing the changes across time, I'll be willing to accept it. At the moment, I do not recall any of these to have been credible. I cannot speak for the Post, but NYT was definitely worthy of distrust in the 90's, as was CNN.
I think you and I are measuring things via a different metric/scale. Mine is simply "Do they lie/mislead often enough for me not to trust them?", which is different from "How often do they mislead?" You would be correct in pointing out that my stance is more binary, but it's because past a certain point, it doesn't matter how much more distrustful an outlet is! If the lies/manipulation were rare, it makes sense to look at the frequency. But I do not see a point in differentiating "lies once a day" and "lies twice a day". While the latter seems 2x worse, the former is bad enough to disregard it.
In that sense, the NYT was untrustworthy in the 90's, as was CNN. Whether they are worse now is kind of irrelevant.
> There has not been a Walter Cronkite for decades.
There are, and always have been, fantastic journalists. They definitely exist today. The question to ask is: If Walter Cronkite started out today, and was as good as he used to be, would people trust him?
> I think its self-evident that journalism has changed, dramatically and for the worst as the Internet became widespread, and we have nothing to replace it with. This is happening at a time when information has been weaponized to an exquisite level with most of us not even aware we are under attack.
The loss in revenue has definitely impacted news outlets because of the Internet. However, information being weaponized really is not that different today. The only thing that has changed is that there are more actors involved. Much of the thrash today is simply because more people have the power to counter the misinformation of the past.
Things are bad now, but I really do not want to return to the days where people trusted Time and Newsweek. I am happy people do not trust them. Those were not good days, and the misinformation then was probably as costly (globally) as it is now.
> There is a great hunger out there for honest reporting and there are plenty of people with both the resources and the integrity to help bootstrap a credible effort.
The people have spoken with their dollars, and it is clear they are not willing to pay for it. Gifts from rich people does well for the "narrow" journalism I spoke of, but is simply not enough for the wider scale that is needed.
Maybe we can get past that issue though. I understand your point to be that Journalism was never credible and that therefore we are not really any worse off than we have ever been. I disagree, but maybe it does not matter all that much, my main point is that more than ever we desperately need something like good Journalism, whether good Journalism ever existed or not.
Information has been weaponized before, sure, but the volume, sophistication, low cost and precision of the manipulation is unprecedented. The difference in degree is so great that it has become a difference of kind and the only defense we have at the moment is cynicism.
As to people paying for proper Journalism, we also used to say no one would pay for electric cars or for music. Maybe we just need better products.
> Would you accept "trust in the media" as one such measure of decline?
No I wouldn't. The whole gist of my comments is that increased distrust is a good thing. That it led to all kinds of factions trusting there own version of nonsense is sad, but the fact that they don't blindly trust news outlets is good.
> As to people paying for proper Journalism, we also used to say no one would pay for electric cars or for music. Maybe we just need better products.
The difference being that people did pay for journalism, and no longer do. 30 years ago, you would likely have had at least one subscription to a newspaper - often two (one local and one national).
Today, the number of people who have such subscriptions has dropped to half what it was (I'm surprised it is still this high).
Interesting article, and of course we don't know the reason for decrease in trust. Is it because the media is lying more, or because the people have better access to information and thus are realizing the lies of the media? That's probably impossible to measure.
And interesting that
> Democrats' Trust in Media Highest in Past 20 Years
While Republican has gone down. I wonder how much effect Donald Trump saying "Fake news" on Twitter all the time has on people's perception, versus what they would think if he wasn't saying that.
Except some of those lie orders of magnitudes more often than others. The false equivalence between the president's lies and the NYT's lies is just flustering. Go to the NYT homepage now. Every possible graph and map of COVID19 is there. You really want to compare this to some dude that tweets like he just got hooked on his sons adderall?
I look forward to the day when Trump leaves office for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that, having lost their most perfect of scapegoats, left leaning people will finally have to acknowledge the dire state of the republic and their part in the fuck ups that lead up to it. Perhaps then we can start to make things better.
Thinking about the idea of legislation to prevent platforms from all moderation doesn't feel right to me personally, so to those that do hold that opinion I am curious:
1. If we can't even regulate ISP's as dumb pipe utilities, then how would it be possible to do it with social media platforms? Would it be contradictory to legislate platforms this way while _not_ also applying the same logic to ISP's?
2. Emerging social media platforms that specifically don't moderate, or decide to moderate _differently_, are in a unique position to benefit from the many users who don't like the major platforms' moderation practices. If these competing platforms suddenly gain in popularity, would there still be a need for regulation if users have a real choice?