They can’t and they shouldn’t. The potential good that could come from this does not outweigh the catastrophic failure modes of this approach. Some enlightened people understood this, hundreds of years ago.
Its time for another amendment.
EDIT since this is related, another horrendous idea that recently disgraced my timeline
What do you propose to combat disinformation campaigns?
Look at what’s happening. The end results of allowing anything to happen on social media are not good. We’re not in a good place. So we can ignore that for rigid principles, or admit that those principles don’t stand up to the real world.
No, no one hundreds of years ago had any idea about the scale or effect of social networks. Yes there was propaganda and brainwashing, but the speed and adaptability and design of these systems is so different as to be categorically unrecognizable.
There have always been tabloid newspapers, underground conspiracy theory magazines and various AM broadcasting stations peddling all kinds of nonsense.
The internet is just a new medium that’s joining the club.
There is no substitute for critical thinking. There are always going to be people who will hold opinions that are anathema to your beliefs. Often, those opinions will be the majority and you will be in the minority.
You learn early in life to ignore the crazy people on the sidewalk holding up signs and screaming about lizard-men running the government. You also learn early in life that politeness and civility will carry you a long way towards being respected in your community.
The internet is no different.
If you can’t function without a school teacher in the room, you aren’t ready for the adult world. We don’t need facebook or twitter or anyone else babysitting us as we go about our lives.
There are multiple places on the internet where you can access completely unmoderated content. 4chan and 8chan are two popular forums, and yet they are far from mainstream.
The fact is that moderation is a feature which people want. People don't want to go through 200 spam e-mails everyday. People don't want to spend tons of time going through bullshit.
Facebook and Twitter has never been about getting "unfiltered" news. Facebook became useful because your friends was there. Twitter became useful because you could read content from famous and skilled people.
> There have always been tabloid newspapers, underground conspiracy theory magazines and various AM broadcasting stations peddling all kinds of nonsense.
And these will continue to exist on the internet. The only thing that's happening here is that Facebook and Twitter is taking a stance that they don't want to become part of this group. Is that so bad?
Again, fine in principle. Doesn’t stand up one second in the real world.
I agree that the ideal of every adult is being educated, taking time to check facts, having a critical mind.
But that’s not realistic. It’s not where we are. And the facts of democracy are that uneducated people vote. People unprepared for the internet crazies. They’re not handling Fox News as entertainment or tabloids. They think it’s real.
So, again, we can pretend that’s not happening. We can say, “well they shouldn’t be like that.” But that’s not reality.
> Again, fine in principle. Doesn’t stand up one second in the real world.
The first amendment and the resulting USA would be my prime counter example. The US wasn't an accident, freedom of speech is a hard requirement for free people and letting companies censor people "for our good" is antithetical to the nth degree.
The first amendment allows companies to "censor people," that is part of the people's freedom of speech and freedom of association. It only prevents Congress from doing so.
It ensures the freedom of the press, and had the founders envisioned a day when three corporations miles from each other had more power than the entire press and government combined to censor citizen's speech I have no doubt that the first amendment would read a bit differently today. For a lot of people, social media has become the press in some ways.
Nevertheless, there seems to be a disturbing trend in these conversations of implying that the first amendment means something it doesn't.
If people want to advocate for nationalizing social media and forcing platforms to publish speech against their will, and making it illegal for them to moderate content, then they shouldn't pretend they're doing so in the spirit of the first amendment or what the founding fathers envisioned free speech to be.
It's a commonly spread fallacy that only "publishers" are allowed to moderate content, and "platforms" not. The entire purpose of Section 230 is to allow platforms to moderate user-submitted content without facing legal liability for doing so. Social media platforms have always been allowed to do exactly what they're doing.
Flood the internet with more disinformation that is generally harmless but ends up being moderately embarrassing or inconvenient to those who believe it enough to act on it. Teach people by negative reinforcement to not assume what they read is true unless they've vetted the source.
Or: Have a counter-disinformation group that responds to political disinformation by creating more disinformation that points in the opposite direction.
To some extent all of the above is done already, organically. In fact, to the extent that Facebook et al. manage to hide the stupidest crap, that would tend to make people believe that what does stay up must be true (or, at least, must have passed Facebook's fact-checkers).
My concern is that strong campaigns against disinformation might not actually help with this problem. They could make it worse, if people start to believe that Facebook and Twitter are sanitized media outlets that won't let you say the real truth.
I don't necessarily disagree, but one big problem is that there is no "adult world" on the internet. If you can't function without a school teacher and aren't ready for the "adult world," you can nonetheless get a Twitter or Facebook account just like anybody else, and interact with the adults, and maybe even fool some of them. It takes a while to sort out who's an insane asshole. The only way to tell is by listening for a while to what's coming out of their megaphone that unfortunately millions of other people can also hear. Finally you decide they're a metaphorical non-adult and, I guess, block or unfriend them, but meanwhile millions of other non-adults are like "Yesss, finally someone said what my lizard-brain has been thinking all along!!" That's not what happens with the guy on the sidewalk holding the sign.
Edit: Just noticed you said lizard and I said lizard. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental. I meant something about the basal ganglia or limbic system, whereas yours is an exotic & fantastical sci-fi scenario. Although interestingly if you consider all the venality and viciousness in national politics, and the fact that every politician has that same part of the brain, it's actually kind of true that lizard-men are running the government!
Happy to see that at least one guy gets it. Every day I‘m more astounded how western civilizations got to be - it sure as hell wasn’t the Average’s Joe idea, and hundreds if years after most still don’t get it.
So basically you are arguing that if all the disinformation published on your site leads to terrorist attacks and worst case, a war (either civil war or think of how disinformation was used by Hitler to convince most of Germany he was doing the right thing), the most ethical thing to do is doing absolutely nothing. Almost everyone want as much freedom of speech as possible but ethically if it leads to huge number of people suffering/dying needlessly there has to be some safeguards. Also, note that FB not publishing something is not against freedom of speech, since they can always create a website to publish any disinformation they want. As long as the government doesn't make a blanket rule against publishing something, there is still freedom of speech.
Since you mention Germany: What if I told you that Weimar Germany had laws against certain types of speech, which were actually applied to suppress Nazi propaganda, and that the result was obviously ineffective and possibly counterproductive?
"In my research, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic and found that, contrary to what most people think, Germany did have hate‐speech laws that were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti‐Jewish sentiment is irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti‐Semitic speech had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis, including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher, were all prosecuted for anti‐Semitic speech. And rather than deterring them, the many court cases served as effective public relations machinery for the Nazis, affording them a level of attention that they never would have received in a climate of a free and open debate.
In the decade from 1923 to 1933, the Nazi propaganda magazine Der Stürmer — of which Streicher was the executive publisher — was confiscated or had its editors taken to court no fewer than 36 times. The more charges Streicher faced, the more the admiration of his supporters grew. In fact, the courts became an important platform for Streicher’s campaign against the Jews."
Pure ideology (how it ought to be) vs. immediate reality (shit is melting down in real time). It's easy to choose the former when you're not the one suffering.
Having principles hurts sometimes. Sometimes they require you to do things that are painful with the understanding that the alternative is even worse.
I'd gladly take a world with disinformation over a world in which an unaccountable third party determines what is truth, and therefore okay to say. I can work around the first problem with some effort much easier than the second one.
> a world in which an unaccountable third party determines what is truth, and therefore okay to say
We already have that - and have had for centuries - the people who control the press control what gets presented as "truth". Look at Fox or any other Murdoch property for a perfect example.
(cf "History is written by the winners" for another angle.)
And is Fox successful in determining what is okay to say? Do you see ordinary people afraid to say something because Fox said it was wrong? Facing social, professional, and even legal consequences for expressing disagreement with Fox?
There is competition in establishing the truth. Not as much as I'd like, but a decent amount. Reducing that competition would be bad.
That is exactly the problem, though, isn't it? Unaccountable third parties are literally currently controlling the truth, via disinformation. An alarming number of people are convinced in conspiracies and untruths like the deep state, QAnon, anti-vax, flat earth... How is the ability to freely and massively distribute misinformation not a means of controlling the truth?
Is there anything new about an alarming number of people believing in untruths? The trade off seems to be how much you trust normal people to correctly parse information and sort the truth from untruth, and how much you trust organizations to parse and dictate truth.
The Downside of the common man having too little oversight is more people believe things that aren't true (Flat Earth), and the downside to too much oversite is people believe different things that aren't true (PRISM, Nayirah testimony, Tuskegee Syphilis Study). The trade off of which is worse varies, but generally most individuals are fairly powerless but there are many of them, and organizations are few but wield much more influence.
Controlling the truth via disinformation.? I admit I have horrible comprehension skills but it sounds like a smart enough statement when you repeat it enough, I just can't grep any meaning in this. Do they know the truth? You throw in the conspiracy groups and you have made yourself half a statement.
They're bad we get it, Id rather be able to hear how bad they are in the light. Who was accountable when we spread lies about WMDs in Iraq? That caused magnitudes of more damage than these groups, yet no one is held accountable even with Public figures. Do you want everyone accountable for misinformation silenced or just those you disagree with?
But the alternative doesn’t stop at misinformation. This propaganda is helping elect people like Trump who has expressed a desire to silence his critics through whatever means he has. I’d rather be censored by Facebook than the government.
I mean yes having principles hurts but leaving social media as it is doesn’t make you Rosa Parks.
We see a problem, we try to fix it.
They’re not unaccountable. This whole thing is about holding them accountable!
If they were completely unaccountable then they wouldn’t do any of this. Why is Facebook taking action against QAnon now when it hasn’t in the past year? Do you think they haven’t seen the polling data for the president, house, and senate races? They’re preparing to fight for their life as a conglomerated monopoly.
What does holding them accountable look like to you?
Why should Facebook (or any other platform) be accountable to anyone in particular for what the users of the platform say?
I get that, now, they've hoisted themselves by their own petard after years of inconsistent policies and enforcement, but I mean in a general sense.
>What does holding them accountable look like to you?
The opening paragraph of section 230 of the CDA, to wit:
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"
There be far worse dragons than disinformation down the other roads. Let's take this to its logical conclusion - you've got people on the left upset about "conspiracy theories" (which is, itself, a pejorative term with problematic origins rooted in thought control), you've got people on the right upset about "bias" against their stances.
When both sides of the political aisle are demanding tighter control over speech for any reason, the intended result should terrify the hell out of you.
The problem you speak of is not "people say false things" (which is not solvable), the problem should rather be seen as "people demand the ability to censor people they disagree with". The solution to that problem is telling both sides to pound sand and take responsibility for their own beliefs, not foisting that responsibility off onto third parties in a way that necessarily restricts freedom of speech.
People tend to over-inflate the potential impact of fake information sources. False information tends to hurt people and we're extremely adept at recognizing false agents, whether they be random tweets, facebook posts or media outlets. Some people walk around so afraid of someone spreading a lie that could hurt them that they insist on authoritarian controls on speech but the fear is completely unfounded.
For smart intelligent people, false statements create untrustworthy agents. For oppressive despots, false statements are always the most expedient shortcuts to some desired outcome. What countries like China are doing are playing the despot and preventing their people from thinking critically as much as possible, and silicon valley thinks that's a wonderful idea.
Keep the marketplace of information free and let people adapt. In the short term, will people be manipulated? Sure. Is that desirable? No.
In the long term, as has happened before, people adapt to the new reality. Marketing has to change all the time because people wise up to manipulative strategies.
The long term solution is a more intelligent public, not censorship.
Banning ad-based news, or at least ad-funded social media. They only push garbage because it attracts eyeballs, which makes them money. Just like tabloids.
We're far from being in a perfect place, but we're in a relatively good place compared to the rest of history.
Reinstituting modernized versions of monarchs and clerics who tell us what we're allowed to know and to think.
I neither want Facebook and a few corporations to declare themselves the gatekeeper of morality and acceptable thought nor do I want the oppressive regimes and dictators use freedom of expression against us by flooding us with misinformation and lies. But forking over control to a group of tech figures like Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Bezos, or Pichai cannot be the answer to the threat of Putin and Xi Jinping.
Thomas Jefferson wrote the living should not be ruled by the dead, and that the Constitution should expire after 19 years.
James Madison wrote the Senate should protect the moneyed from democracy, and the Constitution was forever.
If you’re going to point at their ideas, don’t cherry pick nebulous middle ground cartoon versions of their actual positions. Don’t lump them all together as believing in the same values.
Those enlightened people never conceived of a world where a lie could be spread to millions of people by anyone at the click of a button or spewed in volume by bots posing as people.
Maybe they did conceive of it and they don't care. This type of action satisfies the objective of enforcing the orthodoxy by chilling any speech or action that could be remotely construed as being antagonistic, which is perhaps the true goal.
Understandable. How do you propose we deal with the current wave of propaganda and misinformation that these platforms enable, especially since they’re already having a very real effect on politics all over the world?
Add critical thinking and logic lessons to school curriculum. Issue would be solved in about a generation but governments and large companies would hate that.
That will never happen in this country. The truth of the situation is, one political party benefits from this ignorance way more than the other, and they are protecting their investment in keeping the electorate ignorant.
> "Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
Your statement could just as easily apply to publicizing a whistleblower exposing massive corruption as it could to active collaboration with a foreign power to subvert an election.
But beyond that, what are you actually proposing to "start"?
Thomas Jefferson wrote the living should not be ruled by the dead, and that the Constitution should expire after 19 years.
James Madison wrote the Senate should protect the moneyed from democracy, and the Constitution was forever.
If you’re going to point at their ideas, don’t cherry pick nebulous middle ground cartoon versions of their actual positions, and lump them together as on the same page.
Some enlightened people that knew much less about reality than we do and have been dead for 200 years.
Old ideas of American civic life have become a religion unto themselves. Jefferson wrote of that too: laws must change as human awareness grows.
It’s time to change things, I would agree. I’d start by burying old idols. Little left to be gleaned from men who died without knowing of Einstein, Godel, and the rest of modern invention.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The catastrophic failure mode of doing nothing is that democracies vote to stop being democratic, and do so with deafening applause. It has happened before.
Let them fight disinformation; also require them to be open about how they are doing it so they can’t become a disinformation provider of their own — there are already enough people, left and right, who think FB et al are censoring their ‘truths’ for nefarious reasons.
They're removing bots. I for one appreciate the lowered noise floor. If a platform (Facebook) is claiming that it's for people, then we should know when a post is from a person or a bot.
> does not outweigh the catastrophic failure modes
Here's the opposite catastrophic failure mode which the enlightened free speech defenders fail to notice (or do notice but don't care because they're not the affected parties - or at least doesn't think it affects them or are simply accomplices)
Truckloads and truckloads of unchecked fabricated BS drowning the discourse. Mob censorship.
Such as, say, Fox News buying Facebook? Or Soros? Or RT buying Twitter? Or a Saudi sovereign wealth fund? Now how do you feel about Twitter and Facebook deciding what misinformation is?
One problem is that the power to vet/censor particular things may be beneficial in a certain pair of hands but disastrous in another, especially when you're dealing with a platform that has extremely powerful network effects and controls so much of the information flow in society. To reiterate the point of the previous comment, would you feel comfortable if FB came under control of the Saudis while it was engaged in extensive vetting? I would not. Naval says that one test of a good system is whether you can hand the keys over to your adversary and things don't go wrong, which applies well in this case.
Another problem is that vetting (/censorship) is often supported when it's "your side" doing the vetting, but I don't trust that any politically tilted group of individuals will engage in unbiased, non-partisan vetting. FB's staff is of a certain political demographic that differs substantially to the country at large and this will likely sway the decision making away from a fair and balanced outcome.
If FB or Twitter engages in vetting I would like to see it done in a satellite office set up explicitly for that purpose where great effort is made to select individuals without extreme political leanings.
> One problem is that the power to vet/censor particular things may be beneficial in a certain pair of hands but disastrous in another
What's the disaster exactly? I keep seeing allusions to catastrophe and disaster but I am not seeing any specifics about the material effects of this catastrophe.
> would you feel comfortable if FB came under control of the Saudis while it was engaged in extensive vetting
Why would that make me uncomfortable? Like what are the Saudis going to do with Facebook that would be so terrible compared to what Facebook is already doing under current ownership? The Saudis in particular seem like a weird example considering the already prolific influence of SoftBank in U.S. tech firms.
> Another problem is that vetting (/censorship) is often supported when it's "your side" doing the vetting
I don't have a "side" with respect to what Facebook removes from its platform, I can't fathom a scenario where something being removed from Facebook can be accurately described as a catastrophe or a disaster regardless of who is doing the removing.
You can see the effects in China where state control of the narrative, achieved in large part by oversight of companies, has made their population completely unaware of the Uighur situation.
Granted, FB is a private company so the extent to which it's a concern is not as big, but given the control that FB has over information flow and the network effects of FB, similar risks are present. Think: swaying elections by permitting misinformation that supports only a certain side. It's an extraordinary amount of power that has the potential to be used maliciously. At the moment it remains a hypothetical but given the China example it is not an unreasonable concern.
I think the general concern with respect to foreign ownership of U.S. firms is reasonable to discuss, but I don't see a problem with Facebook removing content from the website regardless of the owner. Regardless of who owns Facebook there is going to be some content that will be removed, same of every platform out there, I just don't see what the harm is that something is taken down from Facebook.
I think my main concern is the potential for politically biased vetting, which could lead to an election being swayed. It's a large amount of power over a democratic outcome by a small group of individuals who are not accountable to the public and are not guaranteed to be acting in good faith.
It's possible that the fact-checking orgs that have been chosen really are neutral but given the political power they hold in their hands, and given my experience with human beings, I still do harbor some residual concern about this. They seem like a remarkably high leverage attack vector for cynical political operatives. I probably have to do some more digging about who these fact checking orgs are before I come to a concrete opinion, however.
I will however admit that the alternative is also fraught with the exact same risk. Allowing various actors to actively spread misinformation can itself sway an election. Perhaps the best solution is to have vetting that only targets the most egregious, obviously false information, where the information that was censored (unless it is violent/pornographic/criminal), especially that which is relevant to upcoming elections, is catalogued and available for viewing by the public, simultaneously for accountability, public trust and to assuage conspiracy theorists that the vetting is political.
> I think my main concern is the potential for politically biased vetting, which could lead to an election being swayed.
That ship has already sailed. The problem of politically biased vetting is a universal fact of life on literally every media platform in existence; people just need to be judicial in their consumption of media.
> It's possible that the fact-checking orgs that have been chosen really are neutral but given the political power they hold in their hands, and given my experience with human beings, I still do harbor some residual concern about this.
I am sure they will be quite flawed, but I don't see the problem with that, of course they will be flawed, why is that such a problem?
Being merely flawed is not the concern. If mistakes were made with roughly equal frequency in both directions on the political axis, that is an example of being flawed but is not a serious concern. It's potential political bias that favours a specific party or election outcome which is the concern. The power to swing elections being bestowed on a small group of unelected, unaccountable people is the concern.
It's not valid to compare vetting by the social media oligopoly with legacy media curation. Social media companies are like the new public commons through which the plurality of conversation and debate flows through nowadays. It's not practically possible to opt-out unless you want to exclude yourself from public discourse. There's also a distinct difference between legacy media bias, which is worn on the sleeve, and the shadowy undocumented impact of vettors whose bias can't be scrutinized by the public.
> The power to swing elections being bestowed on a small group of unelected, unaccountable people is the concern.
Any power they have is given freely of their own volition, nobody is compelled to use Facebook. People who rely on Facebook to stay informed about the world are responsible for their own choices, the same way someone who chooses to rely on Fox News or MSNBC is freely making their own choices.
> It's not valid to compare vetting by the social media oligopoly with legacy media curation
Yes it is. The issue in question is an organization's power to influence elections by controlling information that consumer's receive, in this respect, legacy media curation is identical to social media curation.
> Social media companies are like the new public commons through which the plurality of conversation and debate flows through nowadays
Privately owned websites aren't a public commons, the internet is a public commons and citizens have total freedom to come and go as they please or even carve out their own slice of the commons for whatever purpose they desire. There is no reason to wrest control of business prerogatives from private website owners just because lots of people share political memes on a website. If this issue is a real concern then the government should provide a 1st amendment protected platform for citizens not arbitrarily violate the free-speech rights of private companies.
> It's not practically possible to opt-out unless you want to exclude yourself from public discourse
Totally false. There are hundreds of different platforms to choose from to participate in public discourse online and its very cheap and quite common to self-host one's own blog or platform to that end.
Wow, I had not seen that from Yelp. That is a horrible idea, and because they control brick and mortar reputation more than anything else, there is nothing that can be done about it. Hopefully they get sued for libel and realize what a dumb approach this is.
Cause no one else has the skills or resources. And things are happening too fast and at huge scales to depend on local law enforcement/courts to handle it. You can see them freaking out everyday.
There was a time I thought the US and EU wld get things under control specifically after Brexit and Trump but its quite obvious govts don't have what it takes right now.
Will be interesting to see what the counter reaction is from bad actors. I highly doubt they are going into retirement now.
Its time for another amendment.
EDIT since this is related, another horrendous idea that recently disgraced my timeline
https://twitter.com/yelp/status/1314197509623947265?s=21