Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”(technologyreview.com) |
Alex Stamos: Asking tech companies to police hate speech is “a dangerous path”(technologyreview.com) |
What people are concerned about are the newsfeeds and timelines, specifically. Companies like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube love to pretend that their newsfeed/timeline products are just like chat apps or phone calls--neutral messaging platforms.
They're not. And the specific reason they are not, is the algorithmic timeline and content suggestions.
It's silly to worry about giving these products "the power to determine what people can—and can’t—say online." They've already seized it for themselves--by deciding for me which content will show up in my newsfeed/timeline/suggested list. They decide which content gets promoted to me.
Yes they use an algorithm to do so, instead of human decisions. But guess who built the algorithm?
Companies that run algorithmic newsfeeds and timelines need to own their role as a publisher and a gatekeeper of content.
Instead of pretending they don't make choices, they should be introspective and thoughtful about the criteria they are using to make those choices. "Engagement" is not neutral criteria because emotions are not symmetrical. Engagement is higher on topics of fear, anger, rage, violence. That's down to our evolution; that's down to the amygdala.
So if you build a publishing system designed solely to maximize engagement, it's going to become a system that preferentially serves content that feeds negative emotions. There are articles and case studies where a person starts with a fresh account and sees what kind of content gets pushed to them; inevitably they get horrible conspiracy theories and fear-oriented content.
Making decisions about what content your audience sees is an act of publishing, even if it's executed via complex algorithm. The companies doing this need to accept their responsibility for what they decide to serve and promote.
I think the more pertinent reason here is that these platforms have broadcast capability (immediate communication with many people) as opposed to p2p capability (traditional SMS or phone calls). Even if Twitter was strictly chronological, without any algorithmic mutation, we'd still presumably be insisting they police content, right? I agree with your conclusion that they're publishers, but to me, what makes a publisher a publisher is not content curation or mutation, but is simply broadcast capability. And so our drive to regulate follows quite naturally from similar drives to regulate the press and media.
One involves a neutral role, in which subscribed feeds are delivered to users without modification or filtering.
The other involves an active role on the part of the platform for any number of reasons: increased engagement, removal of voices that may cause perceived damage or lack of trust in the platform itself, or other, more ideological reasons.
I've noticed an intentional avoidance of distinction, lately, between active and passive behavior on a number of fronts, from sexual activity, to medical advice and intervention, to social media publishing. It's a pretty crucial component in ethical analysis that I suspect is being intentionally blurred.
Many people are demanding that Facebook do exactly this.
They're stuck, however, because many of the people who bought into the myth of objective, non-biased algorithms have gone down the rabbit hole of the garbage recommended by those algorithms. To those users, attempts to cull the garbage will be interpreted as censorship.
Add to that there is no way to improve the recommendation systems (from an ethical standpoint of "improve") without hurting engagement.
Add to that HN's allergy to government regulation.
It's going to be quite a rollercoaster ride over the next few years. :)
"There are good ideas floating around for how Facebook could make life harder on WhatsApp propaganda artists. In an op-ed published in the Times this week, Brazilian researchers Cristina Tardáguila, Fabrício Benevenuto and Pablo Ortellado offered three ideas: restrict the number of times a message can be forwarded from 20 to five, which Facebook has already done in India; dramatically lower the number of people that a user can send a single message to, from its current limit of 256; and limit the size of new groups created in the weeks leading up to an election, in the hopes that it will stop new viral misinformation mobs from forming." https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/19/17997516/facebook-electi...
10-15 years ago, SMS forwarding and bulk SMS were marked as a problem. Indian government had put in laws in place where they can and do ask telecom operators to jam mobile or even internet signals in sensitive areas.
In which case, asking technology companies to toe the line is the next logical step.
facebook DOES censor Messenger.
This is true. And it is more difficult than most people want to even come close to dealing with. Let's say that you wave a wand and you have a bot that will 100% eliminate every racist claim ever made on the service, burying it and showing it to no one. You have just made it impossible to talk about racism. By killing the discussion, you will enlarge the groups of people who would never think to use a racial epithet, but who harbor deep convictions that different races have genetically-driven differences in capability and some need coddling. That is racism. But you can't even point that out, let alone discuss why it is factually wrong, on a sanitized platform.
On a sanitized Twitter, Megan Phelps-Roper and her sister would still be members of Westover Baptist Church, protesting gay funerals and spewing vitriol. They might not be able to do it on Twitter, but they'd be doing it elsewhere. Because Twitter was NOT sanitized, and because it WAS possible to confront people with total refutation and challenge to their most closely-held beliefs, Megan Phelps-Roper was convinced that her own position was wrong and destructive. And because of that lack of censorship, that permission to offend and call out, Westover Baptist has 2 fewer people working daily to hurt others. Anyone calling for a sanitized online platform is calling for a death of discussion, a death of social progress, and a death of any opportunity for the ignorant to learn.
In the 1960s, it was profane, disgusting, and obscene to suggest that interracial marriage should be allowed. It wasn't just 'a different opinion.' It was a view that made people sick, that riled up violence, that led to name-calling and hate. And it was only because the public forum was able to bear that hate, those insults, etc, that progress eventually happened.
Eric Schmidt in his book 'A New Digital Age' makes the argument that people like himself should take the reigns and kill discussion so that he might make the decisions for society. Were he around in the 60s, he would be fighting to lock down discussions about interracial marriage. He, and many like him, see the public having heated discussions and roiling in conflict and conclude they are mindless and incapable of policing themselves. This is a view as old as time. It's Conservatism. The old kind. The kind that backed kings, pharoahs, chieftains, etc. The kind that said some people are simply Better and destined to lead, while others are Lesser and destined to follow. Don't be surprised, but many are comfortable to accept that role as a follower if it means less responsibility or need to think. Conservatism died out near the end of the 18th century and through the 19th but there is no reason it couldn't re-establish itself with a fresh coat of paint and maybe with the help of some automation.
Sure they are. Microsoft is even monitoring their service for "bad words".
https://boston.cbslocal.com/2018/03/27/microsoft-ban-offensi...
> What people are concerned about are the newsfeeds and timelines, specifically.
No. That's a small part of what primarily the left want to censor.
> It's silly to worry about giving these products "the power to determine what people can—and can’t—say online." They've already seized it for themselves--by deciding for me which content will show up in my newsfeed/timeline/suggested list. They decide which content gets promoted to me.
Which you can choose to ignore or bypass.
> So if you build a publishing system designed solely to maximize engagement, it's going to become a system that preferentially serves content that feeds negative emotions.
Then why aren't you demanding CNN or the NYTimes be censored?
> The companies doing this need to accept their responsibility for what they decide to serve and promote.
They are. They are serving what their customers want.
The only people who are complaining about it are authoritarian and selfish individuals who want to control what people see and say. It's no different than a prude whining about the porn people watch.
> They're not. And the specific reason they are not, is the algorithmic timeline and content suggestions.
They're not because they're public, akin to broadcasting. One to many. In the past such has always been more or less under careful control. Public broadcast TV and radio were under control of dogma and moral, and it wasn't feasible to make your own. Publishers could opt not to release a manuscript if it didn't fit their ideology.
Consider the following thought experiment: "Twitter and Facebook were exactly as popular as they are now but they'd show everything only chronologically (last on top). Do you recon the control problem would be solved at that point?"
Now consider the following thought experiment: "Twitter and Facebook are only private 1:1 conversations. Do you recon the control problem would be solved at that point?"
In example #2 (regardless of it being chronologically shown or via an algorithm) the communication -whatever it might be- only goes to one person, not the general public. This contains the strength of propaganda (such as fake news or hate speech) greatly.
Also, remember that there are all kind of biases [1] even while we're not aware of them or when we are weak to fall for them.
[1] It is worth summing them all up but I am by no means an expert on this subject. I'm currently reading the book "The Confidence Game" by Maria Konnikova and it explains various of them in detail.
Repealing Digital Safe Harbour would be a good first step. If you are responsible for what people see, you are responsible for the content.
When we demand that Twitter ban anti-semitic tweets, or that Cloudflare block white supremacist websites, or that Youtube deplatform Alex Jones, we are taking the power to limit speech (which the founders felt was too important to be wielded by the government) and handing it to middle managers at software companies. The de jure rule is "Freedom of Speech shall not be infringed" but the de facto rule is "Don't say anything that would upset the advertisers."
This seems like a Bad Idea (tm) but until/unless a decentralized Mastodon/Scuttlebutt style platform gets traction, I don't know what the solution is. It's a natural result of relying on private apps as a primary method of communication.
> we are taking the power to limit speech (which the
> founders felt was too important to be wielded by the
> government)
The core assumption is that while _I_ am able to see these vile ideas for the lies they are, the unsophisticated masses must not be allowed to hear them, lest they fall prey.
This is problematic in ways that used to be obvious to people in free societies, but for some reason seems lost now.
Free speech is what defines a democratic country.
Terms like 'Hate Speech', 'Fake News' are buzz phrase distractions that get in the way of the core of this reality. We already have a legal system in place that defines libel, threats etc. We don't need a new layer of corporate jurisdiction over our ability to speak online or monitoring what we can or can't say
Ideas are the only counter to other ideas and how we communicate those idea is via speech. Suppression only invites martyrdom on the behalf of those suppressed, increasing their credibility.
I have yet to hear compelling answers to this problem, and I am not that optimistic that it can be solved in the next few decades. I do agree that trust busting is the wrong approach. At least the problem is currently centralized.
If you want free speech, you accept the consequences. If you want “regulated” speech, there are consequences.
That’s it. I would argue that the level of satire a society can cope with, is directly proportional to the quality of democracy the society has.
You're contradicting yourself: First, you deny that there are graduations in "freedom", saying it's all-or-nothing.
But then, a democracy's quality is apparently proportional to its freedom of speech, implying that there are, indeed, nuances.
I always thought that the Internet would be a democratic platform that would improve the debate in society. Maybe we would go back to a democracy without intermediaries.
I was wrong.
We are entering a dystopian world where the profits of a handful of companies are more important than the rest of society.
Should Twitter, Facebook and Google Executives be the Arbiters of What We See and Read? August 21 2014 - https://theintercept.com/2014/08/21/twitter-facebook-executi...
Facebook Is Collaborating With the Israeli Government to Determine What Should Be Censored September 12 2016 - https://theintercept.com/2016/09/12/facebook-is-collaboratin...
Then: Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments December 30 2017 - https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-dele...
"hate speech" from:ggreenwald on Twitter - https://twitter.com/search?q=%22hate%20speech%22%20from%3Agg...
Observation: promoting is cheaper (even profitable). But they can promote it with plausible deniability.
Which is a more "dangerous" path? And to whom? Society? Shareholders?
This worked to marvelous effect when legitimate, unique net neutrality concerns were buried under an avalanche of duplicate anti-net-neutrality letters sent on behalf of people who were very much deceased.
The solution to this challenge likely needs a much more nuanced approach to it than just burying hate speech in more speech, because look how well that turned out.
Time bears us many more examples where your proposal was successfully inverted to hideous ends. The loudest have a very pervasive tendency to win.
There's a can/should debate hidden in here. Tech companies totally can police hate speech (or any kind of speech) on their platforms, thanks to handy things like a ToS. Whether they should is a cultural question about what kind of a society we want to have. If history has taught me anything, it's that the can side of the debate wins in the long run.
Did you have the same biases I did? At that time and age (my teens, mostly), I just assumed people with different values than mine were ignorant, and so naturally they wouldn't be capable of using advanced technology.
I'm not proud of that, but there's still a _lot_ of that sentiment kicking around, including in the form that giving people additional access to technology and knowledge will educate the masses into the "correct" set of values held by whoever's pushing for greater technological adoption.
Greater access does help /if they are willing to use it in self improving ways/ in the first place. If they just use it for tabloids and gossip it won't be a library to them but tabloids and gossip.
It's a coincidence that John Perry Barlow died at the height of all this, but I think it's extremely symbolic that governments are asserting their power just as technolibertarianism's radical cleric passed away.
Speech that explicitly or direct line implicitly dehumanizes anyone.
Then the arguments become pretty simple: does a statement dehumanize someone? Does it indicate that they are any less human than another? That's a much easier discussion to have.
You can hypothesize a future in which Mastodon gets very popular, and in which a single for-profit node or a coordinated group of such nodes monopolize it and end up wielding censorship power similar to traditional centralized social media sites, but that's not what it's designed to do and there's no reason to assume it's a fait accompli.
In the end, even most of these hypothetical distributed social network instances would have the de facto rule:
>Don't say anything that would upset the advertisers...
I don't think this is true. I think some people always got it, and some people still do. The difference is that the internet allows anyone to post their opinions, but it used to be a lot harder to reach other people.
We still have people that we hold up on pedestals for saying the right things, and the people that we remember from the past are the ones that said things that were incredibly right, or incredibly wrong. We don't remember what every common Joe used to say daily.
When I was a kid, I saw a full hooded KKK march on TV, and I said "why do we let them march?" and my mom said "because you have to hear from people you don't want to hear from to know free speech is working"
I cannot fathom that this conversation would even be considered good parenting today.
The issue is how to avoid exploitation and manipulation.
When the KKK marched several decades ago, it got coverage in newspapers and media proportional to its influence in society. Today, the wealthy and foreign opponents can weaponize hate speech like this to fan flames of division for their own purposes. That is the problem.
Your first two paragraphs would be a huge hit on /pol right up until you got to the point of resolving which adversaries and interests you're talking about.
I don't know where it takes us when an authoritarian, silencing approach is what both sides agree on, and they just haggle over where to point it.
Preventing manipulation and exploitation and doing them are really completely identical from a practical standpoint. Even nobility preserving woods was itself a form of exploitation since remaining untouched was a divergence from the status quo.
It's also about control. The biggest whiners about "hate speech" are the media and news companies. Because they want to control what people see and hear. They don't care about hate speech, they just want to be able to control which hate speech the masses get to see.
It's patronizing, it's paternalistic and it's also puritanically authoritarian. It's evil.
There's no plausible mechanism by which talking about an idea more and more, makes it disappear. That's all an idea is: something to talk about.
Now, if you want to argue that no ideas should ever disappear, go ahead, but don't cloak it in "antiseptic" language. Antiseptic kills things. If you're talking about antiseptic for ideas, you're talking about killing ideas.
The algorithm will always favor manipulation...
honestly, i just wish users would go back to small communities and indy publishers... It's easy for me to find a music forum or jeep forum with people i want to hangout with but on facebook those that can game/manipulate get the most views and its ALWAYS selling controversy...
Defending free speech means defending those we disagree with, and maybe even hate.
I think no one disagrees that it "works" insofar as it stops the bad person from getting their bad ideas out there. Opponents of deplatforming generally argue that the long-term reaction to the deplatforming is worse than the problem the bad person's ideas were causing. Better to counter the bad ideas with good ideas to do long term good.
I suppose it depends one what you goal with deplatforming is. If it's convincing people that the ideas that people like Alex Jones and organisations like Black Lives Matter (they're in the article as someone who have similarly been affected) are wrong or hateful then I think it will fail.
Consider the fact that deplatforming (primarily of right wing speakers) in the US became significantly more prevalent around 2014, and 2015. It didn't help in the 2016 election.
For example, despite what anyone thinks about what Trump says (I think he's an idiot and a clown), he does occasionally say something that isn't complete BS (please don't make me try to find such an example).
You just can't go down that route and expect a good outcome. In fact, I would argue that you're going to end up with the opposite result that you intended because you'll, inadvertently, end up giving more attention to idiotic ideas than the ideas actually deserve.
A lot of holders of bad ideas have no interest in rational debate. For those people, sunlight is an energy source, not an antiseptic.
When ISIS posts a video of a beheading, there isn't a lot of reasonable discussion going on in the comment section.
I doubt the founding fathers were inviting Quislings to their debating societies during the revolutionary war.
Viruses thrive through exposure to new hosts.
See, you can prove anything using an analogy.
The question is, should "bad speech" be amplified, promoted, propogated, broadcast, surfaced, and repeated, ON PURPOSE; just so it can get rebuked, debunked, dismissed, and exposed?
(I agree with you, the answer is closer to "The Remedy to Bad Speech is More Speech ... Marketplace of Ideas" however, the question being discussed is more akin to "Theres a limited amout of space at the front page, and people have limited amounts of attention to give, WHO gets the megaphone, and for how long". Its the inverse of "the robust debate principle recognizes that sometimes in a crowd of speakers it is necessary to turn down the volume of certain loud and clamorous speakers in order to give others a chance to speak." Facebook and the algorithm DO DECIDE who to turn the volumn up on, who to promote to the top. They already arent neutral, they already exhibit preference and bias for certain ideas.)
Others are arguing that this is flipping the argument, BUT we are talking about algorithmic placement moreso than true censorship. If someone is allowed to post something but it NEVER makes it into someone elses Newsfeed, is it as good as censored?
There's some evidence deplatforming works:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-...
> “We’ve been running a research project over last year, and when someone relatively famous gets no platformed by Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, there's an initial flashpoint, where some of their audience will move with them” Joan Donovan, Data and Society’s platform accountability research lead, told me on the phone, “but generally the falloff is pretty significant and they don’t gain the same amplification power they had prior to the moment they were taken off these bigger platforms.”
> There’s not a ton of research on this, but the work that has been done so far is promising. A study published by researchers at Georgia Tech last year found that banning the platform's most toxic subreddits resulted in less hate speech elsewhere on the site, and especially from the people who were active on those subreddits.
https://mashable.com/article/milo-yiannopoulos-deplatforming...
The idea that if you just say the right, True (TM) thing then people will flock to it so not only naive it's so obviously wrong if you look at a laymen's perspective on basically any subject. It's also just a waste of time for the subjects typically in question. The communication of ideas has changed. It's a chaotic free for all. We've over done it. It's time to have a serious and reasonable conversation about the current state we find ourselves in, least we shoot ourselves in the foot with blind, headstrong optimism about ideals that don't much the reality of human nature.
In before someone references 1984 blindly and displays the ever-popular dystopia-prediction fetish that's so prevalent in these conversations.
I find it curious that those who apparently are in such a rush to suppress Bad (TM) ideas adopt the worst ideas of fascists in order to do so.
(setup - 1950 but we have facebook/twitter/youtube/instagram)
Most of the population thinks that people promoting same sex relationships are just hell bent on destroying the good and wholesome America and demand that the leaders of LGBT of the time be deplatformed from that twitter/facebook/youtube/etc.
So where does that put America :)
It's only unsolved among people who don't understand what free speech is.
There are no "compelling answers" because the problem at hand is how to maintain the positive branding of free speech while removing what it means for speech to be free.
There was no reason why the opposition to that candidate couldn't have put up their own absurd lies, or, dare I say, disproved the far right candidate's lies, thereby achieving the same success via the same platform. The elections are all about effective campaigning. You can't blame the platform because the candidate you don't like is too effective at using it. Instead learn from your mistakes and use this platform to be just as effective.
Then they spend all the time refuting absurd lies instead of explaining their proposals.
Tech is just the easy scapegoat for society.
One of the blocked accounts were of the son of the candidate.
- limit the amount of persons in a group
- limit the amount of people you can forward a message
- Restrict broadcasts
It struck me as childishly pedantic to address, so
>Speech that explicitly or direct line implicitly dehumanizes anyone.
Except, you've gone nowhere. You've substituted the intrinsic ambiguity and subjectivity inherent in 'hate speech' with the same intrinsic ambiguity and subjectivity inherent in 'dehumanization' .. in fact, I have a better idea of what 'hate speech' is than what 'dehumanization' actually entails. I've seen people argue that a model in a bikini is dehumanizing.
It appears to me that we are excluding voices from public discourse because, in the opinion of a powerful group, they have been rude.
One person's rude criticism can easily become another person's hate speech.
People get sick die because of political decisions, and people gain great amounts of wealth because of political decisions.
People maintain comfortable places in society or remain in fully employed poverty because of political decisions.
There is very little in peoples' lives that aren't affected by politics.
If you're in a position for politics to not affect you because it's just an abstract topic of conversation, you're part of a privileged class of people who aren't being scrutinized and blamed because of your inherent, born qualities. Congratulations.
(see the answer?)
There is a clear definition of hate speech. It's not as amorphous as you need it to be in order to protect your ego.
if 1) do you consider yourself a human? A) yes, then why haven't you killed yourself? Since you haven't you think you're more deserving of life relative to everyone else and therefore are dehumanizing everyone but yourself, if 2) ok, you've publicly proclaimed that you don't think you're human which then let me add a second rule. Only humans have right to speech.
One-to-many relationships aren't innocent to begin with; they've always been under public scrutiny, a magnifying glass. Algorithms might make it easier to find what you seek (I can assure you they do not always as I've witnessed on Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple -- you name it).
Bubbles are also not new. If you were a Catholic in The Netherlands in 1950 or 1960 then you watched Catholic TV and listened to Catholic radio and went to a Catholic church on Sunday and listened to a Catholic preacher and a Catholic pope telling you what to think about atheism, abortion, HIV, anti-conception, marriage, homosexuality and what have you and you went to a Catholic dancing. You came home with a Catholic partner of the opposite sex. Oh and you went to a Catholic school. Protestants? They exist, somewhere, but not in your myopic world. [Full disclosure: I grew up as an atheist child of Protestant parents in a Catholic area.]
Its a matter of choosing your overlord(s)...
We've always relied on editorial control for the most part in all of our mediums to make sure that the information being disseminated is reasonably accurate and fit for public consumption. It's not a fascist idea and has absolutely nothing to do with fascism or any type of propaganda for any political party. There's no need to be so absurdly hyperbolic over what is quite frankly, a common sense mechanism when dealing with the proliferation of ideas.
We know that disinformation spreads faster than the truth on several new, internet media platforms these days. The onus is on the people who would so eagerly disregard common sense filters that have been time tested, for them to prove that the danger and harm currently being caused by this new wave of disinformation in every single subject matter will be worth it now, tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future. Take the following:
* Vaccines, health.
* Environment
* Economics
* General politics.
In which subject are the ideals your espousing helping us? Because in each of those subjects I can point you towards real life, damaging consequences that have come about because of unfettered Bad (TM) ideas that spread over modern mediums.
This isn't a theoretical problem. It's happening right now, today.
So called "hate speech" generally is not an explicit endorsement of violence.
Incitements of violence are already prohibited by law.
Gab itself has been deplatformed to a degree, Google and Apple banned their mobile apps and their DNS registrar threatened to yank their domain over certain user posts.
First of all: who is to decide what's dehumanizing, or even hate speech?
It's also possible to make a comment that is read by one part as hate speech, but it was never intended as such. The quick attack made on the poster that made the: "I feel that this comment dehumanized me." makes it seem like someone is offended by that very comment. If I, by accident, make comment, that someone decides is hate speech and try to have it removed, I would certainly feel dehumanized. Having the meaning of my words ripped apart and banned by a system that decided that I must hate someone, that's hurtful.
Hate speech isn't what worries me though, it's the notion that me speech somehow needs policing. First we ban the obvious stuff, not attacking people on the basis of gender or race, we can all agree on that. Next it's a ban on hateful speech against religion... but we don't all agree on that one, because some religions need to be criticised. Anyway screw the anti-religion people, who next? Those who go against the government, how about those opposing certain parties. In the end I'm kicked of the Internet for saying something negative about Disney.
I am more tolerant and wise than you because I can separate political thought and speech from political action. You, apparently, cannot. I am being charitable by calling you a control freak who cannot handle having their deeply cherished opinions challenged.
So, in your words, I would say, it is somehow fundamentally impossible for a technology to be "passive".
You may find the choices of the average person "divisive or simplistic" but the Retweet button doesn't dictate their choices.
"Policing" content, however, is all about dictating people's choices, motivated by the thought that the "police" know better than less powerful people, and reestablishing the biased filter controlled by the powerful (new-)media executives.
It's a relevant analogy. You're free to dispute it, but we might all benefit if you invest some effort explaining why this and other examples aren't relevant.
To answer the heart of your point: any kind of editorial/screening system isn't perfect. We'll get things wrong. We always have, always will. It's still better than what's happening right now on these mediums where we know some portion of the population are "getting things wrong" and we're just allowing it to happen in a free fall fashion. "Do nothing" is never the answer, never has been and probably never will be.
To address your specific example: It's not based on what most of the population thinks. Qualified opinions are a thing. We can talk about what makes a qualified opinion, with your example or any other subject. Notably we see these types of opinions in your example gaining momentum because we're allowing certain groups of people unfettered access to an audience. It's really a bad example in my opinion, but I understand and sympathize with the point you're trying to make.
Unfiltered, unstructured information from unqualified sources tends to prey on our darker nature more often than it appeals to our better senses as people. To kind of expand on implementing practical systems around how we actually function as humans, in a lot of ways the "bad" part of human nature is why we've structured many western governments with explicit separation of powers with checks and balances. There are just some things we gravitate towards as humans that just aren't "good." James Madison in fact said the state was just a reflection of human nature, for the previous reasons. In a lot of ways, we have historically treated information dissemination in the same manner, checking and preventing the worst of our nature when broadcasting and consuming information via editorial controls and trusted, proven sources.
Who qualifies the opinion? The opinion of those that wanted gays muzzled in 1950s were very qualified opinions.
Hell, during the Obama's first term in the office he publicly opposed gay marriage as the President of the United States.
Notice that your comment is being slowly greyed out and my question is already in the negative with you being the only person who actually responded rather than attempt to downvote it into oblivion. And this is on HN, not Reddit.
Not monitor, or not use for advertising targeting?
I'm fine with spam/malware/virus prevention in my Messenger or Gmail. I'm not enormously comfortable getting an ad for baby clothes after I send a private message to someone that I'm pregnant.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
Equating ISIS with supremacists is equating a nuclear bomb with an M80 firecracker.
I don't need to prove that to you. Even in your own odd request, you didn't even make the feeble attempt to pretend that you're running a popular media platform. We are talking about extremely popular platforms that inherently give credence to any view points espoused on those platforms, view points that can have far reaching effects. To give you a very specific area that we're touching on, it's internet demagoguery.
Editorialization is not censorship, nutter.
The platforms ubiquity makes them the Hydes Park / Public Square of the modern age- if anything they should be regulated to be content neutral rather than be encouraged to silence certain viewpoints.
If we actually had a government run system, we could ensure things like accountability for your ideas that you self publish in such a public square because the government itself would have the servers that contain the data. The constitution would limit the government from censoring this platform, but it wouldn't limit the government from implementing more effective methods of processing abuses of free speech such as libel by having an immediate record of what was said. My main point here is that it's easier to agree on what if any free speech limitations should apply if there isn't this proxy layer of "Well corporations can do whatever they want with their servers" and "Well these laws don't apply to what they said because nobody is speaking in the domain that freedom of speech applies to"
And be assured, in such a world, the advertisers would move to the distributed social network instances.
(As an aside, it mystifies me that some VPS provider hasn't already built this. A FOSS decentralized social network that requires a small dedicated server would be like a whalefall for that industry. If I were a PM at Amazon, I would have a team contributing 'store my files on AWS instead of my phone' to Scuttlebutt right now, and ditto for every other promising-looking decentralized social app.)
Not just that the reaction is worse, that the deplatforming erodes the spirit of free speech. I believe free speech is an important part of democracy.
Nobody is listening to his ideas enough to give them underserved credibility.
> That is not comparable to platforms
> censoring certain views.
Facebook, Twitter, Google... they're the ones footing the bill to host their users' content.
The ideas discussed here would be more like a telecoms provider specifically refusing to do business with someone because they disagree with their politics.
So I still don't think it's "clear".
My girlfriend's dog is very sweet and loyal. I think it deserves to exist more than a (human) child molester does. This doesn't mean I think dogs are human.
To say that another doesn't deserve to be recognized with those positive human qualities is at the root of saying that they don't deserve to exist.
Remember that whenever you create a tool to silence people, you are building a weapon that can be used against yourself. As recent elections have shown, sane politicians aren't always in power. The only long term solution is to build a system that works even when your enemies are in charge.
Even in Europe, which has much stricter bans on hate speech and xenophobia than the US does, and where capital punishment is banned, claiming capital punishment should be unbanned is legal.
This is circular reasoning. If we've already established that I might not think all humans deserve to live, you can't claim that thinking I deserve to live means I think I'm more human than everyone else.
It's perfectly possible to think someone deserves to live less than I do while still thinking they're human.
Such tortured logic is hardly "direct line implicit", which is exactly why your definition doesn't work.
We do! Buy a domain, point to your home server, and go to town. Any unlawful messages you spew will be met with seizure of your domain and/or servers, but otherwise you're free to promote or discuss any ideas you see fit.
If you're talking about a government-run social network, that's an interesting idea. I was actually talking about this with someone a few days ago, but with regard to a government run (or government funded) news/journalism publication that reported on facts (as opposed to felings and clickbait).
I think these government-run services would eventually become victim to people's calls for them to be removed...either they are too biased, or not biased enough. A social network in particular...I cannot imagine a social network built and run by the government that ANYBODY would actually want to use.
It seems many very vocal people on the internet are essentially pushing an idea that the most sensitive people should be defining what those boundaries are for everyone and the list of things people can be outraged could change at any time, and ignorance of these boundaries is not sufficient excuse.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/10/17961806/google-leaked-r...
The difference between America and Germany — very broadly speaking — is that America goes for the local maximum (free speech trumps everything) and Germany goes for a global maximum.
Social networks don't control the police and jails. They have always had the right - though they neglected it because they are lazy and delusional - to moderate content on their own servers.
It's so clear to me that "one size fits all" social networks will go away. They are inherently dysfunctional. Putting everyone from terrorists to toddlers on the same forums was never a good idea.
You don't have to allow the KKK to use your private property, and neither does anyone else.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/08...
I don't know many parents and children who would be sitting around watching tv with each other. Let alone watching a klan march?
Way too many screens. Way too much choice. Way too much personalization. The scenario itself would only arise in VERY conservative or traditional families. Most other families just don't work like this.
Blame Netflix I guess?
So kids live in a free market, and they generally choose things we, as parents, don't like. This doesn't, always, make the kids wrong. And it doesn't mean that they are in need of our guidance to see things "correctly". (Which invariably seems to mean, "You're wrong kid, this is what you should believe." And then we wonder why they call us hypocrites when we at the same time talk about a "free market of ideas".)
The argument is, that some software companies have crossed into becoming a telecom like entity. A market failure exists, where consumers may need protecting.
Obviously, current laws dont treat facebook, google, or microsoft that way.
Do we feel the same way about gmail/outlook starting to censor emails that google/microsoft dont approve of?
I understand that there's a different level of consequence we're talking about here (legal vs comment deletion) but how we treat child porn is the extreme for intolerance and I think it's safe to say child porn is less than it would be in the more "tolerant" alternative. And I actually do mean think, I don't have evidence, and I don't know, so if there's evidence otherwise that some society accepted child porn with the caveat of "this is bad" always being placed beside it and then saw it's usage and distribution drop I would find that pretty damn compelling case.
I would point to other comparables though. What causes a decrease in smoking? Did putting health warning labels on cigarette boxes decrease smoking? How did that compare to banning commercials and removing indoor smoking?
People without platforms are still free to speak. If dang banned me from HN I could still go stand on the corner and read my posts aloud and no one would arrest me.
Free speech does not mean I'm entitled to someone else's platform.
Am I being censored or deplatformed? ;-)
I'll see myself to the corner...
But if a platform wants to be a "common carrier" and not a publisher with all the responsibilities thereof, it doesn't get to make the distinction, so actually in a very real sense, you are entitled to use the platform of anyone who wants to be a common carrier, by definition.
If you send something controversial via USPS, they don't have any liability for it, and only in very exceptional circumstances would it be intercepted in transit. If they were responsible for everything they carried, the postal service would look very, very different. If it's illegal you can be busted at either end but the postal service itself doesn't care.
You're thinking of the first amendment, there is a nuanced difference between that and the general principle of free speech.
I'll assume you happened to not be aware of this, but there are lots of people online who refuse to acknowledge that difference and continue to spout the "entitled to someone else's platform" persuasion meme, which is kind of what this whole discussion is about: power, or altering the course of future events. If one's ideas & principles are sound, disingenuously censoring opposing ideas shouldn't be necessary. I believe many pro-censorship people know this explicitly (but would never speak it out loud) and others "sense" it subconsciously.
Is the difference between the First Amendment and the moral principle of free speech really that nuanced?
It seems to me one has to be thinking strictly in terms of a single country, a single period of human history, a single document in order to conflate the First Amendment with the moral principle of freedom of speech. This is a very narrow view.
I'm fascinated with why people don't acknowledge power structures as having any influence in how one part of society views another; that there is currently no hierarchy in society.
You just haven't ever needed to interface with this idea and therefore believe it's not a defined concept.
I didn't say anything of the sort. What I meant to communicate to you was that I don't see any evidence that the SPECIFIC (and arbitrary) power structures you choose to use, have any actual explanatory power. Typically, ideologues of your persuasion will attempt to explain any disparity in society like this. Those claims are almost always unfalsifiable and can be twisted and contoured to fit any data point.
Do you understand my point? There are many power structures and many hierarchies in our society. If you were to explain the particular status of a specific individual here are some characteristics:
- race
- ethnicity
- gender
- sexual orientation
- height
- IQ
- Extrovertness vs introvertness
- Disability Physical
- Disability Mental
- two-parent vs single-parent household
- household income
- geographic location of upbringing
- geographic location of present residency
- education level
- sense of humour
- religion
- political alignment
- marital status
- number of dependents
- hair color
- attractiveness level
- language
- athleticism
- etc. etc.
Ideologues of your persusain tend to argue, with ZERO evidence, that immutable genetic characteristics dominate all others, even though most evidence suggests the opposite. So it isn't about denying the idea that power structures and hierarchies exists, but rather denying the idea that the SPECIFIC power structures and SPECIFIC hierarchies you choose have any value for explanation.
I'm strictly talking about well-defined terms.
Maybe you have never examined them because you never needed to interface with them in practice, or maybe you do understand them and are just arguing in bad faith to defend a more abstract belief. I won't make any assumptions about that.
It depends if you're trying to win elections or internet arguments, or to ensure a healthy marketplace of diverse ideas exists, because that is the best way we know of to find the best solutions to problems. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube are where modern people "congregate" and get their "information". Cutting someone off of these platforms dramatically lowers the chances that anyone will hear them, that's the entire point of the action. Claims that dismiss this as no problem "because someone else's platform" are not just saying nothing illegal has happened, they are also essentially saying a free marketplace of ideas is not valuable. This is a very new development in western countries, and it's pretty easy to see how far gone most people are already, even on more intelligent forums like this. Partisan politics trump almost everything on certain topics, even one as important as this.
You lost the thread of the conversation the moment someone confronted your belief that it doesn't have a clear definition.
The reason you lost the thread is because you're struggling with the internal contradiction of your belief.
> When I was a kid, I saw a full hooded KKK march on TV, and I said "why do we let them march?" and my mom said "because you have to hear from people you don't want to hear from to know free speech is working"
The point is, exposure of reprehensible ideas is part of free speech. The fact that we consume media differently today does not change this. Maybe the 21st century analogue is a kid asking their parents why Alex Jones is on YouTube (well, that example isn't possible anymore). Or why we let the KKK use Twitter. The medium is a detail, the point is explaining the value of free speech to kids.
The fact that kids may be interested of different ideas also has no relevance to this point. The situation here is when kids ask why certain ideas aren't banned and suppressed, the answer is because free speech entails tolerating the existence of said ideas.
Things are not how they were 30 years ago. Children are exposed to a myriad of information on a myriad number of ideas in a myriad number of ways every day of their lives. Here's the reality of being a parent today, your children will have set ideas about many many topics long before they would ever speak to you about it. So the idea that a child would come out of their room, or come home from their friends house, or from practice or whatever, and ask you about the weighty issues of the day, is fundamentally flawed. Children will Google it. Whatever more they need to know will come from their friends via snapchat.
Here's the bad news for all the new parents out there, YOU, will be the last person they will ask about anything like that. And they will attach the least importance to your opinion. (And they will attach no importance to your opinion if your opinion deviates from information on Google or Wikipedia).
Does this mean you will have no impact on your child's development of ideas? No. But it does mean that you have to set your expectations reasonably. The combative and argumentative parent-child relationships in my own opinion, usually arise due to parents not having a realistic set of expectations in this regard.
As a parent, you have to adapt to this new reality. I'm not going to tell people how to parent in the new reality, or even in the old reality. But I will say this, launching into a lecture about the importance of free speech is a REALLY good way to lose the room when dealing with kids. (A lecture sounding speech on anything is a good way to lose the room.)
Or maybe lectures do work for some kids. And maybe there are some kids out there who talk to their parents about these things instead of simply googling them. But my last kid is going to college next year, and that was never my experience.
As I said initially, I really don't think that the scenario that you are envisioning, would happen very often in today's America. Kids today will already have these sorts of ideas set long before you even think to talk with them about it.
(And if that's too much for prospective parents to think about, I won't even let you in on the fun that awaits with respect to the subject of sex, or drugs.)
Our carceral system is widely recognized to be deeply racist in practice and in philosophy. This being the case, it's not an unbelievable stretch to say that when someone holds a belief in capital punishment, there is a good chance they also have parallel beliefs that rationalize capital punishment as a functional part of that racist system.
In that case, such advocacy is part of their rhetorical framework of hate speech. The clarity of the definition of hate speech gives us to see the context of that.
Let's imagine you work at a social media company. You see the comment: "capital punishment should be legal". You don't know anything about the carceral system of the jurisdiction the commenter lives in.
Do you remove the comment for being hate speech, or not?
But the main point is that since the other commenter reached the conclusion that this would be hate speech, and you reached the conclusion that it might be but not necessarily, it follows that the definition he or she proposed is not clear.
That's not a universally accepted definition. You're simply asserting it to be true. It's very similar to the way the definition of 'racism' was contorted from a conceptually simple "somebody who hates someone based on their race" to "somebody who discriminates (usually in some abstract ill-defined, overbroad way) and who is part of some power dominance hierarchy (also arbitrarily defined) against a marginalized sub-group" or paraphrased: "If you're non-white, you cannot be racist". Sorry, you don't get a pass on that and you don't get to just assert this to be true. I also believe that this is a deeply immoral way of looking at the world.
Not quite. I am fully aware that ideas like "privilege" or "dominance/power hierarchies" have well defined meanings. But thought they are well-defined, their applicability in explaining our society is controversial. Proponents of these concepts tend to be ideologically driven. I criticized these concepts because you used them to create a definition of 'hate speech'.
>Maybe you have never examined them because you never needed to interface with them in practice
I have no idea what you're talking about here.
>maybe you do understand them and are just arguing in bad faith to defend a more abstract belief
I disagree. I attempted to be very clear in why I disagree with your point of view and I tried to capture your position fairly. Where is this 'bad faith'?
I don't know how to make this any more explicit. Hate speech having a clear and defined concept (which both you and that other commenter can research on your own) gives us a way to define whether or not the comment and context is harmful or not. I'm not going to hold your hand here, you need to read about it.
I am not discussing whether or not hate speech is clearly defined. I was discussing whether "Speech that explicitly or direct line implicitly dehumanizes anyone" is a useful definition. Do you think that's a useful definition, or not?
If that wasn't the point you were arguing against, then we're going nowhere.