New technologies brought new challenges. There was no social network in the 2000s and before. No retweet button, no "curated" timeline that showed you what you "like". YouTube did not try to push more videos like the ones you watched previously until the mid 2010s.
Free speech does not have the same meaning as before. Before it just meant that you could say whatever you wanted. Now people use it implicitly to mean that they can say whatever they want, but also that they are entitled to have their thoughts broadcasted at large using the amplification mechanisms I mentioned above.
While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible.
If you think about it, before social networks, amplification was done through TV and newspapers, and those have editorial boards that filters the content they share. If a newspaper's staff is pro-environment, they can prevent any columnist writing anything that denies climate change, and it's not controversial.
However the problem is how do we decide who can get free amplification and who can't? Based on what?
My preference would be that no one is, and we go back to uncurated things and to an internet where you have to look for the things you want to read/watch, versus getting content pushed onto you.
I agree wholeheartedly: the "right to free speech" is not the same as a "right to be heard", but we have managed to conflate the two with all of this "free amplification", as you describe; there is a big difference between someone getting to say something to their followers and that content being broadcast and even recommended by Twitter to random people. I personally believe that if a website has a recommendation algorithm that should be considered an editorial decision they are making and they should be liable for the content they recommend (and much more so than they are today: the same level of standard we hold a newspaper to should apply); but, if a user merely posts something and people have to actively choose to follow the poster, then that's on them (as the website is acting as a utility connecting consenting parties). Doing it like this (which might even be the status quo of the law if Section 230 is repealed, btw) changes what kinds of apps can be built and what businesses models are viable "at scale", but almost certainly for the better: apps that work like how Instagram used to--where you just saw content from exactly who you followed in the order they posted it... something many (if not maybe even most) users preferred but which was clearly less profitable for Facebook--seem like they should be fine and you should get to post whatever you want to the people who opted in to hear what you had to say. People who generally like recommendation systems try to defend all of their algorithmic amplification, and then the sometimes-arbitrary-feeling censorship seemingly required to make them universally viable, but here we see Twitter taking the ridiculously extreme position to even block private messages... the regulatory fallout of this political decision is going to be fascinating to watch.
I'm also curious on another aspect, as I don't believe "right to free speech" is meant in any way to imply a lack of liability for damages caused by that speech.
If I convince millions of people that Example companies widgets kills kittens, when I have no reason to believe that to be the case, I would be held liable for the damage to the brand.
But the pseudo-anonymous nature of the internet and most platforms, and even trying to avoid problems like the Streisand effect allow damaging speech to avoid consequence.
I'm not advocating for any approach to fix the problem, this is just a curiosity of mine as of late.
> I'm also curious on another aspect, as I don't believe "right to free speech" is meant in any way to imply a lack of liability for damages caused by that speech.
It depends what you meant. The law doesn't give carte blanche to say whatever you want, however you want, either. Your example above is what libel and slander laws are about. People make (probably millions) of false claims about companies daily and none of them rise to the level of a credible accusation largely because they're done anonymously. Someone who could actually "convince millions of people" probably has at least SOMETHING damning, and if they don't, the backpressure from everyone else is going to be pretty intense. That's actually _normal_. Desirable.
_Some_ speech _does_ require freedom from damage because otherwise the direct effect is the chilling effect. Political speech is specifically one type of such speech. The internet really has forced us to look carefully at what kinds of speech warrant that protection and which don't and we clearly haven't figured it out yet.
But certainly giving that power to private companies - and removing it from the hands of the people, the government, the law, the courts, and posterity -- is _definitively not_ the right way to do it.
Yea sorry if I was unclear, I was referring to slander and libel civil actions, and using an intentionally contrived example that probably didn't fall into the grey area as I intended.
I think the really difficult part about all of it is, the areas that don't require protections, aren't because the speech isn't damaging, it's that an uneven application of the rules can lead to worse problems. Or issues where it's impossible to find objective neutral parties (a jury) to decide on issues central to politics.
It's sad that mainstream media outlets even get away with slander in politics. Everything is twisted either to fit their views or just to make outlandish headlines to get clicks.
I believe the vast majority of the content you see on Twitter and pretty much everything you see on Facebook is from people you follow (ads excluded). Twitter/FB though use an algorithmic feed mechanism to reorder the posts which makes sense. I think they should be transparent about how they generate the feed, but I don't think you can hold them accountable for the content of a post someone made just because it got reordered to the top by an algorithm.
The block is only needed because of the amplification. If tweets and posts showed up chronologically vs from ML-driven engines to identifying the most grabbing content, we wouldn't be systemically hyper-charging emotionally hooking misinformation.
You don't need to unplug the bullhorn if there is no bullhorn.
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all used to use chronological feeds instead of ones sorted by personalized algorithms. They switched to the latter because they found they could make the platforms more addictive and increase screen time and therefore ad revenue. Doing so also involved them making the algorithms purposefully seek out inflammatory content in many cases to show to users because that keeps the user on the platform longer.
Nobody's systematically hyper charging emotionally hooking anything. This is or rather, without the artificial suppression, would be completely 100% organically viral.
It shouldn't be up to absolutely obviously partisan corporations to decide which October surprise info dump is misinformation deserving of censorship, and which is the aok rough and tumble of presidential electioneering.
Finally, on the facts, the Steele dossier was far more obviously fraudulent than pictures of hunter smoking a crack pipe in the bathtub...
But it's okay, because they own the platform. the people on twitter complaining about it are free to start their own twitter-like platform. It's a great country that allows this.
If they want to take that stance, they should also be held liable for anything posted to "their" platform, from porn to slander, fake news, and any personal insults.
They are trying to claim control only when it suits them and not when there may be liability. Can't have it both ways.
Don't compare the whole world to private property. When someone comes along and complains "Hey you censored my post" their response amounts to "We control over what is acceptable on our site". At that point haven't they just taken responsibility for all the content on their site? I suppose they could claim they're going to censor certain things on certain high profile accounts as a policy for [reasons]. Maybe?
There are multiple levels. While I like the idea of separating seeing only what my followers post and seeing other posts, it gets really blurry when the people I follow are clicking the "like" and "retweet" buttons. I would guestimate around 30% or more of my twitter feed are posts people I follow have liked or retweeted rather than posted on their own.
And the network can make that happen on its own, without an algorithm reordering content - if someone I follow is retweeting something that someone they follow retweeted.
Liable in what sense? Who would have standing to sue? The New York Post hasn't suffered any damages. (US courts don't consider loss of potential revenue from hypothetical newspaper sales or web traffic to be damages.)
If you choose to follow disinformation posted by a hostile nation state, is that a right to free speech or free amplification? What if those voices argue harmful or destructive effects on you and your society?
I guess the line is so blurred because often these aren't "people" but often institutions, governments and those intending to shape public opinion, even bots in some cases.
You're talking about it like Twitter is censoring someone specifically but it's so much more complicated and nuanced than that.
It's exactly what they were saying at the invention of the printing press. Amplification becoming too cheap. Maybe being on the side of censorship is always being on the wrong side of history no matter the issue. Can you remember one time in history where we now like "thanks god they censor these thoughts!"?
How exactly is press free amplification? How do I get my random opinion broadcasted to a newspaper audience? I would probably have to write an opinion column and send it to the journal, then they would read it, and decide whether or not they want to publish it.
If it's the NYT for example, you can be sure that no matter how well written your piece is, they will never publish something that pushes the theory that COVID-19 is a plot by Bill Gates to put chips into everyone.
But you can probably find a sketchy, low-audience journal that would.
Well it's the same thing, a well known community was banned from Reddit to prevent them from using Reddit's amplification mechanism (/r/all etc), but they now have their own clone of it, with a smaller audience, that you are free to consult.
"Free amplicfication" isn't about absolute lack of cost, it's about cost relative to older mechanisms. The printing press allowed information to spread much faster and more cheaply than having a monk write it by hand. It also allowed ideas that were not monk-approved to appear in print. When it first came out people were pretty upset about the incorrect ideas that propogated as a result.
Eventually people with power figured out how to mostly control the printing press and so created the heavily gate-kept institutions you describe. The transitions our society is facing now echo these past struggles.
There are similarities with those past struggles, but the differences are significant.
We cannot simply hand-wave some of them away as "the struggles every new medium faces."
Printed materials were still pretty gate-kept. Sure, anybody could spend a modest sum and get a bunch of roughly-printed pamphlets printed up. You could walk around London and hand them out. People did, and I suppose some of these ideas got traction. And some of those ideas were even good.
That was still a lot of money and effort, and it was still a lot of work to establish some kind of credibility so that your ideas might actually gain acceptance. Otherwise you were just a crazy person handing out pamphlets along with all of the other crazy people.
Today, you can post insane and dangerous COVID-19 falsehoods to half of the freaking world via YouTube or Facebook and your message is indistinguishable from ideas presented by people who actually know what they're talking about.
The gatekeeping America used to have was... not great. Network television's self-censorship was often stodgy, at best. But you didn't have absolute fucking lunatics screaming about chemtrails and Bill Gate's 5G microchip mind-control scheme racking up literally millions of followers. That is a PROBLEM.
If you say to me that the ideal solution is to simply have a more educated populace, I wouldn't disagree. However, that doesn't solve things now. We need long-term solutions (education) as well as short-term ones (so we don't have the loonies electing other loonies who actually get to steer the most powerful militaries on the planet)
"But you didn't have absolute fucking lunatics screaming about chemtrails and Bill Gate's 5G microchip mind-control scheme racking up literally millions of followers. That is a PROBLEM."
This article is about blocking a story by the NY Post. It may be true or may be false, but it already passed the traditional gatekeepers.
This article is about blocking a story by the NY Post.
It may be true or may be false, but it already passed
the traditional gatekeepers.
It passed a gatekeeper, and was refuted by others. And if you're describing the NY Post as a "traditional gatekeeper", you're not familiar with the NY Post.
In the distant past of 2007, the National Enquirer broke a sex scandal involving democratic politician John Edwards which often is thought to have played a major role in the 2008 dem primaries.
Should factually accurate information that matters to people be rejected or hidden because of style? Who gets to decide the correct style? Would you apply the same standards to alternately aligned publications of questionable style, like WaPo/HuffPo?
The National Enquirer is listed at the edge between "Propaganda / Contains Misleading Info" (2nd lowest category) and "Contains Inaccurate / Fabricated Info" (lowest category).
The argument that Twitter or FB need to restrict/block content is based on the idea that Twitter/FB built readership for "lunatics" in the first place.
Bu that argument doesn't apply here for two reasons:
1. The NY Post has existed in some form for 200 years, and has built its own reader base.
The NY Post is old (founded by Alexander Hamilton!) but in recent decades has truly evolved into a gleefully trashy and conservatively opinionated newspaper, having been run by Rupert Murdoch for some time.
I completely fail to see how their rights are somehow being impinged here. They have their own mini-media empire and are part of a larger media empire.
How... exactly are they being stifled and why is Twitter obligated to amplify their voice?
I would certainly agree that this does fall afoul of Section 230, which I think was a great foundation but could use some serious rethinking.
That's the crux of it. There is surprise that Twitter even has a "bar". People used to think of Twitter in one way, and now Twitter's actions have encouraged people to think of Twitter in a different way.
So twitter is not an impartial conduit - instead it is editorial and opinionated, and should face legal accountability for it's views as such, in the same way as newspapers?
> The New York Post’s front-page article about Hunter Biden on Wednesday was written mostly by a staff reporter who refused to put his name on it, two Post employees said.
> Bruce Golding, a reporter at the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid since 2007, did not allow his byline to be used because he had concerns over the article’s credibility, the two Post employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
...
> Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents, said five people with knowledge of the tabloid’s inner workings. Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.
> Today, you can [print] insane and dangerous ... falsehoods and your message is indistinguishable from ideas presented by people who actually know what they're talking about.
I bet the response of the Catholic clergy to the printing press was probably pretty similar to this statement. And the ideas of the reformation were certainly far more dangerous than any chemtrail conspiracy.
Chemtrail conspiracy theories are... pretty insignficant. If your goal is to eradicate all conspiratorial wrongthink of this magnitude or greater, you are going to run into ~a lot~ of problems. Epstein memes are very popular.
One, nobody is taking away your right to say or think things. This is about Twitter's obligation (or lack thereof) to broadcast your thoughts to others.
They are not burning you at the stake like a vengeful Catholic church during the Inquisition or outlawing your thoughts like "wrongthink" in 1984.
Two, the printing press analogy is highly flawed. Twitter is like the owner of one specific printing press, not some entity that controls all printing presses. If you owned a printing press, would you want to be obligated to print things you find factually and harmful?
I assume you'd certainly want the freedom to turn down printing jobs. Or do only certain freedoms matter?
> If you say to me that the ideal solution is to simply have a more educated populace, I wouldn't disagree. However, that doesn't solve things now.
Even in the long term, how are you going to produce this more educated populace? Or rather, who are you going to entrust with the task? The same educational establishment that produced the current populace?
But even if you can produce your more educated populace, you still have the problem that the Russian trolls aren't going to stand still. They're going to be better, too, by then.
Or rather, who are you going to entrust with the task?
The same educational establishment that produced the
current populace?T
Ideally, education teaches critical thinking, not a specific indoctrination.
Education, obviously, often falls short of this ideal and you don't necessarily need formal education to be a critical thinker.
I do think that's pretty achievable. When I went through school in the 80s and 90s we weren't exactly devoid of this sort of thing.
Absurd ideas like chemtrails and flat-eartherism don't last very long in the face of the slightest hint of critical thinking.
But even if you can produce your more educated populace,
you still have the problem that the Russian trolls aren't
going to stand still. They're going to be better, too, by
then.
I certainly don't disagree, but doing a better job of critical thinking certainly seems like a reasonable first step no matter what else we do.
How much funding is adequate? I'm so sick of hearing that throwing more money at X is our only solution. Per capita education spending has gone up significantly in the past 30 years.
Enough to pay teachers an enviable wage, so that the job is desirable and competitive, even in poor neighborhoods (not just the schools with good test scores). Funding education reduces crime, homelessness, poverty... it's not a magic bullet and you don't just get there by throwing money at the problem, but with good policy and adequate funding, education is just about the biggest payoff investments that we can make as a society.
Personally I actually get value from HN, there's plenty that is informative and useful here and I consider HN a discussion forum. Social media is more what I would term fb where the main point is about the social connections, instead of the discussion and learning the discussion implies, in my opinion.
As for concrete proposals .. it's a massive topic, and full of interdependent systems and feedback loops and it might be hubris if anyone says 'heres a single concrete proposal to address it all'.. but here's some thoughts more on identifying issues to address in the context of schools, and aligning the results of schooling to learning.
A natural process of learning, especially for children, is to copy an image/role model/idol and learn through imagining themselves as that role model.
What are the social aspirations, or role models, that children usually idolise in our current schools and society? Film stars, sports stars, super models, instagram 'influences' which are usually just models ..
Common themes amongst these: glamourous lives, big money, social capital.
Another common theme is accomplishment in those fields does not have a linear relationship to hard work, to learning, and to the cultivation of knowledge.
Instead it's about coolness, social gaming, and largely about genetic lottery of beauty or sporting ability - yes some hard work but that's not going to get you far without these other pre-requisites.
It's also about luck, so rewards are not linearly related to effort, thus the payoff for effort is very uncertain.
Actually accomplishment in those fields is mostly a winner takes all market environment, so most people can never find success, and the majority of people who realise that they can't ever succeed to their aspirations give up putting in effort, it's a cause of apathy.
So the mainstream kids who idolise mainstream 'stars' aren't incentivised to learn and apply themselves mentally, they are incentivised to try to be cool, play social games, preen themselves for physical beauty, and hope to heck they are lucky .. and the vast majority has to face the unhappy reality they will never be stars.
That's a problem. What if their role models were Einstein who had a talent for imagining and discovering interesting things about the world, even as he worked a mundane job as a clerk (in the patent office). What if social capital for the mainstream classes was accrued to people who worked hard and made sensible decisions and created useful things, instead of to playing social gaming and trying to look beautiful/rich/make other people jealous and 'influence'.
So I don't have a concrete proposal, or the 'answers', but (I think) at least this is asking some of the right questions!
Very flawed comparison. The government lying to you is one thing. The government has literal life and death control over you and others. There is only one government and we can't easily choose another.
These things are not true about Twitter. You can go post on your own Mastodon instance or the Daily Stormer or the Fox News comment section if Twitter is too restrictive for your liking.
Also, do you recognize the irony/insanity of complaining about this on Hacker News, a strongly-moderated platform? HN's centralized moderation is far more stringent.
I believe the consequences of professional, expert misinformation -- half a million civilian casualties -- pales in comparison to the amateur hour on Twitter. I'm referring to New York Times reporting in the lead up to the Iraq war, which was later found to be purposeful fraud, and played a huge role in juicing the public for war.
You don't need to look very far to find other examples.
The "press" has historically not been neutral; political sheets/tabloids heavily aligned with specific parties or individuals were very common in American history until the 20th century. There was little, if any, notion of "journalistic integrity" - they were simply a way to get out what specific persons wanted heard.
It's not a great comparison because both entities are regulated completely different based on what they allow on their platform/paper with exceptions to certain things. That's where people are getting confused. If you curate the news, you can be held liable for things published, if you don't you are allowed a pass (with some exceptions.) By stepping in actively censor a news story that has yet to be disputed, social media platforms have opened themselves up to being held liable for -all- posts.
> They removed links to a story that violated their published policies.
I am not sure that it matters 'why they censored'.
Put it another way, I do not think it matters if they applied their own ToS rules correctly, incorrectly, selectively or whatever.
I am not sure that their terms of service, allow them to claim protection under 47.230 [1]
I am sure that the position that the fed government investigators will take.
If Twitter folks (or their crowd-sourced moderators, or committees) gray-out/remove/comment on/hide/edit content that Twitter claims 'is not theirs' -- then it is hard to imaging they are compliant with the 'non-publisher' protections of section 47.230.
Imagine if one is a for-profit business, claiming tax code for a non-profit organization.
Their Terms Of Service mentions: 'Making the world better and being charitable. We do not do business with bad clients'.
Does that make that business less criminally liable for claiming taxes of a non-profit?
I don't agree with the comparison either, but, in the 16th century just about everyone could make a broad side and disseminate whatever they wanted.
Literally, wars were started because of this. Similar to today's information age propaganda wars and disinformation, physical media was used in a similar way. There are some valid comparisons here.
It's not an entirely inappropriate comparison. The similarities are obvious, and they are extremely relevant.
However, relative to the days of broadsides, the barrier to entry for dissemination of ideas has decreased by orders of magnitude and the potential reach of such ideas has increased by orders of magnitude.
It's like comparing slingshots and nuclear weapons. Yes, they're both things that let you hurt people from a distance.
Huh that's a cool comparison. I guess society will have a rough patch when a new, more accessible medium of communication is mass released to the public.
For clarity, the printing press was for books. Newspapers did not come along until much later.
Interestingly, the Catholic church was very concerned about the ability to mass produce literature and wanted to have control over what could be published. They didn't want just anyone to be able to publish a book. Imagine giving people a platform to speak out against the Church!
I don't think it's comparable. If social network is the new newspaper, everyone is free to create your own newspaper. That's why I'll always defend net neutrality. But forcing a private institution to adopt a specific editorial stance, THAT'S anti-freedom. In general, we should work to promote alternative platforms, not to force the existing ones to promote what we believe is right.
> If social network is the new newspaper, everyone is free to create your own newspaper.
The main difference is that people buy a newspaper for the information it publishes while people join a social network because their friends are there. A social network starting to editorialize content is therefore a problem since there is really no alternative ways to keep in touch with friends as effectively, meaning these social networks gets to force their opinions on people.
I agree, but I am also a fierce critic of what Facebook and Twitter are doing. By doing this they are actually driving many people to even -more- extreme platforms. I am generally not opposed to them banning antivaxxing, and things that are an active threat to safety...but banning the NY Post story was way too far, and Twitter has even doubled down on it by banning the follow up stories. The thing is that their business models rely on them not being held liable for what is posted, yet by curating things which aren't abhorrent or in the interest of public safety they have opened up a massive can of worms of potentially removing their limited liability from user generated content.
> But forcing a private institution to adopt a specific editorial stance, THAT'S anti-freedom
Who is forcing a private organization to adopt any stance? "Leaving alone" is not the same as "actively promoting." Twitter leaving alone a story does not mean Twitter is promoting that story, that is exactly what section 230 is about.
> not to force the existing ones to promote what we believe is right.
I guess they don't need to pay taxes either, or take a stand against violence, or racism, or....? They still exist within the society in which they function and that means both social and legal rules bind them, same as you or me. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, their status as a corporation doesn't somehow entitle them to a more special or louder voice than any one else's.
Is it the wrong side of history? Early printing is unambiguously connected with violence just as much as it is connected with intellectual freedom. Blood Libel and the associated murders of innocent jews could not have spread in the same manner without broadsheets.
"It is really complicated" is the conclusion that early modern historians of information come to.
> Can you remember one time in history where we now like "thanks god they censor these thoughts!"?
Well, the honest answer to the "can you remember" question is going to be misleading. By the nature of the thing we're talking about, the historical things like that are things that people aren't going to remember.
If you believe in "to the victor go the spoils" on the information front, then successful censorship (and more generally propaganda) is always on the right side of history.
I think a better argument is that being on the side of forcing people to do things is being on the wrong side of history no matter the issue. People should be free to decide, of their own volition, that they want to choose to not amplify something. That's different from being compelled to not amplify it, which is generally bad.
But I can think of a number of examples of censorship that history has not judged poorly:
- Libel and slander. If I say "I used to work with 'hartator and they brought in KKK flags every morning and broke the build every evening, you don't want to hire them," it's generally considered reasonable for you to get the government to force me to stop and also force other people not to repeat what I said.
- Planning crimes. If I say "Hey, let's get together tomorrow evening and murder some strangers for fun," and we start talking about how to do it, it's generally considered reasonable for the government to consider that a crime.
- Trademark infringement and other fair competition laws. If I say "These headphones are recommended by Apple" and they're not, or I say "These apples are organic" and they're not, or I say "This is an all-beef sausage" and it contains pork, it's generally considered reasonable for the government to say that I can't keep saying that if I want to keep selling the things I'm saying them about.
- Employment agreements. If I say "Hey, new employer, here's a list of my old employer's customers and here's some of their source code," it's generally considered reasonable for the old employer to object.
(There are a number of cases of compelled action that are currently not considered unreasonable - prison labor, military drafts, etc. - but I think those stand a much higher chance of being on the wrong side of history, in the long term, than any of the above.)
> Can you remember one time in history where we now like "thanks god they censor these thoughts!"?
Absolutely, of course. Hate speech and Holocaust denial are censored in Europe generally, and a majority of people in those countries today do say support these bans (i.e. they say "thank god"). Because they saw the kind of hateful thinking that led to WWII, and how shockingly easy it is for people to be convinced of revisionist history, and don't want that to be repeated.
Similarly, libel laws function effectively as censorship, but are widely supported. I think most of us are happy that newspapers can't maliciously print lies about common citizens.
(Edit: love that I'm being downvoted for this -- apparently people don't like these objective facts?)
The printing press was also used to fuel deranged, antisemetic hysteria in the form of Martin Luther’s widely-disseminated book, On the Jews and their Lies. So, I guess some things really never do change:
You’re mischaracterizing how free speech was viewed in the recent past. “Free speech” (as a cultural value, I’m not talking about the first amendment) was about the marketplace of ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketplace_of_ideas. It meant a free market in ideas, where the dominant ideas arise from competition. What you call “amplification” is just something that makes the marketplace more efficient—it allows ideas to disseminate faster so people can decide which are the good ones and the bad ones. The curation you mention is the antithesis of a free market of ideas.
You're defining "dominant ideas" as the ones that make people the angriest and get the most clicks! That's not the same as quality. That's entirely how those amplification algorithms exist!
Actually, I don't think the "free speech" argument as deployed in defence the unmoderated promotion of fascism actually has a coherent concept of quality: the entire point of the argument is there will never be a time when an idea can legitimately be locked out of "the market", because there simply isn't any fair way to judge ideas.
Whenever the market idea is mentioned, it's always to invoked the principles of unregulated exchange, and not to remind readers of things like legislation about quality control for products to enter the market. And it is always argued that this market should have a constant and unceasing exchange (and more to the point that their particular idea should be given more space), so this isn't a market that works toward a consensus but rather a site that needs to be maintained in constant conflict.
Yep, countries with a greater average IQ have much less people believing dumb theories (e.g about bill gates and covid-19), countries like Japan and South Korea. All countries that reduced funds for public education years ago in a short-sighted attempt to save money are seeing it's dire consequences, and now amplified thanks to the internet.
Teachers still complain they have to pay for school supplies from their pockets [0] [1], and if the money is not going to them I wouldn't really call it educational funding
Ask anyone what they think "educational funding" is and they pretty much will all mention teacher's wages among other things. The single most important thing to get good education is good educators, and to get good educators you need good wages, but I'm pretty sure you already knew that so you are just nitpicking about the exact definition of those words.
That's what they make after 15 years experience, the actual average for all teachers is much lower[0] (it is $38.761), one cause is that about 30% of teachers leave the profession less than 5 years later[1]; for example the average pay for a teacher in NY is 45K, one of the most expensive places to live in the US. According to the OECD itself teachers on the US have one of the longest working hours[3] in the world, this unpaid overtime means money lost due being unable to have a second job or due incurring in costs directly related to lack of time (e.g. eating out thanks to having no time to prepare lunch); the cause of this overtime seems to be lack of prep time in the instructional day as teachers are expected to be actively teaching for most of the day, and are provided woefully few hours for planning, correcting, and collaboration [4]
I don't think I agree that they are mischaracterizing how free speech understood, and I don't think that distinction you are drawing identifies a new idea incompatible with what they are saying. Free speech encompasses a lot of things depending on what you want to emphasize, including a notion in a healthy democracy the best ideas survive critical scrutiny.
As other have mentioned, I think however plausible that conception of speech was then, it's utterly ignorant of the problems we're facing today, where ideas spread for reasons that have nothing to do with merit. If anything, I would think you would want to agree with the person you are replying to that the spread of ideas is not due to good ones rising to the top in a marketplace that is selecting for quality.
> As other have mentioned, I think however plausible that conception of speech was then, it's utterly ignorant of the problems we're facing today
I think it is the exact opposite. Maybe I have read too many dystopian novels like fahrenheit 451, or 1984, or read too much about Chinese govt's control of its population, but I feel that modern technology has allowed too much censorship power in hands of not just the govt, but a few corporations. And it is extremely important that we do not compromise on free speech now.
We're dealing with the net result of a few different forces. Social media has enabled a massive avalanche of misinformation, and of this massive avalanche of misinformation, some subset of that new avalanche gets removed.
The net effect is that there much more misinformation than there has ever been before. Despite the best efforts of twitter, facebook & youtube they appear to have been virtually powerless to halt the spread.
The problem of social media CEOs having too much power is real, and has wrought real damage: Zuckerberg's naive ideas on speech have lead to far too much harm, and now that he's recovering from his free speech trutherism and implementing reforms it's too little, too late.
Lastly I would say that if you are looking at this state of affairs and seeing 1984 or fahrenheit 451, you're seeing things wrong. There are fair examples of that, e.g. Hong Kong, mainland China. But the western internet doesn't fit that at all.
Two keys to an actual functional market place, as you allude to, involves both good faith engagement (you aren't going to convince somebody deliberately out to cause harm to stop with a well reasoned argument) and critical evaluation (something that is practically non existent on most of the internet)
I understand the theoretical argument, but empirically do you think the quality of ideas that people believe has increased from (say) 2000 to 2020?
It seems like there's a lot more going on than just faster dissemination, and the way information travels these days might have introduced new asymmetries and inefficiencies.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
with silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
America has never been about quality. Quality is a result of vigorous and excessive competition.
It is sort of funny to say, "America has never been about quality," while referencing a poem about immigrants who moved here for a better quality of life. I think you've missed something rather obvious.
I think the quality of ideas has improved. We focus on disinformation, but social media gets used for a lot of other things. Reading a dry article on police brutality (which let’s face it, people just skipped over in the past) is a lot less impactful than seeing something shared by a friend.
I think we’re overestimating the effect of social media. A certain group of highly educated urban liberals is shocked by Trump. (And I don’t say this pejoratively. My college educated friends were literally despondent after he was elected.) And they’re looking for an explanation. And it so happened that social media became a major force around the same time. But I think that’s mostly, though not completely, a coincidence.
Social media didn’t create Trump. Right wing populism is happening all over the world, in Europe, India, etc. Its a reaction to liberalism and globalism that’s been brewing for decades. And social media didn’t create Trump’s audience. My mom, a 70-year old Bangladeshi woman who has voted straight ticket Democrat since she was naturalized, thinks Trump is too unpolished, but loves his “energy” and “vigor.” She thinks he would be a “great President” if he could “implement his ideas.” My mom doesn’t have a Twitter account. (I think she’d love Boris Johnson, i.e. Trump with a bit more polish and competent.)
She didn’t get this from Breitbart. She watches CNN in a loop all day.
Social media isn’t not a factor, but I think folks overestimate how much of a factor.
> > A certain group of highly educated urban liberals is shocked by Trump.
> 3 million more people voted for Hillary than Trump.
As I said, I’m not using this as a pejorative. I’m not just talking about folks who voted for Hillary, but ones who were despondent when Trump won. I worked late on election night and got home to an election watching party with DC yuppies and when I walked in the door I thought someone had died. These are the folks who were so stunned the started looking around for an explanation. And social media just happened to be rising at the same time.
Not all Hillary voters reacted that way. My mom and dad voted for Hillary. But they weren’t shocked by the existence of Trump. They didn’t see it as an indictment of the system. They didn’t go on the whole Russia collusion ride like all of my friends. (Not coincidentally, they supported Biden from the start. Meanwhile, I was shocked when Warren and Harris did so poorly, when it came to voting, because that’s who all my grad-school educated urban friends supported.)
I don't understand how anybody cannot be shocked by Trump. He's unlike any previous president, he has aggressively pursued his radical agenda, has broken every norm that has gotten in his way, communicates in purposefully shocking ways. I could go on and on. His supporters are also shocked though in a good way. He's the most polarizing president of our lifetimes by far. Anybody who thinks he is normal is just not paying attention.
I’m talking about the period immediately after the election, before trying to dismiss Comey, etc.
And don’t get me wrong, he’s not fit for office, but the idea that there is anything “radical” about his agenda, before or after the election, is pure gaslighting.
He actually ran on a moderate Republican platform. He committed to protecting Social Security and Medicare off the bat. (Remember Bush and Gore fighting over the “lock box?” Even fricking Sweden has partislly privatized their social security.) Even though it was right after Obergefell he said pretty much nothing about same-sex marriage. He criticized Clinton for her past criminal justice stances. Bluster aside, even his immigration platform wasn’t nuts. Liberal darling Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand became prime minister by campaigning on cutting legal immigration by half. Trump didn’t even do that. He focused on stopping illegal immigration, which 60% of Americans worry about: https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro....
His agenda also hasn’t been “radical.” What has he done? He has banned refugees and immigrants from certain countries—all ones you would expect given the political status, such as North Korea and Yemen. The only one on the current list that looks odd is Nigeria, but Trump instituted that ban at the same as the EU imposed Visa restrictions on Nigeria (February 2020): https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/eu-plans-to-impose-vis...
He repealed a bunch of unpopular environmental regulations Obama pushed through in the last couple of years of his final term. This was after his 2012 campaign, where Obama criticized Romney for standing in front of a coal plant and saying “this kills.” https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/oct/16/barack-oba...
> Governor, when you were governor of Massachusetts, you stood in front of a coal plant and pointed at it and said, ‘This plant kills,’ and took great pride in shutting it down. And now suddenly you're a big champion of coal," Obama said.
> You wouldn’t always know it ,but it went up every year I was president,” he said to applause. “That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas that was me, people.”
So yeah, Obama waited until the last couple of years of his term to push through some unpopular environments rules such as changes to that would require farmers to get federal permits to drain ponds in their land, and things like that. And Trump repealed them just as easily. That’s what happens between administrations.
Then you had the First Step Act, which was a progressive step.
He appointed three justices who were prominent in conservative legal circles long before Trump came in the scene.
So what exactly about his agenda was “radical?” Even if he had succeeded in things like repealing the ACA, that would have taken us back to 2008? (And Trump genuinely didn’t want the total repeal option without any replacement. He was the one who crafted the repeal and replace idea, while previously republicans had just wanted to repeal.)
Here's a list of radical actions, even if you think these were good ideas I don't see how you can argue they're not radical in the sense that it's outside anything previous presidents have tried to do
- increased military spending to Iraq war levels during peace time
- trillion dollar deficits during boom times
- fired dozens of cabinet members and other top officials whenever they didn't display dictator levels of obsequience to him
- got impeached for using US diplomacy for personal political gains
- tried to kick millions off of SNAP
- had DOJ help states kick people off voter roles
- reduced confidence in the election process
- changed DOJ's long standing definition of civil rights to instead protect religious people and white and asian discrimination
- pulled out of major international agreements with little notice including the Paris Agreement and the Iran deal
- attacked european allieas and weakened NATO
- cut legal immigration in a bunch of ways including cut refugee by 80% and cut H1B. And implemented draconian inhumane policies on illegal immigrants.
- appointed hundreds of extremely ideological judges
(hopefully d ang doesn't slap us down for discussing politics)
> - fired dozens of cabinet members and other top officials whenever they didn't display dictator levels of obsequience to him
> - got impeached for using US diplomacy for personal political gains
Bad, but not radical.
> - tried to kick millions off of SNAP
Clinton did way more welfare reform than Trump.
> - had DOJ help states kick people off voter roles
Cleaning up voter rolls is required by federal law.
> - reduced confidence in the election process
Bad, but not radical.
> - changed DOJ's long standing definition of civil rights to instead protect religious people and white and asian discrimination
Not radical. In Evanston, Illinois, Asian kids are now being held back from returning to in-class instruction: https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-school-be-antiracist-a-new-.... We can debate the merits of this, but it's not radical to suggest that discrimination against asians is a violation of civil rights laws.
> - pulled out of major international agreements with little notice including the Paris Agreement and the Iran deal
Presidents change course on foreign policy all the time. Trump's foreign policy has been relatively successful.
> - attacked european allieas and weakened NATO
Are you talking about a concrete policy?
> - cut legal immigration in a bunch of ways including cut refugee by 80% and cut H1B.
Not radical. European countries have done the same thing recently, after realizing their 2015 actions on refugees were ill-advised. Calling a cut to H1B "radical" is hard to credit. Is every small shift to the right from a Republican President "radical?"
> And implemented draconian inhumane policies on illegal immigrants.
Very bad, maybe radical.
> - appointed hundreds of extremely ideological judges
No, just normal conservative judges. The "extremely ideological judges" are ones that think you can look at a 230-year old document and find new things in it that nobody realized were there before. We have normalized that gaslighting, but taking a view that the words on the page mean what they say isn't "radical."
To be fair, the Trump team targeted the electoral college win. If they had targeted the popular vote, i.e. campaigning in states that they wouldn't win outright, but could garner votes, they most likely would have won the popular vote. Meaning they could have won that game if they had tried.
Correct. The popular vote is meaningless for the same reason who is leading after 500 meters in a 10k is meaningless. Nobody is trying to win the popular vote. Most of the voting eligible population doesn’t vote, and we don’t necessarily know which way things would break if folks campaigned for those votes.
If you are in favor of the popular vote movement, how do you reconcile that for residents of sparsely populated states like Wyoming? Why would such residents bother to vote at all under the popular vote? (I would not)
A packed stadium rally in Pennsylvania would have about the same number of attendees as a packed stadium rally in Wyoming or Rhode Island. You couldn't just rely on predictable "safe states" won by voters going straight-party on ballots. As it is, there's barely any reason for a Democratic presidential nominee to show up in reliability red states, let alone offer them anything in a platform.
Switching to a popular vote could lessen the current extremism.
I'm not surprised at how your mom reacts to Trump. I'm surprised so many young people believe that covid is no big deal. I agree with you that the quality of our ideas has improved, but I also disagree in that the spread of our bad ideas has also improved. Concepts that were held by a fringe of society in the past, like the idea that the Earth is flat have grown their own communities who have interests in keeping those ideas alive. Ideas, bad and good, have gotten a lot stickier.
With stickier ideas, the marketplace becomes worse, because nothing ever gets pruned out of it. Too much energy is spent on limiting the growth of bad ideas than can be spent on refining the better ideas.
> I'm surprised so many young people believe that covid is no big deal.
Have you ever entertained the idea that perhaps you're wrong and they're right? I mean it's at least possible that you've been lead to the wrong conclusion by systemic errors that have yet to be identified, and perhaps wont be for many years into the future.
> I think the quality of ideas has improved. We focus on disinformation, but social media gets used for a lot of other things.
I'm not sure what anything else in your post has to do with the quality of ideas being better. You claim that right wing populism is a reaction to liberalism and globalism, and that ideas are getting better. This leads me to connect the dots and think that your claim is that right wing populism is a good idea.
We know now, in hindsight, that the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression led directly to the circumstances that led to the rise of Hitler. And indeed, Hitler was not alone. Fascist dictators rose throughout this time period. Was the discourse worse then? Was it better then?
This feels disingenuous. "Ideas are getting better." "Fascism is a natural reaction." Please, if you are trying to make a political point, say it. Don't tiptoe around it.
I gave an example of the "good things" I was talking about:
> Reading a dry article on police brutality (which let’s face it, people just skipped over in the past) is a lot less impactful than seeing something shared by a friend.
Attitudes towards for example LGBT people and on racial issues are have advanced significantly since 2000, and I think social media has a lot to do with that. (One of the major issues cited by people for why they switched their opinion on same-sex marriage was knowing people in committed same-sex relationships. Social media makes those things more visible.)
As to right-wing populism: it is not fascism, any more than left-wing populism is Jacobinism or anarchy. I don't think it's a "good thing" necessarily, but predictable and possibly necessary. I think Boris Johnson, for example, is absolutely what the U.K. needed, before it got swallowed up by the EU.
> I gave an example of the "good things" I was talking about:
>> Reading a dry article on police brutality (which let’s face it, people just skipped over in the past) is a lot less impactful than seeing something shared by a friend.
> Attitudes towards for example LGBT people and on racial issues are have advanced significantly since 2000, and I think social media has a lot to do with that. (One of the major issues cited by people for why they switched their opinion on same-sex marriage was knowing people in committed same-sex relationships. Social media makes those things more visible.)
Fair enough. I disagree. I think social media has also helped radicalize folks, though I feel that nothing has really changed (not a positive change either). The press was, after all, hopelessly partisan and sensational for most of the West's history. We just had a brief respite. But fair enough and thanks for clarifying.
> As to right-wing populism: it is not fascism, any more than left-wing populism is Jacobinism or anarchy.
What's the difference really? I'm not talking about the boogeyman "literally fascist" thing. Fascist regimes themselves frequently started out as right wing populist representative regimes. Hitler is a fantastic example of that transformation ad absurdum, but there are several other simpler ones, like Franco. And these fascist regimes often started out quite popular.
And likewise with left populism. Stalin and Napoleon are left populism ad absurdum, but we have several more "mundane" examples, such as Tito or Hoxa. I think extremism is bad because of its tendency to flout the rule of law. I see that happening around the world all over again.
> What you call “amplification” is just something that makes the marketplace more efficient
Most efficient in generating engagement for selling banners, not in lifting up the most correct or useful ideas. Was it is, it's pure marketplace manipulation.
Yeah but the issue isn't good ideas and bad ideas and a marketplace where they can be disseminated. We're talking about facts and truth vs. misinformation and actual lies. And in that context, Mark Twain's saying comes to mind: a lie can travel halfway around the world before truth can finish putting on its shoes. This is infinitely more true today since the lies in question are manufactured to be as inflammatory and scandalous as possible, so as to keep their consumers engaged, and they can be spread to entire audiences with the click of a button.
> What you call “amplification” is just something that makes the marketplace more efficient—it allows ideas to disseminate faster so people can decide which are the good ones and the bad ones.
Can you cite empirical research showing that the process works the way you believe it does?
That's not how it works in reality, in reality a lot of gullible people who before internet would have spend their whole lives without hearing the "flat earth theory" now have access to internet and are quickly influenced by a lot of stupid theories because they are pretty bad at distinguishing bad ones from good ones; although just to be clear that is more a failure of the education system than anything else (e.g Japan has near 0 flat-earthers unlike America)
> are quickly influenced by a lot of stupid theories because they are pretty bad at distinguishing bad ones from good ones;
Actually this is an interesting problem to think about; what, then, did these people believe before they could get access to crazier ideas?
I think you'll find the answer was still, "what they were told to believe". The answer hasn't changed from then to now, we're simply far more aware of being upset at the answer. In a way the problem that was always there has been revealed and some people don't like the loss of control over these people's opinions.
Me personally I'm an advocate of "let go, stop controlling, see how things turn out" and then fix the real problems that appear, rather than creating worse problems by squeezing the play doh too tightly. It has the upside of being morally defensible rather than having the air of "I destroyed your life for your own good."
Exactly. People seems to forget that the social landscape of people using Internet in 90/2000s was totally different. As far as I remember, internet was then populated by idealist early adopters, gamers / tech savvy hobbyists. Part of this pool translated to conservative boomers and now Internet is considered as a serious thing.
> People were also stopped from sending the article in a private direct message
In this instance, the solution has already reached beyond the realm of "don't allow certain things to be amplified". You literally cannot share this information even in a private 1-on-1 chat.
> we go back to uncurated things
Yeah. The more I reflect on things the more I think social networks are just a thing that shouldn't exist. Although, of course, here we are on hacker news talking about it. So IDK. Maybe you just can't unring that bell and we're just screwed.
> Who gets to choose who gets pick the things amplified or not?
I get that you're asking this question rhetorically, but the "obvious" answer is the correct one: the people that own and operate the amplification system as their business model get to pick. Why should it be otherwise?
If the powerful choose what is and is not amplified, they will try to avoid amplifying things which hurt their causes, and to amplify things which support them.
I don't want to be a pawn of the wealthy, or of governments, or powerful people in general. I don't trust my own government to do what's in my best interests, let alone foreign governments. I certainly don't trust the wealthy, either. That's why I think it should be otherwise.
> I don't want to be a pawn of the wealthy, or of governments, or powerful people in general.
Then don't. It's your choice to get all your news from facebook or twitter. You're here on HN, so I believe you already understand that the contents of facebook and twitter shouldn't determine the contents of your thoughts.
I don't want countless people to be pawns of the wealthy. I don't think very many people themselves want to be pawns of the wealthy.
Yet very many of these people will continue to use Facebook and Twitter for news, rather than changing to an alternative. So your solution to the problem fails.
> I don't want countless people to be pawns of the wealthy. I don't think very many people themselves want to be pawns of the wealthy.
It's not up to you. People can visit whatever websites they want, your subjective judgements about the nature of the content on the website isn't relevant. If they have a problem with the website they are free to visit another one.
> Very many people will continue to use Facebook and Twitter for news.
That's their choice. Very many people will continue to use pornhub and there is nothing the church can do about it... yet.
For me, it's simple. Facebook is doing bad things. I don't like bad things. I think we should stop Facebook from doing bad things.
Is up to me to stop it? No. Of course not. Obviously not. In fact, even if I had the power to single-handedly, unilaterally, stop Facebook from doing these things, I wouldn't. Because I don't believe that might makes right (that's my wider point, after all).
What I want is a popular, democratic movement to regulate the websites that people use, in the way that the informed population think they should be regulated.
Allowing countless to be made pawns of in the name of liberty seems foolish.
> I don't want to be a pawn of the wealthy, or of governments, or powerful people in general.
yeah - this is the same sentiment out founding fathers had (in US obv.)
> I don't trust my own government to do what's in my best interests...
That's why we vote. The system created relieves us of worrying about being manipulated by powerful people, by letting the people run the government.
The truth is, your opinion only counts as much as your vote. That's how it should be. Your fringe opinions shouldn't count more than the rest of the people's opinions. So go vote. And let that be that.
The dirty secret is that no-one picks that. There's no-one turning the knobs to adjust your news feeds, just like there's no-one managing your Gmail inbox who you can turn to for help. It's all machines. Algorithms automatically amplify what's most engaging, and flame wars are more engaging than calm discussions.
Not the algorithms OP is referring to. Those are black-box learning models which discover what to recommend based on - in the case of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter - what generates the most advertising revenue.
The "particular values, agendas and biases" you're referring to are just advertising revenue, not some political bias installed by the developer. If you WANT to believe there are such developers working at those companies, I can't stop you. But the evidence isn't really there. Make some friends who work at those companies and see what you can find out from the people who actually develop the tools you're accusing of having such political bias in.
Now, if we are talking about political bias in these platforms' policies, you might have something.
Calling it an amplifying algorithm is an insult to the term - literally a sort by most recent or appending to the bottom of a text file primitives posting would favor flame wars as "engagement". The rhetoric of sinister algorithims has been passed around a lot by propaganda "documentaryists" but really with even a bit of knowledge knows trying to cast a correlation algorithim as a singularity in a box master manipulator is absurd. What is next? Putting the wind on trial for billions of sexual assault charges because of all of the skirts it blew up without their consent?
The fact that machines are helping these people accomplish their goals does not mean that people don’t have goals and that they shouldn’t be liable for the consequences of accomplishing their goals.
People dont really understand how dangerous of a situation were in right now. When big tech platforms can amplify or decrease thoughts, sources, and even political candidates voices, they literally decide politics. Democracy is being challenged. We need to decide if we want kings or democratically elected representatives to be in charge of the country.
The only thing that has changed is that the power that used to be in the hand of the press and those with access and control of the press is now in other hands and in some ways more transparent.
A lot of the people yelling about the power of social media giants now are yelling because they represent the old status quo, not because they want democratisation of thought.
People choose which press to go to based on what they thought of the information provided there. People choose social networks based on which people are on them. Social networks controlling what you see is therefore much more dangerous than newspapers controlling what you see, since if you don't like what you see in a newspaper you can just switch but if you don't like twitter removing your posts most of your reasons to stay are still there.
> People dont really understand how dangerous of a situation were in right now. When big tech platforms can amplify or decrease thoughts,
Every form of media has that power, social media is not at all special in this respect. A post getting banned from twitter makes no difference to someone that gets their news from Fox News and talk radio. It's up to the people to manage their own thoughts, same as it ever was.
> If it isn't illegal or incitement of violence, it doesn't need to be removed.
But it can be removed, because its one of many millions of privately owned websites on the internet... This is the great thing about the internet, anyone can create a website and run it however they want and users are free to visit whichever sites they like the most. This is a win-win for everyone except for those who want to control what site owners do with their own websites.
"Can be" and therefore "must be because I say so" are two entirely different things.
It's still an option to just leave it alone. What is this obsession our culture recently has that says "Just because I CAN do something, I MUST do something"?
It's an option to leave it alone, but it's the site owner's prerogative. If you don't like the site owner's moderation practices that's fine, but there's no reason that your opinion should override the owner's intentions with respect to how the site is run and the type of content on the site.
We are not talking about next video suggestion here. We are talking about censoring direct messages or feeds people deliberately follow. Tech companies inserting their political bias in direct communications. Not amplification.
You're still free to send a text, write a letter, call. Twitter and facebook aren't public utilities.
I saw an interesting comparison the other day. If this was a message board from the early 2000s, and the moderator was deleting posts, you move on, not throw a giant fit about free speech using some one else server.
Twitter and facebook have become an internet "public square", kept in monopolistic power by network effects and compulsion mechanisms stronger than casinos.
Insofar as they're monopolies, they should be managed by the people as if they were a public space.
This would be similar to the central area of a mall or when companies provided housing to workers to prevent unionization efforts. Both places were upheld as places where the First Amendment must be upheld, despite private ownership.
Because it's not about being able to say what they want on a particular platform, it's about saying what they want where everyone else will hear it.
A lot of people look at this issue and see two groups fighting over it. There are (at least) three groups though: for, against, and undecided. This is really a fight about how to convince the undecided, so solutions like "go make your own platform" aren't desirable; undecideds aren't going to know about the new platform, and won't automatically appear en masse on it, so it actually makes reaching them more difficult.
This is a crucial point. We are not talking about someone coming to my house and blaring Tweets with a bullhorn.
If I follow @NYPost then I want to hear what they tweet. Twitter may have every right to censure them, but it’s the wrong thing to do, and people are rightly incensed about it.
If I want to retweet a @NYPost article to my followers that is my business. And my followers can gladly listen or unfollow.
Twitter’s faux rationale about “hacked materials” sticks coming just days after NYTime’s story on Trump tax returns.
If these monopolistic social networks want to interfere in public & private messages on their platform to the benefit of particular political candidates they shouldn’t be doing it with the benefit of Section 230 immunity and/or should be scrutinized for making campaign contributions in-kind, like how National Inquirer got hit with charges for their buy&bury on Trump’s affair.
If you want to hear what the NY Post has to say, you can sign up to their email newsletter [1]. You can forward those emails to those who care what you like.
In regards to section 230, the whole point of it was to allow platforms to selectively restrict content from third parties. Before 230 some courts had ruled that if they restricted content from any third party, then they shared in liability for any third party content they did not restrict. So if I deleted spam for boner pills from my chess BBS, but did not delete someone’s accusation that a particular chess book was plagiarized I might be sued by the book author for libel. To ensure I would not be liable for that kind of thing, I would have to let the boner pill spam stay, along with anything else that was not illegal.
Twitter has made themselves clear on this. They're going to censor content they don't like, even in direct communications.
Use another platform if you don't like it. If you can't do that because all of the content producers and your friends have decided that twitter's level of censorship is ok, then you're just out of step with the rest of society.
It's like complaining that Coca Cola is an evil company and you hate them. If everyone else but you still likes Coke then your view on their practices, however valid it may be, won't be relevant
It’s totally fine by me if they want to take on the legal liability of being a publisher.
I think it goes against the stated purpose and core mission of their platform. So perhaps they are lying to their users, and even to themselves.
> The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve – and do not detract from – a free and global conversation.
It also may be an illegal campaign contribution in some cases.
wouldn't this leave you in a worse situation? say twitter becomes a publisher (whatever that means) and gets sued out of business. then you still won't be able to follow @NYPost or retweet content to followers.
I'm curious, how do you think twitter becoming a publisher would help you to accomplish your stated goals?
Twitter can't afford to become a publisher, so if the law didn't let them do what they do now without being a publisher it would force them to stop. Currently they get to eat and keep the cookie.
Twitter and Facebook are in a no-win situation. Remove this content and they are punished by the right removing section 230 protections. Allow it and the left calls them destructive monopolies and breaks them apart. It seems they have chosen to halt the spread of murky 'October surprise' claims on their platforms rather than repeat the course of October 2016. I can't blame them (and agree with their decision).
> Remove this content and they are punished by the right removing section 230 protections. Allow it and the left calls them destructive monopolies and breaks them apart.
This seems to suggest a larger solution -- that these platforms do actually have within their power to implement.
Stop helping those two bickering ninnies by taking sides, and instead use the huge bullhorn society has handed them by screaming, "Shut up the both of you, stop bickering and maybe help the people you were elected to help!"
Who is right and about what are always less important than simply helping people. There is SO MUCH that is being left undone because we endlessly want to debate single issues for literally DECADES while people die in the streets.
Leadership was abandoned long ago and these gigantic bully pulpits could right the ship and instead they are being used as game pieces by their partisan owners. It's... sad to watch.
Perhaps, instead of outlawing new technology and modes of communication, we should produce more speech to teach people how it works so they don't get sucked in by an algorithm and believe everything they read.
Those editorial boards you speak of get things wrong constantly. Limiting who can respond to them in front of an (at least) equally large audience is dangerous and a disservice to all, especially minorities.
Limiting who can publish and the size of their audience is categorically a violation of free speech. There is no daylight there.
Wouldn't the obvious choice be to let everyone have the same access to free amplification? No one is being forced to listen, and I'd rather have the ability to ignore what I don't want to see/hear instead of a bunch of 20 somethings Engineers deciding for me.
I can't think of a way that you can provide equal amplification to everyone. Physically there is only so much space "above the fold" on a website or on the first page of search results. Something has to be put front and center, thus receiving more amplification than other things.
How would you determine what can fit on your mobile screen? What sorting algorithm would you choose?
If you sort based off of what the most recent submissions, you might not ever see things that interest you and you might leave the platform.
If you sort based off of most recent or the most comments, then the most controversial posts would be amplified above more moderate and well thought out posts.
You can think of any type of sorting algorithm you want, you can even provide options/combinations. However it is impossible to give all content the same access to free amplification.
"I can't think of a way that you can provide equal amplification to everyone."
Yes we can. You could make a transparent algorithm in which eg. 15 out of 15 posts in my FB feed are from my friends in chronological order, at most two per friend. Likes etc. are just graphics and a reply from a friend bumps the post.
And something similar for Twitter.
It is not rocked science if you don't want to make the site so bad you possibly can to make visitors stay longer and see more ads when they wade through the irrelevant crap to see the post they want to see.
This is de facto no recommendations and no amplification. Which I agree with; IMO even algorithmic recommendation is an implicit endorsement of "we want you to see this content you didn't specifically ask to see", at which point that's an editorial decision that people should be held liable for.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you have only 15 posts that can be viewed at a time, doesn't that mean those 15 posts are getting amplified over the others? Maybe not since all posts theoretically would be temporarily visible in those 15 posts at some point?
Won't posts that encourage quick responses (clickbait, memes, controversial posts, etc) be bumped up much more frequently, thus making sure they are amplified more than other postings (while burying other posts)? Sure this might not be much of a problem on a site where you only are following a small number of people, but I find it hard to imagine it could translate to a larger site that inherently isn't just you following a few friends (i.e. Reddit).
Ye well one friend could spam alot and almost always show up in his two slots in the feed. But aslong as you have a finit number of annoying friends you could deal with that by maybe muting them from the feed or just live with it. It might be a problem since many Facebook users have 100s of "friends", but I see that as an user error. You could have a "favorite" bar with friends you easily could click on and see what they have posted. Ie. actively looking instead of a feed if the feed gets too spammy by 100s of friends.
Having absolutely equal and fair exposure would need some kind of normalized random selection of posts since last login but that would probably just get messy and confusing.
"Won't posts that encourage quick responses (clickbait, memes, controversial posts, etc) be bumped up much more frequently, thus making sure they are amplified more than other postings (while burying other posts)?"
Ye but atleast its deterministic, your friends find it interesting enough to talk about and the conversation can continue till it is done instead of disapearing in the feed. There could be a big cross to click to mute it.
I have no hope of having an algorithm decide what I want to see. That is my main point.
I like the way Twitter is now, if you configure your settings correctly. You see all the top-level Tweets made by the users you follow. In chronological order. And nothing else. Of course, this includes retweets. If you don't want to see retweets from one of the users you follow, you can specifically disable retweets from that user.
Whenever I see a comment like this, I have to point out that they are already deciding what you want to see and hear. On most of the platforms in question you're being suggested content by a bunch of algorithms that you can't inspect, understand, or control. And while it's not censorship, drowning signal in a flood of noise is not that different.
Suppressing in direct messages is pretty different.
A lot of people I know use twitter DMs as a primary communication method for people in their own families, even inside the same household. Twitter filtering communication between family members in your home is ... well ... a perfect excuse for me to strongly encourage them to stop using twitter.
I think "amplification" is simplifying the effect that these social networks have.
Not only do the social networks allow you to amplify your opinion, they also nudge users further and further into bubbles where voices amplify even more.
Before social networks, if you got a pro-environment newspaper, the bias of that paper still had a bound on it. But imagine if the paper was constantly changing based on what you read. Were you interested in the article yesterday? Here is an even more biased article. Read it again? Try this article even more biased. Soon, the original paper would be so moderate that it would almost appear anti-environment.
The number of conspiracy theories floating around right now is alarming. And I blame a lot of it on the algorithms that these social networks are using to promote content people seem interested in. You get into rabbit holes and eventually land up reading extremist/fringe theories.
Key to this is that the objective isn't interest, it's "engagement", addictive behaviour and advertising consumption. It may be content that you hate, or-- better-- content that depresses you: Sapped of initiative you just keep scrolling and clicking, and some studies have show that depressed people are easier to influence and more vulnerable to advertising.
It's impossible because amplification is a zero-sum game. There's a limited amount of attention per human being. Thus everyone vying for attention is competing in this game, and any criteria for choose one amplified voice over the other necessarily results in bias.
It is a completely unavoidable artifact of our attention span and mortality, with no possible workaround. Hence why curation and bias becomes the value propositions.
That’s a good point. In many ways it is a free market for attention span. Except that people can now pick not from a short list of established editors, but from a massive list of interesting people to follow.
I think people should be the judge for who they trust and/or want to listen to.
I don’t see the “but now we can’t control what they see” objection kindly.
Our problems are simply symptoms of a business model that’s out of control.
If I had to choose between advertising and free speech, I’d be happy to utterly abolish advertising. Even though that means completely tearing down the current media industry.
Obviously there’s middle ground to be found, but censorship is just treating the symptoms and in the dumbest possible way.
When radio came the first few decades were great, but soon more and more people started to broadcast and corrupting music started to harm society. People demanded that government and only government could artfully decide whom aught to be allowed to speak to the masses and censors cracked down on unlicensed radio. Several decades later however and the enthusiasm for radio censoring lost it appeal.
When television came we also had a few early decades where everything were great. There existed one or two stations, and that was it. Then suddenly a flood of people and companies started to use this new technology and harmful video nasty with violent and nude content started to hit society and people cried out once again for government to start censoring and determining whom aught to be allowed to speak to the masses. Several decades again and the enthusiasm for TV and movie censoring lost it charm.
Then Internet came and everything was fine the first few decades with only a few major websites like yahoo and myspace. Then 4chan and 8chan was created and quickly people want censoring again, but this time its not the government who should determine who aught to be allowed to speak to the masses but rather a handful of companies in charge of social networks and cloud services. This is where we are now. In a few decades, I predict the enthusiasm for Internet censorship will drop a bit as it done for all previous technologies that enables unregulated amplification of speech.
I would second this and take it a step further and point out that the right to free speech is not the right to freely say whatever you want. This is particularly sticky when it comes to misinformation.
Currently we have systems which make misinformation more dangerous (primarily via amplification) and a bunch of people conflating free speech with the freedom to say whatever you want. I think what we still need to explore is whether or not there is a responsibility on individuals to be factually accurate when engaged in amplified speech. What does that even mean? Do you simply need to believe what you are saying at the time? Or is the standard higher? Is this responsibility shifted if you provide a citation (where the responsibility of the cited source shoulders some of the responsibility for your derivative thoughts)?
It's a particularly thorny issue. One that isn't necessarily new, but is particularly acute in contemporary times. I am against censorship, but I also recognize certain trends which seem to be deepening divides and strengthening conspiracy theories in our society.
> My preference would be that no one is, and we go back to uncurated things and to an internet where you have to look for the things you want to read/watch, versus getting content pushed onto you.
What a well written response, my friend. Hats off. Perhaps EdgeRank truly was a pandora's box we should have left well enough alone. Who knew how much havoc a simple matrix determinant could cause?
> While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible.
This thought is the exact reason the first amendment separately mentions freedom of "speech" (hard to accomplish much with it) and "the press" (much more effective).
>> and we go back to uncurated things and to an internet where you have to look for the things you want to read/watch, versus getting content pushed onto you.
But people are lazy. Why write a post when you "share" some crap that came through your feed with one click.
We will get to self hosted distributed social media when it becomes easier than Facebook or Twitter.
- Attention is a zero-sum game. In the past, we'd get more of our news from local papers, radio stations or lunch break gossip, resulting in a natural diversity of viewpoints. Nowadays, it's all the same social media outlets and handful of national newspapers (whose staff generally spend all day and form their opinions on Twitter, which thus winds up being upstream anyway) for everyone. Compared to what we had before, one side winds up getting free amplification anyway.
- I don't think free speech as a positive right for the speaker is necessarily the correct framing; at least, it neglects half of the issue at hand. I consider it at least equally important that "free speech" protects my right as an information consumer to get exposed to as many viewpoints as possible on a matter. Right now, my sense is that national newspapers all echo the Twitterati consensus, Facebook has developed in such a way that social and increasingly technological pressure would not allow even those people on my friend list who I suspect had interesting and generally well-thought-out non-mainstream opinions to share them with me, and the rest is all conspiracy websites that are unusable as a source because they've largely been cut off from the means of establishing credibility and separating wheat from chaff via social proof.
If I were a US voter (I'm not), I'd want to know whether Biden was involved in corrupt dealings. As it stands, it seems that if there were a compelling case that he was (and, well, I don't know if there is one!), the media and its allies would be working overtime to prevent me from learning about it.
That's not even remotely the same thing. When you post on an AOL message board, the only people that see it are people who are in AOL, use the Message Boards, and actively choose to read the thread and post with your message.
When I log in to Twitter right now I get a message that Ariana Grande has a new album. I don't follow her, I don't care about her, but Twitter decided I needed to see that.
I have notifications disabled but I can only imagine what it pushes out.
On top of that pushing of unsolicited information, the social networks purposely push controversial topics to gain your attention. After a while those controversial and outlandish posts are legitimized and normalized.
The difference in scale is so astronomically large that using 'amplification' for both of these cases is misleading at best.
How many AOL users were there, total, in the 90s? Now, how many Twitter users are there, today? It's not even a fair fight.
That's only one metric, another would be trust, and clout, and others. The president tweeting is different from a random AOL user posting to a message board. Totally different beasts.
Huh? Assuming only talking about USA, AOL had more than 30 million subscribers. And that's not counting their family members/guests. Twitter claims to have 40 million active US members, a claim I doubt heavily. They aren't far off.
Not all AOL subscribers participated in these boards/posting though.
In addition, you have social media boosting other social medias, Facebook, Reddit, this place, each with their own individual brand of shenanigans. You didn't have that way back when (mostly because the alternatives were just as sparse)
30 million subscribers who read the message boards? And they all took each post as seriously as they do a tweet today? I doubt it. You're also cherry picking from my comment and ignoring the parts about how amplification is different today than then, outside of the numbers scale.
Also, I'm not comparing to just the USA twitter users either! It's a global platform. That matters. Retweets are not region-locked!
Not just message boards, live chat! Thousands and thousands of chat rooms, and everyone on IM, and everyone FWDing inappropriate emails around. I'm not sure how old you are or if you had AOL, but it was by far the most social internet experience I'd ever had!
Global users, of course, Twitter trumps it in count, no doubt. I only assumed US users because the post was about US politics.
If you have free speech but no-one is allowed to hear it. Is it still free speech?
How is this any different to “you are free to speak but you’ll be murdered after you do”. You’re still free to “speak”, you’ll just die after. Freedom of speech right?
The challenge with this framing is that you're equating social media to newspapers which provide editorialization. IIRC, one of the core distinctions that allow many tech companies to avoid liability for consumer generated content is not having an editorial role. If they embrace being media companies and editors I believe different regulations will apply to tech companies than currently do.
Isn't that why they are cracking down now? As social media platforms were increasingly used to spread outright lies, propaganda, and radicalization, the public started to demand social media apply editorial functions- and here we are today.
"The public", it was a small group of elites. And of course big tech aren't against getting more power so they "comply", they were just waiting for the chance to do it without significant backlash.
Stepping outside the US, there is evidence that misinformation spread of Facebook (including WhatsApp) was directly responsible for the Rohingya genocide and forced migration [1]. At what point do these platforms have an obligation to not allow themselves be used for such campaigns?
Okay so maybe we need to start regulating AI, or machine-curated content, or recommendation systems, but not stamping out one of the cornerstones of western intellectual culture. Free speech is certainly more important than YouTube’s engagement metrics.
I’m not disagreeing with that, and I’m also aware that as a private company, whatever they do with their website isn’t an infringement upon first amendment rights. I’m just bristling at the parent comment who seemed to be saying that in our new AI-driven world, free speech is no longer an intrinsically valuable thing.
>I’m not disagreeing with that, and I’m also aware that as a private company, whatever they do with their website isn’t an infringement upon first amendment rights. I’m just bristling at the parent comment who seemed to be saying that in our new AI-driven world, free speech is no longer an intrinsically valuable thing.
Those are all good points.
I didn't understand GP to be claiming that ML algorithms trump free speech, which may explain why we're actually in violent agreement WRT YouTube's recommendation algorithms.
I'd note that I avoid the big social media sites like the plague, and not even primarily for the toxic atmosphere. Rather, I find the business model to be inherently cynical, exploitative and destructive of communities (cf. sites like nextdoor.com).
As long as the incentives (maximization of advertising dollars) favor pushing for ever higher engagement, the cycle that creates increasingly fine-tuned filter bubbles and "targeted" advertising, we're going to see less focus on free expression from large corporations, because their primary goal is to maximize profit.
I believe that this model will eventually collapse and be replaced (with something better or worse, I don't know) with a different one. My concern is in the damage that this will do to our discourse and societal cohesion in the meantime.
Which points to larger problems with our economic model. Maximizing short-term profit is fetishized as all-important, regardless of potential downsides[0]. That focus legitimizes predatory behavior based on the (incorrect) idea that captialism is necessarily a zero-sum game.
This distorts the economy and the culture, pitting us against each other in surprising (and very destructive) ways.
I am most certainly not advocating that we abandon capitalism, as its had a largely positive effect on health, wealth, technological advancement and a host of other areas.
Rather, I believe we need to change the incentives around markets to encourage a broader, fairer capitalism that creates increased prosperity for everyone, rather than those already at the top.
[0] From a long-term perspective, focusing primarily on short-term extraction of value from the economy is self-defeating. Primarily because our economy's success is based on consumer spending (~70% of the US' GDP is consumer spending). Through wage suppression, rent-seeking and (a good thing) automation, we're reducing the ability of larger and larger segments of the population to contribute to that 2/3+ of the economy. If unchecked, we'll eventually get to the point where wealth and income are so concentrated that we won't be able to sustain that model and everyone will lose.
Because there are only so many pairs of jeans, lava lamps, snow globes, raisins, cars, houses or pizza pies that any one individual or household can use.
This argues for a much broader distribution of economic resources (wages, access to capital, safety nets, infrastructure, etc., etc., etc.) than we have now. This could provide enormous benefits to those who have the least and, in the long-term, those who have the most.
Beyond that, it can create a stronger, more resilient economy for everyone.
> While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible.
This is so abusable. Even the best of intentions won't stop it from being abused horribly. I value twitter much less. The same thing is happening there that happened to the declining legacy media.
This amplification isn't magic. You can't build an audience on YouTube (or anywhere) unless people actually care about what you have to say. And doing that is hard work.
Free speech does not have the same meaning as before. Before it just meant that you could say whatever you wanted. Now people use it implicitly to mean that they can say whatever they want, but also that they are entitled to have their thoughts broadcasted at large using the amplification mechanisms I mentioned above.
While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible.
If you think about it, before social networks, amplification was done through TV and newspapers, and those have editorial boards that filters the content they share. If a newspaper's staff is pro-environment, they can prevent any columnist writing anything that denies climate change, and it's not controversial.
However the problem is how do we decide who can get free amplification and who can't? Based on what? My preference would be that no one is, and we go back to uncurated things and to an internet where you have to look for the things you want to read/watch, versus getting content pushed onto you.