Until now censorship advocates have restricted themselves to demanding that institutions that already have the power to censor use this power. The idea that we should systematically centralize information, to make it possible to censor it, is new and worse. And why stop at IPFS? What about HTTP? Maybe it's not such a good idea to allow everyone to have a website. Look at 8chan. Maybe it would be better if all discussion happened under the benevolent moderation of facebook and youtube.
I would have thought that even people who are in favor of some censorship recognize that most censorship is not "benevolent". That even though they might dislike that IPFS will make it harder for facebook and youtube to decide what people are allowed to think, they would like that it will also make it harder for the governments of russia and china, and that this would more then make up for it.
Reading the article, the view hinges on a gross mischaracterization: that a free speech environment has led to extremism and death. But this is absolutely not the case. First of all, the websites where the vast majority of extreme ideas are shared are not free speech environments. Second, the people who do bad things do it because they're damaged, or disillusioned, or some other personal motivator, the only difference now is that we can read and understand their view (not implying that we should be sympathetic, only understand even if we vehemently agree).
Another point I have a bit of a gripe with is that the person fails to point out the misdeeds associated with the ideology he (probably) is more sympathetic towards. Interestingly, the view that people should not be able to freely share ideas with one another and judge ideas on their merit with their own cognitive capacity seems to be common among those sympathetic to this ideology. I wonder how the author feels about those people controlling the environments where discussion happens and policing discussion on extreme topics sympathetic to themselves.
Why, yes, free speech does help spread all ideas, including those which lead to death.
The only truly safe environment is a very strict prison where inmates are not allowed to do basically anything, because anything can be risky and ultimately lead to death. Ideally, thinking should also be restricted for the same reason.
Danger cannot be removed from trying new things and learning unknown things. Danger, suffering, and death are inseparable from any progress.
So it goes. Don't try to make an environment too safe, because it's inevitably stifling.
Of course, every individual extremist has their own story, but we are also all products of our environments and it is clear that the web creates an environment in which extremism thrives.
Personally I think free speech is worth it but we can't pretend there's not a cost.
The free speech web has created the most peaceful least violent society in history. Censors on the other hand are found constantly endlessly and relentlessly at the vanguard of the bloodiest most extremist movements of all time.
What is this cost exactly? Censors have shown an utter and complete lack of evidence that censorship reduces violence whatsoever when you look at the long run and broader picture. They also love destroying the economy as well as art. Censorship at the end of the day always ends up being a particularly evil form of power politics regardless of the noble intentions it sets out with. Outside of a very narrow scope of things that ought to be censored (calls to violence which would include 8ch, defamation, fire in a theater, etc)
> Censors have shown an utter and complete lack of evidence that censorship reduces violence whatsoever
That's because the scale and untracked nature of such noncensored sites make their impact difficult to quantify. We know that social contagions exist, but we don't know the extent to which they affect people.
School shootings are far, far more common than they used to be. They started to really rise around the same time that sites like 4chan glorified the shooters and discussed the issue like it was a game. They spoke of becoming an hero(sic), talked of getting a high score, and made memes of their dead bodies.
The world tends to loathe extremes. We know that extreme censorship causes social issues. Why wouldn't complete non-censorship combined with anonymity cause issues too?
the world is roughly 100000% less violent than it used to be, and the violent crime rate has not increased much in the past 5-10 years. this is a total lie.
This isn't a lie, but it's also more nuanced than this. The world has been seeing a massive decrease in poverty. At the same time, only something like 4.6 billion people have internet.
I'm not saying that social media causes a flood of violence, I'm just saying that there are violent social contagions that should be addressed. Think of ISIS's social media campaigns for recruitment.
>In any case, hateful let's-do-a-genocide ultra free speech didn't help.
Absolutely it did. We get to see who the crazies are. We get to see what extremist ideologies threaten our peace. We get to talk to people that hold those ideologies, understand them, sometimes demonstrate the error in their view and sometimes simply prepare for them.
They exist whether we hear their voices or not. It's better to hear their voices than not.
I start wondering if you've gotten your worldview messed up
That you over estimate how dangerous various ideologies are
Compared with traffic accidents, and possible worse, those who sometimes get elected as presidents in your country.
I'm wondering if the places on the internet you apparently visit, slightly have brought you into a fantasy world now, where you worry for and want to prepare for the wrong things. I'm wondering if you believe you need weapons to defend yourself? Whilst being less interested in climate change and wildfires?
> In any case, hateful let's-do-a-genocide ultra free speech didn't help.
have you read 1 thing by any political revolutionary of the past? ones you like. washington. lincoln. malcolm x. rosseau. they're quite violent, and would get censored by your 'lets-do-a-genocide free speech' laws.
Not "web" but the "attention economy" which tries to lure users into echo chambers and raise outrage in these chambers, so that the users spend more time there and click more (political) ads.
Stay away from the outrage machine. Be polite. Assume your partner in a dialogue is neither a fool nor malevolent. Quench flames. Try to understand, not to prove you're right.
> it is clear that the web creates an environment in which extremism thrives.
No, it's not clear. Please elaborate.
The strongest weapon against extremist ideas is other views on the issues that created the extremism in the first place. Most extremists don't want their people to communicate freely, for a reason.
Your argument presumes that the natural tendency of the web is to foster a free and open market of ideas, rather than a system of closed echo chambers each inhabiting distinct realities in a post-truth landscape.
That by no means seems to be a sure assumption today. If anything, the question now is whether the latter state of affairs might not be the default, and if so, whether it is reversible at all.
Just like people, not markets, create deadweight loss, rent, and negative externalities, and people, not institutions, cause systemic racism? /s
The web is a complex system that is more than capable of producing outcomes that are drastically different from the sum of its inputs (i.e. "people"). Based on what kinds of mechanism design and incentive structures are put in place, it is not only probable, but more mathematically likely that even a web filled only with rational correspondents will eventually devolve into a mess filled with falsehoods and echo chambers.
The important corollary to this insight? There's an entire class of structural remedies we can take that you're not even considering, before we even approach anything remotely resembling censorship on the individual.
You're talking about the "social media" in specific and not the web in general. Yes, social media create echo chambers, that's what they are for. The web never did, it created search engines to find arbitrary content, self-published blogs, online courses, Wikipedia etc. etc.
The web most certainly supported bubbles: who you link to has a huge impact on where readers go next and the language people use affects which results they get for searches (even before Google started personalizing things based on your past history).
It was slower than Twitter/Facebook but the effect is exactly the same as the social media problem. I have a relative who went down the conservative conspiracy theory rabbit hole in the years after 9/11 and the web was a huge accelerant for his intellectual decline because once he found a community of fellow travelers he’d stay in that network of blogs where they strenuously resisted outside sources or the general idea of objective reality. When those communities moved primarily onto social media, they moved faster and got wider range but the practices didn’t change at all.
You are arguing that the choices the web offers result in bubbles because some people choose to stick with particular types of content after discovering it through links. The web however offers just as many ways out of bubbles and there is no better remedy than this freedom. Your relative would not have been saved by a "nanny web" strictly policed by authorities, he would have stayed in a social bubble of personal relationships where the information choices available on the web are inaccessible. It's how extremism thrived before social media.
Having such freedom available is of no use if people won't make use of it. You assume a "nanny web" is about taking away these freedoms, when in fact it's about incentivizing people to actually utilize them.
I agree with you insofar as Mill's free market of ideas is the best remedy against bigotry and extremism, but you have the wrong idea about how to achieve that -- unregulated laissez-faire "freedom" on the web does not result in actual free discourse. On the contrary, that's just a recipe for a web overrun by all manner of adware, malware, spyware, propagation of unconscious self-censorship by means of universal targeted and mass surveillance, and straight-up disinformation ops and public opinion manipulation from hostile actors. How are you going to have sincere exchanges of ideas at scale over all that noise?
People are just as free to follow diverse viewpoints on social media but for many people that’s not the point. They want that bubble and are determine to avoid it. That doesn’t change with the choice of forum.
Similarly, there’s not that big difference on “policing” - the social media companies enforce very basic terms of service but most people use web hosts with relatively similar terms. The major difference is the discovery mechanism (and the fact checking applied to certain politicians’ accounts which aren’t banned on public interest grounds) which is closer to how search engines avoid sending links to certain sites with bad reputations. A lot of what Twitter/Facebook block will also be dropped by Google or many free web hosts. You can definitely get away with more but I don’t see much reason to believe that it’s a major difference rather than minor variations depending on which companies and content you’re talking about.
There's a possibility that if instead of discussing and debating ideas we disagree with, we repress them and try to bury them, it will just form a darker, more extreme underground network. Extremism isn't some new thing. Right now certain political viewpoints are allowed to be discussed and others are not. The Overton window is very small. That leads people who disagree to try to find each other and band together, form some kind of opposition. Because their opinions are repressed, they stay insulated in their bubbles (as do people with mainstream opinions). The isolation leads to extremism.
If you look at the polarization of politics in the united states, both sides hate each other and they won't talk. Maybe if there was some kind of discourse, things wouldn't be so bad. Right now the only words exchanged are insults, all republicans are alt-right, all democrats are communists. It wasn't always like that. It used to be possible for people who vote differently to be friends, or even live in the same household.
That is exactly right. It also gives them an intellectual martyrdom card and a veneer of coolness. If you want the next hip counterculture that all the kids are into to be Naziism, by all means suppress it.
Nazis don’t deserve to be handed the “2 Live Crew effect.” For those who don’t know this was a mediocre booty rap group whose record went triple platinum after attempts were made to ban it.
A parent poster raised another great point: the echo chambers that are full of this toxic stuff are themselves not free speech zones. They are heavily moderates safe spaces for specific ideologies and cultures. I am not convinced that this stuff would fare so well on a level intellectual playing field. It’s asinine.
On a final note it’s important to point out that the original explosion of e.g. Qanon happened not via some decentralized free speech zone or even the chans (where it was always ironic or a prank for most) but on social platforms with algorithmic timeline.
The algorithmic timeline is what has really ruined online discourse and promoted an explosion of insanity. Discourse on these sites is not equals but is weighted toward what will maximize engagement. Trolling, demagoguery, shock mongering, and various forms of “porn” (outrage porn, fear porn) are what maximizes engagement.
The algorithmic timeline would be extremely hard to implement in a decentralized system. That’s perhaps a good thing. It might look more like the genuinely flat forum world of the old Internet where discourse was comparatively far more reasonable.
> The algorithmic timeline is what has really ruined online discourse and promoted an explosion of insanity.
This is a really good point. I think it's important to point to this as the root of the problem, and realize that what's good for Facebook and Twitter isn't what's good for society.
I think a lot of this debate is on false premises. It’s not free unbiased media vs censorship but a debate over different kinds of biased media. All social platforms that implement any form of gamification or algorithmically weighted presentation are absolutely not neutral and will tend to promote whatever best satisfies the algorithm or echo chamber effect (in the case of gamified forums).
If the goal of the site is to maximize engagement, that’s going to be extremism, edgelording, porn, and trolling.
The algorithm has absolutely no way of knowing what I want. It can only guess by looking at what I've viewed, and the real motive is always to keep me on the site and maximize engagement.
As I said: negativity maximizes engagement.
Let me give you a simple example. Lets say I walk past you on the sidewalk and say hi. Not much engagement. Now lets say I walk up to you and punch you. I have just maximized engagement. Which is a better interaction?
I agree with your sentiment that this can be a slippery slope, but I also think that you (and TFA) are glossing over an important point: there's a huge difference between distribution infrastructure and discovery infrastructure.
The internet was full of conspiracy theories, crackpots, and silliness, well before the facebooks, youtubes, and so forth. The key difference is that these were hard to find. Early on, the most effective discovery infrastructure was based on hand-curated indexes (e.g., [1,2]). These moved slowly and were hard to game. Now, those same indexes are generated by algorithms, the gaming of which has spawned an entire cottage industry.
The parent's viewpoint and TFA are not incompatible, as long as we don't assume that content distribution and content discovery have to come from the same service. The open internet survived for over 2 decades without bringing down democracy. At the same time, it would be a good idea to see a bit more editorial responsibility from services driving discovery. Better still, if hosting and discovery are decoupled, there's no network effects or content archive creating a captive audience if editorial power is abused.
Tying things back to TFA, and perhaps the point that you're trying to make here, amadeuspagel: IPFS seems mostly aimed at providing hosting infrastructure rather than discovery. I'll emphasize the point again: censorship-free hosting has been largely unproblematic for the past two decades. What's been getting us into trouble now is discovery without editorial review (and forcibly tying discovery to hosting).
I thought about what you said, and immediately connected it with several other claims of things that also rise with tech advancement... marginal impact of weapons, medicine, intelligence, entrepreneurship/luck, sports, games, entertainment, communications...
So if the marginal impact of everything rises, then maybe that’s just the way of technology? It increases leverage. But then in relative terms, all those things still have the same impact? Or maybe the ratios between them change (e.g. weapons/nukes became more more powerful than communications)? Or maybe there’s other areas that massively reduced in marginal impact (e.g. production of food)...
There is an idea out there that it is always easier to destroy than it is to create or maintain order. As technology progresses, the power to destroy, create, or maintain increases, but do they increase at the same rate? It very well may be that the power to destroy has vastly outgrown are ability to create or maintain. Case in point, our nuclear bombs could kill most of us within the hour, yet science is barely learning how to stop the great killer, aging. Will we get to a point where any individual can order a few parts and kill millions? It seems inevitable if we continue along our current trajectory. Agreat Scifi book that explores these questions is Rainbows end [1]
> I miss when we justified censorship with the fact that children might see something. At least that actually happened instead of being a fantasy.
So, you're saying: "At least a nuke went off?" or that a nuke going off is a fantasy? You know that plenty have gone off, and a few killed a lot of people, right?
I don't have any big problem with nuclear power, but I don't want to see a nuke go off.
The radicalisation directly driven by 8chan, in particular, has led to a large number of people being shot. Dead.
There are dead people, because 8chan was allowed to exist.
That is not something that you should be fighting for. You are not fighting for any greater good there. You are promoting something that leads to actual, real people dying.
I support the right for you to have your own opinion. You should support my right to have my own, too. In this circumstance though it feels like a knee-jerk reaction without citation or factual evidence supporting your strong opposition.
The reality is the reason why people commit crimes, including violent ones such as murder, is a deeply complex subject that has the full time focus of many highly educated people. A simple one-liner attributing extremism to a specific site you find distasteful isn't constructive IMO.
Here's a quick primer on the history of crime and criminal psychology walking through the various phases of understanding why people commit criminal or violent acts. https://law.jrank.org/pages/12004/Causes-Crime.html
I have an absolutism posture on free speech. Everyone should say whatever they want without fear or retribution. This includes offensive speech. If this incites violence, so be it. Why not invest in mental health care instead of suppression of speech? The history of mental health care in the USA is abysmal.
I also come down staunchly on the side that freedom of speech should be broadly and zealously protected.
However, that doesn’t mean to me that speech should be free from consequences. To do so, you’d have to make it free from side-effects (including changing others’ minds) which would make it pointless.
The warmongering driven by the New York Times regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in particular, has led to a large number of people being blown up. Dead.
There are dead people, because the New York Times was allowed to exist.
That is not something that you should be fighting for. You are not fighting for any greater good there. You are promoting something that leads to actual, real people dying.
Whilst the media can influence people, including politicians, there is very little in common between the lead up to the Iraq war and the mass murders the parent poster is referring to.
The death of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987 effectively killed the integrity of journalism and allowed op-ed and infotainment to take place of informed and factual reporting.
I'd be happy if this was successfully reintroduced. I can't imagine why this isn't widely supported, especially by those who detest "fake news" and want misinformation to be suppressed.
Just in America alone... more Americans have died of automobile accidents than total deaths in World War 1&2 __combined__. Going by your knee-jerk reaction that maybe a few people died from an internet forum, we also should absolutely abolish automobiles, right? I mean, automobiles crashes have literally killed more humans in ONLY America, than both world wars, terrorism, and extremist hate speech combined. Why do vehicles get a pass? And then this just leads us to the old "NERF the world" sentiment in which, every single thing humans do is dangerous enough that maybe we shouldn't allow anyone to do anything at all? Right?
>> Records indicate that there were 3,613,732 motor vehicle fatalities in the United States from 1899 to 2013.
Also 70 - 80 million people died in just the second world war.
So your first claim is wrong by well over an order of magnitude. If you meant just US deaths in both wars, you should say so. But in this case, I feel you should choose another comparison. To be so selective would be disrespectful to approximately a hundred million non-American war casualties.
Yes, you are correct that I meant to say Americans and not total all deaths like I typed. However, the point that vehicles are acceptable even though they cause vast deaths, yet for some reason if one thing someone doesn't like causes hardly any deaths, they can strongly condemn anyone being allow free speech and create a slippery slope.
If you were to add automobile accidents in all other countries combined with the US figures, you do get obviously a much higher figure. Automobile accidents are very high up on the list of cause of death.
(The article also only takes into account US traffic deaths since 2000 being greater than both world wars, and of course there were magnitudes more deaths going back to the 1970s, likely in the earlier decades as well I wasn't trying to be super pedantic, which is why I'll still leave my above post intact.)
a system that simultaneously depends on the opinions of the populace (consumer choice, voting) to make good decisions, and can't trust those same people to make a well informed choice is kind of at odds with itself
This looks like a paradox but it's easily resolved when you realize that trust isn't binary.
The "wisdom of crowds" depends on the question asked, the algorithm used, and the countermeasures that keep people from gaming it.
A simple example: if you want to have good restaurant reviews, it's a good idea to exclude people who never ate at the restaurant in question. That alone isn't necessarily going to get good results, but it will help.
Just letting strangers do whatever they want in group activities online typically has bad results. This has been tried many times. If you want to get good results you need some kind of structure.
Who imposes this structure? The people building the system.
But that's the paradox. Who said an uncensorable IPFS will not become completely overloaded by corporate and government propaganda? How is it harder for them than individuals to create any narrative that suits their agenda? IPFS is not a panacea to powerful overlords.
Uncensorable by governments doesn't imply unmoderated by anyone whatsoever. You can have someone ejecting trolls and propaganda but not censoring legitimate speech, as long as it's someone you trust. And, importantly, not everyone has to trust the same party -- if they start censoring something you think they shouldn't then, unlike censorship by government or corporate monopolists, you can go and get it somewhere else.
A good example of the hypocracy of facebook is, while they censor content for the good of all, they run an onion site-- facebookcorewwwi.onion to evade censorship by others.
As much as facebook is a thing I love to hate, I don't see the problem there. It's not because you have an onion site that you are forced to allow any content whatsoever, and in fact many onion services explicitly forbid certain types of content for good reasons.
You're free to not connect to their platform either way (and to be subject to their limitations regarding contents and behaviour), whereas setting up an onion service can be about stuff that people aren't free to avoid (i.e. censorship by the only ISP they might have, by a state, etc). There's no issue with consistency there.
why is that hypocrisy? Even if facebook censors, it's plausible that their positios is that they want to let you opt-in to censorship. an onion site lets you use the site that they censor on an opt-in basis. (I opted out of facebook just over a month ago).
The hypocrisy is that the company chooses to fight the 'free speech' fight by evading the censorship of governments when it benefits them and censors those it disagrees with otherwise.
In the end it will government which ends up picking and controlling the censorship. And then it will pick your poison. USA, some European, some Middle-Eastern, Chinese, Russian? I wouldn't trust any of them, not to even mention raising Africa and Americas... Or other East-Asian...
Likely it will devolve to regional or country specific centralized web with those currently in the lead making the decisions. That doesn't sound too great...
It seems the current pro-censorship group has a fairly homogeneous political slant as evidenced by the author's statement:
> It’s offered a megaphone to those promoting dangerous ideas like white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other anti-LGBTQ positions, and sometimes outright Nazism.
This group always seems to willfully ignore or is ignorant of 20th century history WRT Russian and China.
I also find it interesting how the spread of extreme ideology is characterized as being the result of the free flow of information, when a cursory look at the situation shows that it is not the case. There are sites such as this one where anyone can pretty much say anything they like, and you don't see this phenomenon here. Where you do see this phenomenon is on sites where algorithms control the spread of information directly based on business incentives centered around attention grabbing and emotional reaction, and less commonly (but increasingly more commonly) sites that outright require ideological conformity to participate.
I’m not disagreeing with your general point, but this is definitively not a site where anyone can pretty much say what they like. Individuals flag posts and comments, which can keep them from showing up. The mods here are very active, responding to user reports and dealing with content that breaks the site guidelines. IMO that moderation is what makes this site generally tolerable, as compared to other discussion forums on the internet.
It’s possible I misinterpreted you and you meant “anything they like” in the sense of being able to hold (almost) any opinion and be able to express it, provided it’s expressed politely and in good faith. In that case, I would still argue that it’s only the selective moderation of impoliteness and poor faith arguments that keeps this site bearable.
If you want to predict the future just look at history. The belief that somehow these groups will get it right and aren't inherently harmful is false.
At my prior job we were fairly big (1000+) and had internal meetings more or less instructing people how to vote. We had a significant social reach and the ability to promote arbitrary articles such as news. We had editorial guidelines forcing us to be politically biased. As much as I disagree with the current president I do think there was some sort of attempt at manipulation. Whether it was successful or not is beyond my ability to analyze.
I am actively developing tools for the purpose of evading censorship. I find it disturbing that people have stopped supporting free speech when they stopped liking its content. Disturbing because either these people have caved to yet another mob thought or never believed in the concept at all. I don't agree with most of the content I see on my platforms. The content doesn't change me, however-- and I refuse the premise that we tech workers know best and therefore must protect the fragile little minds of everyone else.
I really hate that these discussions always end up stopping at whether the idea of censorship is good or bad. One side will point out all the bad ways censorship can be used, and then the other side will point out the misinformation that spreads when there is absolute free speech.
The thing is, both sides are right. However, neither side ever talks about trying to take any steps to mitigate the negatives of their position.
I am anti-censorship, but I think that people on our side can't just ignore the damage misinformation is causing our society right now. We also can't just rely on the old adage that "the truth will win out in the end". Free speech advocates like to believe that is a truism, but the evidence keeps showing us that that isn't true. There is nothing inevitable about the truth, and lies have many advantages that can often prevent the truth from winning.
So what do we do? I am much more interested in talking about steps we can take to mitigate and prevent misinformation while preserving free speech.
Just because censorship isn't a good option doesn't mean we should just throw up our hands and allow misinformation to win the day. The truth needs allies, and allies with a strategy.
Misinformation, by mistake or intention, is bad. But without freedom to publish and speak, nothing can be done about it. This is especially true when the government is spreading the misinformation. Soviet Russia jokes aside, without freedom of speech and press, our soon to be former president would have been able to spread misinformation with impunity. It's really remarkable that this happened.
The other side of this, that most people don't like to discuss is that people are also free to believe misinformation and lies. It's hard, but that is actually part of the human condition.
I feel that solution is to build, use, and promote platforms that encourage dialog without censorship. A free exchange of ideas is still the right solution. This includes discouraging the practice of silence-by-mob. All these tactics accomplish is polarization and tribalism and don't do much to contain disinformation.
That is a good question for which I don't have a good answer. A good first step would be to stop celebrating the aftermath of these actions. As to the racists part, I haven't personally seen the explosion of racism linked to free speech that keeps ketting implied. I suspect that some of this is hyperbole. This line of thought implies that ultimately anyone who seeks out a free speech platform is a racist or supports racism. I think this is dangerous.
I'm curious what platforms you're on that don't censor things where you haven't seen some bullshit stuff. I haven't sought out any free speech platforms.
I also don't think that line of though implies that everyone is a racist. The previous comment just implies that racists will seek out these platforms because it is the only platform that will accept them. Not that everyone who seeks these out are racists. Just enough racist and shitty people who got kicked out of the larger platforms will slowly fill up these free speech platform
Every alternative platform that is focused on absolute free speech. If you found an anti-witch-hunt society, the population will be primarily witches, regardless of how bad witch hunts are. Not having free speech is detrimental if there isn't an alternative, and it's detrimental for any alternatives. The only solution that works out the best is having free speech.
The answer is probably not in building a system, but by individuals putting in the effort to challenge misinformation in the contexts where it is deployed. I feel the phrase “don’t feed the trolls” and XKCD 386 have caused a generation to give up on fighting the good fight, while the trolls have not given up.
I don’t think there is a lot of radical strategy needed here - just a lot of hard work and vigilance.
When you see misinformation, take the effort to call it out, and hope that your civility and reasonableness win over the silent audience.
Easier said than done when dealing with echo-chamber communities, but those communities have to spill out into your own world at some point, and I guess that’s the point to tackle it.
I don’t know, my wife spends literal hours a day arguing with people on Facebook about COVID-19, citing CDC statistics, sometimes arguing with 20 people at a time.
The problem is the flow of all this goes something like.
1) A friend of hers posts something factually incorrect about COVID or lockdowns.
2) My wife posts a carefully worded and cited response.
3) Four or five people react with laugh or angry emojis.
4) someone weighs in and tells my wife how stupid and dumb she is, and how she is completely wrong. They often say this in a very nasty way.
5) She responds in a firm but not rude way that she believes they are wrong. She cites sources.
6) This person never responds again, and drops off.
7) A new person weighs in, generally rudely, making ad hominem attacks about her weight or whatever else they can.
8) She argues with them as well, never personally attacking them. She focuses on facts and statistics.
9) Over the course of hours she starts to accumulate likes and a significant number of people thumbs up her responses despite not saying anything.
I don’t know how she manages it, honestly. I can’t argue like this at all, it’s completely draining. She likes to think that because the threads are so active that hundreds of people are watching and she’s helping to change minds to think more rationally. But it’s hard to know for sure, and I don’t think most people have the psychological wherewithal that she has to deal with how abrasive and rude all these people are to her.
> 2) My wife posts a carefully worded and cited response.
> 3) Four or five people react with laugh or angry emojis.
> 4) someone weighs in and tells my wife how stupid and dumb she is, and how she is completely wrong. They often say this in a very nasty way.
> 5) She responds in a firm but not rude way that she believes they are wrong. She cites sources.
> 6) This person never responds again, and drops off.
Happens to me as well in other forums.
I have decided I'm not doing it for those people, but rather for those who would otherwise read the post, see it was uncontested and think "therefore it must be true".
Kudos to her for trying. I’m sure it feels like picking up a single bag of litter while mass pollution continues all around us, but change starts small and if only more people put in the effort to contest nonsense when they see it, we’d be further ahead than any technological solution to misinformation.
I think we've seen that doesn't work. It's incredibly difficult to counter misinformation because there's SO MUCH OF IT. Plus you can't assume the general populace has the time or energy to do it. If I'm working 10 hour retail shift, help tuck the kids in, and then check FB.
Why do you think I have the time to check my friend's post for disinformation? Yes I can be skeptical of it but sometimes it's hard to decipher that especially when it may confirm to your own biases.
You can counter misinformation on a particular topic scalably by gathering a set of authoritative sources of information on it, and presenting them in places where there is discussion about that topic (ex. YouTube putting COVID info links on videos). Now of course some people won't believe that information, but those people weren't going to have their mind changed regardless of what you do.
> I refuse the premise that we tech workers know best and therefore must protect the fragile little minds of everyone else.
I quit my tech job and went into construction. Only in hindsight has it been glaringly obvious how egocentric tech workers are. High paid, wielding incredible power, and the praise from their managers/peers just reinforces delusions.
Try doing a hard days work in a skilled trade such as woodworking, electrical, or HVAC. Now that's humbling. It also exposes you to many different people and types of thinking, which IMO, promotes healthy self perspective. Echoing here even on HN just amplifies the dilemma.
more and more i've grown into the opinion that aspiring members of the professional class should be required to spend at least one year doing some form of ungracious working class labor. there are things you learn as a line cook or a garbage truck driver that not even the most elite school will ever be able to teach you.
personally i think i would've become a real asshole if not for misfortune & hardship and learning exactly what it means to start over with nothing.
Yep, definitely. I'm very fortunate that I didn't discover coding until my late twenties. I worked odd jobs in several industries, and right up until I started in tech, I was working two jobs in order to make $30K per year. I feel unbelievably lucky to be in this industry and I try not to take it for granted.
Early high schools in the US had shop classes, too. It was still just a token effort at trade work but it was still something. Almost all of these classes have been cut due to budget.
I am not a trade professional, but I do a lot of physical building projects as an amateur. I find the work to be much more mentally stimulating than my job in a well-known CS/EE research lab. I think that it is because structures must be elegant, and every piece affects many others. This can also be true for code, but it often isn’t. At work I’m forced to take part in software monstrosities that any tradesman would laugh at if it were a piece of architecture. And it’s okay to laugh and be laughed at too.
I did it at an amateur level many years before depending on it to pay my mortgage. When you do it for a living it's very different. You no longer strive for perfection, you strive for expectations management.
Some things cannot be perfect due to prior imperfect work. For example if a room isn't square, or something isn't level, you build your new work to match previous errors or your work looks out of place.
I walk onto a jobsite and there are some unspoken rules. Learning these rules is part of the fun. At the end of the day it's just a bunch of people trying to get something done.
Working in trade also helps you accept the principle of "good enough". You should always try your best, never give up, but accept things aren't perfect. What you see as imperfect will likely never be noticed by the property owner.
Dealing with the customer has some quirks too. If you run a bundle of cat6 that looks like laminar flow then you will blow their socks off. They assume everything else is perfect. Meanwhile you could have wrapped cat6 around a/c ducts 10 times in the attic and they will never know.
New generations come and go. Nobody is born with pre-existing notions of what is right or not, including free speech. It's not a surprise that some values are replaced with others on a per generation basis.
> I find it disturbing that people have stopped supporting free speech when they stopped liking its content.
I think the problem is that - in the west at least - we have fairly good free speech, and the governments do not routinely go around censoring discussion etc (obviously this is not true everywhere and varies from place to place).
So this means that people who want to say something can say something using the usual means/technologies. They do not generally need to resort to anything special to avoid censorship or consequences.
As a result, a large proportion of the people who do end up using the uncensorable/untraceable tech are the worst of society doing outright illegal stuff. Drug dealers, kiddie fidlers, murders, organised crime, terrorists etc.
I love the idea of decentralised web tech etc, but I do not want to spend my time facilitating the scum of society to break the laws in my country. I also don't want to host their decentralised content on my machines or waste my bandwidth transmitting their uncensorable porn etc.
Of course I realise that there are places in the world where there are not as many freedoms as I enjoy and people might genuinely need to use such technology to avoid oppression. I guess I am just selfish.
Tl;Dr - you can support free speech without supporting illegal activity.
> I find it disturbing that people have stopped supporting free speech when they stopped liking its content.
You're misunderstanding the argument. The argument isn't that they don't like the content. The argument is that it's a net-negative to society, and possibly an extreme-negative.
>when they stopped liking its content
well when that content is "these people do not deserve to live, are degenerate, and need need to be killed" I think it is reasonable to protest against that.
You can't have consistent good content without curation and moderation, both of which are considered forms of censorship. The closest thing to what you're describing in the /g/ board on 4chan, except of course even they have a line.
There's a distinction between moderation and censorship.
Moderation is just removing spam, comments that have no point, or personal attacks.
It crosses into censorship when removing alternate ideas even if the ideas are well sourced and logical and presented in a respectful manner.
Be sure not to confuse the two.
These are clear differences.
4chan let's anything go except, I believe, pedophilia, including personal attacks and comments with no point. Very little moderation.
Hacker News will actively remove posts that are counter to prevailing narrative even if well sourced and presented respectfully. So bordering on Censorship.
It's sort of a form of the paradox of tolerance. If there is no moderation, the least pleasant/most abrasive people will drag the quality of discussion down, and drive everyone else away. That's not to say I agree with the conclusions of the author of the blog post
Moderation and censorship are radically different.
Moderation is just to prevent spam and personal attacks and things that have no connection to the conversation.
Censorship is manipulating the conversation by removing ideas that go against the conversation even if they are relevant, well sourced, and respectfully presented.
The difference between censorship and moderation is entirely subjective. Censors always think they're moderators — that they're protecting the quality of the discourse rather than stifling ideas they dislike — because part of how they rationalize their dislike of those ideas is by believing that they harm the discussion.
If it's increased, it hasn't scaled with population. Reagan was well known for cutting the Department of Education's budget[0], and the public school system in Florida is abysmal. In places like that, it's implied that, if you remotely care about your kid's education, you enroll them into a private school[1]. A lot of those are Catholic, too. No wonder the right likes them.
Considering that textbooks now ship with software licenses, I'm not surprised. The education vendors are all-too-quick to find reason to soak up any available gubmint cheddar.
For the expense, where is the value? My kids' online curriculums are a nightmare. They're expected to keep track of arbitrary assignments across a litany of broken "apps" without any sort of cohesion. One of them is taking chemistry-- online!
And naturally, we need to redefine the way we teach things like basic math for every generation. Forced obsolescence rears its ugly head here too. My parents could never figure out my math homework. I can't figure out my own kids'. Thankfully we have Pearson's successive suites of books and erratic ActiveX plugins to show us what the ancients haven't.
Government spending should not be considered an indicator of progress.
just out of curiosity, have you ever made any effort to actually interact with the qboomers or is your view of them entirely based on the opinioneering of your preferred media personalities?
it's hard for me find them particularly threatening to democracy when really they're just a different partisan stripe of the burnouts who would tell you to 'just watch zeitgeist maaaaaaaaaan' in the early 2000s.
The content changes enough individuals that there is aggregate effect on larger scale social dynamics which impacts all facets of society. Unregulated free speech with wide reach over global media platforms is not standard human interaction. It is unnatural. It is new medium dyamamic with different messaging potential. Online censorship is not about limiting free speech, it's calibrating / optimizing the new medium for specific messaging goals. Right now it's money and eyes, maybe a more sensible one is political serenity. It doesn't have to be Chinese great firewall level of suppression, but more and more are realizing it can't be next to nothing.
Why can't it be next to nothing? How is freely discussing things with other people without someone policing that unnatural? You're making a lot of declarative suppositions that are self supportive, and you have to explain and justify them. A cursory look at least from my point of view shows that at least the two I mentioned are entirely unfounded.
Freely discussing in small human-social scale is natural. Ability to broadcast and disseminate information at instantaneous, transnational scale is as unnatural as printing press, radio and television. For individuals to do so via unfettered individual platform outside of existing power structures that's foundation to all large scale human governance systems since history even more so. Free speech + mass dissemination was conceived and rationalized as the ultimate democratic instrument, and it may very well be. But it is also an artificial instrument that was always going to disrupt. We anticipated it, an experimented with it for 15 years. The question now is whether this type of instrument is useful for governance and this type of democracy preferable. I don't think it is.
I don't think it isn't either, there could very well be a combination of factors like proper media and civil literacy that enables a society that could operate with unlimited speech. All I _feel_ is the status quo now is not working. Many feel the same way. It's not a hard why, it's a slowing growing consensus that does not feel misplaced. Information and ideas spreading faster than word of mouth and walking speed shapes society through each successive technological mediation that enables faster and broader transmission. Free speech in person with your peers is not the same as free speech online. Hence medium is the message. If the medium is the problem, than tweak it.
Ideally none, I'm not against free speech, I'm against unfettered dissemination on default mass media platforms. I would like to see a system where no one is censored at all, but certain categories are suppressed below default public visibility. i.e. politics and things tangentially related to politics to be treated as NSFW tags. One tier above spam. Still viewable by those curious, but not elevated to current prominence. Ultimately a system like western TikTok, the default category is vastly apolitical content but you have to search for fringe partisan issues, and those issues are siloed from the greater user base.
>I find it disturbing that people have stopped supporting free speech when they stopped liking its content.
I think the issue is the current system seems to be pushing content people would usually avoid. My position is _edit: not_ pro-censorship, it's pro-moderation / curation / or suppression if we're being less charitable.
>I refuse the premise that we tech workers know best and therefore must protect the fragile little minds of everyone else.
I don't think it's the tech workers job to decide how to protect, but to implement protection based on what's good for mental health and not dark patterns for monetization. There's studies on the effects of social media out there, people are fragile. Current social media feels like it exist in pre traffic regulation and seat-belt era of safety. Not just for users, but for society.
Interesting. The analogy I reach for is the invention of the printing press. It saw an explosion of pamphlets in Germany, around the Reformation. Luther was one of the great authors. But by the 1520s the ideological opening had led to the Peasants War, and the disaster of Münster (think Waco on a larger scale). Luther himself became disillusioned, and turned more towards the power of the civil authorities and away from unrestricted Bible reading.
Yet, in the long run, societies that embraced this chaotic power did better than those that tried to repress it.
The rhetoric coming from Big Tech ("we can't let people even think these bad ideas") is extremely similar to the rhetoric that came from the Catholic Church during the Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion. The universalist ethic is also the same; i.e. letting other parts of the world have differing ethical views on certain issues is unacceptable and must be eliminated. There cannot be more than one opinion on X social issue, just as there could not be more than one interpretation of Christianity.
I think we are still in the power-building stages. There is no real alternative to Facebook/YouTube/etc. yet. But say, 30 years from now, there probably will be. Combined with increasing governmental hostility, we'll probably see a deeply fractured internet, undercut by a (semi-illegal) totally open one.
I don't know, I think it just betrays a deep insecurity. Who cares what a bunch of teenagers say on the Internet? Even the real world consequences of fringe online groups are minuscule in comparison to their perceived threat.
Civil society, in theory, is supposed to be about keeping civil with people that you have fundamental disagreements with - so that society can function. That has morphed into one highly religious in tone, in which it's not merely enough to tolerate other people - you have to convert them, and if they refuse to comply, excommunicate (deplatform) them.
I think instead of deplatform them, it's trying to force them off onto their own platform.
When racists (or similar "undesirables") share a larger platform they've kinda got to be on their best behaviour, they can't be too obvious instead they've got to be subtler and in doing so they likely attract more people to their cause because susceptible people tip toe in their direction gradually.
If they're all forced out onto their own platforms because of "muh free speech" the users won't tolerate being policed and so the absolute worst comes out and anyone stumbling across the community is going to be repelled fairly quickly.
That assumes they all only go to one place, which then turns into a cesspool that immediately repels anyone who enters.
There are two problems with this. The first is that it works both ways. If you expel all the heretics then your site becomes a cesspool of groupthink that immediately repels anyone who has had so much as a conversation with someone from the other side, because you'll be saying things that are transparently wrong to anyone who has had any real-world contact with the subject matter and be unable to correct yourself because anyone who spots the error fears being ejected for pointing it out.
And the second is that the version of the opposition on their best behavior for doing recruitment doesn't actually disappear, it just ends up in separate places. Your opponents will have their home base which is full of their own obviously wrong groupthink, but there will also continue to exist places where moderates gather.
Which means you have a new problem. The place where moderates gather will still have the subtle extremism you were trying to eject, but now, because your population hasn't been exposed to it, they're more susceptible to it. They're unvaccinated. So now you have to not only eject the extremists but also the moderates, because anyone who starts listening to the moderates may start to realize that some parts of the things your own extremists say aren't exactly true. Which puts them at high risk of switching to the other team. And you've already turned the other team into a coalition of crazy extremists. But ejecting the moderates turns your team into a coalition of crazy extremists, which is likewise quite ungood.
People like their own online bubbles in much the way they like their own offline bubbles. If you're sick of hearing the shit some people spew in the real world you don't go out of your way to be in the same places as them if you can avoid it.
We choose our social circles and the material we consume in real life it's not unsurprising this happens online as well. These broad platforms like twitter, reddit e.t.c. aren't any more immune to this than offline.
So let me give you an example of the problem. You have your filter bubbles, but then you visit an independent forum for amateur taxidermy. It has an irrelevant miscellaneous section which is well moderated enough to not be full of spam, but not by someone who really cares about or even particularly understands politics at all.
Someone on that forum posts the following statement. "The concept of white privilege is anti-Semitic because the subset of white people who are doing better than black people are disproportionally Jewish."
The factual component is true, it's not obviously spam, so the moderators leave it there. But what happens when people on the left read that?
It pits members of the same coalition against each other. If you're black you start wondering whether Jewish privilege is a term you should start employing, but you're not likely to be pleased with the response if you do, and that may leave a bad taste in your mouth. If you're Jewish you feel attacked and suddenly nervous about a popular tenet of your party's platform. If you're a non-Jewish white Democrat who has never been exposed to anything like this before, you're primed to receive some outright Nazi propaganda next.
Statements like that need to be encountered for the first time in an environment where the problems with them can be analyzed thoughtfully and without vitriol or recriminations, because otherwise, when they are encountered, they create internal conflicts and push people into the arms of the opposition.
If you ban them from your filter bubble, that is not the context in which they'll be first encountered.
This is self correcting. The mod will see the inevitable shit storm and ban anything that looks remotely like it in the future. The filter bubble of amateur taxidermists will filter it out in the future.
"Statements like that need to be encountered for the first time in an environment where the problems with them can be analyzed thoughtfully and without vitriol or recriminations, because otherwise, when they are encountered, they create internal conflicts and push people into the arms of the opposition."
This will never happen in social media. Unless in some highly highly moderated forum setup for the purpose, which is its own filter bubble and in which expertise of the participants can be ascertained.
Any forum like that essentially excludes most of the general public.
You're assuming the shit storm happens on the taxidermy forum. But most of the taxidermists aren't there to talk about that stuff, or maybe some of them are but they're not the sort to be uncivil or try to cancel the heretics, so it isn't a problem there.
But then those people bring the heresy into the rest of their lives and get thumped by the mob for crimethink when they bring it up. And then once they're declared an enemy by their own tribe they seek refuge in the opposition.
...and this actually happens how often? Say, in comparison to the consequences of suppressing speech (easily observable throughout the 20th century)? Or even just other causes of death or violence? It's minuscule, so little that it's almost absurd to even be worried about it.
It’s non-obvious what the consequences of suppressing free speech are. You can’t just assume an equivalent between that and fascism or socialism. Today, Germany bans certain kinds of hate speech, as a result of its previous experience.
They send hate letters to each other with stagecoach services?
The problem is that there is no such thing as "freedom of speech" it's BS, there is a right to have an opinion, but some opinions are crimes and should never become speech, let alone be public
Corollary: public speech must be granted to everyone, because it's in the US Constitution, but you should not use it to badmouth the US
Not as an occupant of course, because that's what usually Americans living abroad do
The point is to prove that "freedom of speech" said by American corporations is ridiculous and nobody should believe it, on the contrary, everybody should start to worry
If you're sincere, you are definitely acting on incomplete information with regard to what America and Americans are actually like, and missing the point that it's individuals who need to have the freedom to speak, not corporations. If you're here with an agenda, well, whatever you're doing isn't making the world better.
Individuals will retain the freedom to speak even if we shutdown social networks.
That's the point you are missing.
> whatever you're doing isn't making the world better.
Imagine what a nation founded to avoid taxation and that became a superpower by securing resources in half of the World by starting wars or supporting dictators that committed genocides is doing to make the World better...
OP never said he pretends that USA are not a violent country where mass shootings don't happen all the time. OP implied that young adults PLANNING mass shootings on the INTERNET is miniscule.
What website should we block if we want to avoid another Boston Marathon bombing or men running trucks over people in Christmas markets like in Berlin?
(I just realized that both happened mere blocks of my residence at the time. Maybe if I become homeless we will be able to prevent these horrific events)
So rare that a very similar one happened in the French Riviera just some months after?
Anyway, the point is that we can not solve social issues with technological solutions. You are just acting on the symptoms but still never going to get a cure. Block a "cancerous" open site, and crazy sick people are just continue to do what they do in a darker corner of the net.
Like a few times in a century, not hundreds times in a year, every year, sir.
Closing social networks is not a technological solution, it's political.
Public speech must not be controlled by private entities
Unless you are the US and don't understand it.
Crazy people with their forums for crazy people have no ability to target hundreds of millions of people through paid ads
Please, try to understand it, because it's really not that hard
There's a reason why every developed country in the World strictly controls firearms but not knifes
There's a reason why the only "developed" country where mass shootings happen all the time is the only developed country that refuses to strictly control firearms
It's the most evident proof of Einstein law of insanity
> Public speech must not be controlled by private entities
This is part where we disagree. Not that I am defending that private entities should "control" public speech, but rather that this control is circunstancial. Remove Facebook and Twitter (and every big media conglomerate as well, FOX, CNN, NBC) all you want, people will still look for groups that share their views and messages that confirm their biases.
This is not just a guess. I am seeing this first-hand with the people looking into leaving Twitter and joining Mastodon. Go to /r/mastodon and you will see me arguing with every one that comes with the idea that different instances mean different "communities" and "interests".
Also, consider the alternative. The article is saying that we shouldn't want a decentralized web. Who would you propose to "control" public speech? If not private companies and if not smaller groups, the only alternatives left is, guess what, Big State and tyrants
They always looked for places where to share their opinions with other people
Those places didn't weaponize their feelings and weaknesses against them to sell them ads
Want to make a global social network?
The State should be able to control them (every single state they operate in) and their decisions should be held accountable in court
The SN banned you?
They should have human support to solve the issues and a judge could overrule the decision, while now they are black holes
I trust the State, more than Facebook, if someone doesn't they shouldn't impose their decisions on other groups, including other countries
It's weird to read that people living in countries where the police can arrest you for not stepping out of the car or saying to a police officer to f*ck off defend the right to wear swastikas or private companies keeping public speech hostage in the name of freedom
Decentralised web can exists only among many small actors, when there are a few behemoth that control everything, of course segregation is gonna be the most obvious response: Russian internet, Chinese internet and let's hope European internet soon.
> Those places didn't weaponize their feelings and weaknesses against them to sell them ads.
This can be said of every media company. Every newspaper, magazine (low-brow or high brow), radio, TV station, cable TV company.
Every. Single. One.
> I trust the State, more than Facebook.
It doesn't matter who you trust more. It matters who you are able to disengage from. We as individuals and as groups can choose to keep Facebook of our lives. Can the Chinese say the same from the CCP?
> segregation is gonna be the most obvious response (...) let's hope European Internet
So, you are so afraid of Facebook's "control" of the internet that you would actively advocate to put in the hands of tyrants and kleptocrats?
Either you don't understand the concept of "decentralized web" or you are just fucking with me.
> Weird and revealing double standard you got there, comparing "Chinese" as a collective to "many" Americans.
Chinese are collectively more or less in the same situation, they are ethnically mostly the same people and live under the same rules, Americans are not.
Few very reach Americans enjoy all the freedom power can buy, everyone else either comply or suffer the consequences
You really did not know?
> Chinese who are much, much, much less free than nearly all Americans
Nope.
I don't believe in the kind of freedom Americans believe to possess
It's simply a different kind of tyranny
Unless you mean the freedom to be shot in the streets.
For example: there are 700 people in jail every 100k citizens in USA, they are only 115 in China.
In 2008 USA had the 25% of the global World jail population
And you know why?
Because the private prison system in USA is highly profitable
USA has the lowest life expectancy of the whole west and it's only one year longer than China, despite being the country with the highest spending per capita in healthcare in the entire globe.
Is this the freedom you're talking about?
So no, USA is not a benchmark for anything good, including the exercise of free speech, which is only a lame excuse to not take action against extremists propaganda
> Indeed
So sometimes you experience moments of lucidity when you see yourself for what you really are?
Have you ever considered the possibility that China has "less people in prison" because their government just kills any dissident and "troublemaker" without any semblance of due judicial process?
Stop giving him such a hard time! China's execution rate is a state secret, so no one really knows how high it is, but it's estimated to be significantly lower than that of peer countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran :)
And besides that, who cares if some troublemakers are killed off? The Han "collective" is not bothered by such minor things as individual rights and due process
> Because the private prison system in USA is highly profitable
LOL. You "know" just enough to remain comfortable in your ideology, and your self-imposed media echo chamber is more than happy to feed that "knowledge" to you.
If you think you are credible outside your tribe... don't quit your day job. You're just as delusional as the people whose speech you wish to control, and hence provide an abject illustration of why we don't want state control of our speech.
And don't feel bad that China is still behind the US in so many ways, there will be a Great Leap Forward very soon!
Regarding media: "playing the insecurities of people to sell them ads" is actually something that every marketer does. No exceptions. Fabricate demand. From news channels that are considered infotainment to product placement spots on movies, from teen magazines that promote utterly wrong role models and lead girls to bulimia, anorexia and all sorts of psychosis to any property from Arianna Huffington that mastered the exploitation of outrage culture to sell to Millennials. Rest assured that every single media outlet that depends on ads to make money has no interest in elevated public discourse and thrives on public anxiety.
And no matter how bad it is, it is still better than State-owned media, which bypasses the whole marketing mechanisms and just relies on the ruling power to keep the very same type of public control through fear and intimidation.
Regarding China and freedom: tell me if you prefer to be Black in the US or a Uighur in a concentration camp. Afterwards tell me which people gets to more or less manipulated by their media.
China gets more propaganda, but average Chinese knows they're being fed propaganda, whereas free citizens with their free 5th estate are rarely aware of when their consent is being manufactured. More highinfo/curious Chinese are informed about the world simply because there's a fuckload of bilingual Chinese with English fluency able to share news from across the wall. You can't say the same about anglosphere and Chinese information literacy. The amount of absolutely ignorant western commentary on China is staggering, where as Chinese net actually has western perspectives that somewhat comport with reality.
At the end of the day, media that doesn't turn society into idiots that undermine national interests has its virtues and maybe preferrable. That was once the case with tame free media before much of it turned into divisive reality TV. Similarly you can have dangerous state media that whip up nationalist frenzy, cause sectarian violence etc, or you could have boring ass state media and manage civic engagement for political serenity. All media are manipulated, all narratives shaped, blatantly manipulating media for serenity to a knowing population self-fulfilling properties. People stop giving a shit about politics, and politicians end up government instead of campaigning. Prerequisite is having a good system for selecting competent leadership in the first place.
This is not unambiguously endorsing state media as good, but decline of free media in many places is simply that bad. Some countries still have passable public broadcasting, but for how long, and whether commercial pivot for ads + anxiety is terminal transition.
For Uyghurs: under the most delusional estimates, Chinese Uyghurs still have less lifetime chance of being in a indoctrination camp than US blacks in US prison industrial complex. For much shorter sentences. After they'll be coerced to work in vocational program for more pay, even adjusted for exchange rate. Not US prison labour moving covid bodies tier coerced labour, but actual useful jobs designed to transition into society instead of recidivate back into for profit prisons. China actually wants to integrate minorities instead of exclude, even at extreme costs. So I suppose the answer is, it's better to be a Chinese Uyghur in a few generations after they've been sinicized and integrated than a Black American in 20 years who will still be getting executed on the street and fighting equal treatment.
What good is it to be aware of the propaganda if no one gets to act and defend the values they seem worthy of protection?
Take the Hong Kong situation. If "highinfo/curious" chinese people in mainland China look at it and just repeat the Party line of "they are just troublemakers" instead of supporting them as loudly and as effectively as they can, then all this awareness of being fed propaganda is as good as nothing.
I mean, you are actually parroting the bullshit about concentration camps being about "integrating minorities". Minorities that are being tortured and brainwashed into submission are not "integrated", just destroyed while keeping a shell of the people to show around.
Maybe mainlanders don't deem HK worthy of protection. Mainlanders cared about pollution, they protested, government responded. They lost their shit at poor safety due to rapid development (aviation, high speed rail, food, medicine), the government responded. They were disgruntled over pork prices. The government responded. Chinese society skews old, conservative and anti LGBT. Government unfortunately responded. Unprecedented MeToo trials happening right now. Government responding. Sufficiently significant issues that elicit widespread attention gets addressed, Chinese people advocate for themselves all the time.
> fed propaganda
Fact is pork prices is literally a bigger problem to mainlanders than plight of privileged HKers with historic acrimonious relationship. This is a well understood dynamic, suggesting HKers would have ever got mainstream mainland support because of propaganda and not bad blood is exactly the kind of anglosphere illiteracy on China I'm talking about. ProHK / pro liberal reform voices exist but not much. Why? HK protestors from mainland perspective: young, nativist, disillusioned but privileged individuals who spread shit about mainlanders on social media for years... Yeah, I just described alt-right. Is it any surprise they got minimal support. Lots of mainland diaspora in the west with access to both side of the story, did meaningful numbers come out to support HK? No, they had access to both sides of the story, they just knew better.
>integration
Of course the goal is integration, CCP is not spending tremendous resources to be cruel for shits and giggles. If Han knew how much was going into XJ they'd protest, due to costs not human rights. Like people everywhere, the public would rather the minorities rot than take disproportionate resources. But unlike democracies, CCP can actually ignore public sentiment. Some in this generation will be a shell, their descendants will be integrated. It's ugly, but things move fast in Chinese 5 year plans. None of this long arc of justice nonsense. It's not right, but history will judge relative wrongness compared to locking up 1/4 of black Americans or trapping indigenous peoples in backwater reserves forever.
I hope you realize that you so into getting into a shouting match that you are not making any sense whatsoever.
I don't know where you are from, but as someone who grew up in Brazil, lived in the US for ~5 years and now has 7 years in both Northern and Southern Europe and close relationships in the Middle East: globalization is real. Someone autistic like you may not notice due to subtle differences to adapt to local cultures and local flavors, but the message everywhere is to get people to measure themselves by what they consume and to stimulate consumption by creating needs where there are none.
It might surprise you but being in the spectrum doesn't mean being autistic as in the cliché.
It's, as the same implies, a spectrum.
I've lived in the US, New York, Los Angeles and Columbus Ohio for a brief period.
(I also lived in Berlin and Barcelona, but that doesn't really count as a radically different experience for an European)
I have strong northern African looks, but am still white and loved every moment in the US.
But the devil is in the details, I could not ignore that when my friends there told me that some neighborhood was dangerous it really was dangerous, not dangerous as we usually mean it when we say it in Italy.
I could not ignore the staggering amount of homicides reported in the news.
This year LA will surpass 300 homicides in a year, Italy has 12 times the population of LA and there were "only" 270 homicides last year.
I could not ignore that the police is scary there and you should not talk to them or engage in any way.
I swear I notice a difference when I see one.
Having said that.
Globalization is real, but the media here are not trying to exploit my weaknesses to sell me ads, they are putting ads on their products, generic ads, not "I know who you are and I know you're gonna like this" ads.
I'm ok with the first kind, not so much with the latter.
The point of decentralised web is a misguiding one.
The decentralised web is the web!
Everyone can build their own website and host it at home on a raspberry PI on their connection.
That's what made the web a novelty that could (hopefully) spread culture and knowledge.
The dicotomy between centralised and decentralised web was born because the web has been taken away from people and transformed in a targeted ads delivery machine by the same companies that sell ads (FB, Twitter, Instagram and most of all Google, they sell ads as a primary business)
They are fighting to get screen attention so that they can deliver even more ads to the people.
And when we say ads we are not simply talking about product advertisement, we are talking about political ads used to radicalise the debate, that the same companies selling ads control, thanks to the network effect.
And since the majority of companies doing it are American, I blame the USA that let them do it
As paradoxical as it might sound China doesn't need to sell ads to people to convince the people to support this or that position, because there is no alternative position.
They rely on good old State propaganda, which existed for centuries ans has been studied for decades and is a well understood topic.
> There's a reason why every developed country in the World strictly controls firearms but not knifes.
As a slight tangent, Britain actually does strictly control knives - a short folding non-locking penknife is the only knife that can be carried in public without good reason, and “self defence” is considered never a good reason, and the penknife can still get you arrested if you happen to have it on you in an inappropriate place (bar, nightclub, sports event, etc).
480 deaths in a year in a country of 350M isn't a lot, and doesn't make a place "a violent country".
Being killed in a mass shooting in the US is only approximately one order of magnitude more likely than getting struck and killed by lighting in the US.
Rather than censoring people, we could take the approach that our worldview is robust enough to withstand competition / challenge. More discussion should in theory wither the fragile ones:
Which they never will without some central power because the (economic)market selects for virality when it comes to communication tools.
The action of that central power will be called censorship.
You could also try to have some guarantee of interoperability to reduce network effects and thus make the market effect weaker and reduce the selection for virality. That seems like something we could try.
Maybe they become those young adults for different reasons? It could be an effect of an alienating society, focused mainly on wealth instead of on the human being.
You can’t explain a change with a constant. We’ve had capitalism for centuries. Far right and Islamic terrorism are not new, but they have risen greatly, and their spread is linked to extremism on the internet.
Most Islamic extremism is spread through mosques and prisons, at least in Europe. I can't remember the last time a terrorism investigation tracked the original radicalisation back to the internet. It's a non issue.
Good point, but I'm struggling to remember people who were radicalised exclusively through ISIS websites. There probably have been a few just because there were so many cases by now they all blur together a bit, but usually ISIS sympathisers seem to have been exposed to a lot of ISIS propaganda during sermons. They may also have consumed online content but it was in addition to, not in replacement of, traditional offline radicalisation.
OP’s argument was specific: “ Take a look at some BLM protests and how people wanted to chant, display repent for their sins, subjugate in Communion, etc.” By all means, disagree on the specifics - that will be more persuasive than calling him “sad”.
Won't speak for your OP, but from my perspective most Social Justice Warriors embrace the term, even if it is thrown at them derisively from the other side. Same thing goes for being "Woke" -- it is a term and mindset that they embrace.
Yeah, pretty much. My comment was not about trying to put a blanket statement on anyone that defends any kind of progressive policies. I am referring to the fundamentalist "activists" and those that turn Progressive/Liberal values to an extreme core point of their identities.
No. The vague language is to avoid getting caught in fruitless conversations with some holier-than-thou puritanical clown who will comb through any comment I make with the intent of showing how something I said is an unforgivable sin.
"SJWs are the puritans of the 21st century." What's vague about that? The fact that you are trying to police me show that it doesn't take much to have such a good sample of the statement.
There's been more than a few terrorist incidents connected to forums like 8chan. In terms of the physical damage these attacks are not a threat to society but that's true of all terrorism. The argument normally is that the psychological damage to society as a whole is worth throwing everything we have at it.
Large media outlets like The New York Times were instrumental in convincing the public that Saddam had WMDs and thus justifying the Iraq War. That conflict led to something like a million deaths (and counting), which is 1000x more than all the "Internet forum"- related terrorism put together.
Yet I don't see anyone calling for further control of The New York Times or implementing restrictions on the corporate media.
No, I can't, unless you assume that everyone else doing the reading is somehow more gullible or impressionable than yourself.
Did 8chan make you pick up a gun? Did 8chan turn you into a nazi?
Just because seeing something published makes you upset does not mean that publishing those things is inherently dangerous.
You need to trust the other people in your society a bit more than you do, and stop assuming most readers are ten years old.
Your conclusion is based on fear, not the millions of people who read "objectionable" things online and go "ugh" and then close the tab (and sometimes go write long-winded blog posts about how censorship is essential to prevent violence).
"The rhetoric coming from Big Tech ("we can't let people even think these bad ideas") is extremely similar to the rhetoric that came from the Catholic Church during the Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion."
Not only is the rhetoric from Big Tech not at all similar to that of the Church, the comparison to Big Tech now and Printing Press then has no merit at all really.
The Church was suppressing arcane knowledge, and controlling their access to 'God' - so to speak.
The Internet is a new form of 'hyper commons' where a race war could flame up instantly if allowed.
Understand that the Internet has absolutely nothing to do with the 'truth'. The truth comes from examination, and the legitimacy of the examiners, purveyors of information. If that legitimacy does not exist, then the truth is just whatever everyone wants it to be.
The comparison is not 'The printing press' - it's the Rwandan genocide.
In Rwanda, the driving fuel was radio. Unfettered, angry people would urge, every day, to think of the 'other' (i.e. Tutsi v. Hutu) like 'dirty cockroaches'.
Without daily, constant mass propaganda of an entire nation mesmerized and inflamed by genocidal talk radio - there would have been no genocide.
The Rwandan war was mostly not a military incursion - it was militias vs. people. It was individuals, coming out of their homes with machetes, chopping up their neighbours.
Extremism is fuelled by a nudge in either direction - as a small, populist media example, we saw this as both CNN and MSNBC leaned harder left as Trump rhetoric rose.
I'm not political - but some of the Talking Heads on Fox have been aggressively and actively promoting voting conspiracy theories about voting issues that have been very publicly debunked and rejected by the courts - but the opinionists of course avoid that part, and just push the conspiracy without at all pointing out the facts have literally been proven false.
Millions of viewers accept the conspiracy as truth.
While the comments section on Fox has been surprisingly more enlightened that normal, with somewhat of a majority even calling them out as 'Fake News' - a sizeable majority of responders are adamant the election was stolen.
At OAN and Breitbart, the comments section is vicious about the 'clear fact' that the election was stolen by Biden, and there's talk of violence.
There was quite a lot of violence in the streets during the BLM unrest, we are not in a happy situation, there are a lot of guns in America.
If for example 'some group with guns' ended up killing 'someone from some other group' - things would get out of hand fast.
If FB, and Twitter, Google and the Press did not manage information - I think it would devolve into regional, balkan like violence, like a quasi civil war very quickly.
While it's really hard sometimes to fathom how information should be controlled - the night of the election, when Donald Trump came out and claimed the election was rigged without any evidence, literally trying to overthrow the Republic on the basis of his ego ... using threats of having his, often armed supporters 'not stand down' (!!!) it became crystal clear how important information control is.
The issue contend with is how we go about it. We need transparency, regulation, independence, proportionality etc..
So Google, FB, Twitter - the 'huge' entities, need to set guidelines and probably have some way of ensuring they are enforced consistently and not selectively. The rules for what constitutes 'organizing violence' need to be clear etc..
Webs of trust can help isolate the issue, in that if you can trace news back to it's source, you can weight the relevance of the news according to the weights assigned to the friend's and your own weightings combined, in that particular web of trust (eg. A Web for cooking, a Web for politics etc).
The issue then is that you're likely to get a balkanization of the webs of trust - echo chambers.
How we can support cross pollination of these webs is the issue. I don't have an answer for that, but being able to trace news sources at least helps though.
First, this is missing the point a little bit - people don't care about the truth. They actively seek out channels of bias. If everyone were so conscientious as to be seeking the truth society would have far fewer problems.
Second, there is no such thing as 'web of trust', it's an academic idea.
Third, it's unnecessary. We already have pretty good institutions.
FYI I just checked the commentary on Fox to see where there plebes minds are at this morning, and this was the 4th comment on the top article:
"The military must restore President Trump to the presidency.
Any pockets of military resistance should be dealt with.
Our country needs military law and God's chosen President, President Trump.
President Trump for life!!!!"
A few comments down:
"MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
STEALING AN ELECTION IS AN ACT OF WAR! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
STOP THE STEAL"
This kind of rhetoric is not uncommon now, and this is on a mainstream news outlet, it's only a little bit of accidental violence from words to deeds.
Yes, that was the point with the balkanisation bit. There's no grey area for debate as the echo-chambers polarise discussion.
Hence the real issue- how to persuade people to see news etc outside their usual fare. This could be simply a random post of the day on their feed, to a 'you may like' or 'the other side' on a post.
Far from being academic, webs of trust have existed since the dawn of time, for example marriage with other tribes to strengthen trust. On the web, twitter retweets are a loose example in that people retreat what they find useful, building trust between users over repeated retweets.
I don't know the answer to this btw but the current institutions don't appear to be enough, from potentially influenced elections and referenda, to trying to silence whistleblowers (Assange, Whitehouse leaks etc)
Isolating the issue though ie. Being able to verify optionally signed posts goes some way towards building better Web. Curated posts by Facebook have no indication of agenda or veracity, same as for most of twitter.
Something like Radicle or Spritely might be the way forward, more research needed :)
>how to persuade people to see news etc outside their usual fare
I'm not sure, but you actually need a place where people COULD see viewpoints outside the usual before those interested can go there.
An example of this working was the Slatestarcodex Culture War thread and its successor, The Motte.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
It turns out that there's a sizeable contingent of people who do want to talk to people on the other side, and if you build it, they will come- and be surprisingly civil to each other, given you might expect them to assault each other on the streets in other circumstances.
Of course, as mentioned in the above article, one problem with building a space where people can talk civilly about their differences is that you end up talking civilly to unpalatable folks, and people on the outside really don't like that and will try to destroy you- even if what you're seeing here, people de-escalating by talking to each other, is a miracle in the making.
The culture war and the Motte have problems, of course. I'd just like to see a Cambrian explosion of spaces with a similar ethos, to explore the design space.
> Understand that the Internet has absolutely nothing to do with the 'truth'. The truth comes from examination, and the legitimacy of the examiners, purveyors of information. If that legitimacy does not exist, then the truth is just whatever everyone wants it to be.
Ironically this sounds just like the kind of argument Thomas More would have made against Erasmus. And he’d have referred to Münster just as you refer to Rwanda.
Anyone can have their printing press. But if they want to start printing pamphlets that say 'Kill All the Celts/Jews/Lutherans/Catholics' then it's going to get taken away.
Again that's very similar to arguments made in the 16th century. "Take away the magistrate, and let loose the bridle unto the unruly multitude... virgins shall be deflowered, matrons ravished, old men slain in their beds...." Despite all this, it's hard to be sad that freedom of speech eventually won out in Northern Europe.
The truth comes from examination, and the legitimacy of the examiners,
It sounds an awful lot like you are calling for an explicitly elevated class of people, with the sole authority to interpret the literature. Sort of like a priesthood.
We have to find a new way through this problem.
Censorship is hardly "a new way." And this problem only exists if enough people pay attention to it. It's not the freedom of speech that is the problem, it's traditional media that amplify every debate instead of projecting nuance, and it's algorithms that optimize for engagement over connection.
I've never heard anyone use the Rwandan genocide as an analogy for what's going wrong with the modern web but I think you've hit the nail on the head.
It seems that the most ardent supporters of unrestricted free-speech are the most optimistic in their belief in humanity to come to a stable, moral consensus if we all just say whatever we want.
The Rwandan genocide shows the darker truth that we're just as likely to talk ourselves into horrific violence and war over arbitrary divisions. Cultural and societal pressure over what's acceptable to discuss seems like a very real, and very useful bulwark against that possibility.
Rwandan hate radio is not simply a story of unbridled free speech.
"One of the most virulent voice of hate, the newspaper Kangura, began spewing forth attacks on the RPF and on Tutsi immediately after the October 1990 invasion. It was joined soon after by other newspapers and journals that received support from officials and businessmen linked to the regime. "
"Until 1992, Radio Rwanda was very much the voice of the government and of the president himself.... Before the daily news programs, Radio Rwanda broadcast excerpts of Habyarimana’s political speeches. This national radio sometimes broadcast false information, particularly about the progress of the war, but most people did not have access to independent sources of information to verify its claims.
In March 1992, Radio Rwanda warned that Hutu leaders in Bugesera were going to be murdered by Tutsi, false information meant to spur the Hutu massacres of Tutsi."
[later Radio Rwanda becomes less partisan:]
"With the new direction at Radio Rwanda and the voice of the RPF increasingly strong, Hutu hard-liners decided to create their own station. They began planning their radio in 1992, incorporated it as Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) in April 1993, and began broadcasting in August 1993...."
"Although nominally private and opposed to Radio Rwanda, RTLM in fact was linked in a number of ways with the national radio, with other state agencies and with the MRND. RTLM was allowed to broadcast on the same frequencies as the national radio between 8am and 11am, when Radio Rwanda was not transmitting, an arrangement that encouraged listeners to see the two as linked, if not as identical. The new station also drew personnel from Radio Rwanda, including Nahimana, who played a leading role at RTLM after having been dismissed from ORINFOR, and announcer Noel Hitimana."
First - my Prof. and colleague was the Adjutant to the Chief of Staff of the UN mission (General Dallaire) during the Rwandan Genocide. I'm well informed.
Second - that the 'government' was in control of some of the radio has nothing to do with the argument - that's an example of 'political speech', particularly lacking institutional controls of the press.
The genocide was not arbitrary, of course there were leaders and those pushing for it. There were political forces moving millions of machetes into the country to be used in 'the uprising'. But when it happened, it was almost universal, like a Zombie film.
President Trump, using 'direct channels' (Twitter/FB) to spout lies about election rigging, is able to do this completely without any fact checking. He can say almost anything he wants, and a certain % will believe him. He has made veiled hints at violence.
5-10 Million people believe that the election has been rigged, and the constitution has been usurped. Those are Revolutionary terms, and they have guns.
This story reads like an election in a crappy African Republic where there is zero institutional credibility.
A 'decentralized web' mostly lacks any ability to decipher fact from truth - it's expensive, it requires integrity, transparency, oversight - which is why we have many institutions to do that right now, and it becomes a real problem when they start to bend.
It seems that the most ardent supporters of unrestricted free-speech are the most optimistic in their belief in humanity to come to a stable, moral consensus if we all just say whatever we want.
Personally, it's more that I'm pessimistic about giving governments the power to imprison people for expressing opinions that governments don't like.
The government of Quebec fined a comedian $30 000 for making a joke about a handicapped person.
I think the issue is that 'Freedom of Expression' ought to exist - it's #1 in Canada and #2 Ammendment in the US, but there's no such thing as 'unrestricted' speech, and, institutional controls are going to have to be in place.
If you're plotting with your buddies to walk into the post office and murder someone ... well I'll bet most people think your Signal channel should be snared.
If you want to call a Female Trans person a 'He' because that' what they are biologically, even if they present themselves as a She ... well, most people think that should be legal, but there are absolutely people with power who want to make that a form of hate speech.
On Twitter right now, I'm thankful that they are adding notes to indicate that specific actions of election fraud.
But they have also indicated they will ban you for 'dead naming' or 'misgendering' a Trans person.
So you know the Actress 'Ellen Page' is now trans, so 'he' is now 'Elliot Page'. Fair enough. But if you literally use the term 'Ellen Page' or refer to them as 'She' - you could be banned. Which is ridiculous.
Fair point. I wonder if my prioritization of the echo-chamber/fake news balkanization problems the web is facing now is purely because it's a more novel threat than authoritarian government overreach?
But it seems like there should be some level of compromise that can address both risks. We restrict other natural freedoms in all sorts of ways in modern society, why not free speech at all? As an example that's repeated so often it's practically a cliche: even with the second amendment in the US, citizens are still restricted from owning nuclear weapons.
A new class of weapon was invented and society decided that no matter what they said in the past, this was too powerful to treat like any other weapon until now. Seems like this new form of hyper-speech could qualify for a similar approach?
> So Google, FB, Twitter - the 'huge' entities, need to set guidelines
I agree, but let me refine: Dissenting opinions in civil society are arbitrated by civil courts.
So we need the 'huge' entities to commit working together with civil society. That means they need to lobby towards their own regulation. AT&T allegedly did it in the 20th century. Lobbying for more constraints on your own company is only contradictory if the company considers itself infallible in perpetuity, i.e. a benevolent dictatorship.
The Ottoman Empire banned the use of the printing press for 270 years.
"This opposition to the printing press had the obvious consequences for literacy, education, and economic success. In 1800 probably only 2 to 3 percent of the citizens of the Ottoman empire were literate, compared with 60 percent of the adult males and 40 percent of the adult females in England. In the Netherlands and Germany, literacy rates were even higher. The Ottoman lands lagged far behind the European countries with the lowest educational attainment in this period, such as Portugal, where probably only around 20 percent of adults could read and write."
Low literacy in the Ottoman Empire should not be ascribed solely to the lack of the printing press. It also had to do with the standard written language used in the Empire: written Ottoman Turkish was an artificial mixture of Turkish and Persian that was specially taught to a small elite. The average Turk would not have been able to make sense of Ottoman Turkish texts even if he did become literate (in the sense of knowing the letters and being able to read things aloud).
This is why one of the concerns of Atatürk’s revolution was not just increasing printing and switching to the Latin alphabet, but also replacing the Ottoman Turkish written language with one much closer to spoken Turkish.
Based on your writing, it seems you have a level head and a good angle on world history
I am hoping that if you have any books that deal in the history east of present day Germany, present day Italy, and or south of Madrid (directly/indirectly) that you really liked or found especially engaging or informative that you might remember and graciously share what they were if it pleases you to do so.
I am at a point where I am starting to appreciate what I am "rooting for" in western Asia/northern Africa which was a step in my study of northern/western barbarian history (frankish, gaulish, Norse etc etc) that made everything more fun and interesting to learn and therefore easier for me to study and accumulate interesting information
Because you seem very reasonable, I am thinking if you liked any of those direct/indirect history books that I might like them too
If you read this comment, thank you for your time and attention. I hope that you and your loved ones are doing okay in these difficult times.
The printing press still required costs to operate - and these costs were huge compared to the costs of required to post on the Internet nowadays. This post mentions that it is the posts done by usual people that do the most harm, usually due to their sheer amount first and foremost: this is equivalent to giving everyone on the planet the power of having a printing press of their own and multiple free places to hang their pamphlets for other people to see.
The scale of the Internet's "printing power" is already millions of times bigger than that of the renaissance printing press.
That is absolutely true. But compared to what went before, the printing press was a huge advance too. Going from 0 to 1 can be a bigger deal for society than going from 1 to 100.
It definitely was - I'm not negating the fact that the discovery and implementation of printing press was a giant net positive for human civilization as a whole.
I'm just not really sure about the omnipresence of the Internet. Too much of a good thing, you know; the sheer volume of information is insane, usually unless someone actively and awarely combats it. Then there comes the questions of whether and how much pieces of that information are meritorious and beneficial.
> The scale of the Internet's "printing power" is already millions of times bigger than that of the renaissance printing press.
True, but much of that "printing power" benefits the behemoths through their central nodes on the network.
If everyone's not locked down device were also acting as shared consensus/validation on crypto transactions with payouts (instead of ledgers at banks and ZIRP account payouts), partial distributed file storage (instead of on AWS/Azure/GCP), etc, then a lot of the benefits the behemoths have would decrease (while the benefits non- behemoths have increase). I think this will be the case in the long run as the costs go down, knowledge of implementing such capabilities go up and the incentives to move in this direction go up, but getting to such a state can happen outside of our lifetimes.
It's always curious that the same people who see fascists everywhere want corporations and governments to have the power to censor, without considering that fascists might gain control of these institutions.
From this person's perspective the right kinds of people already control those institutions. This entire article boils down to someone discovering they wish the entire internet was Twitter and YouTube because then people with the same ideology as him would control everything.
Well, the web (which is already decentralised) isn't like that.
Ironically, his blog is not hosted by these social media firms he praises so effusively. It's self-hosted on OVH and uses a privacy guard on WhoIs data. Apparently he wants to benefit from the web's decentralisation whilst preaching against it. This type of hypocrisy seems very common amongst those who rail against imaginary dog-whistle enemies like "Nazis" (of whom there are virtually none in today's world).
truthfully i think that many people would rather live in a monarchical or even fascist state just as long as it their ideology always aligned with the extant power.
democracy is messy and chaotic, it means more often than not you have to spend a painful amount of time re litigating the bad ideas of absolute morons. but it also is the only form of governance that you can troubleshoot without resorting to considerable violence.
I was with you except for the ending. I agree with you that the current nazis are not a real threath.
But lets not forget that there's very smart people that are hungry for power and will do anything to take control of our lives for its own benefit.
With them you can have a "neo-nazism" adapted for the reality of the country. Remember "war on drugs" and "war on terror"? Guess what, manipulation tatics using fear to control a large number of people for political gain.
Remember all the things Snowden and Assange bring back to light? first, with centralized control, it would never be possible to go against "the men". Second, that they describe how under Obama, you know that guy everybody likes and thinks do everything for the good of the mankind? the peace nobel prize? the first black president of US? how can he do wrong right?
And yet there was a lot of shady things going under his government, like spying its own people to resort absolute control under this "above good and evil" figure in a country who worship celebrities and big money (the winners).
My point being, its doesnt even need to be a nazi state, and can be a facade "rainbows and unicorns" kind of government, that do a good job into making people think everything is good, and their leader is some sort of Gandhi, that the real show, the nasty one, the one that even resemble the nazis, can happen behind the curtains.
I agree, but the word Nazi doesn't mean "anyone who desires power". It has very specific meanings and connotations. That's why these people constantly abuse it, it's a form of linguistic parasitism. They find a word with the strongest possible connotations that yields the strongest revulsion possible and then start labelling absolutely everyone who disagrees with them, even in minor ways. Eventually the word loses its power and they move on to the next.
The cell for instance, is a natural decentralized concept in the very fabric of life.
Darwinism which will spread characteristics all over. The fact that a bird spread trees when he drops his food, or the bees spreading polen.
Theres a lot of examples of this, and its the reason nature is so resilient, because it never centralize all the good stuff in one place, like we, the ones who like to control everything keep doing it to "protect" ourselves from nature.
And yet, we should embrace it, and learn from it instead.
It's the perfect metaphor. Your brain is not a single cell. It's a couple billion. Every day in a healthy body a few million cells die, without any repercussions whatsoever.
A very strong argument for free speech is that it's the only schelling point that allows for stable peace. When one side in power starts censoring its opposition, the other side rightly sees that as an attack and is likely to react with violence.
Eventually the group in power loses it, and the cycle is likely to repeat, only with sides switched.
Identical mechanic occurs with religious tolerance. It appears western societies are going to be forced to learn old lessons all over again, paying with blood, again.
This sounds like a nice idea, but I wonder if it's backed up by historical fact? There are plenty counter-examples of countries with stable peace as well as some restrictions on freedom of speech. The discussion in the linked article seems to be about absolute vs. semi-restricted freedom of speech, as opposed to absolute vs. none.
There are plenty of examples (for instance, [1]) of "moderate" restrictions on speech being used to unjustly curtail speech which should be protected. If politicians have any power to restrict political speech, they will use that as a weapon against their opponents.
The US is a good example of that. The US has existed for 150 years with stable peace (not to say there has been 0 conflict, but it has existed as a single coherent unit) and freedom to say and publish whatever you want. In contrast, every single nation that has a "stable peace" with speech restrictions has only been in this state since the end of world war 2, when they all destroyed each other, a defining characteristic of their evolution out of that state was freedom of expression, and many of the speech restrictions in many of those countries are relatively new or only recently enforced. Some countries with restrictions that claim to have a stable peace are currently involved in ethnic cleansing and internal armed conflict.
>The US has existed for 150 years with stable peace (not to say there has been 0 conflict, but it has existed as a single coherent unit) and freedom to say and publish whatever you want.
Untrue. The US has plenty of limits on what its citizens can say and publish[0].
For the most part, the restrictions there cover intentional deception, incitement to commit a crime, or speech acts of aggression such as harassment and threats. When we talk about "absolute freedom of speech," we mostly mean the free expression of any opinion, not the freedom to say literally anything.
You're creating a thing yourself to argue against and attributing that thing to people who disagree with you so that you can validate your point essentially against nobody.
That will depend on your definition. As mentioned in other threads, European countries are putting a certain speech outside of the law. The most essential outlawed speech is speech that directly urges others to violence. I think that free speech that doesn't allow for organizing physical violence is still a free speech. That being said, I would love to know if there are examples of instigating violence that were productive and useful for society (because there might be some)
> I would love to know if there are examples of instigating violence that were productive and useful for society (because there might be some)
Does the American Revolution count? (No snark, I'm serious.)
Freedom of speech as recognized in the US Constitution is about the recognition that one person doesn't have the right to silence another, and forming a government doesn't grant that right, and cannot. There ain't no King anymore.
The First Amendment is not an authority granting a right, it's an authority recognizing the limits of its own power or domain. It doesn't say "y'all have the right to say what you want" it says "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech" It's saying that even the highest authority in the land doesn't have the right to limit what someone says. (Although you certainly don't have to listen!)
the uk and germany have banned musicians and artists, notably tyler the creator and death in june. media is heavily censored to even be allowed to be sold in these markets. people are arrested for speech within the uk & eurozone on a regular basis for crimes like making a shitpost video with a pug.
this is not free speech under any definition, it is controlled speech with latitude.
>The most essential outlawed speech is speech that directly urges others to violence.
how do you differentiate between urging others to violence and calls for 'direct action', 'bash the fash' etc?
the black panthers and the nation of islam were widely criticized by the establishment for instigating violence and the armament of black people. the fbi thought mlk was a communist instigator. neither the american civil rights movement nor it's predecessors in the abolitionist movement would largely pass the smell test for permissible speech under european restrictions.
likewise, hate speech laws do not have a good track record for preventing the rise of fascism. both weimar germany and tsarist russia had speech restrictions and aggressive censorship regimes. it didn't work.
Religion is just any arbitrary set of beliefs. You cannot be tolerant of all arbitrary sets of belief and expect to get any sort of stability out of it.
That's taking the concept to an absurd extreme. Totalitarian belief systems that can't coexist with others can't be tolerated, yes, but it's nothing inherent in christianity - yet different Christian denominations spent decades killing each other in the Thirty Years' War. It's more of a character trait. Same personality type that was happy to kill all 'papists' would be a fanatic nazi in 30s' Germany and an eager killer for Pol Pot.
People like that are always going to exist, what happens depends on the reactions of the other members of the same 'tribe'. If they oppose it nothing happens, if they ignore it or, worse, weakly support it, the situation deteriorates in a feedback loop until both sides convince themselves that everyone from the 'enemy' camp wants to kill them, so the only option is to kill them first.
You're the one who made the claim. If your idea can't handle the "absurd extremes" then your idea is wrong. Frankly, religious beliefs that include intolerance of other religious beliefs are empirically the rule, rather than the exception, and you don't need to be a mathematician to figure out how that throws a wrench in your characterization.
Well they are not arbitrary, and they are deeply historical and have tons of context. Even if you cite the church of the flying spaghetti monster, well it has exactly 0 followers. Also in the countries where there is still violence due to religion (ie. ISIS conditions) but made speech 100% free (or free as in US style rule) it is very likely the violent elements will mostly go away. That's assuming you "could" - in most of these countries it's a long way off.
Forgive me if I am misunderstanding your statement - "Even if you cite the church of the flying spaghetti monster, well it has exactly 0 followers."
Our faith has many followers. Also, among religious communities, we are shown to put our money where our mouth is. We back our beliefs, as do other faiths, with charity/cash.
I am happy to be part of a religious congregation that, in the context of microfinance/lending to strangers (not for profit, by the way), performs admirably when compared with more popular, mainstream religions:
But can I ask you, do you actually believe the FSM exists or is it more of a statement about how nutty religion can be? Because that's what Wikipedia says, not a religion, a social movement.
"is a social movement that promotes a light-hearted view of religion and opposes the teaching of intelligent design and creationism in public schools"
I disagree with the author in very strong terms - but only with their premises, not with their conclusions. The conclusions are accurate - if you believe that the ability to censor public discourse is necessary to maintain a stable and desirable society, then of course IPFS and similar projects are counter-productive.
(FWIW it's refreshing to actually see this being argued openly and honestly, instead of the usual "of course we support free speech, but ..." tripe.)
The parade of horribles presented as evidence is not particularly convincing, though, although bias (either way) can make a big difference here. But while we're at it, since the blog post mentioned the Christchurch shooting in 8chan context as an example of the case where censorship would be desirable, I want to talk about the censorship that happened after - specifically, the attempts to take down copies of the terrorist's manifesto that were floating around. NZ apparently had some emergency legal powers to criminalize distribution outright, which is bad enough. But the real mess was Australia; they didn't have any legal pretext to ban it, but there was a strong social consensus - among people who make decisions, anyway - that "somebody ought to do something".
So, the Australian ISPs made a synchronized private effort to censor it, to the point of domain-blocking several large forums where the manifesto was posted and not removed by the local admins (because it didn't violate their lax rules, nor local laws!), while the government caught up on legislation. Effectively, it was a private censorship cartel, and the citizens that didn't like the outcome had no recourse - not even the usual democratic mechanisms to repeal the laws etc, since there were no laws involved. This is the kind of stuff that the present non-decentralized structure of the Internet makes possible, and the inherent power makes it a near certainty that it'll be abused eventually, whether for cynical political suppression or a do-gooder witch hunt. I'd rather take my risks with more decentralization - some parts might stink more than others, but at least I'll have a choice.
You are conflating censorship with moderation (a.k.a self-censorship), particularly by stating that "there were no laws involved". eg. If you have kids in a school and someone makes innuendo to do significant major harm to that school you have the RIGHT to remove that post even if it's not legally required. The "private censorship cartel" you speak of may have just been a precautionary reflex to stop future litigation or even widescale boycott of one's online service, which is a direct democracy, since you mention democratic mechanisms.
Fwiw, the Australian who carried out the act in question here in NZ did so because Australia had banned the specific weapons used after the Hobart massacre. We here in NZ hadn't experienced such a massacre and were slow to act. He was easily able to legally acquire the weapons here that may have been very hard to acquire at home, thus the Australian problem was "exported" to a softer target in a near jurisdiction. I expect the early online reaction in Australia may have been tacit acknowledgement of this fact.
Censorship is restriction on others' flow of information. Legal censorship by governments is only one of its many forms, and private censorship has a very long history. What the ISPs did in Australia was very much censorship, since Internet users in the country were locked out from several websites, even if they wanted to access the content there.
I also don't think that justification matters all that much - indeed, the whole point is that, just because the majority of the population might want to censor something, that doesn't make such censorship any more inherently legitimate. The laws against "gay propaganda" in Russia are similarly supported by the majority of the population, but they're no less wrong and oppressive for that. .
> "Censorship is restriction on others' flow of information."
There was nothing stopping people emailing the manifesto to each other privately using any archive formats. That is different from having to provide a free soapbox for supporters of the manifesto. Just as you have the right to block someone commenting on your Twitter posts. The ISPs are businesses and have legal terms and conditions to remove anything. That is not censorship. Here in NZ it became illegal to transfer the manifesto, but primarily the video which was deemed offensive under existing censor laws.
> "The laws against "gay propaganda" in Russia are similarly supported by the majority of the population, but they're no less wrong and oppressive for that."
If the Russian example you give is supported by the majority then that is by definition democratic, even though propaganda created that public sentiment in the first place. Should propaganda (manifestos of hate in this case) be censored? Your own example suggests "yes it should".
There was nothing, yes. But if Austalian mail providers joined the fray, the same excuse would apply to them as well. At what point does it become "genuine" censorship on your scale? Even in China, there are ways to get past the firewall, so if the ability to pass information somehow is sufficient to have freedom of speech, then China has that.
The Russian example doesn't work out the way you think it does, though. Yes, it's by definition democratic, and it's also oppressive - but saying that the propaganda that led to its popularity should be censored to prevent such laws amounts to saying that democracy is a sham, because people should only be allowed (by whom?) to hold "safe" opinions. If that argument were made openly - that we should abandon democracy in favor of rule by the enlightened elite, because people just can't be trusted to make the right choices unconstrained - I'd still disagree, but that would be a different conversation. But advocating censorship of political propaganda for the purpose of maintaining the illusion of democracy is just hypocritical.
My actual takeaway from that story is simply that nobody should have the power to do such things on a large scale. In a more decentralized political system, there can still be localized hotspots of oppression - but they don't suddenly apply to tens of millions of people at once, and with no easy way to escape.
> If the Russian example you give is supported by the majority then that is by definition democratic, even though propaganda created that public sentiment in the first place. Should propaganda (manifestos of hate in this case) be censored? Your own example suggests "yes it should".
Not at all. If you give governments powers to censor people, sooner or later you will have someone in power that will use those tools maliciously against their own populace.
Therfore you don't allow a government (or anyone else for that matter) to censor except in very specific circumstances e.g. when the content is considered obscene (child pornography being an example).
That why it is important that everyone has a right to speak their mind, even if it highly objectionable.
Knuth writes in the beginning of The Art of Computer Programming that he will deliberately lie to the reader, to further her understanding of the main subject.
> if you believe that the ability to censor public discourse is necessary to maintain a stable and desirable society
I understand this can make sense, when reading capacity of each individual is limited
When you get a advance warning about a "lie", is it really still a lie? Although I would argue that even if it is, the warning is enough for you to establish consent to be lied to, so it's not actually harming you. Real censorship is different.
Of course, the real problem with censorship is that whoever ends up in charge of it, automatically gets immense political power - including the ability to suppress opposition to censorship, thus perpetuating the arrangement. I would argue that the only reason why we haven't seen more abuses of that yet is because the Internet infrastructure was not originally designed to make such large-scale censorship easy, and as this changes more towards centralization, censorship will be more pervasive and more oppressive, as well. Countries where the government could mandate infrastructure tailored to censorship (e.g. China) are a good example. Now, some argue that, so long as functioning democracy is retained, it doesn't matter, because any such censorship in a democracy would be majoritarian in nature, and thus it's a fundamentally different and justifiable case, but one only has to look at historical moral panics in various democracies to see the flaw in this argument.
I think this is actually very insightful. What if we agree with Knuth, and we add "but only sporadically and in a limited way"? That's a much more subtle and interesting line of thought.
I wonder if that applied to sites like drive.google.com... If you are going to censor, you should treat all the players equally. The annoyance from customers when google doesn't work after all is small price to pay right?
"Islamophobia", that term which criminalizes religion criticism ... Can't wait to live in a world where blasphemy is forbidden again !
I guess nowadays: diversity is great, except for opinions. Can't wait to see the left crashing itself trying to compose with opposed sides, against homophoby on one hand and against islam criticism on the other, but islam is like christianism and probably other religions: homophobic.
Oh, shouldn't I be allowed to state that anymore ? Funny world you want to live in, but I guess that's what it is when you get confused and believe that your CS degree is worth a pol sci or law degree.
This is the Quran saying that husbands should beat those of their wifes who are disobedient, and that's just the tip of the iceberg, I could go on and on on about the Quran: I'm Algerian.
Sorry for the victims of my "islamophobia", but it's nothing compared to what the victims of islamic violence have been through.
I don't dispute that some Muslims' practices are incompatible with modern liberalism. But it can be unfair to judge a religion by the worst parts of its holy texts. Here's 1 Samuel 15:
7 And Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to Shur, that is over against Egypt.
8 And he took Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword.
9 But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them: but every thing that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly....
10 Then came the word of the Lord unto Samuel, saying,
11 It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king: for he is turned back from following me, and hath not performed my commandments. And it grieved Samuel; and he cried unto the Lord all night.
and then Samuel tells Saul:
18 And the Lord sent thee on a journey, and said, Go and utterly destroy the sinners the Amalekites, and fight against them until they be consumed.
19 Wherefore then didst thou not obey the voice of the Lord, but didst fly upon the spoil, and didst evil in the sight of the Lord?
So here we have the Israelites slaughtering an entire population. But God is angry with them, because they did not also slaughter all the cattle.
Would it be fair to make that a summary of modern Christianity?
People who nominally think a text is infallible often in fact pay attention very differentially to different parts of it. That’s why few modern fundamentalists own slaves or stone disabled people who enter church. Perhaps you can ding them for inconsistency.... Meanwhile, many Muslims and Christians are not literalists in that sense.
> That’s why few modern fundamentalists own slaves or stone disabled people who enter church. Perhaps you can ding them for inconsistency....
I don't know of any religions which require adherents to own slaves, so it is not inconsistent for a fundamentalist to not own any. (In particular, Christians are commanded to obey the laws of their country[0], in general, so owning slaves would be inconsistent).
Also, I don't know why you think churchgoers would have a problem with disabled people. Jesus healed the sick, and didn't stone anyone. Perhaps you're thinking of the story of the woman caught in adultery, whom Jesus saved from being stoned.[1]
That doesn't sound correct. Perhaps you're mixing up the rules for tithing cattle[0] in Deuteronomy 15 with the rules for approaching Mount Sinai[1] in Exodus 19.
Christianity revolves around the fact that Jesus replaced the Old Testament with an entirely new one, and his teachings in some cases directly contradicted what the Old Testament says. It's not really fair to judge Christianity by version 1 of their book when Christian teaching about morality derives from version 2. That's why they're called Christians.
Sure. But they keep plenty - like the Ten Commandments. And many are, at least nominally, committed to the idea that the Bible is the Word of God, including the OT.
Anyway, it’s indeed my point that it’s not fair to judge Christianity (or other religions) by every part of their holy text, so I think we agree.
You're missing a bit of the back story and context with that passage, by the way. For example, Exodus 17 verse 8:
"The Amalekites came and attacked the Israelites at Rephidim."
and earlier in the chapter you quoted, verse 2:
"This is what the LORD of Hosts says: ‘I witnessed what the Amalekites did to the Israelites when they ambushed them on their way up from Egypt."
It's not unreasonable to imagine that the Amalekites might have intended to carry out a genocide against the Israelites (something which the Israelites seem to have been uniquely disproportionately targeted with in history), and that an omniscient God might have known that putting an end to the Amalekites would be the most peaceful solution in the long run.
As for the cattle, perhaps God didn't want the Israelites to make a huge profit from their defensive war, lest they be tempted to start some other wars to profit more.
I've been working on a decentralized discussion platform for the past 2 years or so. My view is that the issues that the OP is concerned about arise from an absence of functioning reputation and trust systems. After all, fake news and conspiracy content proliferates on centralized platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
While these platforms do moderate some of the worst content, they are reluctant and the problem is too large for them to solve. Only a decentralized approach to trust and reputation will scale well enough to regulate decentralized content. I believe it is the decentralized platforms that will solve this problem first - they need to, while the centralized platforms will continue muddle on with half measures.
I agree that it seems like the problem is more a lack of reputation and trust than decentralization. But how do we build trust in a decentralized network the size of the human population? How do I know if this username on my screen is publishing in good faith without some kind of transitive trust?
I might trust someone my real-world friends trust when it comes to local gossip. If I want trustworthy national news my only recourse seems to be to go through a centralized journalism institute. But which one? Well I'll probably look at what people around are looking at.
If there's a national broadcaster or dominant cable news channel in my country I'll probably look at that, but if I don't like what I see I may be biased to go search out another institution that I find more agreeable. Then you get things like Macedonian teens running sites dressed up to look like US-based newspapers posting straight-up bullshit because there's always a market telling people what they want to hear.
How can we build a decentralized system to overcome people's biases and laziness? People are going to gravitate to sources their friends and family use, and collectively to sources that fit their preexisting beliefs. It's no wonder we're in this situation where people are struggling to agree on reality.
>> Only a decentralized approach to trust and reputation will scale well enough to regulate decentralized content
But what if a decentralized network of trust collectively agree that covid is a hoax and the Earth is flat? I'm not sure if the (de)centralization of the underlying technology really has an impact on that problem.
Transitive trust / Web-of-Trust is the solution I think. You do need to find one trustworthy entry point to such a web of trust, maybe a journalist or a news source that you trust. Once you trust one node in a network that is providing trust ratings of other nodes, you start to have some footing to judge content and authors.
Within this network, you may have a pocket of users who espouse Flat earth theory, but I believe if you were to rely on such users for trust ratings, the picture of the world created would be so incoherent, it would simply be unbearable.
Right now, on Twitter, I can have a list of people I follow. I assume this is something like saying I "trust" them in some way.
I get a feed full of stuff from them, and stuff they've re-tweeted ie said explicitly that they trust, etc.
The whole "social network" thing really is approximately the same shape as an explicitly reified "web of trust". I would not expect the results to be terribly different, other than the added effort of having additional explicit system entities to manage.
> Within this network, you may have a pocket of users who espouse Flat earth theory, but I believe if you were to rely on such users for trust ratings, the picture of the world created would be so incoherent, it would simply be unbearable.
I'm not sure I understand your pessimism. Are you legitimately concerned that, unchecked, flat earthers might actually "turn" the entire population? If everyone agrees that the earth is flat it may as well be so.
If the concern is that some people will hold mistaken beliefs then I am not sure there is a technological or sociological solution to the problem. I believe there will be people holding mistaken beliefs regardless of whether the world's information channels are "decentralized" but I agree with your parent's poster that a decentralized approach is the only approach that does not come with a high probability that the majority will be coerced or gaslit into holding false beliefs at some point in time.
> I'm not sure I understand your pessimism. Are you legitimately concerned that, unchecked, flat earthers might actually "turn" the entire population?
Not at all, but the fact is that these beliefs are growing at all thanks to the web. There are always going to be some people with completely illogical fringe beliefs. Conspiracy theories were always a thing. It's just not that despite the quality of these conspiracy theories dropping (seriously...the Earth is flat? That hasn't been a topic of debate for a loooong time), their reach and number of adherents are going up. That seems like a pretty clear regression in our society. We shouldn't be complacent about regression.
> ... a decentralized approach is the only approach that does not come with a high probability that the majority will be coerced or gaslit into holding false beliefs at some point in time.
But I don't understand how decentralized tech is somehow going to be more immune to this than the current web, which is already decentralized in most ways. Anyone can host a blog on their PC and publish what they want. We thought the blogosphere was the start of this golden age. But people aren't techies, they choose to centralise with providers like Google for gmail (email is a federated, decentralized protocol!) and Facebook for social media.
If IPFS takes off, what makes it immune from people going with the same massive provider all their friends and family are on? There's no hard barrier stopping everyone from moving off Google and Facebook tomorrow with the current web, but they won't. The big players understand this, that's why Google pays Apple billions a year to make Google the default search engine. That's all it takes to ensure everyone keeps using Google. Competition is literally a click away, people just don't click.
That said, I do support the decentralization efforts. It seems like an improvement over the current technology. I just don't buy into the hype that it's going to cure any of the problems we're seeing now. Our problem is less one of censorship, more overload of bots and bad actors.
> If everyone agrees that the earth is flat it may as well be so.
Except that it's a real, measurable regression in our knowledge as a species. I get the point you're making but that doesn't give me comfort, hence the pessimism.
Personally I am not worried that flat-earthers will turn all of us, so I am not uncomfortable, but I agree that such a regression would be quite unpalatable.
Rather, I believe that the majority of people will continue to understand the earth as "round" and will be more likely to believe the (also minority) science pedants when they say "actually, it's more slightly egg-shaped" than they will the ravings of someone who does not believe in satellites.
The beautiful trick of decentralization is not that it has any ability to prevent wrong-information from being disseminated, but that it ensures that correct-information will be disseminated regardless of any co-existing propaganda campaign to the contrary. In a centralized censorable system this guarantee cannot be met.
I believe that as long as correct-information is available the majority of humans will eventually find consensus with it.
I am not convinced that fringe ideas like flat-earthism are necessarily growing or that they would be doing so because of the web. It is likely that the web is just exposing, for the first time, the true extant of the population that is willing to accept fringe theories which while I agree is a disconcertingly large percentage, still does not seem to be the majority of people.
That said, roughly half the people I talk to still seem to fully accept and believe in some sort of literal sky god and roughly a third still seem to take in earnest the existence of actual ghosts, luck, karma, or other such poorly supported meta-think as obvious truths. But I believe this number is way way down from 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1000 years ago... I believe more people are finding consensus with actual truth due in large part to the awesome power of decentralized messaging systems we've built to date starting with language and so far culminating at the internet and the nascent social and technical overlays that are being built on-top of it.
The web already provides this: people or groups can publish under semi-stable names, linked to their real identity or not, and people can hyperlink to each other's content. The link graph is the web of trust and Google famously uses it to rank content. What is it really missing?
At the very least, people would need a reliable way of indicating whether the site they are linking to is one they are endorsing or criticising, and there would need to be some clever crawler that can calculate a trustworthiness score from this graph for each page you visit.
Presumably this would be implemented as a browser extension. It could also recommend similar pages with a higher score, and maybe highly scored pages that offer a different perspective on the same topic as the page you are reading.
Google let's you link to a page without transmitting PageRank. There's no notion of transmitting negative rank because of course that would be horribly abused by competitors trying to sink each others sites.
I think the web is pretty good as a decentralised systems for ideas. A lot of basic stuff isn't exploited though. For instance a simple way to set up networks of caching proxies and point browsers towards them, so sites can survive ddos attacks and be fully anonymised would be good. CDNs like cloudflare provide that today but tools for smaller scale equivalents would be great.
I guess theoretically and in some ways in practice. But I’m thinking more along the lines of “search through the web only returning results bookmarked with 2 degrees of trust” or something like that. Where each of the nodes are not documents but are identities- which may often tie 1:1 to a human
Isn't that basically newspapers? Journalists post articles and links to indicate they're at least interesting if not trustworthy, and usually under their own name. Webs of trust never worked for cryptography though.
People using the system to say things that I don't like, won't be "solved" by letting everyone have the system help them find whoever they tell it they trust.
Using a trust / reputation system to prevent wrongthink means it has to be a centralized reputation system, where anyone too far from the median (or who the Cabal doesn't like, if you design it to not trust the general userbase) gets shut down.
Also, why would a decentralized system be able to have a stronger effect that the efforts Twitter and Facebook are currently taking to flag or block wrongthink? If those efforts are "half measures", what sort of "full measure" would this reputation system impose? And if it's really distributed, how would that be imposed?
Decouple "trust" from "authentic". "web of trust" is almost a misnomer. The root problem is verified identity, aka authenticity. Whereas trust implies a judgment about the content.
The ability to confirm provenance of speech, that a known person claims the words spoken, would be very useful. Completely independent of fact checking, agreement, truthiness.
I don't agree with this article. Every tech can be used for the right and the wrong. The fact something is used in a bad way should not prevent us from building the tech so we can reap the benefits of the good uses it can offer.
One example for a decentralized web benefit that I see promising: wouldn't it be just amazing if you had something like Facebook, but all the posts were not owned by Facebook? Just think of the possibilities to use your own UI, have your own recommendation algorithm etc... This can be amazing. I deeply want something like. However it cannot be done as long as the data is owned by Facebook.
So what education do we need to know how to utilize total freedom of speech in a civil manner?
In other words, what needs to be taught/learned that everyone can understand globally and across cultures which helps humanity understand how to get the maximum benefit from this technology and protect oneself from the negative impacts?
I mean this honestly and literally, what would you tell or teach people? What would an educational program for this look like? What would it look like for all ages, and cultures and how could we make it universal? Is it even possible?
I feel the best way to harness the power and control the outcome in the longest run is to evolve our understanding with intent.
Because absolute freedom means without restriction and can tend towards chaos, how do we train humanity???
Maybe I'm on a tangent but I am not sure how to answer this question myself.
One thing that came to mind was secular ethics but that is far too complicated to teach directly. And I am not sure if there is any cultural bias in that idea as well.
I guess I'm thinking.. teach, learn and evolve while trying not to force control. I realize even writing it how impossible that sounds, but should we put our energy into cracking this problem?
The problem isn't that humans don't know how to use totally unrestricted speech civilly. It's that we're vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Execution attacks, and those who attack us in that way prosper.
We need an environment that disincentivises such things; that's the only way (known to me) to escape perverse incentives. An empty playing field is not such an environment.
Poverty leads to fear, fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to censorship.
When people feel (economically) insecure, they become selfish and sometimes lash out at the Other as the cause of their troubles. For 1930s Germans going through hyperinflation and WW1 reparations, the Other was the Jews. For 2010s Americans going through the Great Recession and unequal recovery, the Other (who was non-white, non-Christian, and non-patriarchal) was "taking our jobs."
Unfortunately after this pandemic, we should expect another wave of xenophobia resulting from all the economic damage, although it's not yet clear if the Other will be different this time.
And I should say that while lashing out in this way is absolutely wrong, it also should be quite understandable.
So the "simplest" fix is making the economy work for everyone, so people feel financially secure and can focus on pursuing their dreams.
maybe, but most of the contemporary calls for censorship ime are not coming from the poor, they're coming from a class of culturally sheltered, hypersensitive & over-medicated professionals.
as far as xenophobia, i think the knowledge class has largely been insulated from the effects of migration & trade policy and thus have only ever reaped the benefits. we'll see if that stays true once faang starts offshoring to remote workers in kiev and mexico city.
Right, the groups you mentioned increasingly want to censor speech from the groups I mentioned.
The original question boiled down to "can we reduce the incidents of censor-worthy speech via education?" to which I say yes, but via financial security rather than education.
I'm of the belief that everyone in life is just choosing the best option available to them. Every choice, every action can be reduced to this. And people who make 'bad' choices, or to spew out hate on the internet, are simply doing this because they have nothing better to do in their eyes. We need to give people more options in life, more opportunities. Nobody wants to be on the internet all day spewing hate, it's just that they can't do the things they actually enjoy in life.
Education helps but can't fix the problem, as the problem is the tragedy of the commons - propaganda is an attempt at the land grab for the "commons" of our collective attention and mind - and the conflict between differing self-interests and ideals / worldview. No amount of education can eliminate this. Fundamentally there's no perfect solution - we can only manage it, with a delicate balancing act.
The idea that conspiracy theories transported via the web cause so much damage ("wreak havoc all over the world", according to the article) is in itself a conspiracy theory. And one that makes for good newspaper articles.
9/11 happened in 2001 - was it already the result of internet conspiracies? Are there really more incidents now than before?
i spent many of the pre-facebook years surrounded by people who would tell you all about tower 7 and the trilateral commission. those people were called schoolteachers.
Is QAnon prevalent? I keep reading it is, but I have never encountered it. (Edit: I just googled it, and Wikipedia claims there have been studies finding hidden Facebook groups about QAnon with millions of users. Seriously, I don't think that is sufficient proof for the ubiquity of QAnon. Edit2: the article I read, German Wikipedia, pretty much seems to simply equate people who voted for Trump with QAnon believers. No wonder they estimate their number to be in the millions. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon ).
I mean, even here in Germany we have people with Q signs and slogans at the corona protests, so it's not even a US-only thing, despite being focused on Trump.
Edit: You realize the Corona protests are organized by a group that calls themselves "Querdenker", so the "Q" may just refer to "Querdenker"? You just provided me with another indication that the alleged wide reach of QAnon is the actual conspiracy theory.
Even assuming that is true (I haven't noticed, but I didn't specifically look for it), it doesn't prove they are "widespread", as only few people go to Corona protests. They are a special part of the population. I don't think people happen upon QAnon stuff and become radicalized that way, as the social media alarmists claim.
The problem with the idea that "the answer to bad speech/misinformation is moar speech!" is that people aren't bayesian belief nets who update their beliefs in propositions based on new information.
Instead what happens is, information that confirms people's existing beliefs is not only heavily weighted, but it is reshared with others. Information that contradicts existing beliefs is filtered.
This has the overall effect of reinforcing the bias of a person and their existing social network.
So conspiracy theories, propaganda, racism, just flat out wrong information, once it takes root, is very hard to dislodge.
We have huge chunks of the population now believing in COVID conspiracies, that hospitals are misreporting to make money, that it's a psy-op, that mask and distancing directives were either purely to disadvantage their favored candidate, or exist for some nefarious purpose, and on and on.
Maybe this is the real answer to the Great Filter/Fermi Paradox -- civilization drowns in a sea of mutually reinforced misinformation.
> people aren't bayesian belief nets who update their beliefs in propositions based on new information.
I disagree, I think this is mostly true. However, I think people have a strong tendency to overestimate how much their favorite pieces of information should force others to update their beliefs. The same piece of information can be valid in many worldviews with wildly varying interpretations. It is sometimes difficult to separate the core information from the interpretation, and so one can become confused when sharing facts with others doesn't change minds. This can be mitigated by spending more effort to understand others' priors.
I disagree, there are objective facts. Someone who believes the earth is flat and is presented with objective information is not presenting something subject to much interpretation.
Look, we're talking a huge number of Americans who believe there was widespread election fraud of millions of votes. Who believe COVID is a conspiracy, to hurt their favored candidate, and that hospitals are false reporting cases as COVID for money. We have people with objectively false believes about vaccines, contradicted not just by available studies, but having their premises themselves contradicted (e.g. beliefs about mercury content, believes about the way the immune system works, beliefs about the economics of the vaccine business, all demonstrably false).
Do you think it is unreasonable for someone who believes smoking massively increases risks of lung cancer and other health problems, to not expect a smoker who denies the harm that smoking causes to update their beliefs in view of this?
The "priors" you speak of are really addiction, and a cognitive dissonance, for the most part.
Unless you are a true renaissance human who has made outstanding individual contributions in all of the spaces you list (astronomy, economics, medicine, political science, etc.), your faith in "objective fact" is probably derived in a large part from trust in authoritative instutions and experts. This trust is a prior that not everyone shares.
If you believe in the medical industry and related authoritative sources, it may seem crazy to you that someone wouldn't look at their published data and determine that covid is real and dangerous. However, if you have watched esteemed medical professionals drive your community to opiod/herion addiction, or watched hospitals close during the pandemic in your already underserved minority neighborhood, you might have a lower level of trust. You may even find the people who trust doctors crazy. You are not going to convince someone who has lost faith in these institutions by linking to medrxiv. That this source is valuable at all is a subjective assumption.
It's easy to dimiss alternate viewpoints as cognitive dissonance, but I'd be wary of assigning that exclusively to any specific segment of people. It is very popular. Rememember, it was once scientifically-supported objective fact that smoking was perfectly safe.
> It is very popular. Rememember, it was once scientifically-supported objective fact that smoking was perfectly safe.
Sure, but that's why you update your beliefs based on new information. You don't consider an institution being wrong once as a complete repudiation of everything else. Consensus reality based on division of labor and a web of trust in our authorities, combined with peer review and criticism, is the only way for society to function.
Our institutions can be wrong, but what is argument are placing your trust in hearsay, innuendo and rumor? If you want to be skeptical of what the scientific authorities say, that is fine and healthy. It is quite another thing to go from skeptical to believing in unproven conspiracy theories with no authority behind them and no history of being right.
In other words, you're going from a source of information whom you might think is wrong sometimes, to a source of information with practically no reason to trust it.
When 97% of the world's climate scientists say global warming is a threat, when the basic thermodynamics of the situation, the paleo-climate data, even the recent temperature records, and flooding, lead you to give credence to their conclusions, and take reasonable precautions, shouldn't it encourage you to take it seriously even if it turns out wrong, instead of assuming it's all an elaborate hoax driven by wealthy scientists trying to get government grants?
I mean, there's a real false equivalence that keeps coming up when people discuss these issues. They act like the repercussions and risks on both sides are the same, and that both sides are being equally reasonable.
But the other side, for example of the climate debate, makes fully unsubstantiated claims about the massive harm that addressing climate change will have (if it is wrong), when there is not much evidence for these claims, other than very mild slightly lower GDP growth numbers. So if the scientific community is right, climate change leads to massive ecosystem disruption, massive economic losses, a refugee crisis, probably more wars, and if they're wrong, a fraction of a % of future GDP growth is lost.
It's crazy to me to go from "some people have been harmed by our institutions" to "whatever they say, I'm going to believe the opposite, even if it is a looney conspiracy"
There's no way to call what's happening right now rational. And the "priors" you're talking about, have largely been manipulated by conservative media for financial benefit. Fox/Murduch, Mercer & Koch funded media, Limbaugh, Hannity, Clearchannel, largely spend a great deal of their time undermining trust in Western scientific institutions, largely by gaslighting.
Healthy skepticism is what people should aim for, not cult beliefs. You know, when a new medical study comes out and claims that chocolate extends your life, or another comes out and says it shortens it, you're right to question it, and be skeptical, and ask for more confirmation. What you don't do is go "fuck scientists, my uncle told me that Trump said chocolate protects you from the effects of the Deep State chemtrails"
> Consensus reality based on division of labor and a web of trust in our authorities, combined with peer review and criticism, is the only way for society to function.
Is this also an objective fact?
Pascal's wager is similar to the climate change risk/reward function. And yet atheists still exist. If the risk magnitude is tied to the assumptions of a belief system, these arguments do not convince non-believers, just reaffirm what is already believed.
It's easy to talk dispassionately about "lower GDP growth" and "some people who have been harmed" when these are things that happen to other people. When they happen close to you, it is hard maintain trust in institutions that actively harms you. It's not just Trumpists. For example, vaccine support is low among urban black communities who typically have poor experiences with the medical system. Have these people have been gaslit too? Or are their voices valid?
If you want to start a conversation that can actually change someone's mind, you have to start with empathy for other positions. You cannot simply dismiss other beliefs as lies spread by the devil and/or Kochs. If, however, you are starting out from the position of "my way is the only way," then there is no dialogue possible, only repression of heterodoxy. It may be catharthic to tell someone all the ways in which they are wrong, but it doesn't win friends. It is historically not a winning strategy.
I can empathize with not wanting to be involved with this anymore, which is fair enough, your choice, but there are solutions to the mentioned problems.
There are social or technical solutions to the problem of "too much free speech".
There can be decentralised filters set up that can be moderated by communities like democracy. You can have curators of content that can guarantee to bring safe and healthy content to you. You can have decentralised reputation, authority and reward systems for the content creators and the validators. And so on.
While I agree this an important factor to keep in mind and I'm personally very supportive of the idea, I don't think this really addresses the author's concern, which is not too much free speech as in "too many people being chaotic neutral", but more about small radicalized groups with too much free speech as "too extreme views". You can't ban "too extreme" communities.
I'd rather have them visible than underground. If the radicals can grow, it shows that there are problems that need to be addressed. Address their core problems using reasoning, no more reasons to be radical. It's better for everyone.
HN is a moderated community, which means that various social mores are enforced through behavioral nudges, through voting and flagging, and through ostracism of those who refuse to comply. These constraints upon speech offer a net positive value for participation that a forum of unconstrained speech cannot match.
I participate in HN because this forum's guidelines refuse the precepts of unconstrained freedom of speech, resulting in a healthy and vibrant community. If HN were an unconstrained speech forum, as many other forums are, then I would not desire to be part of this community — my participation would be of net negative value, and any controversial view I hold would be immediately overrun by abuse, personal attacks, and even doxxing.
The first full page of comments on this post are rejecting the viewpoint that a decentralized web would be harmful. I appreciate the cognitive dissonance of such views being posted here in such stridency and quantity, and each other time I see it occur. The passionate participation by those who believe in unconstrained speech demonstrates, through their own participation, that compromising one's idealism for the sake of social inclusion is considered acceptable — even when their viewpoint as presented indicates otherwise.
I've written about this a bit — might be helpful perspective:
"I’ve had many conversations recently with very well meaning people who believe that if we just decentralize everything, it will fix the internet—and perhaps all of society! Decentralize social networks, decentralize money, decentralize the world…if only it was so simple.
This is the “magical decentralization fallacy” — the mistaken belief that decentralization on its own can address governance problems."
...
"decentralization is clearly helpful in cases where governance and policing infrastructure are tyrannical. But often that isn’t the crucial problem or threat. It definitely isn’t the case in democracies where misinformation and harassment are being used to harm public discourse. In those cases, decentralization just turns a hard centralized problem into a harder coordination problem."
...
"There are ways to avoid tyranny while maintaining centralization and monopoly. Most notably, constitutions are specifically structured to avoid tyranny — and are generally based on a system of “overlapping centralizations” with checks and balances. The legislative, executive, and judiciary all “monopolize” governing the same people—and together also have a monopoly on violence."
...
"How can we create the competing powers of a multi-centralized social network and [online spaces]?"
The hard part is getting people to organically organize according to principles, virtue, and ethics. Do that, and decentralization is a natural consequence because a principled, virtuous, and ethical people don't need centralized forms of power and control.
I think the author is objecting to the idea that his content is hosted in the same system and on exactly the same terms as content he finds abhorrent . So he chose to move his stuff elsewhere so he's no longer associated with them. But that's not a good argument why there shouldn't be a space for those voices in the first place.
If he s advocating for the latter, that's a totalitarian idea.
Decentralization of the web (has also come to?) mean that we shouldn't centralize everything to FAANG. And I think it is important to keep those notions separate.
And I don't necessarily see how decentralized has that much to do with the issues described regarding IPFS. The issue there was more with it being more anonymous and resilient. And I do agree with the author on the downsides, I haven't really been a fan of IPFS but it is a neat idea.
Though I do believe that keeping internet open and away from google et al. is paramount.
> One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.
- Salman Rushdie
As soon as you get behind censorship, you are preventing things like critique of your government that are really really important. The same is true for defending things like encryption to prevent online eavesdropping. It's easy for a pro-censorship individual to point to 8chan which is part of why this is such a struggle.
> As soon as you get behind censorship, you are preventing things like critique of your government
This doesn't seem true to me. We currently censor child porn, but that doesn't mean we censor critiques of the government. You can censor one thing without censoring everything (despite that seeming contrary to most people's opinions in this thread).
I disagree with the author: tucking away our head from the future is not how we deal with the challenges of such future. We need new perspectives and ideas to cope with the unknown.
as if the regular web doesn't make illicit activity easier. as if the telephone doesn't make illicit activity easier.
as if the telegram doesn't make illicit activity easier
as if the printing press doesn't make illicit activity easier
as if the trained pigeon doesn't make illicit activity easier
as if the ink quill doesn't make illicit activity easier
as if the smoke signal doesn't make illicit activity easier
the man is shell shocked, needs a break, thank you for your service, lets keep moving forward!
I can see a newspaper in 1994 writing a piece of how they dont want internet because this will give power to the ordinary man.
"Internet will do more harm than good" they say. "Stick to whats working, centralized media with centralized control protecting you from all evil there is in the world".
Its fine that you are afraid of the future, but the future will become present whether you want it or not, and i rather have a decentralized future beyond control of big techs and governments, even if this mean giving voice to hate speech.
The fact that they assume that decentralized web equals immutable and global by default shows ignorance. You should take a look at SSB and Radicle, if you want a different dweb than IPFS.
On a purely technical note, something being "fully decentralized" would usually imply low reach. To amplify voices a platform has to be conceptually centralized enough to allow for a common experience. Which comes with the ability to impose rules. People may disagree on what the rules should be, but the great majority do want some.
The notion of huge swaths of people being sucked into some totally anonymous decentralized platform with no rules and nobody in charge sounds implausible.
Oh, look, another omniscient person protecting all the lesser human beings from the crime of wrongthink. So virtuous, moraly superior. What would we all do without them.
One can work or not on something for whatever reason they want. Just spare us the long description of how other people are lesser human beings that should have their rights restricted for their own good, and how it's better this way.
Now you want to limit their freedom of speech? Because you don't like what they say or how they say it? You're free to skip the parts you don't like and focus on the ones you find valuable.
(I was thinking whether to end this post with /s or not, and strangely, both ways provide valid context for this post; therefore, I'll end this with a Heisenberg /ß.)
> Just spare us the long description of how other people are lesser human beings that should have their rights restricted for their own good
That seems like a particularly uncharitable reading of the post. From the article:
> Many of you reading this will not agree with me, and that’s fine. I’m not going to try and change your beliefs with this blog post. Rather, I’m looking to explain why, while I respect that others might have differing opinions, I stopped doing anything that would actively advance a technology whose ethics I question. To put it in other terms: your freedom of speech isn’t my obligation to enable you and give you a platform.
The author isn't advocating making the distributed web illegal? I'm not sure what rights you think they're advocating restricting either? The article simple raises the question of if this technology would on-balance improve or harm society based on the experiences we've had with the web so far and the kind of content that can _already_ be found on IPFS.
The author says it doesn't stack up for them, and so they aren't working on it any longer. They call for others to put more thought into what they work on and how it may be used. Seems pretty reasonable.
By all means, disagree and explain why you think the scales are different than the author. But when you say something like:
> Just spare us the long description of how other people are lesser human beings
I don't know man, you clicked the link to read a personal blog. If simply reading someone's thought process as they come to a different conclusion than yours is such a sufferance for you maybe exercise some of that freedom and don't read it. As it is you're just coming across like a troll.
Hacker news discussion should be of higher quality than that.
Would your attitude be different if you were agreeing with what he says? I disagree with him but he's absolutely free and welcome to make such blog posts. If you don't like what you read, don't read more. Unfortunately you cannot ask for a refund of your time when reading blog posts.
There is a difference between a critique and censorship. The person is not advocating that the hosting company of this blog post remove it from the internet, he is saying the writing added no value, so should not have been written in the first place. I would assume your down-votes are for purposefully conflating these points.
> There is a difference between a critique and censorship.
I don't say otherwise, or even refer to "critique" or "censorship" in my post, so what are you talking about?
> The person is not advocating that the hosting company of this blog post remove it from the internet
I also didn't accuse them of advocating the hosting company of this blog remove it from the internet, or even remotely hint at such, so what are you talking about?
> should not have been written in the first place
He said the author of the blog should "just spare us" their opinion.
If you want to carry on pretending you don't understand what that means I can't stop you, but next time try addressing what was actually written, not stuff you've completely made up to argue about.
The downvotes are far more likely simply because some people who love hate speech but hate free speech have more than 500 karma.
Obviously (thought it seems not to you) free speech advocates like myself have no problems with different opinions being expressed. It doesn't mean other people have to agree with them. They can express they opposition and critique. And they don't even have to endure reading it.
In a way, I can't even understand how could you have confused the two (critique vs censorship).
I don't know who you were hoping to kid here, other than yourself, but grandly stating someone should "just spare us" their opinion you don't happen to agree with is obviously not even remotely a "critique" of anything, it's simply a call for someone to shut the fuck up, because what matters (to "us") is what you personally are willing to tolerate.
In a way, I can't even understand how you could actually need this spelled out to you, unless you simply have no grasp of what you're posting, which admittedly is what it looks like.
The OP is a long posts explaining how other people don't deserve their right to free speech and how that made them stop working on IPFS, and somehow you twist my frustration phrased as "just spare us" as saying I am trying to censor OP.
Not exactly, he just chooses not to participate, which is fine. Many - me included - still think freedom of speech is important, so these systems need to be built, and hopefully, they will. We can also choose to participate.
This dude's issue isn't the open web, it's social media. There are and will always be those fringe elements, but things really didn't start getting bad until the masses adopted Facebook and Twitter
Censorship is a conduit to ignorance and is more harmful than "misinformation". I suppose you believe there is some infallible authority which can sort the truth from lies, but this isn't true. The censored will legitimize any information conducive to it's own power. You're advocating the foundation of "thought crime", go away.
I had liked his other article, the one he linked there about the spying app. Showed an ethical baseline of concern for the users that every developer should have, in my opinion.
But this, this is not a result of any sort of concern for any user. This article was written clearly out of a self-righteous desire of the author to declare his own morality, and the result is that he ends up looking like he would be okay with controlling the users of whatever he builds.
So, as usual for people who make that claim I quoted, he fails to see how his own approach has clearly made him an example of his own words.
> [Unrestricted speech in the internet is worse than] criminal activities, terrorism and child pornography
Not a good start if the first implication is "online agitators" belonging to the fringe and extremes are somehow worse than actual crimes.
They aren't.
> All these extreme ideas have divided societies and increased social tensions. And they’re responsible for a number of acts of terrorism which caused the death of too many people.
This is pretty damning, in that those extreme believes he listed before this are far from the only ideas increasing tensions and leading to terrorism.
The more one reads, the more obvious it becomes—as seemingly always happens with defenses of censorship—that his problem is not so much with "unfiltered speech in the internet", but unfiltered speech in the internet that he disagrees with.
> It won’t be because of my help.
And here I feel lies the root of the problem, at least in its modern form, and what often causes good intentions to pave the road to hell nowadays: Some people are no longer content with merely having "opinions"; they need to have "stances" now.
Just ignore people like this and continue to build. There is no reasoning or arguing with them. Eventually there will need to be a micro fork of the internet as it is today that is used like freenet, deep, ipfs etc. eventually sovereignty itself will need to be forked. This will need to exist at hardware level as well. Though this will be moot once you REALLLY want that neura link. But expect a fight from gov and alphabets to ban people using alt tech. And expect non kyc wallets and cryptos to be banned. Expect kyc to be needed to even access the internet regardless of your concent or knowledge of your consent. Expect your DNA sequence to also be stored in goog or elsewhere regardless of your consent. The virus has accelerated this process. If you value your speech use alt tech.
Let me tell you a story of a society which built a liberated but centralized information system.
The main TV and radio stations uncritically report the progress of an unprovoked foreign war until one night, one man on one station uncharacteristicaly editorializes against it.
Media organizations through their leiason with foreign intelligence report falsely the atrocities of one side of a conflict, ensuring support for the other side which is actually committing atrocities.
The most heralded media organization in the nariona suppresses a story through an election which provides irrefutable proof that the state executive is running an illegal spying operation against the citizenry.
Is this Soviet Russia? Communist China? Tito's Yugoslavia? No, it is the United States prior to ubiquitous internet news.
Respectively I refer to Walter Cronkite's turn against the Vietnam war at the Tet Offensive, the misinformation campaign levied at the Nicoroguan Sandinistas and the New York Times decision to hold the warrantless wiretapping story until after the 2004 election.
I'm not sure that is a better world. I'm not sure if we aren't just looking at trade-offs, moderated media having its flaws and virtues, unmoderated having its own.
It is no wonder we shrink at the trials and tribulations of unmoderated information. They are new. But I think there is a tendency recently to overlook the costs our gatekeepers previously imparted to our society.
The issue i find with viewpoints like this are these comments:
> In the last few years, completely unregulated online speech has given rise to fake news and conspiracy theories that have actually killed people. It’s offered a megaphone to those promoting dangerous ideas like white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other anti-LGBTQ positions, and sometimes outright Nazism. It has tilted many democracies towards right-wing populism and fascism.
Perhaps that's what people actually think and would have thought regardless of the internet? Every thing listed is well below peak popularity, and anti LGBTQ sentiment for example is the lowest it has ever been with LGBTQ view enjoying widespread grassroots and estalbishment support.
Authors like this are simply yearning for the ecstasy of ideological conformity; the dream that they will one day open their web browser and find a world of people who suddenly share their enlightened world view. Instead of criticising others, perhaps they should question their own worldview and whether it would be even remotely normal for everyone to share it.
There is nothing more likely to grow those beliefs than to ban them outright. Goebbels was prosecuted for hate crimes in Weimar Germany in 1928[0], and to say such laws were ineffective is to put it mildly.
[0] Longerich, Peter (2015). Goebbels: A Biography. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1400067510.
People like that will returns us to the dark ages, every year propaganda for censorship is getting stronger and if in the past censorship was limited to actually published works, this time around it will be ubiquitous.
I feel it's hard to comment this without getting political but trust me, I am not the type to force anything on people.
Just imho all systems are flawed and a big centralized system is flawed in a catastrophic way.
At the same time I want humans to work together. That's why federation seems like the best way. Not just how the fediverse speaks between AP instances, but also how nations speak to each other in fora like the EU parliament and the UN.
Just like IRL I want us to keep our little bubbles of sub-cultures online, but to federate with other bubbles and sub-cultures.
For example I do not believe Mastodon did the right thing by implementing a hard coded ban of certain instances.
That's a discussion for another day but I've met several converted neo-nazis who might not have changed if it wasn't for activists making contact with them and not giving up. Something made impossible by a global ban. Each instance should be allowed to ban what they want.
A centralized anything suddenly means we're making big decisions centrally on who to exclude and who to include.
All effects aren't caused by a single factor. Free speech as a causal factor may enable an unfortunate causal path, but we can weaken this path by attenuating or removing its enabling antecedents, or by adding or amplifying its mitigating decedents. As such, multiple solutions to a problem that corresponds to a causal path exist.
Our values and understanding decide what solutions we seek. If a person doesn't recognize or underestimate the benefits of free speech, this person may accept or prefer a large degree of censorship as the straightforward solution.
Of course, finding an alternative solution needs insight and broad knowledge, which perhaps isn't that commonplace, even in academia.
I like that people write about this kind of things, as it shows they care about the direction they are walking towards. The essay is more an exposition of uncertainty and personal preference than actual arguments, but it's a good start to get more people talking about it. So let's do that.
I'd like to focus on one point: when you have millions of people interconnected, even "radical" ideas can find a place and resonate with others, and even become amplified. Gwern's "the melancholy of subculture society" [0] might be a good introduction to the topic. This is not inherently good or bad. We might be afraid of nazis of whatever, but the same dynamics also benefit oppressed groups and minorities for whom anonymity and this opportunity to connect with other people in similar situations is highly beneficial. I recently watched a video where Diana Fleischman presented this argument in favor of anonymity: without it, there might be no escape from certain totalitarian and manipulative regimes. Now, you might pick a side if you want. The truth is that we see examples of both in today's world. You might say that education could help with extremist views, so we shouldn't give up on decentralized, anonymous, uncensorable networks. You might say the same about totalitarian regimes or centralized monopolistic powers.
From a practical perspective, I think a good start is to acknowledge that decentralized and uncensorable networks already have good proofs of concept, and that in the future they will indeed become accessible to everyone. The question is not whether they will become mainstream or not, but what are the challenges we have to prepare ourselves for in case they do become mainstream. And to do that we need a deeper understanding of the dynamics of these small groups, and, in general, of online interaction. And again, this is already happening, even if decentralized networks could make this even more common. So I think the best path forward is to start educating people on the "dark sides" of online interaction: how the lack of eye contact and physical presence allows you to express yourself with less consideration of others (they can't punch you back even if you are rude), how echo chambers work, how extremist views are amplificated online because it's almost the only medium where they can expand through (and how that's not an accurate reflection of the average perspective on a topic), how conversation is highly decontextualized, how addiction, FOMO and infinite scroll impair our attention and might even induce a feeling or sense of detemporalization in our lives, etc. Summarizing, how online conditioning makes us act as different creatures than in real life, and the need to be able to tell those creatures appart, both in others and ourselves. Of course, real life has its own share of conditioning too. What's even the real you. Have fun.
Now this is the kind of comment I was hoping to find in this thread.
I'd like to highlight what I think is one of the more insidious "challenges we have to prepare ourselves for": bad-faith communicators.
I have faith in the ability of people to have a meaningful discussion given that all participants are taking part in "good faith". That is, I am trying to convey an honestly held idea or question using language to you, and you are trying to parse that communication in a manner to grasp my intended meaning. This is the hard problem in all communication as language is inexact and none of us perfect. But if we all buy in to this system, it's amazing at how well it works at building consensus and fostering useful debate. This good faith buy-in lies at the heart of functional democracy.
We all know that it's harder to communicate over the web. As OP mentioned, lack of eye contact and physical presence reduces the available bandwidth we have to get our point across. But the fact that we can talk to so many more people than before seems to make up for the deficiencies.
But we're seeing more and more bad-faith actors abusing this system. They don't want to explain a point so that it can be discussed and debated. They want to implant a thought or idea in an audience in order to alter behaviour in a way that benefits them. We're seeing nation states conducting manipulative campaigns against their rivals' (or their own) population. If you're a democratic nation this kind of campaign is tantamount to an attack against you (it's degrading your nation's capability to make the best decisions it can, doing real harm). But even if you're not a democracy, having a foreign nation convince your population something like COVID isn't real causes real-world harm to you.
Combined with our highly connected social media networks these attacks are growing increasingly effective. How does anyone fight this?
I'm somewhat cynical that education will turn out to be the solution. Is there really any way to train a population to spot and negate bad-faith communication with such proficiency that these attacks are nullified? When nations start hitting each other hard enough to do real damage, but not enough to unilaterally wipe each other out, my bet is that they're going to fall back to the historical solution for balancing power: demarcating zones of control, ie "borders".
...and this is why, despite sharing the same concerns as the author of the article, I think I still come down on supporting the decentralized web. We're in a unique point of human history where we can communicate irrespective of borders, and I would hate to lose that capability because of hordes of trolls. Maybe if we just keep the UX real shit we can avoid another eternal September? (only half joking)
I actually have a reversed view of what you say about good/bad faith. I think bad-faith communicators are a group small enough that if enough people actually had the ability to have meaningful discussions (which requires being able to focus on the communicative intent behind the words), then bad-faith communicators would be left without targets. I don't think the biggest obstacle to meaningful discussion is a lack of good faith or excess of bad faith or available technologies, but rather that communication is hard and most people suck at it, making it basically a game of confusion. I mean, for most topics we only come up with "rational" arguments in order to try to validate our own perspectives, but rarely think rationally about them. We have feelings and impressions, accumulated through our life experience, which help us develop our "intuition"... and I value intuition very highly, but it's also very often very wrong, and I personally find that almost everyone practices communication as a very lousy rationalization game of attaching bad arguments to honest intuitions. Large scale consensus is not possible under this situation, and in my opinion, changing this requires far more than good faith.
Oh dear. This blog needs to stop being posted here. Two straight days where all he says is "this tech is actually bad I'm not going to use it anymore and neither should you"
Discussions about censorship like this tend to take a sort of God’s eye view—-should we have censorship or not, as if ny of us get to decide and implement whatever we want.
Here’s a more practical question. Suppose there are two alternative social networks, one censored and one uncensored. Which one would gain market share?
Which is to say, this debate may not be settled via argumentation. But rather, the technical viability of uncensored networks, plus people’s free choices, may mean that we don’t get to decide at all.
From where I am, free speech is with a few exceptions (Germany: Holocaust denial) implemented.
> I have seen, and I am seeing every day, the dangers of completely unrestricted speech
IMO, it's important to point out that from a simple definitions standpoint, speech can only be free when it's unrestricted. And also I believe that free speech isn't dangerous when speech is free.
Speech starts to become dangerous when it gets constraint e.g. by force or power.
And then another comment as a software dev that worked since 2014 in crypto: Just because we have decentralized technology that can be used by the badys and the goodies, doesn't mean we'll have to consume both their content.
Centralized/controlled views are always possible and work well today already (e.g. what Google displays vs what is the actual content of the web).
Just ten years ago I would have found impossible to believe that the american left would be champions against freedom of speech and cold-war style russia blaming.
For every technically competent blog author out there that (was, but no longer) into IPFS / decentralized web, probably many more who just want to make one aspect of their decentralized web they experience today better for themselves without the need to evangelize (against) it, thus slowly make it more powerful for more people rather than the few who control the central nodes today.
Most of those problems come from anonymity. Especially from the ability to generate large numbers of fake identities. This is the fundamental problem with fully decentralized systems. Email and telephony suffer from this. It's why Facebook has a "real names" policy, although they're soft on it.
Non-anonymous free speech is much less of a problem.
"Maybe we shouldn't want" is a strange statement. It simultaneously appears to acknowledge widespread desire for something, along with an apparent minority view that wanting that thing is bad. In the context of a democracy, the argument ends before it begins.
Maybe we shouldn't want to write "maybe we shouldn't want"?
>I have seen, and I am seeing every day, the dangers of completely unrestricted speech, and I don’t want to be the one enabling that.
Sums it up. I hate to be the guy to say that. If you do not agree with the quote I posted you're probably going to have a fundamental disagreement with the title and just about everything in the article.
I think this blog post should be taken down or at least mostly censored, because it promotes depression. I don't want to see posts like that on the internet. Children can stumble upon it and find links to nazi content.
> I understand that my opinion is somehow a minority one
I for one age with you, and I have noticed these things myself on one or more decentralized anonymous discussion sites (and that made me lose interest and leave)
What are some p2p platforms and techs that have the best content / productive uses? BitTorrent, email, Mastodon, DNS, WebRTC and Tor come to mind for me. What makes them different?
They don't try to be entirely decentralized. Or entirely centralized. They balance between both. DNS still requires registrars and root servers if you want the whole world to be able to find you, but works just fine as well without those bits if you are fine with having a smaller community and can run a private root.
Ultimately I tend to think societies do best when the forces of aggregation and disaggregation can balance each other out and optimise for each other's strengths and weaknesses.
> It’s offered a megaphone to those promoting dangerous ideas like white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other anti-LGBTQ positions, and sometimes outright Nazism.
One should note that every one of these ideas flourished in times and regimes with strict and sometimes totalitarian control of speech. From the anti-Islamist Crusades to the criminalization of queerness to the damn Holocaust, all of the cited problems of free speech had their hay day in times and places without it. What progress has been made to fight these ills only occurred because of the right to say the unpopular.
this isnt even about the tech. He just doesn't want free speech/unrestricted speech because he's afraid others who don't share his views might be convincing in their argument. People like him are exactly the reason these technologies are so important. He hasen't lived in counties where they shutdown the internet on will to prevent people from getting information, or outright jailed people for saying anything negative about the patriarch on the internet.
I think there is merit to his argument in the sense that we don’t know what will happen.
We didn't anticipate any schmuck having a global platform and their fellow schmucks being able to vote. Seriously, our founding fathers did not anticipate this when only literate land owners could vote, and our ideology is based on that.
It is accurate that we don't have a society that factors in the ramifications of that either, only our brainwashing of the free speech ideology.
His conclusion may not be the accurate one, but we can acknowledge that neither extreme of restricted speech or completely hands off of technology is the answer for our future.
I wonder if there will ever be an answer to this question, at least in regards to free services on the internet[0].
Centralized services will always have incentives that are orthogonal to their users, because anyone who isn't paying for a product with cash is "paying" by allowing their data to be harvested. They may provide strong moderation at their discretion, but that will never be one-size-fits-all (see: the bipartisan section 230 repeal arguments in the US) - there's not a balance here that people won't find a way to politicize.
Federated protocols create perverse incentives to lock in users so they can't switch providers and to differentiate their service from neighbours using non-standard protocol deviations. These moves create insular communities where self-hosted participants are left out to dry through entirely defensible actions such as spam prevention systems (like big email providers junking/refusing to deliver mail from "untrustworthy" sources). Even relatively new protocols are wrestling with this problem - Matrix recently put out a document discussing a federated reputation system for servers to judge other servers. This will inevitably turn them into pseudo-centralized protocols, like email is today.
Decentralized protocols, like the ones in the article, are filled with all the people who've been banned from the centralized servers and kicked out by federated server admins. It's not surprising to me in the least that decentralized servers host objectionable content; without any meaningful form of network-wide moderation you have no way to cut out the bad actors from your network's discovery mechanisms. Anything approaching network-wide moderation would rely on some kind of network topology approaching a federated system.
I think part of it might be that humans are just inherently horrible. Not all of us, and not all the time, but enough to ruin the experience for everyone. I suppose it was easier when our ancestors lived in tribes of a couple of hundred individuals, but now that the entire globe is a text message away we're coming to grips with the fact that there's far more "objectionable" material out there than we previously thought. As with other problems of human nature, I don't think the problem or the resulting solution will come from tech alone. Rather, I imagine it'll take society as a whole a few decades to come to grips with the fact that everything is public for everyone, and power in the real world doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot on the internet.
[0] Paid services obviously have a different calculus ascribed to them, but with the way the internet has evolved there's a prerequisite discussion to be had about whether paid services will be able to catch on in the world today. Social networks, for example, rely on network effects, which are (to my understanding) a non-starter if your service isn't free. This is especially true if prices aren't adjusted for the developing world where people have even less discretionary income than in, say, California.
True. Controlling human thought at scale can be useful though. It stops my 8-y/o from watching what he shouldn't. There's a balancing act between FAANGs, and the wild west where you can go looking for things without being hand-held.
The mistake, I believe, is absolutism. If you're a Replublican everything Democrat is bad. Maybe there's a future in which the best parts of opposing sides meet to create a happy place?
Everything is a balancing act. Some FAANG is good. Some distributed web is good. Where on that scale we live is our choice. Choice is good. And sometimes, very occasionally, the illusion of choice is good.
> Controlling human thought at scale can be useful though. It stops my 8-y/o from watching what he shouldn't.
Surely what you actually want is categorising of human thought at scale, and then you deciding which categories of ideas are suitable for your 8-y/o to be exposed to (and which categories of ideas you are comfortable being exposed to).
Allowing a few entities to control human thought at scale is likely to produce a world that is bad for everyone, including 8-y/o's.
You can't have 'some' distributed web. Either you have somebody who can censor, or you don't.
You can't have somebody only able to censor some things or only a little thing.
If there was a way to censor child porn and nothing else, I would be running a Freenet node and be quite happy to do so. Unfortunately that is not possible.
Wasn't clear, sorry. Facebook censors things, Freenet doesn't. That doesn't mean there's no place for Facebook, and it doesn't mean there's no place for Freenet.
Imagining Marconi or Alexander Graham Bell storming off in a huff because someone said shit they don't like using their technology. Technology which obviously has been used for far more horrible things collectively than the internet or .... IPFS.
This attitude, however popular it may be among the coddled infants of current year, is a form of barbarism. Being threatened by ideas is hilariously insecure unless you believe your ethical and ontological system is a network of lies. Hell current year ding dongs fall apart into a froth at the mere writing of words -let alone the formation of them into something resembling ideas.
FWIIW IPFS is amazing, and fortunately doesn't need the contributions of such people to thrive.
Murdering people for holding the wrong opinions (see e.g [0]) is not something unique for coddled infants. Charlemagne did it, every tyrant in the world has and continue to do it, the inquisition did it. The 30 years war was, at least on the surface, a war about which version of Christianity leaders were allowed to believe in.
It idea that you should not murder people who disagreed with you, if you had the ability to do so, is an enlightenment idea, which still has not been fully embraced by most people.
In addition the complaint in the article was that it would encourage other people to do bad things, not that the author felt threatened by the words themselves but by what they might cause another third party to do.
My personal solution to that is to punish the person who did the crime, bringing back medieval torture executions in public if that is required to prevent people from doing these things.
Many comments seem to be fine with removing propaganda, which is fine, but historically states declare uncomfortable truths as propaganda, including Western democracies.
Would people saying Iraq doesn't have WMDs in 2003 be pushing propaganda?
> Instead, I think that regular people’s writings on the Internet is hurting the world on a bigger scale. And the collective sentiment is often manipulated by some “agitators” that are exploiting anonymous online speech for their own agendas: that includes online militias–for example sponsored by foreign governments–whose goal is to destabilize a society.
People seem to think the censoring ideas makese them go away. Nothing can be further from the truth. It just moves it elsewhere. If people are motivated they will find a way to get their message out there.
> In the last few years, completely unregulated online speech has given rise to fake news and conspiracy theories that have actually killed people. It’s offered a megaphone to those promoting dangerous ideas like white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other anti-LGBTQ positions, and sometimes outright Nazism. It has tilted many democracies towards right-wing populism and fascism.
Anti-semitism has been around 100s (if not 1000s) of years. Nazism was most prevalent in the 1930s to the mid 1940s. Homophobia and anti-LGBTQ views have been existed since the beginning of time I would wager. The last time I checked that was well before the internet was around.
AS for the the move towards populism (by the way there is left wing populism as well) and facism is because politicians don't address valid concerns around thorny subjects like immigration, whereas people outside the overton window will talk about those subjects. This isn't a problem with free speech it is a problem with these issues not being discussed and addressed by those in power in a serious manner.
As for propaganda (which is what meant by fake news) has been around since pen was put to paper.
> Second, while almost everyone in the communities supporting a distributed web are good people, with good intentions, seeing some names in there is concerning to me. Regarding IPFS, advocates (at least for a while) included people like Nick Lim of BitMitigate and VanwaNet, companies responsible for rescuing, among others, pro-nazi website The Daily Stormer and the platform 8chan, a cesspool full of Nazi propaganda, child pornography, and other hate speech.
This is the same crap old crap from governments and traditional news outlets to justify spying on their citizens and other privacy violations, which I am sure many people on here are opposed to.
> Gatherings on 8chan have been blamed for at least three mass shootings in 2019 alone, including the one in the mosque in Christchurch, all of them motivated by racial hatred.
The same can be said about more mainstream websites and communication services. IIRC the Christchurch shooter streamed the shooting on facebook.
> The first real examples of the distributed web aren’t particularly encouraging either. Among some of the most popular apps (“popular” in relative terms, of course) for the distributed web is DTube, a sort of YouTube that is built on top of IPFS. As you can expect, the website is full of questionable content, including conspiracy theories, cryptocurrency scams, weapons, RT International’s Russian propaganda… and of course, porn.
Not porn! Porn has never got onto the web before, we better stop this right now. /sarcasm
People used make the same criticism of large successful services we have today like Youtube, Reddit, Vimeo by saying the content was trite or dangerous. They used to same thing about novels in the 18th century.
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Ultimately his lamentations will be meaningless. Someone will pick up where he left off and continue the effort.
At the same time I wouldn't say that the Dutch a very united. Their lower house[0] is 50/50 split between pro-govt and opposition fractions, and Senate[1] is 43/32 for opposition.
They are not famous for street riots though, I'd give them that credit.
I think this video is err... somewhat misleading from first seconds. According to World Bank data[0], Netherland's GINI index is 28. Their neighbours are in the same ballpark: the same figure for Belgium, Denmark and Norway, 32 for Germany and Poland, 33 for France and UK. South Africa is 63. US is 41.
> It has tilted many democracies towards right-wing populism and fascism.
"Left-wing populism: OK. The right-wing flavor: not so much," is what I read out of pieces like this. That reading tends to be confirmed when you look at any given author's other recent takes, esp. on social media, to try to get a sense for their total perspective, including where their blindspots are. Outside of the obvious concerns, the thing that bugs me most is that because this and similar pieces are (correctly) thought of as a "left" call-to-action, and the left in the US has been associated with the tag "liberal", then people have become used to using the terms interchangeably, and they continue to do so, even when the new mainstream left's philosophy is rooted in fundamentally illiberal desire to quash. I recently listened to a Glenn Greenwald interview where, even in the midst of a long, impassioned argument regarding his departure at The Intercept, he slipped into going along with the misapplied "Liberal" label when what he was referring to was the left. This ultimately leads to more newly minted opponents for liberals.
It's easy to see what's going on. The author of this piece and many others once upon a time purported to espouse a certain set of principles, because it was fashionable and a socially expedient thing to do for the time, especially in the context of what it was a reaction to. The author eventually puts some thought into it and subsequently adopts a public stance matching what was privately true all along—revealing how little they value the things they said they did. The author then uses public messages like this one to signal that the earlier reactionary phase is over. This indicates to other fairweather philosophers that they, too, should now move into the new phase and adopt the new reactionary stance.
The level of sophism involved is important to keep in mind when trying to have a discussion. Principles here don't really matter, not even the ones which are said to underpin the new stance. Trying to have a principled discussion, therefore, or to attempt to work your way through a reasoned argument, is just going to be a waste of time and energy. It's still important to do it, but it's also important to understand what it's (not) going to achieve and be conscious of how you can better spend your resources.
>The author eventually puts some thought into it and subsequently adopts a public stance matching what was privately true all along—revealing how little they value the things they said they did.
I wouldn't chalk this up to irony just yet, but the lack of benevolent gatekeepers has allowed this to happen. And it will happen time and time again and there is nothing you can do to stop it. You've had a good run in your basement using something that the suits didn't pay much attention to, because they couldn't connect at the time how this seemingly boring machine called the computer could lead to money. But rest assured, your hard work has demonstrated it to them and has brought them over.
Slowly but surely you should make amends with some utopian idea of a decentralized, apolitical, and not-under-control-of-some-state web. Anything less than that is being delusional.
A free society has so many enemies from inside and outside who wish to force their hand upon everyone, that it's best to stay out of the way of the herd unless you believe getting trampled over is worth it.
When we were "battling" for net neutrality last time (or was it two times ago?) there was a good meme image floating around that showed a handful of different "packages" of websites you could have access to:
But if you really look, this has already started to happen. Netflix once had a decent library of movies, and then everyone caught up to them and now it's Netflix, Amazon, Hulu/Disney, HBO, and the list keeps growing.
Spotify, Apple, Google Music. Eventually this exclusivity card will be played by them in a much greater scale. At which point, the necessity of most people having to _ration_ what web they want to see will inevitably resemble having those packages up there.
So in closing, you're out-financed, out manned, and to make things worse, you've got so-called "leftists"/"liberals" as front line soldiers working free of charge (Mark Zuckerberg was right - they're not just dumb fucks, they're _gullible_ dumb fucks) for these corporations to further erode your chances of having any semblance of a decent internet.
As Morgan Freeman so eloquently put it in The Dark Knight: "Good luck."
Imagine a world where you can create a blog and write anything, even discuss ideas against the "status quo". That's the world the OP lives now and he's arguing against it.
The "status quo" in the dark ages was: bigotry, fanaticism, supremacism, conspiratorial theories, anti-science, slavery, and so on. At this time, writing anything against the masses beliefs would lead to persecution and death. People died trying to educate others and at the same time others extremist ideas were born but the society learned to ignore them. The good ideas were victorious.
Remember: On May 10, 1933 around 25,000 books from 34 university towns in Germany were burned! Some of those books were unique, their ideas will never be known by society.
If you go back in time, 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years back, whatever, the society always approved horrendous ideas and few people fought back. You should never trust the "status quo" or the "justice warriors" of the internet, as they could easily be on the wrong side of history. The access to information is the solution not the problem.
In my opinion, asking for censorship shows no respect for the ones that died trying to change the world.
There has been a trend among the progressives lately to scoff at freedom of speech as something that stands in the way of progress and majoritarian rule. Which is kinda amusing, given all the fights over it on campuses etc back in the day, that were in many cases about the rights to publicly express those political opinions that are now mainstream on the left.
But what's especially worrying is that some people do remember, and dismiss it anyway, because it "had served its purpose". That is - they explicitly say that it was never an actual principle, but merely the means to enable their propaganda when they were not in a position of power to ensure that they'd be heard. Now that they are, they don't want that tool to fall into the hands of those who "oppose progress". Same thing goes for due process rights, and some other long-held left liberal principles. Indeed, the very word "liberal" is becoming a slur further on the left, and specifically so because they see it as an ideology that protects their enemies. Much of that rhetoric is hard to distinguish from Soviet propaganda of old (take a look at question 42 here to see what I mean: https://archive.org/details/USSR100QuestionsAnswers1986/page...).
And while it's tempting to dismiss all this as some random internet rants that don't matter, it's hard to continue doing that when even ACLU is forced into changing their long-held stance to appease the social pressure and demands of newer members, and when their events are shut down by protesters chanting "liberalism is white supremacy".
There is some weird playing the victim card here as social networks try and clean pure play disinformation campaigns on their networks. Nothing is perfect and there will be missed but there is clearly a intent towards reality rather than lies.
It's kind of the point of the lies and subjugation that cast this as a liberal conspiracy where its just a matter of not getting it right 100% of the time ( which is not possible )
Indeed, ACLU has long done so - this is why I said "even ACLU". But this particular article is misleading - they certainly did change their take on free speech after post-Charlottesville criticism from the left. It kinda dodges the issue by saying, "well, there are conflicts between rights sometimes, so we just issued a guidance on how to resolve them" - but the point is that the guidance is different from ACLU's past consistent stance.
I would have thought that even people who are in favor of some censorship recognize that most censorship is not "benevolent". That even though they might dislike that IPFS will make it harder for facebook and youtube to decide what people are allowed to think, they would like that it will also make it harder for the governments of russia and china, and that this would more then make up for it.