In an earlier era, people's opinions were shaped by a small number of newspapers and newscasts. Some of these old media were so biased and agenda driven that they caused wars.
Not that much has changed, except that people now rely on centralized, AI-driven funnels of information and entertainment.
Democracy has always been fragile, barely functional, easily corrupted, warped by money. The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis. This is the best inoculation against totalitarianism.
I have the same inclinations as you. I see there are various kinds of bias from different sources, and that you have to be able to think critically in order to maintain some sort of perspective. I also think that we need a bunch of different perspectives, so in that way it's good there's a lot of people talking.
But we also live in a world that is more educated than ever, and a lot of those people who went to school can't figure out why they should believe in the moon landings, or dinosaurs. How often you do come across a posting from a friend who thinks the virus isn't real? You sat in a room with people like this for over 10 years. Did you think they would someday be able to think for themselves? I had hoped for that.
I'm starting to think that education as the answer might just be a naive point of view, but I'm also not desirous of a world where we tell adults what they're supposed to think.
You think the problem is a lack of education or understanding? I don't think so, it's something else - being left behind, feeling unheard of, destitute, incapable of changing the situation no matter how you vote. Then people start breaking away from the official story and invent their own explanations, and why would they have solidarity with the mainstream society when it betrayed them? Better to vote in an antagonistic way and muddle the waters because this system is corrupt in their eyes.
>> But we also live in a world that is more educated than ever, and a lot of those people who went to school can't figure out why they should believe in the moon landings, or dinosaurs. How often you do come across a posting from a friend who thinks the virus isn't real? You sat in a room with people like this for over 10 years. Did you think they would someday be able to think for themselves? I had hoped for that.
>> I'm starting to think that education as the answer might just be a naive point of view, but I'm also not desirous of a world where we tell adults what they're supposed to think.
> You think the problem is a lack of education or understanding? I don't think so, it's something else - being left behind, feeling unheard of, destitute, incapable of changing the situation no matter how you vote. Then people start breaking away from the official story and invent their own explanations, and why would they have solidarity with the mainstream society when it betrayed them? Better to vote in an antagonistic way and muddle the waters because this system is corrupt in their eyes.
I don't think the GP thinks the problem is a lack of "education and understanding," but rather the inadequacy of it.
You both are also right. There's also a problem of people "being left behind, feeling unheard of, destitute.... [and] breaking away from the official story and invent their own explanations," but a good chunk of them have, in their discontent, allied with some of the very same people who caused them to be left behind in the first place. And they've been cemented to that mainstream faction with a slop of lies, delusional conspiracy theories, and other disinformation.
If you were both wrong, I think the discontents would have allied into something like a new Nonpartisan League [1] to work as factions in both parties to change the polices to help the common man.
Honestly, having studied a bunch of official figures that I « was surprised of », I found there were just blatant lies covered by a scientific stamp (actually someone succeeded to pass a paragraph from Mein Kampf into the same journals, after replacing « Jews » by « Men »). The « scientific evidence » we’re governed with is frequently grossly manipulated, and yet it routinely passes peer review, journal publication and makes its way on TV channels and then into law to « curb this unprecedented situation that disenfranchises [place this politician’s favorite group here] ».
Politicians have very well understood that modern civilization is governed by scientific beliefs rather than religious beliefs, and masquerading science for political gain will give you power for a very efficient cost.
The problem is not Facebook, but that our science is as vulnerable to 51% attacks as Bitcoin.
About the Mein Kampf thing. Were you referring to the grievance studies affair [1]? There is a documentary on it on YouTube [2]. Definitely recommend the watch. Funny too.
Highly qualified experts disagree ALL THE TIME and the scientific industry is very competetive.
Look at Copernicus or Galileo or Barry Marshall or Semmelweis. These scientists bucked all mainstream scientific beliefs even after almost roundly being ostrasized and ended up being correct in the long run.
Many science experiments are measured terms of varying levels of statistical significance not in terms of correct/incorrect.
You can tell someone who is not trained in science when they claim you should 'trust science' or 'just believe in science'.
Science changes constantly and is an ongoing process to discover truth not a static set of true facts.
Science is as open to interpretations, best guesses, and political agendas and all kinds of human frailtys as any other industry.
But ignorant people think because an 'expert' says something is true it has to be true.
> You can tell someone who is not trained in science when they claim you should 'trust science' or 'just believe in science'.
The layperson should trust science. Because the alternative is some QAnon cult bullshit. Don't confuse the scientific process with concrete scientific results.
No one is out there refuting Newton or Einstein. Nuclear bombs still work as good as they did in the 1940s. Every time you use your smartphone you're "trusting" that the capacitive screen still works. It's rather silly to not trust science when the products of science are all around us. Whether it's GPS or the airbags in your car.
The problem is with bullshitters and those (such as the media) that use early scientific papers as final scientific truth. With Gell-Mann amnesia effect, the bullshitters have the upper hand. Twitter is particularly bad about this, where people with high follower count toss out "hot takes" all day in hopes of something sticking. You might follow, say, a Paul Graham type of person that knows their VC stuff. But in between their VC messages they start talking about gravitational wells or something entirely unrelated to their core competence. Twitter is an endlessly flowing vortex of this type of bullshit. It's sort of a trust arbitrage marketplace, where influencers in one market try to gain entry into other markets by relying on their expert status in one field.
As for the media, they have deadlines and revenue targets to meet. They want fresh new stories, and Einstein isn't saying much these days. So they'll reach into the scientific paper wastebasket and pull out some trash and present it as some recent scientific discovery.
> But ignorant people think because an 'expert' says something is true it has to be true.
The crux of this problem is that many years ago we decided that experts shouldn't exist. America, at the very least, has a particularly strong anti-intellectual sentiment running throughout its history. So we decided to do away with experts. Just look at Dr. Drew or Dr. Oz. or Dr. Phil. These are people playing the role of expert but are just the same bullshitters that are on Twitter. With the internet, everyone can be an expert.
> The layperson should trust science. Because the alternative is some QAnon cult bullshit.
This is an extremely black and white view. I think the gros of human knowledge isn't even formalized in science.
Some of that knowledge might be bullshit or false assumptions and we might use science as the tool that it is to catch our mistakes.
But a proven mistake is to delegate thinking to authority when you become an adult.
The problem with bullshitters is that they are given air. No, Alex Jones isn't the downfall of western civilization if you let him preach. And please do not feed him, he will only get fatter. Yet, we have elevated to be the largest threats of online interaction.
Very true, especially on side topics science is extremely vulnerable. You have no counter study and peer review is a lot of work, so some works might just stay uncontested for a very long time.
Meanwhile, a lot of proved studies are dismissed for political reasons. Sometimes that is good, sometimes not. But it is safe to say that it would indeed not be prudent to derive policy impetus from a lot of sciences without a public debate.
And if Facebook reduces the friction to those attacks? Isn't it then back to being the problem? I think the friction was part of the design/major benefits of older forms of media
The friction of those media prevents people from criticizing blatantly false scientific studies which have made their way to television and into laws. For example the layman has been told women are paid 73 cents for a dollar for the same work, and people constantly vote to raise women’s salaries based on the assumption it is true, because TV said so. Yet programmers who use spaces instead of tabs are paid 20% more, showing that even the slimmest external variable can double one’s salary, not even talking about internal variables.
Having entire sewers of points of views pouring in Facebook is a then great scientific education that there is no one truth, which _some_ people believe a bit too much. And sewers are immensely better than downright falsehoods taught on TV at wide scale with a confident voice and a suit.
What’s next, do people believe Biden is president?
> For example the layman has been told women are paid 73 cents for a dollar for the same work, and people constantly vote to raise women’s salaries based on the assumption it is true, because TV said so. Yet programmers who use spaces instead of tabs are paid 20% more, showing that even the slimmest external variable can double one’s salary, not even talking about internal variables.
It's worse than that, because the media keeps saying "73 cents per dollar for the same work" when, first, the current number is 79 cents (73 cents is out of date), and second, it's not for the same work, it's overall across all jobs. For the same work it's around 95 cents, which is within the margin of error.
You need more than just education. If people feel their standard of living is deteriorating due to no fault of their own then they become much more susceptible to disinformation. If they have to work 12 hours a day just to keep their home and feed their family then there's no room for critical thinking - you just believe whatever makes you feel better. Democracies have always struggled when the standard of living of the population has decreased - either in absolute terms or relative to their peers. And this is one of the main reasons in the US: The growing divergence in economic outlook for people living in the rich coastal cities versus the people in the "flyover states".
How many of the people that think the virus isn’t real are critical thinkers though (meaning Occam’s razor, the scientific method, etc)? It’s not just education per se that we need, but education in critical thinking, and also history.
I'd love to see logic taught in schools. Like philosophy of argument style courses. Of course this won't fix all the problems, since it depends on the acceptance and practice of the knowledge presented (US grades and high school graduation rates aren't great). But maybe it would give us a chance at being a little better.
I think citizenship tests should be extended to all via school curriculum. If we require people who immigrate to know our laws and how the system is supposed to work, then I don't see why the people already here shouldn't also be required to know this basic info.
Immigrants are required to possess a modicum of knowledge about the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the system of government, not to mention some level of command of the English language (my wife teaches citizenship courses to immigrants). I, myself, am a naturalized citizen, from Canada, and I had to swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, forbear allegiance to foreign powers etc.
It's a ritual, but rituals have meaning and power. It would be nice to see more native-born Americans with a strong grounding in democracy and electoral politics.
When we had a mandatory military draft, at that time most able bodied young men were required to put on a uniform, salute the U.S. flag, march to patriotic music, etc.
Today this sounds trite and even anti-democracy -- weren't we indoctrinating generations of gullible young people to just blindly follow the leader?
Yet, today, many young people including college graduates are hardly patriotic at all, and are mind-numbingly ignorant of even the most basic facts, as illustrated by man-in-the-street interviews posted on Youtube by wags like Ami Horowitz and Mark Dice, getting college students to admit that the triceratops (an extinct dinosaur) is endangered and trophy hunting of this poor beast should be banned, and similar ridiculous notions.
Even during the Vietnam War, one survey in about 1970 found that 25% of Americans thought Vietnam was in South America.
Education is the key, and by that I believe you and I both agree that indoctrination in particular directions is not the same thing. My kid in high school... well, I could tell you stories, but I'd better stop :)
I tend to agree actually, and would go a step further and suggest that citizenship should be a requirement to vote in any election, and that persons born in the US should not be granted citizenship without being able to pass the citizenship test.
I'm less comfortable granting people a bid based on general knowledge and intelligence though, I think the uninterested citizenry is a far larger problem than the uneducated citizenry.
My concern with gating for votes in America is that America specifically has a very long history of gating voting in order to disenfranchise minorities from voting. We cannot trust our institutions not to use any restrictions to vote in a racist way. Without this, I can easily imagine a world where our existing disenfranchisement of minorities makes them uniquely vulnerable to being unable to acquire the education necessary to pass to citizenship test- and that this vulnerability is taken advantage of to cut them out of democracy altogether.
The problem with this argument is that racists historically used every system in order to be racist. Should we eliminate public schools, because we still to this day provide less funding for schools in black neighborhoods? What about the Post Office, which was still segregated as recently as the 20th century? If we can't trust politicians not to implement policies in a racist fashion, don't we then have to eliminate the entire government?
Or we could strive not to implement good policies in a bad way.
The property tax system of funding schools is not a good system, but it's also not truly racist. Yes, there are urban schools which are underfunded and disproportionately affect minorities, but there are also rural schools in predominately white areas that are also underfunded. Look to much of Appalachia and some of the south as examples. So in my opinion, property tax funding of schools would fit more with the "rich get richer" paradigm.
You could say the same thing about literacy requirements. That's kind of the point.
> Yes, there are urban schools which are underfunded and disproportionately affect minorities, but there are also rural schools in predominately white areas that are also underfunded.
You could presumably also find some instances of so-called "white trash" being disenfranchised by aggressive voter eligibility requirements.
> So in my opinion, property tax funding of schools would fit more with the "rich get richer" paradigm.
All of racism fits into that paradigm. Racism is a system for causing poor black folks and poor white folks to fight against each other instead of fighting with each other against the systems oppressing both of them.
"All of racism fits into that paradigm. Racism is a system for causing poor black folks and poor white folks to fight against each other instead of fighting with each other against the systems oppressing both of them."
Your statement contradicts itself. If in fact the oppressors are targeting both white and black people to maintain power, then they are by definition not targeting only one race and would instead be classist/elitist.
Also, not all racism is about people getting richer. Some of it was done on their (misguided) principles without financial benefit, or even to their detriment as the civil rights movement grew.
I fail to see how the citizenship test would lead to the rich getting richer.
> Your statement contradicts itself. If in fact the oppressors are targeting both white and black people to maintain power, then they are by definition not targeting only one race and would instead be classist/elitist.
Elites don't promote racism because they're racists, they promote racism because it's a mechanism of control.
Racism as a theory is pseudoscience bullshit. There is no scientific basis for race even existing. We're all humans. The only people who believe otherwise are the victims of propaganda.
> I fail to see how the citizenship test would lead to the rich getting richer.
It could benefit them if the subset of people it prevents from voting would vote for things they wouldn't like.
Also, some policies are nothing but collateral damage. Elites get the proles fighting each other and each coalition starts demanding aversarial policies that harm the outgroup and neither hurt nor help the elites, but keep everyone distracted and fighting each other. The elites don't care which policy like that is implemented as long as it keeps people too busy fighting each other over it to pay attention to certain other things.
It benefits the rich because the proponent-victims spend their political capital to implement the policy and then the opponent-victims spend their political capital to repeal it instead of either of them spending that political capital to do anything that benefits the poor at the expense of the rich.
"Elites don't promote racism because they're racists, they promote racism because it's a mechanism of control."
That may be true, but the policy we were discussing (property tax funding education as an example of 'every policy being racist') affects large portions of both whites and minorities, and thus does not make it a racist.
"Elites get the proles fighting each other and each coalition starts demanding aversarial policies that harm the outgroup and neither hurt nor help the elites, but keep everyone distracted and fighting each other."
If that's your premise, then your position is moot. This is happening already.
> That may be true, but the policy we were discussing (property tax funding education as an example of 'every policy being racist') affects large portions of both whites and minorities, and thus does not make it a racist.
Affecting large portions of both whites and minorities hasn't generally prevented anything from being labeled racist, if they affect minorities differently than white people (as a whole, not a specific subset).
And voter literacy requirements continue to be of the same kind. You can argue that neither is bad because neither is really racist, but then you can have voter literacy requirements. You can argue that both are bad because both are racist, but then you can't have public schools funded by property tax, or even public schools at all, because after all we're talking about avoiding things over their historical implementations even if other implementations are possible.
What I haven't seen is a consistent case that you can have one and can't have the other.
> If that's your premise, then your position is moot. This is happening already.
Are you implying that it happening has had nothing to do with the inflammation of racial tensions by elites and media organizations?
"...we're talking about avoiding things over their historical implementations even if other implementations are possible."
Well that's not at all what has been discussed. If that's what you think this thread is about, then you are very off-topic. If we are truly doing that, then we need to avoid all institutions and policies since they all have some bigoted background, and there's no path forward because everyone can just unsupportively call anything racist.
"Are you implying that it happening has had nothing to do with the inflammation of racial tensions by elites and media organizations?"
You have been stating that subjecting everyone to the citizen test is racist and said that we shouldn't do it because the racist policy will lead to parties fighting each other so the elites are left alone.
I'm saying that's already happening, so you don't have any premise for why not to do this. And quite frankly, you have derailed the actual topic of thread and failed to provide any logical reasoning for your stances (paraphrased, because all past policies have been racist this one must be racist and shouldn't be implemented).
> If we are truly doing that, then we need to avoid all institutions and policies since they all have some bigoted background, and there's no path forward because everyone can just unsupportively call anything racist.
I believe this was my original point. Go back and read it again.
Would you rather play basketball with Shaquille O'Neal or
Neil deGrasse Tyson on your team? They're both humans. They're also both "black", so what's your point?
Your comparison is moot. If I were to select a squad of long distance endurance athletes, I would look to those of Kenyan stock before I’d look to Icelandic.
We are animals, it may not be politically correct but animal husbandry (science) applies.
If we can't trust our institutions, then what is the solution?
There doesn't have to be much education to pass this test. A small book with the material could be mailed to each person on request with no charge. Crafting a strong ammendment with protections like this could address those concerns.
This I don't particularly mind if a small book with the material is provided to each person on request with no charge, potentially even at the point of voting. The point after all is to ensure that maximum numbers of people participating are aware of the systems, not as a gating mechanism.
I'm merely protesting the use of a gating mechanism in isolation. If the gating mechanism came with an educational booklet then my concerns evaporate.
Yeah, I think any law creating restrictions should also provide protections so it's not abused.
For an example on another topic, gun rights groups want a punishment in the new red flag laws for people who file false red flag claims against others so that it can't be "weaponized", as restraining orders have increasingly been used as a "standard" part of divorce proceedings by some lawyers (in cases without any abuse). Seems to make sense, but like most laws it doesn't seem to get any legitimate debate because both sides are just passing laws on mostly partisan lines instead of investigating possible tweaks that would make both sides accepting (no empathy or devil's advocate).
I agree uninterested citizenry is a bigger problem than uneducated, but what about a citizenship test (which is absolutely, without a doubt, going to be immediately used as a disenfranchisement tool by a particular political party) is going to get people interested?
It seems like that'd fix absolutely nothing but create further class distinctions between people who are represented and people who aren't.
In fact, I'd prefer to see things go radically in the opposite direction. I think it's unjust to prevent non-citizens from voting. If you live in place x, you should have a say in how place x is run.
We can do it that way. You just end up with many of the same issues we see today being exacerbated further, like rule of law not being followed and a lack of understanding about the legal structure.
The point of citizenship distinction is part of organizing a democratic government and maintaining cohesion. It tests a person on the basic form and laws of the government and their allegiance to the tribe. The point here is that you have a group off like-minded people allowing other like-minded people into the group. This creates a cohesive group that agrees on basic principles and can function well. Think about trying to conduct a system architecture design meeting with the non-technical users weighing in through a democratic vote on each suggestion - are you excited to do your job in that scenario? Do you end up with lemmings following the best salesman without understanding what is going on? (Different opinions are fine as long as they are legitimate and don't violate the common principles)
Letting anyone in makes the knowledgeable people feel disenfranchised by mob rule, not to mention making the organization susceptible to subversion. There's anecdotal evidence (probably statistical evidence if we look around) to support that citizenship that is earned results in a population that is more involved (look at voter turnout in places that never before had free elections).
So while I agree that people in a given location should have say over their government, I also believe that in being a part of that democratic government they have the responsibility to learn the basics by which the government functions. This minimum requirement at least shows a good faith effort on the part of the individual to be a diligent member of society.
You make good points, though I'm sympathetic to the parent's point too.
In the very layered federal system we have in the US, it might be possible for us to have it both ways. Non-U.S.-citizens could be given a vote in local/municipal/county matters, but still not for national representation. (And some states might want to try out different levels of statewide enfranchisement.)
The problem with this is that you find yourself in a position where you're adding educational access as a means to manipulate the voting base. Want to disenfranchise people (as an example) from rural areas in your state over the long run? Funnel education funding away from school buses and into schools that offer wide varieties of academic programs (that can only be offered in large schools).
Before you say "that would never happen", the US has a long history of using literacy tests to disenfranchise voters, including many cases where those tests were applied unevenly or administered in ways that were openly discriminatory. [0]
All you really to do to fix that is have the ammendment require the test study material (small book) be provided via mail upon request. Or some other means. If you have an ammendment that requires this, anyone targeted by manipulation can sue for their constitutional rights. Most of the past manipulations are attacks on older laws that were less specific and required judicial interpretation to determine applicability.
Getting the study material in the mail doesn't help if your education system isn't equipped to teach people how to read (much less study the government).
You might or might not have noticed, but the politically and economically disenfranchised are not well-known for their access to legal recourse.
If illiteracy is a widespread issue, then there are bigger issues at play. Not to mention, do we really want people like that voting? After all, that would make one ineligible to perform other duties which require basic english proficiency required of citizens (military drafts, jury). Rights come with responsibilities.
Lawyers would love to take a clear cut case on a contingent basis.
> If illiteracy is a widespread issue, then there are bigger issues at play.
There are bigger issues at play [0]. Largely the echoing effects of white flight on second-tier cities, and politically motivated defunding of urban education. As with most of the other forms of systematic discrimination in our lives, there is always just enough plausible deniability to avoid judicial ramifications.
I'm all for doing everything we can to ensure the people voting in our elections are educated enough to make informed decisions. I just don't think we should be doing that by depriving people of the fundamental right (in our system) to elect their representatives.
That group is using a 5th grade reading level to indicate literacy. The citizenship test doesn't even require that level of literacy. Incorrect grammar and spelling are considered passing so long as the person can read and write well enough to communicate. A good gauge of that could be whether or not they can study from a book. I would be interested to see what percentage of illiterate people are voting now anyways.
The part of your comment that is a bit twisted is saying that we would be taking away someone's fundamental right under the current system. I'm not suggesting we take away anyone's current rights, but institute a new policy for future children to require the test for them. Under our current system the right to vote is only a right for citizens. As we wouldn't be removing anyone's citizenship, we wouldn't be stripping anyone of that right. Not to mention that the current test is allows some immigrants to vote and others not, due to literacy constraints. So why not extend that paradigm to people who are born here.
Finally, it seems the most important part of what I have said is consistently ignored - citizens have duties and to be a citizen one should be capable of performing those duties. That's a fundamental principle of democracy, as the people are the government. If being illiterate prevents one from being able to perform those duties, then they have have no reason to be afforded the privileges and specific rights from which they are derived (basic human rights would be intact).
If one can have all the rights and privileges of being a citizen without the responsibilities, why would they even want to be a citizen? What would being a citizen even mean at that point?
I can see where I was confusing. I meant that voting is a fundamental right in our system, not that our current system takes away that right.
In any case, I would consider a policy that removes the right to vote from a class of people to be taking away a right, whether or not you grandfather people in. In the long term, it's a regressive policy.
You still didn't get it. It's only a fundamental right in our system for citizens. There is no right for non-citizens. Nor have you provided any logic for why it makes sense to allow non-citizen voting.
It's not a regressive policy. That would mean we go back to the method of only land owners voting or excluding classes of minorities. This is simply validating that citizens meet the minimum requirements to be good citizens, something we already do for immigrants. This also does not discriminate against any class of people - the requirements would be the same for all and are easily achievable. This would actual make the granting of citizenship more equitable by making the process the same for everyone instead of the current process that differentiates between those born here and those not.
I'm also still waiting for your answers to my previous two questions.
Unpatriotic college grad here, I think you're missing the "most basic fact", that the government obviously doesn't work for you and me. What's the point of getting involved with all this political junk, spending my time on it, when they're all in it for themselves, for their donors? That's a real question that's totally legitimate for most people. They're busy, the issue isn't education, it's a totally corrupt system that works for the wealthy.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about non-electoral politics? I've found that sort of engagement is much easier to get traction for from normal people. It's easy to see the effects of your actions.
That disinterest is part of what drives the issue of poor electoral choices. The most radical candidates can draw the most support in primaries since the voter turnout is so low.
I also feel the disenfranchisement that you talk about. I think non-electoral civic engagement is also an important part. I try to write my representatives on some issues. It seems largely futile, but often times you get a more detailed response from them than you see I'm the media. I also try to right the wrongs I encounter in my community. For example, a police department was wrongly stating that a specific summary offense was a misdemeanor and I was able to correct that. I also encountered a state trooper that was doing things that violate civil rights, like lying to a judge. I filed a complaint and he was counseled (should have been fired but the investigator covered for him - only so far up the chain you can chase corruption before your life/safety becomes a concern).
But the government is supposed to work for you and me, at least indirectly. Mind you, if you get stopped for speeding and you say to the cop "Do you realize I'm paying your salary?" he's going to find 10 things wrong with your vehicle that you didn't know existed (a cop friend told me this years ago). But getting back to the main point, it is our government and we can take it back. It takes hard work and dedicated involvement, though.
Years ago, a bunch of reform minded Boomers moved into a dying neighborhood in north Boston (a city known for its corruption over many decades). They were well educated, affluent, and politically active. They banded together, went to meetings, made their voices heard, and after a time, city politicos became more responsive to them. They showed how democracy can work, if one puts in the time.
Once you own some property and raise a family, you will probably find that you need to become involved in local government to get what you need from it, as have millions of others.
What critical thinking is involved in believing the virus is real? Apart from those who made some independent study I would say there is little critical thinking at all... Just faith in the institution of government and press.
That you've made this point is part of the problem.
I'm judging that the virus is real and a problem based on having had it, knowing people who died from it, knowing other people who had severe symptoms, from knowing (via other acquaintances) what the hospitals in my area were like, and from seeing freezer trucks full of dead bodies in the streets. OTOH, I'm from an area that got crushed by the virus early.
I can't say for sure that if I were in an area that hadn't had much contact with the virus my "Critical thinking" hat wouldn't be saying, "wait, what if they're just telling us there's a virus outside to keep us locked up".
It's not an appeal to authority to tell you to trust in doctors that have been studying and fighting infectious diseases their whole life; for me, however, the fact that so many countries have independently developed their own testing methodologies; that certain quantitative elements of the virus - e.g. transmissibility, CFR - are relatively consistent, with outliers and anomalies having additional evidence to justify their uniqueness; and the unfortunate human toll of this is undeniable.
Believing that the virus is real means considering the possibility that the virus might be fake (manufacfured, overblown, non-existent, etc) and then discarding them based on critical thinking. I don't have to believe the US government to see how North Korea was one of the first countries to completely block Chinese people from entering the border. We could all see how quick New Zealand was to implement travel and tourist restrictions. One has to stop and think about why all these nations are doing things that are actively harmful to their bottom line. To actively look away from these facts is what gets you away from critical thinking. Listening to the government does not equal sheeplike blind acceptance despite what the conspiracy theorists might have you believe.
My only proof from personal experience was when my wife got it, and lost her smell. Never having heard of that symptom for flu before, that was my personal proof.
Until a colleague told me he lost his smell 2 years ago after a serious flu.
I still do believe the virus exists, but not having the equipment to look at it myself how can I be absolutely certain?
The problem is not everyone are the same. For example, regarding covid, for some people they think the risk is low, for some people they think the risk are high.
Some think the lockdown are worth it, some think the lockdown are not worth it.
Both are correct，it highly depends on your personal preference.
This will always cause conflict.
This is democracy, both side will fight and to convince other. Whoever gain the majority/power is the winner.
Unless facebook taking sides, i don't think it harm democracy. Both side too can utilize facebook for their advantage.
> This is democracy, both side will fight and to convince other. Whoever gain the majority/power is the winner.
> Unless facebook taking sides, i don't think it harm democracy. Both side too can utilize facebook for their advantage.
The problem is, for the most part, there's harm to democracy if no compromise is ever reached, and the "fight" on every issue becomes constant and intractable.
For instance, the fight around the response to COVID has pretty thoroughly undermined the response to it. You have people refusing to wear masks for the most part to just to say "fuck you" to the other side.
This kind of over-the-top fractiousness is a clear propaganda win for authoritarianism. China, for instance, is pretty effectively using it (and their corresponding success) to reduce the appeal of democracy among its people.
I think The fight is inevitable. Eventually winner will emerge, democracy doesn't care who the winners is and how it get there as long as both side still allowed to fight.
Even to reach compromise, fight may still be necessary.
>You have people refusing to wear masks for the most mart to just to say "fuck you" to the other side.
Mask has real downside (for some people), you can't just dismissed that (not just to say fuck you), although there is of course people like that.
Similarly, You have to acknowledge there also people who want to force other to wear mask to just to say "fuck you" to the otherside.
>>> One. Wearing Mask can be uncomfortable, and it is real downside (at least for me)
>> I'm sorry. Grow up. I wear a mask 8 hours a day. Surgeons do for longer. Is it really that much to ask? I honestly don't understand this mindset.
> Its fine for you doesn't mean its fine for other. Not everyone the same. Whether its too much or not can be different for different people. Its not hard to understand right?
Some people aren't fine having a DD or getting a taxi after a night out, and would rather drive themselves home drunk. Those people have a far greater likelihood of getting into a crash that kills themselves or others.
Your decisions and actions can have real consequences for others, it's not just about your personal preferences. Reflect on that and take the GGP's advice.
> Forcing other to wear mask has its consequences too.
As you've said before, people like you would be forced to wear something you think is uncomfortable. I'd even be forced to play the world's smallest violin for you.
The thing is, you have to weigh those consequences (ideally non selfishly), not just assert they exist.
So, one the one hand, you have minor inconvenience and intolerable oppression of having to think of others for even a second. On the other hand, you have hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths and the economic toll of a poorly-managed pandemic.
> You dismissed my concern as "minor inconvenience". I acknowledge that for you its minor but for me its major inconvenience.
I did, because your concern is something that should be dismissed. The hypothetical drunk driver I mentioned earlier almost certainly has similar rationalizations for his irresponsible behavior, too. But no one is swayed by his insistence that not driving drunk would have caused "major inconvenience" to him.
Refusing to wear a mask in this environment is like deciding to drive drunk. Don't be like a drunk driver, be a responsible person.
Covid related death is a highly inflated number, i mean it include people who die and happen to be tested positive for covid, not just die due to covid.
Okay. So, according to [0], about 6% of the covid related deaths have only covid as a cause.
According to [1], there have been 291,522 covid related deaths since Jan 21 of this year, and according to [2], there were 2,977 fatalities in 9/11.
All numbers are rounded to the nearest whole number. EDIT: Except for the 6% and final results, for obvious reasons.
291,522 * .06 = 17,491 deaths with no related comorbidity. This number happens to be still ~1.7 times the number of drunk driving related deaths in 2017.
Finally...
17,491 / 2,977 = 6 times the number of people who were killed by 9/11 with no comorbidities.
---
Now, lets do the math for this past week.
16,308 * .06 = 978.48 deaths with no comorbidities.
2,977 / 978 = 3 -- So last week was equivalent to one third of 9/11 for deaths with no comorbidities.
As deaths are expected to climb, we can expect to have at least the equivalent of 9/11 every three weeks for a while.
And none of this math includes those who were mostly fine, but happened to have a small condition that was lumped in, causing them to not be counted in the 6%.
So by your number, only 978 death last week ? Even if its true that is still such a low number and probably skewed towards old people.
With this number you want to have shutdown business, restrict business, prevent gathering, implement all those silly safety theatre for the rest of population? Yeah very very not worth it.
978 deaths is equivalent to 1/18 of the entire year to date. The rate is increasing, and there's only one way to stop it.
Edit: And again, this number is with absolutely no comorbidities. Had diabetes for your whole life? not counted. Broke your arm? not counted. High blood pressure? not counted.
Plenty of people who would've lived decades more are not included in this number.
> With this number you want to have...
> shutdown business
Nope. I want masks and social distancing.
I recognize that businesses need to be open. Heck, I'm still working.
> restrict business
Depending on your point of view, yes.
Meaning that I think social distancing should be practised at all businesses, and people should decide themselves not to go to businesses that they don't have to. Note, this is "Free market" restriction, not government mandated.
> prevent gathering
Not precisely. I would say don't gather with people from outside of your region, and social distance when you do gather with people inside your region.
> safety theatre
Still waiting on a source for this, assuming you are talking about masks.
I haven't said anything about any measures other than the above, and masks to point.
> no assessment of whether masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others.
Still need a source. I wasn't asking for a source on if they protect the wearer, I was asking for a source for "whether mask actually help with the pandemic"
I don't at all mind wearing a mask when I go out, and the risk of causing harm is higher now, but wouldn't "I would rather risk killing someone than having this piece of cloth on my face for a few hours" apply in December of 2019 for example? I think this is what makes the perceived seriousness of the virus such a central point of conflict, as it determines what people see as the appropriate level of response.
> I think this is what makes the perceived seriousness of the virus such a central point of conflict, as it determines what people see as the appropriate level of response.
I have to agree there. The hospitals in my hometown are getting to the breaking point, and people are dying. It seems reasonable to expect some sort of response under the circumstances.
> Medical reason is not the only reason for it to be legitimate.
I agree. I could also understand not being able to afford a mask.
Somehow I suspect that's not the case.
> You too are selfish for forcing other people to wear mask.
Disagree. Is it really that selfish to say "Hey, please endure some temporary mild discomfort with no lasting affects, in order to protect others?"
> Very much Yes
I have no words for this. You are either the best troll I've seen in a while, or are -- imho -- a ridiculously childish fool who is both weak, and hardhearted.
>Is it really that selfish to say "Hey, please endure some temporary mild discomfort with no lasting affects, in order to protect others?"
For some people, including me, its major discomfort and they never asked for protection.
You are trying to force your interest againts other people in interest, yes that is selfish too.
How is it a troll? It is true i find mask inconvenience and uncomfortable. Risk of seriously sick from covid ? very very low. Not sure what else to say.
It would be wonderful if epistemology was taught in schools and universities. But it would need to be embedded into every subject and focused on practical exercises. Whenever I've seen this sort of thing taught, the students learn about good reasoning methods, but they don't really internalise them.
Yes there ARE people that believe the virus isn't real, the same way there's people that believe the world is flat, but ironically I find your viewpoint about all the "stupid" virus doubters to be what's actually the real problem.
You'll say that Trump called the virus a hoax, or push narratives that imply there's actually any significant percentage of people that think the virus doesn't actually exist. You treat it in black and white, and ignore all the shades of gray and all of the extra dimensions to the issue. It's either "you're with me and everything I believe about every aspect of the issue" or "you're an evil stupid virus denier".
There's so much more to the issue than that, and 99% of the people you think believe the virus isn't real DO believe it's real, they just don't agree with you on how severe it is and how it should be responded to.
>But we also live in a world that is more educated than ever, and a lot of those people who went to school can't figure out why they should believe in the moon landings, or dinosaurs.
The problem is that "education" doesn't necessarily train people to think critically. Indeed, the current educational system often does the exact opposite. This becomes more apparent the farther you advance through the system. Success in most post-grad programs is primarily about a student's willingness and ability to absorb established dogma and conform to orthodoxy. Those who are not willing or able to conform (culturally, socially, politically and educationally) will find their academic progress severely inhibited at every turn and eventually find themselves on the outside looking in.
The paradox is that those in power do not (and have never) want a necessarily skeptical, inquisitive and free-thinking population. They want a docile population that is easy to control. A population that uncritically absorbs and believes whatever messages are disseminated by those in power. This system works well when you have a virtual monopoly on information, and all of the people get their information from ABC, CBS or NBC. It stops working so well when a decentralized system of spreading information comes along, whether its referred to as "the internet" or "social media", and suddenly you have a population that has been conditioned for generations to lack skepticism that is blasted with conflicting messages, ads and propaganda from all angles.
Those in power are now left with a problem that has two possible solutions. Either start a massive campaign where every man, woman and child is taught to be necessarily skeptical, to think critically in all things and reject all established orthodoxies, or to try to put the information genie back in the bottle. The former strategy (if successful) would lead to a population that is very difficult to control and govern. A society filled with critical thinkers and those who question and scrutinize every policy and every assertion by those in power (and everyone else). The latter strategy (the one that has been chosen) is to attempt to close down those decentralized systems of spreading information. Regain control over the information narrative through a massive censorship campaign where those who are not actively working to push the establishment narrative are silenced. Unfortunately, its clear which path our benevolent overlords have embarked on. Whether the excuse is, "hate speech" or "disinformation" or "foreign influence", the desired result is the same. Silence dissenting voices, regain the information monopoly, and feed the gullible dullards you have cultivated the diet of information that you wish them to consume. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), its always very difficult to put the genie back in the bottle - which is why we are seeing the battles over free speech, censorship and information control play out before our very eyes.
A lot has changed. If you didn't like a newspaper or a broadcast, you stopped seeing it. They built a reputation that they had to maintain somewhat. You knew most of the time who was behind each piece.
Now? You see content that a lot of people dislike because it generates controversy and engagement and attacks, lies get way more exposure than truths. A lot of publications come from unknown sources, with no reputation, so they can lie without consequences. You don't know who wrote something and the interests they might have.
> The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis.
What is more probable, that social media has completely changed the type of content that people see or that education has plummeted in a decade or two?
Education is not the solution: no single person can be educated enough to make informed decisions on all the topics they are exposed to in a single day. We don't even have the time to do that! We need to revert the changes that social media has created in our information diet, that's the solution. And we need to start by forcing social media companies to stop maximizing engagement over everything, show people only the content they explicitly subscribed to (no 'look at this comment someone made on this post of a page you don't follow'), and stop editorializing the priority of that content via algorithms to maximize engagement.
The best thing for the people would be to re-assert control over what we see and how. That means a new level of control over the interface, filters and ranking of our feeds and search results.
Of course that would be the worst thing for Google, FB and Twitter (and their advertising clients) because they desire our attention more than anything.
I think control and availability is the key. People have lost a lot of control over what they say, but how much they see it. The average US adult in 2020 spends 8+ hours consuming TV and web media.
Like a sugar addition, we evolved in an environment where information could mean the difference between life and death, so we are hardwired to seek it out.
It takes a huge amount of self control to turn off the screens, but it is the best, and possibly only path forward.
There is no such thing as news anymore. It is infotainment designed to shock, outrage and be sticky for the sole purpose of selling advertising. Additionally, the FTC and SEC have failed us in letting such enormous consolidation. Just look at something like Parler that got popular for a hot minute but will fade back to obscurity whence it came. We need to start taxing advertising revenue aggressively to make disinformation more costly.
I suspect that Parler along with other alternative social media sites like Gab will be with us for a long time. They fill a need. If you've been banned from Facebook, you have to go somewhere and right now these alternative sites fill that gap. I don't see Parler having a billion users any time soon, though.
A very interesting story about democracy and its evolution is in Estonia's history.
Estonia in the early 20th century had one of the highest literacy rates in the world. When it first won independence around 1920, it formed a parliamentary democracy based on a constitution. A little while later, one party took over, and a new constitution was written that was much more authoritarian. The same leadership a little while later than that wrote another new constitution that was halfway between the first and second constitutions in terms of mix of democracy and authoritarianism.
Then the Soviets invaded, and democracy vanished until the early 1990s. At that time they regained independence and created their present government.
This is a huge oversimplification, but the four separate constitutions and the evolution of the Estonian system is fascinating.
Facebook is also a public forum. Normal folks talk about things they care about, including politics, on social media. Normal folks did not peer-to-peer discuss the sinking of The Maine in the pages of The New York Journal. So there was never the issue of The New York Journal promoting, hiding, or editorializing that peer-to-peer speech.
Filter bubbles existed before, but they were nowhere near as narrow as they are today. Only fifteen years ago it was normal for most people to either watch or at least be aware of the same shows (including nightly news) as their neighbours, work colleagues, and school friends. That is no longer the case at all.
I think a lot more attention needs to be paid to the ML recommenders that companies like Facebook are deploying, and the assumptions going into these algorithms, and the externalities they are creating. In my opinion they are playing a similar role in our social crises as the Gaussian copula played in the financial crisis.
Do you oppose health warnings on cigarettes? Food labels? Independent testing and verification of air and water? Safety testing for appliances and vehicles?
In your informed consumer advocacy, is there any room for shared responsibility?
What chance do individuals have against a corporate juggernaut's finely tuned outrage machine, exquisitely crafted to prey on human fallibility?
--
Sure, we've always had propaganda.
What's new with social media, like with personal computers and smart phones, is the convergence.
Now all the social pathologies (targeted ads, dopamine hits, crowd out authentic speech) are bundled together and monetized, begetting a positive feedback loop.
This is it right here. Most people are comfortable using the Times as a high quality news source, in spite of it's role in manufacturing consent for the Iraq war under false pretenses.
The bad behavior isn't the problem, the problem is that the current power players in media are now having to compete with Hungarian content farms and it's cutting into their market, with the added industry wide damage that the content farmers don't give a damn about covering their bad actions with good PR.
As much as people like to pretend otherwise, the mainstream media is still has reputation to maintain and a history of credibility or lack of credibility.
These are features alternate media outlets don't have concern for. They aren't driven by a subscription model based on whether or not they're generally accurate; they're based on an advertising model utterly detached from the nature of their content.
But that all requires an informed populace. The problem with Facebook (and others, of course) is that it warps all financial incentives for the publishers, while sapping revenue away from them.
Now if you want any revenue at all, which is required for surviving, you need to have clickbaity headlines so you can get traffic to your page. And even that assumes that certain news can find an audience; local news especially tends to fail in that regard because it by definition appeals to a smaller group of people.
Except for the fact with journalism you know who's responsible for the bit they publish. And that the publisher can't hide behind the fact that they're 'not responsible for user generated content'.
In most countries media is regulated, you're not allowed to advertise everywhere or publish lies.
When Facebook says 'free speech' they actually mean 'free enterprise'.
This can be true and still not move the needle. In traditional media, how many people seek out the opinion of the other side? Increasingly fewer. I would guess fewer than 10% of people try to find information disconfirming their beliefs on even an occasional basis.
That's not correct. There were staggering numbers of them. In 1900 there were 15 English language daily newspapers in New York City alone.
The problem with Facebook is monopolization. It's different when you have a ton of places that share information, and some of them are biased in one direction or another, versus when you have just one, and that one actively works to prevent other options from emerging.
There are far more news sources available today than in the 20th century. Not only can I read local newspapers and magazines from all over the world, which wasn’t easy to do before the internet, but also there are tons of new digital-only publications and millions of blogs.
In the 1990s in the US, before the internet took off, most people had access to one local paper (two in some cases), maybe an a few local magazines (include “alternative weekly” newspapers), a few local TV and radio stations, PBS and NPR, the 100 or so cable channels their local provider offered, the hundred or so magazines and newspapers the local Borders or Barnes & Noble sold, and whatever magazines and newspapers their library had in the periodicals section. And a lot of this media was owned by a few big corporations like Time Warner, News Corp, Condé Nast, etc.
> versus when you have just one, and that one actively works to prevent other options from emerging.
How has Facebook tried to prevent news outlets from emerging? They benefit hugely from news outlets, and kind of even depend on them for existence. They need the content for people to post and share. New publications like Vox probably owe some of their success to Facebook, and vice versa.
FB might have a lot of power to amplify traffic to certain publications (kind of like the big retail chains did in the 90s only more so), but that’s very different from actively preventing new news outlets from emerging.
There's both more and less news. Yes, I can now access all sorts of news worldwide which would have been difficult or inaccessible in the print era. But the newspapers in smaller markets are either disappearing or have greatly reduced capacity. It's much easier for me, in Kansas, to read about the current political struggles surrounding Brexit than it is about whatever my rural county is doing. There are rumors of corruption here. Certain decisions which are completely idiotic. But there's no one investigating. No newspaper or television willing to cover it in any detail. It's a black hole.
My situation isn't unique. This is the reality across much of the US. Not just the rural areas. There are many cities where cutbacks mean the local press doesn't cover the cops or the city council as much as they did in past decades.
There is a current federal legal complaint against Facebook with exacting detail about their anti-competitive practices, we don't need to speculate on this one. There are literally hundreds of numbered paragraphs each with a specific allegation of anti-competitive behavior.
That’s more a last 30 years or so phenomenon. Before that most major cities had at least 2 primary newspapers (often split on party lines). Most large cities had many more than that.
How does that compare to the number of daily facebook posters, tweeters, tiktokers, bloggers, youtubers, internet tabloids, and other media sources accessible to a new yorker today?
> The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis. This is the best inoculation against totalitarianism.
I agree that education is one of the best ways to combat this problem. I don't necessarily agree it's the best one.
> Not that much has changed, except that people now rely on centralized, AI-driven funnels of information and entertainment.
There's no reason why middle grounds don't exist. We can guarantee Free Speech without everyone having access to Instagram, FB, Twitter...
I bet most of the problems could be solved by making these platforms pay to use. Moderation loads would get reduced significantly. Excessive tracking would stop (because now ads are way harder to justify). Accounts would NEED to be somewhat verified by a payment, which makes it harder for trolls/manipulators/abusers of the platform to hide new accounts etc.
The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education.
If one accepts this premise, it's important to pay attention to who is advocating for and making it easier to get an education, vs those who downplay its importance, let it get prohibitively expensive or put up other roadblocks.
I agree but it is important to understand the psychological need to have your biases confirmed and your prejudices reinforced often overrides all logic and reasoning.
"The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education."
This is really the core of the issue. I was going to add "and allow for competitive market", but that's going to be derivative of a truly educated population regardless.
Honestly, americans who are thinking in all seriousness that "we can have democracy or we can have Facebook" are just deluding themselves.
I wonder why facebook usage isn't "sowing discord" in Netherlands or, say, Germany, or other EU countries? From what I know, Facebook makes some real euros there, so adoption rate is quite high, but still, democracy is not "under attack" in these countries because of "automated newsfeed".
Consider these countries as a control group for "facebook being bad for democracy" test.
Maybe US should take a hard look into a mirror and accept the fact that it is very polarized country, not very cohesive society, with very little common ground (if any at all) between different factions, and facebook just shows this fact.
> I wonder why facebook usage isn't "sowing discord" in Netherlands or, say, Germany, or other EU countries? From what I know, Facebook makes some real euros there, so adoption rate is quite high, but still, democracy is not "under attack" in these countries because of "automated newsfeed".
Yes it is. Polarization is increasing in a lot of countries, and there is heavy criticism. But while US news are exposed to the rest of the world, news from EU countries aren't as much. That's why you don't see "Facebook is damaging democracy" takes from EU countries. At least from what I see in Spain (I can't speak for other countries because I don't read french or german or dutch news) the debate on Facebook (and other social media platforms) effect on democracy is growing bigger each day, specially now with the COVID pandemic.
I certainly can't prove it, but I'd be willing to bet that it wouldn't have happened without Facebook.
The thing is that it's the first time were you can really microtarget bigots, racists and xenophobes. And that's what makes it frightening. Especially when everybody nowadays has his own brand of reality.
Note: Despite the fact that I think Brexit is a devastatingly bad idea I don't mean to imply that leave voters are bigots or racists. Brexit is just a great example about undue influence on a referendum.
There was a strong racist undertone to the campaign. In my family we used to joke about my kids grandparents being mildly racist. The leave campaign helped turn that up a notch.
Sadly Brexit is a product of the "mainstream" rightwing media in the UK who've been lying about Europe for decades. Remember the UK media are explicitly political; Johnson was even employed as a journalist for a while on a higher salary than the one he gets as Prime Minister.
Honest question -- do you think that without Facebook there will be no tensions between anti-maskers and people who insist on wearing masks everywhere? Is FB really to blame here?
Yes. The progressives were fighting against the mask mandate imposed by the lynching-friendly Republican mayor of SF. They were saying that mask mandates are unscientific, and turned out to be right:
> A study then in 1919 concluded that mandatory mask mandates did not make any difference on epidemic
Without Facebook and the self-amplifying validation bubbles it produces, being "anti-mask" would be seen as just as ridiculous as being an anti-vaccine or a flat-earther. There wouldn't be tensions at all because the fringe group wouldn't have any other way to grow to the point where there could be "tensions".
There seems to be a relatively large covid-denial movement in the Netherlands compared to the rest of Europe, and focussed on The Hague in particular. The administrative capital is a good place to protest when the whole country is around an hour by train.
But, the politics is quite different from the US. Some restaurant and bar owners threatened to stage a protest and re-open against the law, giving six weeks notice that they might do this. This has since been defused.
Russia, and many populist/extremist political campaigns, literally manipulate European elections by employing content farms to push out controversial content. Internet Research Agency, Cambridge Analytica, etc.
How do you think populist leaders gain such a large voice so quickly in those EU countries? You're kidding yourself, if you don't think the same tactics are being deployed in Europe, and amplified via platforms like Facebook.
>How do you think populist leaders gain such a large voice so quickly in those EU countries?
There are two options here.
1. People are not really happy with current status quo so they are looking to choose alternative leaders via elections, just as expected in democratic countries.
2. Some bad guys post bad stuff on Facebook and, like, 30% of german voters read it and march to election booth like zombies to vote the way bad guys said them to vote (for Alternative for Germany).
Well, you can pick which theory survives the Occam Razor test better.
EDIT: And oh, wrt to "a large voice so quickly" -- when a lot of stuff happens quickly (i mean, between 1 or 2 elections) -- yes, a lot of people can change their minds quickly. Turbulent times, you know. In stable times people change their minds slowly.
In case 2. you're being a little disingenuous by oversimplifying the issue.
The issue is that when "bad guys post bad stuff", it gets amplified because its engaging, and can really distort people's reality and nudge their belief systems. Have you taken a look at Cambridge Analytica? This was their playbook. There's a reason those people were paid a lot of money, and received a ton of scrutiny.
As for case 1. Yes, people are not happy with the status quo, but they can be convinced that the reason they are not happy is because of something that's difficult to prove, and creates an "us vs. them" mentality. Think antisemitism in WW2, or anti-immigration, more recently.
IRA was totally overblown in terms of its impact. See Thomas Rid's Active Measures.
Andrew Bosworth, former head of FB ads, has been pretty critical of Cambridge's claims as well: "In practical terms, Cambridge Analytica is a total non-event. They were snake oil salespeople. The tools they used didn’t work, and the scale they used them at wasn’t meaningful. Every claim they have made about themselves is garbage. Data of the kind they had isn’t that valuable to begin with and worse it degrades quickly, so much so as to be effectively useless in 12-18 months."
To me it seems like both of these are true? There is a lot wrong with the status quo, so people go looking outside that for solutions. They run into charlatans offering quick, easy, convenient, and disastrous solutions.
It's strong parallels to those people who've found a valid but isolated problem with the medical establishment then immediately jump off the deep end into completely untested nonsense from quacks which they've heard from Youtube. "Collodial silver" and all that.
Are you under the impression that 30% of the vote is insignificant? What if I told you that Hitler never won more than 37% of the vote in free and fair elections?
30% is HUGE, and this is why I do not buy the idea that you can get such percentage of votes because of some evil state actor who posts ads on facebook, with independent press, TV, all being available and popular as well.
If some party got 30% of votes in Germany, stop blaming facebook and 'state actors'. Germans are better then this, they are not zombies, and they have a lot of information sources to pick up news/opinions from.
Especially Russia would have a lot to gain from Trump being re-elected. It would have been crazy if they didn't put all hands on it. And the same can be extended to friendly candidates in other countries.
Stealing goverment money under the premise of "we will rule the world comrade, so please allocate 100 million dollars to us ASAP" and pocketing it to buy London properties, obviously.
And of course, 50K out of 100M will be really allocated to buy some shitty FB ads to make screenshots and present it to higher-ups.
It's really interesting that people still bring up Cambridge Analytica as a driving force in elections both abroad and domestic. Earlier this year, the UK's ICO concluded after a 3 year long investigation that Cambridge Analytica had no impact on the Brexit vote, and really was no different than your run of the mill marketing agency (just with better PR spin)[1].
But no one has picked up/amplified that story. After the 2016 elections, NYT/WSJ/The Atlantic/etc. ran article after article pinning the outcomes of the US and UK elections on Facebook, despite having no evidence of this outside of testimonies from some former CA employees. Anyone with a background in adtech knew that these allegations were full of shit, but the narrative was too good to pass up.
Now, conclusive investigations have debunked these claims, but it's 4 years too late and the idea that FB/CA caused the problems of the past few years is ingrained in everyone's mind.
Platforms like FB are just a tool for abuse in your example. If not for FB it would just take place on different platforms or through different channels. This is the price we pay for an interconnected world, killing Facebook will not save "democracy" - whatever that is.
What makes you say that Facebook isn't doing those things in other countries? It really is. It's so easy to get caught in a web of scary news that agree with something you were already thinking, and never letting go.
I have friends and family members who will blame random problems on completely unrelated things like "new walk-way in large city" or "beheading in france". Meanwhile they will vehemently deny or state that real issues are overblown.
Agreed, Facebook is just exploiting weaknesses that already exist in American minds. Those problems exist elsewhere, but have not advanced as far.
There will be a silver lining in the Facebook case though. We're going to see a lot of emails and depositions that end the "Mark Zuckerberg is a uniquely competent person who earned an empire through ability" myth. That's good enough for me.
Thank you for saying that. The deposition will definitely be illuminating. Unlike his performance in front of congress, it will not be judged by public opinion ( and technically inept congressmen ) and will have real consequences should he chose to lie.
I haven't seen a single article even trying to suggest that politics in Germany or Netherlands is affected by Facebook is any way. (And for USA, you can see such articles on HN front page any other day, btw).
The only gripe EU is having with Facebook is about privacy violations, as I can see.
HN frontpage and US news sources aren't a good indicator for what's happening in countries that dare to not speak English.
It's maybe not to the same degree, but political polarization, filter bubbles and conspiracy theories made worse through FB and other social media totally are a topic here. EDIT: I guess hate speech legislation is in a similar corner and does appear on here too.
It's sowing discord everywhere, because the design is the same everywhere, and humans have the same psychological vulnerabilities everywhere.
Maximum profit requires maximum engagement. This requires creating filter bubbles and prioritising emotional content. From there, the social fracturing is inevitable... only the topics differ from country to country.
Notice that in US, one side (Democrats, media conglomerates and their 'journalist' employees) are pushing for Facebook to censor, de-platform, or 'rank down' independent, conservative and progressive outlets. It is this group, author of the post included, that keeps calling Facebook, YouTube, Twitter (and even first amendment) divisive or undemocratic as a cynical, self-serving strategy to move the needle in their direction (for Democrats, it means more political power, for media conglomerates, it means less competition for eyeballs, and more revenue).
Meanwhile conservative and progressive outlets are calling for less Facebook censorship because they see themselves under constant attack, even when they report factually correct news.
The far right and far left have surged globally, the old center has collapsed. The far right has had more successful surges, to be clear.
Are you American by any chance? You may be committing the same mistake you complain of.
The neonazis have made great gains in Germany, Brexit happened. The far right northern league came to power as part of a coalition, with a leader who called for mass cleansing.
A Hindu nationalist party is in power in India, buoyed by whatsapp chain messages. In France, Macron came out of nowehere: he is a centrist but this still shows a collapse of the old structures. His biggest threat is a fascist.
Bolsonaro, a Trump admirer is in power in Brazil. The president of the phillipines, Duterte, boasts of summarily executing drug dealers. Authoritarians rule in Hungary and Poland.
> I wonder why facebook usage isn't "sowing discord" in Netherlands
But it is? Antivaxxers are at an all time high here, the Pietendiscussie is inflamed on both sides primarily through social media. My plumber-neighbour is an excellent source for learning what the latest conspiracy theory is on his Facebook feed.
If you don't see it, you probably meet people from a narrow slice of society. I certainly see that these kinds of experiences are vastly different between my friends-circle, all former fellow university students, or my villages neighbours, a tiny place far from the urban centres of the Netherlands. My family is a bit in between, again correlating with age.
I absolutely think Facebook is making this country worse. It's the main method of how corona-disbelievers are keeping rates up by encouraging each other to ignore 'rules'.
Another angle here is the amount of people communicating and making a living thru facebook, particularly in third world countries (i am born in, and still living in).
The accessible value in tapping the network effects of FB as a communication platform is quite an okay amount of democracy.
But on the other hand I think the polarity in US (and large countries like RU and CH) is quite relative to the size of their countries.. is there any science to that lol
Yes, there are problems in the United States but I do believe Facebook is accelerating the polarization significantly. We have widespread belief in voter fraud based on no hard evidence. This was simply not even conceivable 4 years ago. Just because there's a fire burning already doesn't mean we should turn a blind eye to those who pour gasoline on it.
We had widespread belief in Trump-Russia collusion despite no hard evidence too. There's a word for a baseless conspiracy theory that implicates the right: "fact".
I’m not sure that you’re very well informed - your opinion is that theories of trump Russia collusion were baseless? Is that what you believe the Mueller report said?
It did say that they couldn't find hard evidence of collusion, yes.
But "baseless conspiracy theory" is practically a term of art. There was sufficient evidence of election irregularities in key battleground states to at least warrant a proper investigation. The same media companies which reported Trump-Russia collusion as hard, settled facts, however, rushed to call any suggestion of fraud a "baseless conspiracy theory" and reassured us that the 2020 elections were absolutely airtight, which -- I don't know what you have to be smoking to believe that last bit.
I am from Brazil, and here Facebook is a problem too...
We even have our supreme court doing blatantly inconstitutional things because they are upset with Facebook (and Whatsapp).
Also during the Gamergate debacle, there was some high profile news about a "gamergater" that sent actual death threats to people (many people falsely claim to have received death threats), when police caught the guy, it was a Brazillian leftist troll, that thought it would be hilarious to watch whatever was going on in Facebook and try to outviralize viral posts by doing whatever would stoke more controversy (in this case, pretending to be right wing, sending death threats to left wingers, and watch the two sides fight).
But Facebook is affecting Germany, the Netherlands and here in Sweden where I live. Most of the voters for SD (Sverigedemokraterna) follow the same pattern as Trumpists in the US: regurgitating bullshit spread through Facebook (and to a lesser extent YouTube) which became a firehose of lies, impossible to keep up with to be disproven. People fall into that hole more often than I imagined and I'm glad that the education system here is decent enough to allow the majority of the population to see through this farce.
It still affects society, it still sows discord and I'm not sure how you are unaware of this if you are making such claims...
People have to always preface any criticism of it by saying “there is nothing at all wrong with capitalism, but...”
But no, the actual ECONOMIC SYSTEM and the incentives and constraints it exerts on institutions and organizations is responsible for what is happening. It selects for the current types of organizations and outcomes by its very nature.
You see, both our news and our social networks are driven by a profit motive and face market competition. Thus they are forced to adapt to changing circumstancss in certain ways:
Act 1. Journalism was disrupted by the Internet, and survived by adopting the FOX News model of locking in an audience and being biased, showing one part of the story.
MSNBC explicitly did it, while CNN jumped the shark after the Malaysian Airlines flight, realizing it can lock in audience. One sided clickbait outrage articles are the norm. There is some attempt to have journalistic integrity and policy focus at Vox and NowThis, but then you also have MotherJones, OccupyDemocrats, DailyKos and more on the left. You have all kinds of independent podcasts like TYT network, Kyle Kulinski, David Pakman, Majority Report, etc. And similarly for the conservatives, libertarians, etc.
We are divided also because giant corporations like Sinclair Television bought up all the local stations and outlets, resulting in this:
No really, watch it. It’s black mirror level, and you can see the capitalism at work here. Top down control by a small group of people, disseminating to everyone under the banner of “free speech”.
Act 2. Social networks are in a race to the bottom for advertising dollars.
So they adapt by desiging algorithms to maximize your “engagement” and attention on their platform.
Capitalism leads to a tragedy of the unmanaged commons, where in this case the commons is human attention. There is a reason that you salivate at notifications like Pavlov’s dogs. You’ve been conditioned to look at that screen light up during dinner. It’s NOT just about a slot machine dynamic. It’s that - if Facebook doesn’t get your attention every so often, then LinkedIn or Twitter would.
The solution is changing the economic model for news and social media.
Yes I said it. But let me use less triggering words than capitalism and socialism.
We need more projects built on collaboration instead of competition.
Wikipedia instead of Britannica
Workd Wide Web instead of America Online
Open Source Software instead of closed source commercial software
Cryptocurrency instead of banks
Creative Commons instead of Copyright
Prizes for Open Source Drugs instead of Patent System and IP
And so on. Not only would it make the system cheaper, it would make it far more effective and less divisive. People would be able to build on each other’s work, without threats.
This is already how peer reviewed science has worked, and for all its flaws it has produced tremendous progress. Scientists are careful not to overstate things. Titles are “boring” and descriptive rather than sensational.
Compare that to the “free speech” where money - and yes, audience size - determines which ideas get pushed in one direction. Clay Shirky spoke about this 15 years ago:
There would be a wiki-like site for news. People around the world would upload their own videos and raw media.
Then each news story would be edited and re-edited by mutually distrusting parties, checks and balances, similar to Wikipedia’s talk page.
The final result would be published only after a delay, when most parties have had a chance to challenge all the claims they needed, with well sourced claims of their own (each claim would have its own page).
That way, the world can make up its own mind by using the collaboration of the crowd, on issues like what’s happening in Saudi/Yemen, with China and Uyghurs or whether Assad gassed his own people after winning with conventional weapons. As well as on issues of religion, science, health policy, and so on.
We are building something like this as a reference implementation. The domain will be Rational.app
If you want to be involved you can email me at “greg” at the domain qbix.com. I am happy to welcome people on the project who know Javascript or PHP and who believe something like this is needed. This would be an open source project.
Very good point. There are a ton of legitimate criticisms of Facebook, but you can’t blame FB for American anti-intellectualism, rampant gullibility, and the failings of the two party system.
Americans have for decades been gullible fools who never read below headlines and fall for tabloid trash. This “post-reality” thing that is culminating with stuff like Qanon has also been cooking for decades, nurtured by trash TV, dumbed down religion, and new age word salad.
In the past only mass media had the privilege of being able to lead this mass of morons. Now that has been democratized, allowing DIY YouTube and Facebook personalities to take advantage of America’s rampant foolishness.
The solution has to start with an broad spectrum social movement to raise the quality of discourse in the culture, a kind of big tent anti-bullshit movement. We need to replace hard line partisan intolerance with intolerance for intellectual junk food. Liberals, conservatives, and anyone else should start promoting all content of any perspective so long as it is well written, well reasoned, and credible, and rejecting BS from their own side as well as others.
This person is confusing ranked newsfeeds with free speech. Ranked newsfeeds are the actual poison, because they are their own form of censorship and amplification for exploitative purposes.
It’s fine if someone says something horrible or false on the internet, it’s not fine if a ranked newsfeed amplifies that message to millions of people because it’s engaging.
This free speech or not argument is a complete straw man.
Yep. Alex Jones is a bit of a nut, and left alone I'd have no problem with him. But youtube recommended his videos 15 billion times, and presumably made a killing in advertising revenue off his videos.
I don't have a problem with alex jones. I have a problem with social media companies promoting lies about reality in the name of engagement. Polluting our information ecology in the name of a quick advertising dollar is lazy and dishonest and they know it.
I don't think it's really ranked newsfeeds. It's also newsfeeds that pull in stuff you didn't specifically express an interest in. It starts with showing you stuff your friends merely liked or commented on, but didn't repost. Then it's things that they merely looked at, and groups that overlap with ones you're already in. Then posts that share some arbitrary characteristic with those you've read or liked. And so on. If I were only shown things that my friends actually posted, I'd be mostly OK with ranking them except that the ranking seems unstable and ends up reshuffling everything all the time. Not pulling in random crap would also slow or reduce the spread of disinformation. It would still exist, certainly, but without being able to exploit the Facebook equivalent of SEO it might not have quite the toxic effects that it does currently.
Fortunately, I know a trick that makes my feed better behaved in all of these ways. Some day they're going to kill it (they briefly did break it once already due to sheer incompetence) and then Facebook will become unusable again.
That's .... a kind of ranking. Personalized ranking made by algorithms based on what they want to show you using their own patterns is still ranking. Dynamically adjusting ranking based on new data (or not) is still ranking.
Could you explain this further? I'm using the generic term "ranking". It seems like you're using a very specific subset of an industry's version of 'ranking', and you're mixing it with the word "ordering".
And, "as anyone who has worked with software development probably knows (definitely should know), ranking/ordering/sorting can be done in many different ways".
Citation needed. "Ranking" in plain English is practically synonymous with sorting, and it's no different in computing, unless you're in some very specialized pocket where they've twisted it. The difference is that it's possible to show different posts first within the same set and IMO that's not particularly problematic. What's problematic is when Facebook selects a different set. Those posts I didn't ask for shouldn't just be at the bottom of the list; they shouldn't be on it.
In an infinite-scroll world these phases do get interleaved a bit. Query, sort, show top N, repeat. Some posts might get dropped in the "show top N" part, but the point is that those posts I didn't ask for should never even have come back from the first query. In SQL terms, it's the WHERE that's broken, not the ORDER BY or LIMIT. (Yes, I know it's not SQL. I could tell you exactly what it is, but I'm still bound by a legal document that says I shouldn't.) It's really not that subtle or unusual a distinction, and I'm sure most people understood it. Why are you so invested in a weird definition?
HN's formula may be hidden but I think we have a good sense of its inputs: recency, upvotes, moderation to remove crap, and perhaps some boosting to promote YC interests.
The article is saying monopoly is private government so Facebook is in opposition with democracy. "Free speech" doesn't appear in the article as a phrase. There seems to be more concern with the disruption of previous business models for journalism. Towards the end of the article, there is a little about centralized curation of information (hiding a candidate from view, etc.), which is tangential to free speech, I suppose, but not exactly the same thing.
I don't understand the obsession some people have with ranked newsfeeds. I don't see what's wrong with showing people content they want. What content that is always depends on the user themselves. If they've liked a lot of horrible stuff before, they'll get more horrible stuff, if they've liked a lot of thoughtful stuff before, they'll get more thoughtful stuff.
> I don't see what's wrong with showing people content they want.
Showing them what who wants? The users? That’s be great, but today they are trained to show what the company wants, and the company wants to keep you on the site as long as possible to generate ad clicks.
No, if users didn't like anything they see on Facebook, they'd log off. Facebook optimizes to make money and they can't make money if people leave, so they try to avoid that scenario.
But that doesn't mean all content is something people want to see, because Facebook can't make money either if users only consume content that doesn't make Facebook money, so they try to avoid that scenario.
The profit-maximizing strategy is to show users a mixture of content they like (to keep them around) and money-making content, preferably all jumbled together so people can't easily tell the difference. (The same calculation is behind Google deemphasizing the difference between paid search ads and actual results.)
This applies to all media though. I love the discovery channel but not all commercials. I love “Life Below Zero” but it’s filmed in a way to maximize the chance you turn to it when channel
Surfing, and getting you to watch ads. it’s not optimized for long term viewing.
I really hate that style of editing. Does it have a name?
The big signs include quick cuts of content you had just seen in order to summarize the story till then, previews before commurcial breaks, pre-starting the next episode (starting the next one before a break), and so many more annoying things.
The worst is when you binging it without ads - there's only 15 minutes of new content for the full duration.
It's not the same in two key ways:
1. Not everyone can broadcast on discovery channel.
2. Not every click/scroll/interaction is recorded by discovery channel.
Include these two ingredients and you essentially get YouTube.
Let's say a food manufacturer finds a chemical that is tasteless but addictive and starts adding it to all their food. Would you also argue that this is very clearly food the people want to consume?
We have ingredients lists on packaged processed food, but we have more than that: the ability to buy ingredients, learn recipes, make recipes, and cook.
We should have the ability to put what we choose (and omit what we don't) in our feeds.
"I wrote this song so people would listen to it and I would make money."
"I made this TV show so people would watch it and I'd make money."
It seems like we're trying to force the input to be wrong as opposed to just acknowledging that the output is wrong. Facebook is doing the same "capitalistically moral" thing everyone else is doing, building something people want so that they make money. The input doesn't have to be "theoretically wrong" for the output to still be wrong. Good intentions and all that.
The issue is that people are not rational actors, and their emotions can be manipulated into forming new habits. In this case, facebook's goal is maximizing time spent on site. They know if they get you into a state of emotional flow, you'll stay there for much longer. That is the purpose of ranked newsfeed. Companies just make the "relevance" argument, because it's not wrong, it's just not the whole story.
Specifically, if you had a passing interest in a controversial topic, the algorithm will make sure to sink its barbs into you, and exploit you emotionally. This is especially real for older people who didn't grow up with the internet, or people who are blind to this issue. These two groups haven't learned to moderate their emotions and question the nature, or source, of the content.
> If they've liked a lot of horrible stuff before, they'll get more horrible stuff,
This is the problem here. It's like gambling addictions: on the one hand the gambler seems to be doing things voluntarily, on the other hand an entire industry is trying to trick them into coming back.
I might think I am interested in learning about how 5G spreads COVID or about Vaccines causing autism but both of those things are fictions.
The idea that the web needs to be helpful and start showing me more of something I have looked at or even searched for needs to die.
Just because I geolocate as being in Japan does not mean I want my search results in Japanese first, especially when I specify English(Google).
Just because I clicked on a funny looking mousepad that has an ass on it does not mean that I wan advertisements and suggestions for similar things for the next several months(Amazon).
In the name of user engagement and trying to figure out how to capture revenue, I feel that tech is losing sight of how to be a good service. We all railed on Microsoft when Clippy would patronizingly pop up to try and help you write a letter but think we have improved service when we search for one thing and have it show up a number of competing products.
Sorry for being all over the place, I agree that we should be showing people what they ask for but also think that is as far as it need to go. Don't follow them down the street and shove more of the same in their faces.
I personally think that the hard non-inferential view we have on free speech is holding us back somewhat (and also is hardly true in a world with "intellectual property"), but you're wrong to act like "it's not speech, it's ranked newsfeeds" is some killer dodge that free speech advocates haven't considered.
> it’s not fine if a ranked newsfeed amplifies that message to millions of people because it’s engaging
So companies are now restricted in what messages they are allowed to amplify?
This is the issue. There is no such thing as news. It is infotainment designed to shock, outrage and be sticky for the sole purpose of selling advertising.
> The business model is to divert revenue that used to go to newspapers and publishers to themselves. And so by manipulating people in this specific way that they do, which is to keep them using their system and keep surveilling them so that they can target them with ads, they are, in the process, crushing newspapers and publishers, who no longer have any financing, particularly local newspapers and niche publications like Black-owned newspapers.
Is there any business this entitled? Imagine a bookstore owner describing amazon's business model as diverting revenue that used to go to bookstores, particularly black-owned backstores, to themselves. Somehow the revenue flows, like water, it used to flow to newspapers, and now it flows to facebook. I'm glad at least that the interview skips over bots, russians and algorithms and goes straight to the point, which is that people like matt make less money because everyone can share their views now, and people find their friends rants just as entertaining as matts.
I tend to agree with you. Imagine if a restaurant complained that they are losing money because people are making their own food at home. I think it would be clear that said restaurant isn't providing enough value to compete at that point.
What would be more likely - that everyone cooking at home is a michelin star chef, or that the restaurant(s) losing money weren't very good to begin with?
Enough with the food analogy - respected and valuable journalists and news agencies are still thriving. Facebook is not eating AP or Reuters lunch, nor the Financial Times or other specialized organizations.
This is more like Amazon diverting the money that used to go to the book authors back to themselves, and then when the authors and publishers start layoffs and go bankrupt, people ask why the writing is so bad.
1. That Facebook is maliciously and mostly singlehandedly responsible for the death of the newspaper and journalism.
Except newspaper readership has been on the decline since the 90's. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/01/circulation... - the article frames Facebook's grand plan as taking money from newspapers, but Facebook's revenues in 2019 were nearly twice what the whole newspaper industry had as revenue in 2008. In that same window of time the ad industry grew 50%. Facebook makes money by making products that engage people and then presenting them with ads that are of interest to the individual in question. That makes them in the broader attention market but the framing of "Facebook versus newspapers" seems peculiar here.
2. That "monopolism" is rampant and anti-democratic.
Besides the fact that this is poorly defined in the article (perhaps as incentive to purchase his book?), it sure is an curious turn of phrase that there are "endless numbers of monopolists" in healthcare. Perhaps one could say there are millions of monopolists in music because each work is copyright? Over what does the author claim Facebook have true monopoly? On attention? On information dissemination?
3. The thread of conversation implies that breaking up Facebook will somehow help, for example, the decline of the newspaper industry. It's not clear how any of the author's goals will be accomplished by this and the OP alludes to this in "there's a lot more you need to do than just break them up". But what?
If the point of the article is to claim Facebook's present mode is a threat to democracy (claimed in title) they A: need to actually articulate this case and B: ought make an argument for how they'd propose to remedy the situation. Instead the former was done barely at all and the latter was omitted.
I generally believe Facebook and other social media platforms are bad. I can also absolutely recognize that most people complaining about them don't seem to articulate their reasoning well or in some cases at all.
In the article, Matt claims
>There's a lot more that you have to do than just break them up. But the answer is, it would improve things dramatically if they were broken up, and you don't have to imagine it.
Facebook has been doing their practices that deserve criticism before they became a "financial conglomerate". If they are broken up, they will not stop poisoning people's news feed overnight. Things will NOT dramatically improve.
In fact I believe if Facebook is forced to break off instagram and other companies, things may get worse. They would need to try harder to make more revenue using less users / screen time.
Breaking up Facebook would most likely be a good thing, but I personally believe as long the news feed exists, the negatives that Facebook brings will be there.
1. Yes, the decline of print news predates social media. Most blamed popular media like radio and television. Treating social media as the next iteration of TV would strengthen most criticisms.
2. Gross inequity is axiomatically anti-democratic.
3. The sole flaw in Stoller's anti-monopolistic advice, eg break up the titans, is that half-measures are insufficient.
Critics are not advocating either pro-competition or pro-consumer policies.
a. Prohibit all conflicts of interest, self-dealing. "Chinese walls" between business units are insufficient.
b. Prohibit aggregators from competing with their clients.
c. Normalize the rule of law, allowing plantiffs to appeal to a fair and impartial judiciary to resolve dispute and grievances.
d. Regulatory oversight and enforcement, with real teeth. Impose mandatory punishments onerous enough to alarm activist investors.
> That Facebook is maliciously and mostly singlehandedly responsible for the death of the newspaper and journalism.
The mistake here is in blaming Facebook in particular when it was really the internet in general.
Ironically what really happened here is basically the opposite of the premise. You used to have local media monopolies, or at least sufficiently concentrated local media markets that the players were making ad money hand over fist. Then they used some of that money to pay for local reporting.
The internet leveled the ad market. No longer did you need to buy advertising from the local Los Angeles media outlets to reach customers in Los Angeles. You could still buy it from them, but also Facebook, Google, Apple, a million independent blogs aggregated by third party ad networks, national media outlets that now allow you target adds to specific regions or demographics instead of having to buy nationwide ads etc.
It dramatically increased competition for ad space, which lowered prices and thereby grew the size of the market (Jevon's paradox) but made it so that the incumbents weren't making as much money as they used to because the price for a given amount of advertising fell as a result of increased competition.
> That "monopolism" is rampant and anti-democratic.
This is the part that's actually true. Democracy requires the free exchange of ideas. A handful of oligarchs deciding what people see is the opposite of that.
To give two examples from the recent election, there is some decent evidence that Twitter and Facebook suppressed a negative story about one of the candidates prior to the election as "Russian disinformation" even though it appears to be true, and there have been claims that social media sites showed voting reminders to users on a partisan basis, skewing voter turnout.
> it sure is an curious turn of phrase that there are "endless numbers of monopolists" in healthcare.
This is pretty obviously the case. Healthcare is not a single market, individual products in healthcare are. If you're diabetic you need insulin and can't substitute an SSRI. If you have severe allergies you need epinephrine and can't substitute acetaminophen.
It's frequently the case that the individual markets are controlled by one or two players, not just because of patents but also regulatory burdens that constrain new entrants etc.
> The thread of conversation implies that breaking up Facebook will somehow help, for example, the decline of the newspaper industry.
Breaking up Facebook et al could help the anti-democratic concentration of influence over the political discourse. A larger number of entities would reduce the influence of any one of them and increase the availability of a diversity of viewpoints.
It might even help local news reporting, if Facebook et al were sufficiently atomized, because smashing them into tiny pieces could mean that each city has one or more independent local Facebook which uses some of its revenues to fund local news reporting.
> dramatically increased competition for ad space, ... lowered prices ... grew the market ... incumbents weren't making as much money ... increased competition.
My assumptions have long been that while total ad spending has been fairly stable, the business shifted to digital. In other words, FAANG did not grow the size of the ad market, merely captured it. Sadly, I can't quickly find any cites.
If I understand your points correctly, there are now more ads for same overall spend. Roughly speaking.
So really two things happened as a result of the internet. One, there are now many more places to buy advertising. People are seeing more advertising than they ever did before, and there is more competition to provide space. Two, demographic targeting.
Suppose you sell widgets at a margin of $10/customer. You buy an ad in the newspaper, 10% of the readers are prospective customers, 5% of the prospective customers buy the product because of the ad, so showing the ad to 50,000 readers is worth $2500. The newspaper knows this, and the market lacks competition, so that's about how much they charge.
The internet comes in. Now you can target based on demographics, so the percentage of people who see your ad who are prospective customers is now 40% instead of 10%, and showing it to 50,000 people is now worth $10,000. But there are also many more sites competing to sell advertising, so the ad network doesn't get $10,000, it gets e.g. $1000.
Then the advertiser says holy cow, we can make $10,000 by buying $1000 in advertising? Buy more until diminishing returns causes the marginal value to get back to breakeven. Go buy $5000 in advertising. They end up spending twice as much as before even though the price is lower. (Remember though that advertising is mostly zero sum. The advertiser isn't actually making a ton more money all of a sudden because their competitors do the same thing and it cancels out. They're only buying that amount of advertising because that's the amount of sales they lose if they don't.)
So the advertiser pays twice as much as they used to in order to get more value (or avoid losing more value) than they used to. But most of the money is going to Facebook and Google and diffused out to a million random kitten blogs, when it used to go to local media outlets.
Thank you. Three (of your many points) stand out to me and are not receiving enough attention (criticism).
1. People are seeing more ads.
I'd love to see this quantified. Attention theft is another form of pollution, right? Just like we're starting to quantify the impact of noise and light pollution on both our physical health and mental well being.
(I live a mostly ad-free existence. It's always quite jarring when I step outside of my personal filter bubble. Like doing eldercare for my mom, airports, shopping, dining. TVs blaring every where. It's surreal.)
2. advertisers are spending more
I don't doubt that advertisers are spending more online. I would like to know (confirm) if overall ad spending has much changed.
Or perhaps the population of advertisers has changed. So some types of businesses are now advertising less, and others have embraced digital ads, and therefore make up the difference.
Personal anecdote: A sibling opened a neighborhood retail knickknacks (aka "shit you don't need") store. The performance of Facebook and instagram ads is surprisingly good. So I'm now certain that targeted ads are fantastic for at least some advertisers.
Or perhaps what's considered advertising has changed. With the decline of brand based campaigns and rise of ad blocking, there is more product placement and payola (influencers).
I have no idea how non advertising marketing dollars are accounted for; probably something like surveying CMOs. I've skim read reports that marketing budgets as percentage of revenue has been stable thru the shift to digital.
3. ad performance is going down
This is very interesting.
I've long assumed that a huge fraction of digital advertising is fraudulent. Examples abound of Facebook lying, belatedly revising metrics downward, remarkable coincidences that errors always favor the aggregator, etc.
But maybe the bigger scandal is declining performance. I would totally believe this; diminishing returns and all that. We (society) are completely saturated, so excess advertising may even be detrimental. Worse example I can think of is political advertising.
--
Thanks again. I wish critics would better address all the points you touch on.
How can freedom of speech be the downfall of democracy? Surely Facebook and democracy can coexist if we get better at teaching people to think for themselves?
I don’t like the idea democracy can only survive if governments censor and remove platforms for spreading information (however false that may be).
Facebook isn't "Free Speech" in the traditional sense, it is a massive AI system designed to funnel people towards controversy and lies (because it turns out controversy and lies get the highest engagement).
Twitter is even worse because of the format. At least with facebook people can have their own private spaces with only the people they trully know. Twitter is a just a machine to get people outraged and pissed off and yell at each other.
Yet I see very little pieces written against Twitter, probably because Twitter bought the media with the blue check system, creating an 'elite' class within Twitter.
- Twitter relationships are based on interests mostly. If I follow people who tweet about math I will see tweets about math. Facebook relationships are based on real-life relationships so the topics in my news feed will be more heterogeneous.
- In Twitter don't see as many content from people I don't follow directly. Sometimes I will see tweets that other of my followed liked or replied to, but it's a minority. In Facebook I end up seeing a lot of comments of people I follow in other publications.
- The suggestion engine of Twitter is not as aggresive as Facebook's. Right now I have three suggestions of profiles to follow (people who follow me or profiles I've visited before), a few trending topics which can be mostly ignored, and that's it. Facebook is constantly suggesting me pages to follow and friends to add (people I don't know at all) and groups to join.
- Twitter is more straightforward in the content you get shown. Yeah, they changed things with the inclusion of tweets liked by other people and replies, but most of the time you see tweets of people you follow. Facebook, however, does this weird thing where it shows you only the content you're more likely to engage with. If that content is conspiracy theories, so be it, even if that means you don't see innocent updates from your friends.
- Privacy controls on Twitter feel easier. Make your account private and that's it, instead of five different controls for each thing you might or might not do on Facebook. Muting and blocking accounts, notifications and keywords also feels easier.
Very succinct description of twitter. I use it mainly for work and I mostly see work related stuff that is trending.
Facebook likes mashing your whole life together, so one post is from a group, another from your high school weirdo that sells MLM products and another one from your racist uncle.
Honestly, Google+ "circle" concept was ahead of its time and I will die on this hill.
I do not think many will disagree about circles. Having circles would make Facebook so much better, but presumably they do not think that that would make them any money.
This is a good point. Facebook has a lot of value in community groups where you can find all sorts of friendly people in your area with common interests in hobbies, sports, or what have you.
Twitter has none of this. Twitter rewards abrasive clapbacks, angry arguments, and rage tweeting.
Mainstream media is no better, look at how many pages of newspapers are dedicated to columnists, editorials and opinions instead of news. Why aren't they being criticised? It's exactly the same principle.
In the end it comes down to the fact that people are being conditioned that they should have an opinion or position on everything, because "everything is politics". And many people fall for that and therefore search around for some indication on what opinions are out there.
Instead we should be propagating the message that it's entirely fine not to have an opinion on something that doesn't affect you. Indifference is actually a virtue.
Because newspapers have editorial boards, ombudsmen, and liability (in the form of libel) for what they print. Facebook has the conceit that it doesn't have any perspective, that it's just a carrier of speech of others. The concern is that Facebook (and YouTube and Twitter) already has preferences (such as for controversy over dry facts) and is developing more (curation through fact checking, etc.).
If Facebook came out and said, "Yeah, we're more or less like Readers Digest but for the internet" I suspect they'll still have detractors, but it will be more of the "I don't like reading Readers Digest" variety, not of the "Someone needs to break up Readers Digest!" one. They might also lose accounts, too, because who wants to write for a paper with clear points of view and biases that work at cross purposes to their own?
In the US - which tends to be the main country articles like this on efocus on - it is almost impossible for public figures such as politicians to sue newspapers for libel, and any suggestion of changing this is immediately met with sinilarly outraged articles about it being a danger to democracy. Also, the editorial boards are just as keen on pushing their preferred narratives regardless of the facts as the papers themselves.
Gawker certainly was held accountable. Facebook blames it's users if similar content is posted. But it also censors and suppresses content. I'm just saying it should pick a lane. Be a carrier or have editorial control.
Mainstream media has gotten a lot worse in the last few decades because subscriptions have tanked and now most of their profit determined by how many clicks facebook and twitter send their way. Newspapers have to choose between competing with buzzfeed or closing their doors.
Real journalism is a casualty of social media too.
The problem isn't free speech in itself. The problem is the amplification of that speech by algorithms optimizing for "engagement" which practically speaking ends up being synonymous with "conflict". The medium lends itself to spreading bullshit and outrage, not quiet reflection, empathy and 'thinking for yourself'. Lies simply scale better than truth, outrage scales better than understanding and clickbait scales better than accurate headlines. As if that's not bad enough on its own, authoritarian states have realized the potential in this, and weaponized it, by using sock puppet accounts and targeted advertisement to further amplify division and conspiracy theories, as a concerted attack on the electorate of western democracies.
Sure, but is the internet to blame then? Everyone ends up in their own echo chamber, even us on HN right? And the media have been doing this for decades too... Maybe not to this level but I find it hard to believe democracy is that brittle, and I worry the narrative to remove sources of sharing info freely is actually anti-democratic (all news coming from 'authorised sources' at its most extreme).
Youtube has 55 hours uploaded every minute (iirc). Its not "the internet"'s fault that, of all the content available youtube recommended Alex Jones's videos 15 billion times. Or that facebook has been recommending and promoting antivaxer content and communities to mothers' groups. (And specifically mothers who its algorithms think might be taken in by conspiracy thinking).
The blame lies with our peers who work at those companies. And every manager who prioritises their own advertising profits over healthy sensemaking amongst their billions of users.
The central point of the article is that Facebook is not free. Yes you can have free speech and democracy but free speech becomes rather more difficult when its biggest medium is a privately controlled monopoly.
Fake-news and the like aren't mentioned in the article.
But why does it become more difficult when it's centralised by numerous tech companies and not by numerous media organisations or the government itself? I don't see why FB is any different except it's easier for anyone to share stuff, and I don't see why that stuff should be a risk to democracy.
- For one when a news article is incorrect it is very easy to hold accountable the source of that information. How many people keep track of who said what on the internet?
- Fake Information takes more time to respond to than true information. False news travels 6 times faster (..) than truthful news [0].
- Media has a cycle of information that is way slower and more curated (even if manipulative) which allows true information to be heard louder.
- It's becoming easier and easier to fake image, video, and audio in a way never seen before [1].
- It's way easier for platforms like FB and Twitter and YT to make you spiral down a rabbit hole of similar content. Sure, this did happen in the past, but the current level of detailed recommendations makes it really easy for people to lose context inside their bubble.
- People are not machines, if they hear a message many times by different sources that trigger the right emotional responses they will believe it to be true. Now group every point and compound it by a lot of consumption and ingest it into monkey-like brains :)
When a single platform controls a large part of public discourse, without democratic control, and actively stifles competition (the jury's still out on that one, but that is the allegation), then that places a lot of power in private hands.
This doesn't mean that power is being abused (though it gets increasingly hard to tell) but it's hard to call that kind of platform 'free'.
Sure you might be fairly certain that Facebook isn't limiting free speech right now, but the main reason you know this is through other channels. When their monopoly is complete there'd be no way to tell if speech truly is or isn't free.
And of course there's no way to tell if your posts are unpopular because of some well intentioned algorithm, or a more malicious algorithm. At the very least Facebook's incentives don't align with the rest of society.
In most countries, as far as I'm aware, TV started out as a government controlled medium, which has its own problems but is definitely not privately owned.
And to the best of my knowledge there's still nothing preventing you from buying radio bandwidth. It's not really my area though so I could be wrong.
> Surely Facebook and democracy can coexist if we get better at teaching people to think for themselves?
There are some serious limitations on that approach.
We have limited time to devote to going into an issue in any depth. We can maybe handle thoughtfully evaluating all sides for one or two issues if we are getting honest information from all sides.
When you have one or more sides deliberately trying to mislead, they have a huge advantage. First, since they aren't burdened by the need to actually be correct, they can generate a wider variety of arguments and do so in greater quantity than those who are arguing in good faith.
Second, we have a variety of built in cognitive biases. The people trying to mislead can purposefully craft their arguments to hit those, increasing the chances we'll believe them.
On top of all that, social media's algorithms for determining what to show us are trying to maximize engagement, and the things that most engage us are the things that fit in with our cognitive biases. They have a huge amount of behavioral data on us, which has made them very good at picking out and prioritizing stuff on our individualized feeds that will hit those biases.
You can't really think for yourself without high quality information, and because they are based on maximizing getting your attention social media tends to mostly show you low quality information. In short, the way social media sites like Facebook are designed makes it nearly impossible to get accurate information from them no matter how much you try to think for yourself.
There was a recent article in Scientific American covering research into this, "Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It" [1]. HN discussion of that article [2].
Do you think that the majority of adults and children in the United States right now are highly valuing education, and pushing their politicians harder than corporate interests, to improve our education such that critical thinking is a top priority going forward?
Is that the value system that is being streamed into each citizen's eyeballs at this moment?
So the premises to support the title are that Facebook 'steals' revenue from traditional news publishers and allows user generated content to proliferate, which can contain conspiracies.
I don't know that breaking up Facebook will actually fix these issues or 'save' democracy. Conspiracies will still spread on other sites (Reddit: The Frontpage of the Internet, anyone?). Ad revenue will continue to go to electronic platforms and use tracking (Google is huge in this space too).
I can see that Facebook has engaged in anticompetitive behavior, such as buying some competitive companies. I don't see them as a full monopoly. There are plenty of other sites (some of them large) that allow you to connect with others, share content, and create an online identity. Just look at LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, etc. There are other large ad services too, like Google.
A strong democracy requires an educated and diligent citizenry. We can break up Facebook, but that won't fix the root problems in our society. We could start by teaching basic logic in schools. And I'm sure this will be controversial, but I do think we should make a citizenship test part of school curriculums so that the citizens know their rights, the structure and function of our government, etc. Then we still need to hope that voters do their homework.
> The business model is to divert revenue that used to go to newspapers and publishers to themselves.
And there you have it. Anything that threatens the position of media companies is always portrayed as an attack against Democracy.
If choosing democracy means shutting down the free flow of information between individuals on social media sites like Facebook, then my vote is for Facebook.
"The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest." - Bernays. This quote makes me think how it should not be a surprise that journalists working for big media companies are some of the main voices behind the calls for censorship.
America is and has always been predicated on the idea that the ordinary person has the capacity to make decisions that guide the republic, either as elector or elected. This idea is the basis of all democracies, generally.
Whenever I read that people “aren’t educated” enough or are “unduly influenced” by media, e.g., newspapers, television, or social media, I like to remind myself of this.
I notice that there is, and maybe always has been, a vocal group of people who believe that we should only elect and appoint experts, highly-trained specialists in their area of government. Heinlein reminds us that “specialization is for insects”.
I’ve come to know many politicians in the past few years, some of them nationally prominent. And I can say without hesitation that the average person is as qualified to make decisions about governance as the average professional politician.
Crowds can be pretty smart. Not faultless, but smart. That idea has been fashionable for a few years now but it’s definitely not new. Its implementation has changed from democracy to democracy. But as a general principle it’s been broadly and effectively applied.
> America is and has always been predicated on the idea that the ordinary person has the capacity to make decisions that guide the republic, either as elector or elected. This idea is the basis of all democracies, generally....
> I’ve come to know many politicians in the past few years, some of them nationally prominent. And I can say without hesitation that the average person is as qualified to make decisions about governance as the average professional politician.
The idea that Facebook is bad for democracy doesn't contradict that idea. For anyone to make good decisions, they need good information, and the problem with Facebook is that it amplifies lies and disinformation.
> I notice that there is, and maybe always has been, a vocal group of people who believe that we should only elect and appoint experts, highly-trained specialists in their area of government. Heinlein reminds us that “specialization is for insects”.
I don't think that's what being advocated for. What specialists are good at is providing accurate information in their specialty. Often different specialists will disagree.
In many cases, democracy should be about the people choosing which specialists to listen to and where the balance will be between them when they conflict. It shouldn't be about ordinary people trying to replace specialists (e.g. lets have a vote of non-engineers to determine how big the support beams for the new bridge should be).
> I don't think that's what being advocated for. What specialists are good at is providing accurate information in their specialty. Often different specialists will disagree.
This is an interesting point insofar as the second and third sentence seem to contradict each other. Am I over-simplifying?
A translation of what I expressed above is that common people have common sense and that common sense inoculates us from misinformation. It’s an imperfect response, but effective.
What Facebook is and does, at least in terms of spreading misinformation, is not new. Newspapers were that for a long, long time and, arguably still.
> This is an interesting point insofar as the second and third sentence seem to contradict each other. Am I over-simplifying?
It's not a contradiction. For instance: maybe you have an specialist (a consensus epidemiologist) that says if we don't do A, B, and C, then N thousand people will die. Maybe you have another specialist (an consensus economist) that says if we do those things, it will cost the economy M billion dollars. Maybe you have other specialists in those fields that say other things, but are fringe figures rather than consensus figures.
Now the political figure or ordinary person has a menu of options, and has to make the trade-offs between them.
I was thinking of specialists within the same specialty disagreeing. Read that way it is a contradiction but it’s now clear that’s not what you meant. I feel the point still stands!
When I read your first reply I hadn’t considered specialists in different specialties disagreeing on the same problem or issue. But that seems to further bolster my point, at least as it relates to the distance between common sense and specialized knowledge.
> I was thinking of specialists within the same specialty disagreeing.
That's a thing too, which I was trying to get at with my comment about fringe specialists. But it's not like every specialty is homogeneous (especially true in something like economics), so decision makers may need to choose between one camp or another of some specialty.
The thing I was arguing against was the now prevalent behavior of dismissing any specialist view that contradicts what you would have done in the first place. Common people should have a say in a democracy, but if that democracy is going to function, those common people need to understand the limits of their knowledge and understanding, which means they need to respect the knowledge and understanding of specialists.
I want to go back to something I forgot to respond to earlier:
>>> A translation of what I expressed above is that common people have common sense and that common sense inoculates us from misinformation. It’s an imperfect response, but effective.
I used to think that too, but I think that's turning out to be far, far less true than anyone would have hoped. That's proven by how prevalent and influential misinformation and disinformation have shown to be. For instance, by the support of totally baseless claims of election fraud by an alarming fraction of Republican party officials [1], which in my view is substantially driven by the influence those claims have on the Republican party base. I say that as someone who's leaned to the right for the past 20 years.
The debate of electing competent politicians is pretty old. Plato criticized democracy and advocated for rule by wise philosopher kings. In the 1900s it manifests as a debate in Europe where communism gives it a go. In more modern times, Singapore is more on the side of “meritocratic rule over people” than not.
I think the "Facebook bad" horse has been beaten down to Earth's inner core.
Yes, Facebook has its downsides just as any other social platform would. Yes, you can live without it. But I don't believe that the negatives Facebook has enabled comes close to the utility it has provided to society.
It is "bad" only because the right people cannot control it as easily, it was "good" 8-9 years ago when the good people (or the countries that they controlled/lead at the time) were using Facebook against "bad" people (i.e. Arab Spring).
If by utility, you mean enriching the pockets of their shareholders, then sure. But that is not a net positive for society. People got along in the world before Facebook just fine.
The only utility Facebook gives me is Messenger, which I have to use because several family members use it. The only utility it offers over other messaging platforms is slightly better support for media and GIFs (maybe?) And network effects. I would really prefer they join me where I am, on Discord, which is where my local friends, neighbors and online friends go to exchange messages. (It doesn't support video sharing as well/easily as Messenger.)
I stopped using Messenger once they started with the ads. Signal is a great replacement. The chat heads on Android were cool but I don’t find I really miss them.
I'm glad you were able to move all of your contacts to Signal! That hasn't worked for me, though many people have joined me on Discord. My siblings are sort of straddling between Messenger and Discord, just like me, but they tend to be more responsive on Messenger. Perhaps they only use Discord to appease me.
I've never enjoyed the chat heads and always disabled them right away. I don't notice ads in Messenger, though I mostly use it from a desktop browser with uBlock Origin enabled!
But as a I said, I only use Messenger because I have to, as it is the primary messaging service family members tend to stick to.
You seem to suggest that Facebook itself is to blame for that, and not the people interacting on it.
Previously, mass manipulation was only available to really rich and powerful, or states versed in it. Now it's available to much smaller and less sophisticated actors.
But I don't think that's an issue, the issue is that manipulation is acceptable at all, and how we can draw the new, better line there? (Looking at you too, Marketing)
In that case, why not blame Hillary Clinton for normalizing relations with the genocidal state, so that American corporations could have access to a new market?
Does anyone actually enjoy this kind of writing style where the author constantly blows their own trumpet? The introductionary text is borderline satire.
Journalists tend to have an over-inflated sense of self-importance. They even created an entire section of society for themselves ("The Fourth Estate") because being a commoner wasn't good enough.
There article is reasonable and it just asks to apply laws that already exist. I am surprised how much false advertising is allowed on all this platforms. Chinese counterfeit products sold on Amazon, Russian state propaganda promoted by Facebook, ... The judicial system and the law need to catch-up with new technologies.
USA companies are becoming less competitive and more hostile to its own users and costumers. USA in general has an increasing image problem as many people defend to lie and scam customers. Trust is extremely important for a well functioning society and even more to do business.
These headline dichotomies have a tendency to be utterly false.
Even after a successful antitrust action and forced division, Facebook would likely stay Facebook, only minus Instagram, WhatsApp and possibly other current appendages.
Information used to be hard to reproduce and disseminate across geography. This is no longer the case, and now exploits in human psychology that weren't really feasible to exploit in the past are available.
The "problem" isn't facebook or any social media company, it is with humans as a whole, and it isn't really a problem, just an evolutionary bottleneck. Selection pressures have changed and certain traits that used to be a net positive are now net negatives. People will adjust generationally as those resistant to mass hysteria from information overload succeed and get rich while everybody else (most people on HN included) fail and get poorer. Until the adjustment to the new ecosystem is complete, expect instability and uncertainty.
Those who fail and get poor reproduce faster than the riches and within a few generations you put salt on your fields... Your comment reminded me of the movie Idiocracy
The elite need lots of slaves to work the fields and if you can keep them spending all their free time worried and emotionally exhausted about the news item du jour you never need to even whip them, they won't have any energy to cause you problems.
There are alternative solutions to censorship. Censorship would just be a patch, and not even enough for the problems Facebook and other social media is creating. The issue is that Facebook has completely changed the incentives for what type of speech gets the most exposure. Now the contents of the speech do not matter, nor the source, nor whether it is true or useful or anything. Instead the metric is how much "engagement" it can create. Facebook will, by design, show on your timeline a lie that creates comments before a truth that doesn't. And it will do this time and time again, and the effect of the repeated exposures to lies is that even if you don't believe them, you will start doubting.
Society can't keep up with that. It isn't just that there are people with polarized opinions, it's that you have people with completely different views of reality. Propping up lies is incredibly easy, and doing the necessary research to disprove those lies and spread the result is orders of magnitude more difficult. It's impossible to keep up the rhythm.
The solution is not censorship, the solution is to force these companies to change those incentives. Stop with the automatic suggestions to get more engagement, stop showing content to people who didn't explicitly subscribe to it, stop the uncontrolled spread of content of any type. We can live without viral memes, we can't without a functioning society.
The most pessimistic and paranoid commentators saw this coming back when the "fake news" and "fact checking" narratives were being ramped up, and it seems they were right.
Any measure for success, when used as a target, becomes a bad measure.
Freedom of speech is a measure of a free society, if you make freedom of speech the target and insist on maximising it without limit, then boring complicated truths are overwhelmed by simplistic emotionally engaging lies.
I don’t know where to aim, exactly, only that the real target is whatever freedom of speech is for — call it X because I’m not confident I know what X is.
To the extent freedom of speech and X are aligned, aiming for whatever X is will also enable as much free speech as possible.
This sounds to me like mental gymnastics to justify censorship on the grounds that lies are more popular than the truth, as if this is some new development that Facebook just recently made possible.
Lies have always been more popular than the truth. Observe that billions of people are entirely convinced that there is an invisible and omniscient wizard residing in the sky, watching them.
The majority of people believing false things is dangerous, to be sure. Appointing censors is a naive and harmful approach to solving that problem, counterintuitively.
Uncensored communications tools are how we fix that issue, despite the fact that fearful people will look at some of the short term effects and foolishly conclude that it's making things worse, focusing on antivaxxers and the like while ignoring the rise in global literacy and scientific progress and achievement.
It sounds like you’re aggressively agreeing with me, and the closest you get to disagreement is:
> Appointing censors is a naive and harmful approach to solving that problem, counterintuitively.
But even then I would happily accept even the part that it is “naive” to appoint censors (I am calling for something much more subtle).
These two things are close, but not perfectly so. “Free speech = free society” has been a good approximation for most of history even despite a majority believing in falsehoods.
But the difference is there.
Facebook per se isn’t the problem, I think; I would blame everyone who uses A.I. on large populations, testing and refining what is most likely to be shared without consideration as it “sounds about right” while pushing a particular narrative (in Facebook’s case the goal is “money”; others, including those who use Facebook as their means for this testing, have political rather than financial agendas). Facebook is just one of many doing that, the A.I. genie is well out of the bottle, and conversely Facebook could exist without that A.I. optimising for something we don’t really want.
However, despite that being the only point where I think you’re actively disagreeing with me, I disagree with your new point here:
> look at some of the short term effects and foolishly conclude that it's making things worse, focusing on antivaxxers and the like while ignoring the rise in global literacy and scientific progress and achievement.
These are separate dimensions of what I consider a good society. China is part of the rise in those two, yet lacks free speech. Does it lack all the things which free speech is a good proxy for? I don’t know; but it does lack free speech.
Yup, and it's interesting to ponder why this narrative gains ground. Especially if we take at face value the claims that undue influence has been exerted for the past few years to ruin free society.
Partly Facebook is a problem because of their top-down profit-driven manipulation. But partly it seems inherent to any recommendation algorithm that gives weight to content you're more likely to share, reply to, etc. The stuff that outrages you is more likely to propagate.
So what would be a recommendation algorithm that does not have this effect? What would it measure and optimize?
The case for free speech absolutism has never looked more questionable than it does right now. Every online platform that has tried to market itself as a “bastion of free speech” has become overrun with the absolute worst of society and as of 2020 is directly implicated in multiple real life terrorist attacks including most recently in the Nez Zealand government’s post-mortem on the Christchurch shootings here https://christchurchattack.royalcommission.nz/the-report
We already have rules regarding what we consider to be acceptable both in general society and in a legal context with regards to free speech so the line in the sand already exists.
Trying to wave away this debate by just shouting “censorship” contributes nothing meaningful to a debate that is sorely missing from society.
Edit: There are some interesting points in the replies that I think could be answered with some clarifications.
I think there is something that is very unique about social media specifically that should have a higher standard about it than other forms of speech. My argument is not at all about trying to force "the one acceptable point of view" or anything like that. History has a long long list of ideas that were once considered dangerous that not only stood the test of time but instead became something much more and in order to continue having that diversity of opinion is generally a good thing.
There are fundamental problems with how the economics of a social media platform function. Never before has a tool existed that allowed everyone to broadcast any unfiltered thought they had to everyone else in the world with basically zero effort.
Furthermore, they can do this both anonymously and without any kind of repercussion. That sounds great in theory as some libertarian fantasy where you might expect the "marketplace of ideas" to take care of everything and the cream would rise to the top. The reality of what that looks like in 2020 however is actually very different and I think now would be a great time to have that discussion about what guardrails we can all generally agree on that would address some of the many downsides that have come out of this experiment so far.
All of the current iterations of major social networks came pretty much exclusively from a group of people who had zero background in anything then Computer Science. At no point have we reached out to groups like sociologists, ethicists, historians, psychologists or anyone else who might have some really valuable thoughts on how to arrange anonymous social interactions in a way that might not devolve into the shit fight we have on our hands currently.
As an example Facebook was started by a guy who by all accounts is not exactly known for having great social skills where he could rate women on campus. Twitter is a platform that purposely doesn't allow for nuance. I think they were both a terrible starting point and that perhaps we should rethink what social media COULD look like from the ground up and learning from all of the mistakes we made with it the first time around.
To me, the case for free speech has never looked as good. A few (even hundreds) of murders are an acceptable cost of free speech. Restricted speech has killed millions.
Little by little the western freedoms are being taken away. And you want it to go faster?
Rap music which idolizes violence is allowed, despite thousands dying every year in connection to crimimal enterprise. The case to ban rap is just as naive as the case against free speech.
The free speech is well... a lot like right to bear arms. While you only had muskets, right to bear arms had a clear benefit (ability to quickly raise reasonably trained militia ready to fight in days) and little risks. Now that you can buy assault rifles, and war has become so high-tech that people who are trained to use small arms and nothing else aren't of any benefit in it - it has become a different thing.... Which is not to say i am against 2nd Amendment, just that the situation changed and concern of many people are understandable.
Same is free speech: when actually exercising this right was about printing books of pamphlets that meant a certain level of financial and intellectual barrier to it, free speech was clearly all benefits and no risks. Now that literally anyone can invent his own conspiracy theory and post it on facebook - and with well, intellectual majority driving the views and rankings of them so smart content ends up unnoticed coz it's so nerdy - people are right to be concerned.
> Same is free speech: when actually exercising this right was about printing books of pamphlets that meant a certain level of financial and intellectual barrier to it, free speech was clearly all benefits and no risks.
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but this is also a very dangerous approach in my opinion. What you seem to be saying is: "as long as only the well-off - and therefore likely to be educated - people had the means of mass expression, dangerous ideas could not proliferate". Should it be one group of people, preferably "us", who decides what the other groups are allowed to think and discuss? To me this is much more ripe for abuse than the other extreme. Doubly so because the dangers in free speech can be much better solved with education and removing the ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots.
So I disagree vehemently that the solution is to limit free speech. That to me is akin to cutting off our own noses because we have a flu. The root of the problem is elsewhere.
What does pretty much every malicious and totalitarian regime start with?
1. Ban free speech
2. Institute the concept of thought crimes
3. Limit education
Concentrating knowledge and intelligence in the hands of a few, and reducing information and idea flow to the masses.
Dangerous and radical ideas can proliferate mostly among marginalized groups who have been excluded from welfare for one reason or another. People who are gripped by existential fears and see little to no possibility of improvement or solution to their problems will naturally gravitate towards radical opinions because they have nothing to lose, no other options and nobody else listens to them. Banning their voice will do nothing just push them further away and radicalize them even more.
That's the thing: the concept of "human rights" was born in 1700s exactly because it was technologically limited to the people who invented it: the elites (more often then not, slaveholding elites!). It's just now it backfires because technology changed in the way everyone can use it.
And then again, it is mass democracy, which was always a mistake, and if it didn't exist many of the problems we have now won't exist either, it's entirely fair if voting is limited to landowners who have land giving no less than $X annual rent, the way it was in late 1700s-early 1800s America. And even more so when we have massive social programs so democracy becomes a death trap of freeloaders voting for even more free stuff.
What is the realistic exit from it? I believe that Chinese way relies too much on individual obedience so culturally impossible in any Western country. Returning to democracy for the elites and human rights for the (sub)elites too, is impossible because it's a catch-22: people won't vote for it.
Maybe something like Putinism is a good way out: keep democracy on paper but make sure actual voting is irrelevant, keep free speech on paper but make sure "right" content is ranked better than "wrong" (this is how Russian social media, which is KGB-owned, works, after VK.com acquisition). Of course it can't also work without some countries remaining true democracies - just kept afloat, with their social programs, with massive amounts of stolen money - because the elites need safe places to live in, after all.
This way, we will return to the "good old" American system of 200 years ago - except geographically, rather than racially, segregated.
So free speech was good, when it was restricted to the elite (those of means and intellect). Now that the unwashed masses, the plebs, have access to it, it's no longer good?
Exactly! And so was the democracy itself (in Washington's times, only 3% of people could vote and it was great, in Andrew Jackson's, 15%, and it was still sort of OK, but anything more was a disaster waiting to happen)
Now that literally anyone can invent his own conspiracy theory and post it on facebook... people are right to be concerned.
People always had the right and capacity to make conspiracy theories. They deeply believed myths, and could just as easily be manipulated. Look at the Salem witch trials. Look at the conspiracies that sprung up from the moon landing or the assassination of JFK.
The person you're responding to asked about assault rifles, and you responded with a link about assault weapons. They're very different things, and this has led to a lot of confusion.
Generally, when people talk about "assault weapons" they're actually thinking of automatic, military-style weapons with large magazines. Those are "assault rifles", which have been legislated at the federal level for a long time. The laws are indeed complicated, but in general these weapons are hard to get legally.
The only way no background check is required is if you buy from an individual, not a dealer.
The threshold to be considered a dealer is fairly low. If it's someone with a table, they're going to be a dealer. It's just that if an individual sells their personal firearm, they're not required to do a background check, and at gun shows you'll see a few people walking around with a rifle slung over their shoulder and a sign saying they're selling it.
But that's semi-auto only (one bullet per trigger pull). Fully automatic weapons have stringent federal requirements.
How effective would you rate those federal requirements on fully automatic weapons? If a person wanted to illegally modify a semi-automatic weapon to create an illegal fully-automatic weapon, how feasible would that be?
Must weapons that were easy to convert have been pulled off the market. AR-15s used to be easy to convert by buying a little part called an auto sear, but now the auto sear is considered a machine gun by itself, so you have to go through the same hassle to buy that as a full machine gun. Owning this stuff illegally gets you a ten-year felony conviction.
Just about any federal dealer. There is no permit required to purchase fully automatic weapons in the United States; you just have to pay a transfer tax. Unfortunately processing the tax payment takes about a year, in their effort to turn it into a form of permit, but that's not what it is. Anyone (without criminal background) can pay the tax and buy one.
There is a ban on the import and manufacture of new ones (for civilian use) in place since 1986, so the ones available for purchase (by anyone, again, no "special federal permit" required) cost about 10-20x more than they would cost otherwise, which effectively restricts them to "rich people only".
You have to pay $200 and send an application to the Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms. It takes 8 months to a year; they will do a background investigation and send you an approval form if you pass. Then you can purchase the (used) machine gun. Fully automatic weapons are not currently manufactured in the U.S.
Florida, in particular, has banned machine guns like the AK-47 which is to say weapons that fire multiple bullets with one pull of the trigger.
Semi-autos are the dominant technology in firearms; when a bullet is fired, the energy released forces a fresh bullet into the chamber, ready to fire but you must pull the trigger again. This is known as "semi-automatic" and is legal everywhere, for now.
Up until the Vegas shooter in October 2017, you could add a mechanism called a bump stock to a standard semi-auto AR and make it shoot continuously like a machine gun. The Trump Administration banned the device (angering quite a few of his base). Is it difficult today? Not for someone who has some knowledge and connections. The how-to videos and files are still floating around. It's not recommended, obviously, because it's now an illegal modification, but there are thousands of them already out there and it's likely people are still making them in garage workshops.
An Ar-15 is no more compact than a hunting rifle. Barrel length is restricted by law.
And every gun I’ve seen with a detachable magazine comes in a variety of sizes. Hell. A Ruger 22 rifle accepts a 100 round magazine. Is that an assault rifle?
Yes, assault weapons are a different category, legally and technically, from semi-automatic weapons which are the majority of firearms manufactured and sold today in the U.S.
The anti-gun lobby has conflated the terms to push a blanket ban on anything that looks remotely military. But functionally, it's two separate categories and fully automatic weapons require a federal permit that takes about a year.
If you think that's the definition, why not clearly say that instead of playing this "let others guess what your definition is" game?
> Yes, assault weapons are a different category, legally and technically, from semi-automatic weapons
What's the clear legal definition of an assault weapon?
E.g. as referenced elsewhere in the comments here, the federal assault weapons ban clearly talked about "semi-automatic assault weapons", suggesting the legal definition was not so clearly "only full-automatics"?
I think I did clearly say that; what's unclear? The federal assault ban covers fully automatic weapons, not semi-automatic. Here's a pretty good explanation of the differences.
From what I understand, you claim there is a clear legal category of "assault weapon" you base the definition on. So where is that defined? Your link only talks about fully- vs semi-automatic, the NFA linked from there doesn't use the term, ...
Whereas past laws that used the term clearly considered it not to be fully-automatic only. E.g. the law that's commonly known as the "Federal Assault Weapons Ban" (1994-2008) literally regulated "semiautomatic assault weapons", a category which doesn't make any sense if you insist that assault weapons always are fully-automatic. So what's changed that you now can insist that including semi-automatics doesn't make sense? I won't claim I know all relevant legislation, but it seems pretty obvious that not that long ago, it wasn't as clear-cut as you present it.
Certain military-grade rifles that are semi-auto but can also be made to fire fully auto are classified as assault weapons, officially and militarily speaking.
Civilian anti-gun activists just call anything "assault" that even looks kind of military, like a black AR-15 that might only fire .22 bullets, one at a time. By the way a .22 bullet might not stop a man unless it's a heart hit; this is why police (and bad guys) tend to use .45 or other larger caliber weapons. A .22 is quieter, less kick, cheaper ammo, and is good for killing rabbits.
The "assault weapons ban" basically cosmetic features illegal. Which is silly.
This is precisely the problem that people have with the term "assault weapon".
If you are using the words "assault weapon" you are basically saying that you want to ban guns that look scary, because this is what the original assault weapons ban did.
You'll note that the comment blisterpeanuts objected to didn't include any cosmetic features (unless you consider "compact" to be cosmetic I guess), but somehow that wasn't ok either. And note that he didn't object to the term being used, but to the term being used incorrectly.
But after a bit of googling I guess I found the missing context: "Assault weapons" being full-auto amounts to a US gun scene shibboleth to make it easy to dismiss anyone making the mistake of using the term without having to engage the substance, even if many people, including law makers, define the term differently.
"People call all kinds of things assault weapons based on stupid criteria, what specifically do you mean" would have been a far stronger point than this "haha, semi-automatics are normal guns and not assault weapons" game.
> "haha, semi-automatics are normal guns and not assault weapons"
Specifically, the assault weapons ban has nothing to do with banning semi-auto weapons. It has to do with banning things like bayonets on weapons.
Thats the point. The only definition of assault weapon, that has ever existed in the law, has been regarding banning mostly cosmetic features of a gun.
> without having to engage the substance
The substance of the assault weapons ban, is regarding mostly cosmetic features. It is instead other people, who are trying to ignore talking about the actual substance and specifics.
Yup. I think it’s absolutely shocking that people think that with free speech “this time it’s different” and it’s time to further restrict freedom of speech.
The thing that really pushed me over the edge was the poll that said “98% of people don’t believe what they read on the internet”.[1]. Unlike many people, I actually have faith that people will accept the truth, eventually. It may take time and it may be messy and ugly, but it will happen.
And I also believe that the free flow of ideas (good and bad) is a fundamental quality of the American system that is overall a net plus, not a net negative.
And I feel sad when I see people so willing to give up such a fundamental right because of what they see on Facebook. I mean it’s not like there are thousands of examples of where a lack of free speech has been used to oppress people.
>Unlike many people, I actually have faith that people will accept the truth, eventually.
It is ironic that you use the word "faith", which is a word that means "steadfast belief in spite of lack of evidence, or indeed countervailing evidence".
What would it take to convince you of the truth that people do NOT always accept the truth "eventually"? Anything? Or is your faith unshakeable?
You don't need to restrict speech to kill millions, you just need to have a louder voice than the people you are oppressing, deafening out anyone who might otherwise listen to them.
There's a whole lot of terrible screaming when you kill people, unless you restrict their ability to speak :) Very unpalatable, even to the executioner.
Has restricted speech actually killed millions or are you conflating regimes that killed millions and also restricted speech together? Basically I doubt the restriction on speech was a significant causal factor in preventing or encouraging the murder of millions. That is to say those authoritarian regimes would have murdered millions of people even if they were also into free speech.
Literally Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. The hallmarks of a whole lot of restricted speech. That was the cornerstone of their power dominance since they had perfect and efficient legal and social mechanisms to not just undermine, but arrest and disappear any opposition. Not exactly regiemes know for their humanitarian activities.
Everyone knows about the Nazis and Soviets but that’s not following through my point. You need to think a little beyond famous example of mass murdering regimes that also were against speech and causally link the speech restriction to the mass murder. As you can do with the Myanmar regime’s genocide and their use of Facebook.
Basically authoritarian regimes restrict speech to maintain control but don’t necessarily commit genocide and some authoritarian regimes will use free speech to commit genocide.
Except everyone recognizes that their suppression of speech was a major contributor to their dominance. I dont understand how this is difficult to follow. Opposition speech is the basic cornerstone of freedom of speech. Those in power cannot retaliate against you if you criticize their actions on whatever grounds whether its scientific, moral or economic. If you're in power and say "we need to kill off all stamp collectors to create a better society" then kill/torture/imprison anyone who in turn disagrees with you. Yes, you dont neccesarily get govs that kill off folks in non-free speech societies. The average person also doesn't murder either, we still make it illegal to kill others. You put in place these kinds of laws to create a deterrent or blockade against a ruling body from easily crushing opposition. How in the hell this is difficult to comprehend only means your history knowledge comes from pop culture articles instead of unbiased books. Democratic and republic forms of government are built on concepts to limit total government power and to place checks and balances on those in power. While we can argue the hows to do so, which are typically productive when the initial common ground is accepted, the general consensus after you know history from at least the Magna Carta days shows that those in power need limits. Freedom of speech is one of those mechanisms to limit those in power in a relatively fair way because it is a two way street. You cant shush the opposition, you cant shush those in power. The idea is the people, after hearing both sides, can make a generally good decision. Thats a whole other bag or worms. Anyways, social media has been a huge problem in becoming more one sided in many, many debates. But social media and Facebook are not freedom of speech. The ideal that the silicon valley crowd are a higher form of "for the people, by the people" has been another problem to this mess. They're rich fucks that alter "freedom of speech" by letting certain folks talk and then shushing the other side by burying their argument or just kicking them off. That's a one way street. Free speech is a two way street. They're saying they're agendaless but allow certain ideals to flourish and choke out the others. This ends up having backfiring effect due to creating a giant echo chamber then having the other groups go into their own echo chambers. They're all amplifying to stupid degrees instead of everyone being on the same forum to have a discussion. The social media companies are just that, companies. Zuckerberg and the other cunts are just in it for the money, not for social good. Since their business model was built on a house of cards chock full of debt and investment, they're tied to take large sums of money from whoever's willing to offer it.
Facebook has an algorithm which highlights outrageous and livid claims. These often tend to be false.
Your Facebook feed is curated to look like this—something a “traditional” publisher can’t do because of libel laws, etc.
What needs to happen? To my eye this is simple—all algorithmic publishing should be held to the same standard as a newspaper or even better—abolished altogether. Let’s keep it chronological.
Like, the core problem that algorithmic feeds were invented to solve is still there. The issue is that a minority of your connections produce a majority of the content, and it would suck to just see that one friend over and over again in your feed/timeline/whatever.
You are essentially arguing for a social internet without filtering and search engines. Lots of people claim to want this, but the fact that no platform lets you do this leads me to believe that the revealed preferences of people are different.
Heroin is illegal for a reason. We have an opioid epidemic for a reason
You can choose to see it as a revealed preference or you can call it unhinged addiction.
I am in the “unhinged addiction” camp.
We create and shape markets by defining the rules. As an example the supposedly free NYSE will stop trading if a stock is going down a certain percentage points in a day.
I can tell you that getting off social networks was a hell of a lot easier than getting off nicotine (i still haven't succeeded with the latter, to be honest).
Like, the hyperbole associated with social networks just astounds me. They are just websites. They have been carefully engineered to be addictive, like many other services, but there's nobody at Facebook coming round to people's houses and forcing them to open the app.
I actually think that social media is addictive because people like talking to other people, and these tools facilitate this.
Is HN addictive? Is it more like heroin than the NYT?
Is your argument that free speech exclusively attracts the scum of the earth?
Maybe these hate bubbles wouldn't proliferate if they had to co-exist on a platform with a diverse set of opinions. These people are heavily outnumbered. But of course, all the major platforms are so successful because they aggressively silo people into pigeonholes via curation.
Not the OP, but no, not "exclusively". But sites that espouse that principle end up attracting them in droves because they're shunned everywhere else.
And then people who believe in free speech but don't intend to use it to be assholes don't feel comfortable there, further making those sites hives of ... well, whatever bad adjective you want to assign.
The argument is that free speech absolutism attracts totalitarianism that wants free speech for itself specifically, and will hide behind the demand for free speech at the expense of many other things, include the speech of those it disagrees with.
And we should not put up with that kind of dishonesty.
I don't agree that free speech absolutism attracts totalitarians exclusively. But I do agree it will attract those that have a hard time finding a place elsewhere. Anyone who can be tolerated on twitter, which isn't a high bar, wouldn't go elsewhere unless ideologically motivated to do so (mind this doesn't necessitate horrible views, some people want to oppose censorship not because they themselves are censored). People who hold objectionable views won't change their minds when censored, and they won't change their minds because they're being told they are wrong or somehow deficient. But we have to do something to lead people to have better beliefs, there has to be a way to redeem the objectionable people of the world. If one is to choose to not help these people, in my cynical opinion the only other option is too cynical to post.
Here's the thing, though: Societies always have norms, and norms are enforced by making norm-breaking views shunned. Letting people speak their objectionable views with no repercussions normalises those views, and makes them more acceptable.
Objectionable views HAVE to be opposed, or they will fester and grow. Polite disagreement doesn't help, because the person will just go on to post them again, and again, and again. The fact that I politely disagreed with one of them will not help with the other 99 times.
There needs to be visible consequences for breaking norms, or the norms themselves will break.
There are enough repercussions for deviating from the norm in modern western societies, especially offline. Again, toxic people congregating to indulge in their __wrong__ beliefs wouldn't be nearly as bad online if they weren't ostracized offline.
I agree, there must be a way to have the better beliefs to survive and the lesser beliefs die, but ostracizing people who hold the lesser ones doesn't rid them of the beliefs.
And why the platforms silo people? Because people want it: "the implication of the Internet is that ideas are in abundance, and people will seek out what they already agree with, as opposed to accepting what is delivered to them." https://stratechery.com/2020/the-idea-adoption-curve/
Free Speech is not a supply problem it is a demand problem.
They’re not outnumbered though. They’re backed up by sock puppet accounts, nation state funded propaganda / troll organisations out to cause trouble and well funded PR companies pushing populist agendas.
It’s not a question of free speech vs censorship, it’s which type censorship do you prefer? The corporate kind or the shitposting bullying trolling kind?
Because if you employ bot farms and troll hordes, you crossed the line. You left free speech (your voice should not be censored and you should be able to say your mind) in favor of amplification and agenda pushing.
At least in my personal view.
Take this forum here for example: There is a community driven mechanism that enforces some rules. Your comment can end up dead. One can decide to view dead comments, but given enough negative feedback you can be silenced here.
The community enforces values. These might change over time, but they are there, because the community does value collective freedom (freedom from trolls and such things) in a form that allows individual freedom of speech to be restricted.
On a deeper level: There are always different forms of freedom at play and valuing one above the other restricts the other necessarily.
Freedom of speech without restriction enables said actors and bot farms together with content personalisation to hinder the freedom of individuals. Because they aren't allowed to see content that amplified voices drown out or that is being hidden from their view by the algorithms.
So actually Google, Facebook and the likes are already restricting the freedom of people. And doing so under the thin guise of "fighting for freedom of speech".
The deplorables are made more visible and made to appear more popular by bot-assisted upvoting/retweeting/sharing efforts.
Non-deplorables are silenced or made to self-censor by mass-downvotes/death threats in DMs/doxxing. And even the ones who just view and don't write get disheartened and leave if their curated frontpage is a cesspool of falsehoods and outrage bait. So yes, bot farms and their manual brethren (wumao dang, IRA, alt-right discords) over time help to purge dissenting voices.
Except speech that illicits violence is already considered illegal in most free speech societies. More censorship would not have stopped those kinds of atrocities. Human beings just generally suck.
The interesting argument isn't really about the mechanism of free speech anymore, it's the scale. Anyone can have a global platform without any real effort these days. Most of the famous internet people would never have been a blip 20 or 30 years ago. There is something to say about the need for some sort of gatekeeping, but theres also more arguments that counter the benefits. The problem with Facebook, Twitter and the rest of their ilk is the fact they benefit from radicalism of some sort. Take a step away from politics. Who are the popular folks on social media for any subject? The people who are really into whatever it is. They're fanatical about their craft or topic. They then try to show how great it is as to have others appreciate it, do it themselves or fund that influencer's endeavors. Radicalizing the audience. When it comes to ant farms, drone racing, game dev, game plays, growing hot peppers, the dangers only go so far in radicalizing an audience. Apply the same thing to politics and you get psychopaths. Why? I'm not smart enough right now to answer that, but I recognize that social media requires it. That's how they get the views, the ad sales and that sweet sweet user data. They won't give it up, no matter what rhetoric they pull out of their ass and throw in our face. The worst part, they'll agree to censorship, but to their own flavor. Current free speech generally requires you dont talk about hurting or killing someone or directly lie about something specific (libel, slander). Current media platforms, both traditional and social, believe those rules only apply when their group is the victim. When it's those "others", it's okay to be a complete dick and break the law. This goes for all political parties, they're all equally assholes. Free speech laws are meant to affect everyone evenly (naive, I know) when it comes to the gov intervening. Sadly, it's technically true that private corps dont have to play by the same rules. But when the corporation can influence the gov, where is that line drawn? On top, corps influencing gov, where is that line drawn too? This whole thing is a mess. We should go back to being hunter gatherers and fight bears for blueberries.
censorship is connected to regimes who killed (and continue to kill) way more people then all the terror attacks combined.
Also, if you let out governments and look at non-government terror, those who are internet-rooted, are a tiny fraction, and a joke compared to the real terror networks.
It's been a year since the Halle attack, the attacker is a joke: a typical internet incel as you would picture him. Infantile, insecure, physically weak, clumsy with his firearms. It would be literally funny if not for the two people he killed. Sorry for them, but, should we really sacrifice basic freedoms and rights, being afraid of THIS GUY?
"censorship is connected to regimes who killed (and continue to kill) way more people then all the terror attacks combined. "
Every state and institution in the world 'censors.
The BBC, ABC news, Fox News, the government, every corporation, Facebook, Twitter, Google.
Every single one.
Stop talking about this absolutist stuff - it's not helping the argument.
You, as an individual, can stand outside your home and say quite a lot of things before the cops will arrest you, but that doesn't mean there are not rules in the commons.
There are basic rules for civility in every institution, if you don't like them, start your own institution where you can press 'free speech' essentially to the legal maximum.
If someone tried to stop you from criticizing a politician, that would be an unnaceptable restriction but that's not happening.
If someone tried to stop you from telling your friends privately that you think COVID is fabricated by the Nazis, well, it' be bad because you have that right.
But don't have any inherent right to go on to some massive platform to tell Americans that you have evidence the COVID vaccine is killing people - if the owners of said platform don't want to let you on.
My argument was the opposite - that if people want less censorship, because they don't agree with FB banning their version of 'hate speech' - then they can make their own website.
There are 0 common platforms that don't censor. They all do, all day long.
Do you realize how much content on there is not suitable for publication? Death threats, doxxing, harassment, using the n-word to refer to black people etc.
No civil platform is going to allow that - and most of them have a higher bar frankly.
The much more challenging question has to do with 'truthiness' - because if you make a post that says 'XYZ stole the election, here is the 'evidence' (and it's not evidence) and it gets 300 million views - the result being that 50% of a nation firmly believe the election was 'stolen' but by objective measures it clearly was not ... then you have a mass media problem.
The 'free speechers' might want to be inclined to allow that to pass, because there's nothing illegal about lying. But misinformation has material impact.
Issues of vaccination are a deep - we know that 'anti vaxxers' have had huge success on Social Media leading up to COVID, and now were are facing a public health emergency where we need probably 75% of the population to get the vaccine to reach 60% herd immunity or whatever - or the pandemic won't subside.
People spreading false fears and lies about vaccines - while probably totally within the scope of 'free speech' is going to create some very serious problems.
On the other side, Twitter has announced that 'deadnaming' a trans person will get you banned. Literally saying the name 'Ellen Page' (because it's now 'Elliot Page') is like hate speech. While I understand that 'deadnaming' is a very rude thing to do, I don't remotely think it's a form of 'hate speech'. The government of Quebec fined someone $30 000 for making a joke about a guy in a wheelchair. Again, really, really not nice, but should not be illegal, and probably should be allowed on Facebook or Twitter as well. That's why we have the 'unfollow' button.
If someone is threatening/doxxing/abusing Elliot Page a person in the wheelchair, probably greater steps need to be taken, but not otherwise.
All media is controlled. Always. Someone is always in charge, someone is controlling what information flows, and frankly it's usually biased, but most 'institutions' bend at least to the public good.
So you can say anything you want on your front lawn, and on your personal blog ... but once in the commons, different kinds of filtering will kick in.
> that if people want less censorship, because they don't agree with FB banning their version of 'hate speech' - then they can make their own website.
But specifically this thread and whole article is about people wanting more censorship, on FB. Those people are the ones who can leave, and go make their own website. Everyone else, who supports free speech can stay on facebook.
Facebook has enabled significantly more free speech, and democratization of information. That is why people are upset in this thread, and this article. They are upset about how much free speech facebook has enabled.
> The 'free speechers' might want to be inclined to allow that to pass
The free speechers have already won. This is what people in this thread and article are complaining about. They are upset about how social media has allowed a lot more free speech, and has democratized speech and information to very large degrees.
If you don't like how much free speech is on the internet right now, then you are the one who is going to have to create your own website. Because the pro-censorship people are the ones who lost, and are currently very upset about the fact that they lost.
Thats the entire point of this article thread.... That people are upset about how much more free speech is available right now, and how much easier it is for people to spread ideas.
Those are the people who should leave and make their own platform that has less free speech, if they are upset.
I was replying mainly to parent's statement that privacy and freedom focused platforms end up having a specific audience. And I don't want us to lose any of those platforms. Facebook & twitter can do whatever they want, there is no reason to be there in 2020 unless it's part of your job in the marketing department.
I think this is plainly wrong that all online platforms are overrun. A minority of platforms is, with a majority of users perhaps.
And yet we already censor beyond that regarding health and voting issues that is certainly NOT the line that is drawn in the sand legally. This is a fact and a very bad development.
The debate should really be about the reward system - the like counter - thats the only new thing Facebook has injected into society.
It props up all kinds of things good and bad and Social Media execs have fallen into a pattern where they take credit for the good (using the good to defend the Like Counter) and pretend that the bad has nothing to do with the Like Counter.
Old social norms go out the window because everyone is busy pointing at the Like counts they have accumulated to justify their actions and behavior.
So we are at a stalemate on every debate.
Social media companies will talk about everything under the sun other than what happens to society built on top of a like counter.
I never understood how the Christchurch Shooting would argue in favor of putting tighter controls on 8chan or abolishing it altogether.
The way I understood it, the shooter placed a manifesto there before shooting, that, if anything, could have given the enforcement a way to stop it if they were fast enough — it enhanced their chances of doing so.
8chan allowing anything and everything hardly caused the shooting, and gave enforcement a possible window to stop it.
The report goes into detail about what his path towards radicalization was. The posting of the manifesto is not what I am talking about here. The argument was that had he not had such easy access to well organized hate communities who would egg each other on to take it further and further that the incident probably wouldn't have occurred to begin with.
I don't know if this is not well known in tech circles perhaps but this is basically an established fact among those who study this kind of thing for a living. Those communities effectively act as an extremely effective radicalization pipeline where the most extreme version is actual acts of terror and mass shootings.
In the exact same way that say law enforcement and intelligence agencies spent the last 15 years trying to ensure that access to jihadi material wasn't freely available online they are now being asked the question of what exactly is the difference because not only are the outcomes very similar but so are many of the steps leading up to it.
> I don't know if this is not well known in tech circles perhaps but this is basically an established fact among those who study this kind of thing for a living. Those communities effectively act as an extremely effective radicalization pipeline where the most extreme version is actual acts of terror and mass shootings.
Because tech circles actually visit 8chan and come to the conclusion that the news reports are ludicrous — have you actually visited it? Because I was a frequent visitor on 8chan before it was pulled and the news articles were certainly grossly inaccurate that portrayed it as Stormfront.
In reality, most of the website was about lolcat image macros, cartoons, and dating advice.
> In the exact same way that say law enforcement and intelligence agencies spent the last 15 years trying to ensure that access to jihadi material wasn't freely available online they are now being asked the question of what exactly is the difference because not only are the outcomes very similar but so are many of the steps leading up to it.
Yes, a prime example of how censorship is never done æqually.
Mein Kampf should be illegal; the Qur'ān should be banned; but the Bible, which contains much of the same rhetoric is untouchable, of course, even though it pretty much contains “Hear ye, go out and smite ye to death the male who lieth with another male!”.
But when another Christian killing of a M.S.M. occurs, there are no cries to ban the Bible; there are no cries to shut down the churches that led to this radicalization or the websites where they might gather.
You are spot on. From what I read it's the most likely explanation.
I don't think it's that much different though, it's still about screaming/shouting whatever you want to get your way (either to assert dominance or to laugh).
This is insightful, but it's more complicated than that.
In the same way that people with money find it easier to make more money, people with social influence can leverage that to obtain more social influence. It's a positive feedback loop. The "multiplier" is never 1.
But that's the point: social influence is meant to be what free speech levels the playing field for. Can you persuade others to repeat and defend your ideas and influence them, and idea value is provided in part by how many other people are talking about it.
With automated bots, fake accounts etc the attempt is to create this illusion.
Trying to wave away this debate by just shouting “RACIST! NAZI!” contributes nothing meaningful to a debate that is sorely missing from society.
Edit: why is this controversial and the post I'm replying to not? We both advocate the exact same thing: to abolish a founding principle of western civilization because sometimes people die. Hell, there's even a quite large disparity between the number of deaths caused by those two principles - my argument has way more merit.
I'd really love to see why these two cases are totally different and incomparable. Three paragraphs of mental gymnastics or less though, please!
Religion is not banned in France, that's a great misunderstanding of the concept of laicity.
Laicity means that religion is kept away from the State, it has no impact whatsoever on private practice and definitely nothing to do with it being 'banned'
What do you mean Religion is banned in France?
I'm curious about what sort of twisted broad exaggeration and misunderstanding do you have to believe to drop something like that?
To be fair, the NYT's reporting of Macron's limited and perfectly reasonable attempts to combat rampant fundamentalism might give an uninformed reader a reason to believe he was some authoritarian nutjob. But that's yet another symptom of the NYT's habit of lashing out at any perspective other than their very limited one.
Yeah, it's strange that Americans on the whole are not well versed in what secualrism means.
They think it's some sort state-enforced communist atheism or some anti-religious-freedom agenda, without understanding the pains the country went through in the past 300 years (sometimes to the brink of civil war) to remove religion from the State and ensure religious freedom and equality for all.
For most, religion is a personal matter. It starts becoming an issue when it is used as a political ideology that aims to destabilise the State.
It happened before with Catholicism and there are now some fringe Islamist movements that want the same.
Perhaps it was a poor choice of words considering HackerNews nitpicking, but in france display of religious symbols (such as wearing a cross) is banned in public places (mostly). I wrote it that way for effect, thinking that people would be familiar with the french laws.
I have no "twisted broad exaggeration and misunderstanding" of belief. I don't think this chain of comments has a good tone, and won't reply further.
> but in france display of religious symbols (such as wearing a cross) is banned in public places
That is not true; you're free to have religious symbols in public places. What you cannot do is wear them ostensibly if you're acting as an official for a public service. Teacher ? no cross/kippa/etc. while you're teaching. Cop ? same. Mayor in the process of marrying a couple ? same again.
Parent helping teachers during a school outing ? you're perfectly allowed to have such signs visible, you're not an official representative of the French republic. Same goes in public places in general.
It's banned (not just in France) because there is are existing laws against face-covering and religion is not above that.
There is also a perfectly rational thinking behind a reciprocity of rights: if you can see me but I can't see you then we're not equal.
There are also fierce debates around the role of women, ensuring equal opportunities in society, and the fact that ideology (whether religious or not) should not remove citizens from their rights and duties.
Of course, any of this is always open for debatable, and it is debated, at length, politically, socially, philosophically and these issues are always in flux, between those who want more restrictions in the name of greater freedom for all, and those who want less in the name of greater freedom for all.
The french debate on the face-covering ban was well broadcasted internationally, and it was clear to me then that it was about burqas and niqabs. The law came in place when there were thousands of people wearing religious face coverings, not before. I do not agree with the sentiment of your first paragraph, in fact it seems to me that you are being either intentionally misleading or ignorant.
There were existing rules against covering your face in some situations but you are perfectly right that the law in 2010 was triggered by the rise of radical islam and the (perceived or real) problem that full head coverage place on Republican values[1].
>And he said that somehow it's not a religious symbol.
The full sentence: "It's not a religious symbol, but a sign of subservience and debasement."
Basically, "some think it's a religious sign, but we don't agree". And most Muslims in France don't either as the wearing of burqas and niqabs was quite uncommon in the first place (some estimates placed the number of women wearing them at around 2000).
We can argue on the merit of forbidding full-covering or whether there was really a need for all that noise but there is a reasoning and much public debate on the matter.
From your original comment, you seem to disagree, but in France people are free to practice any religion they wish, as long as it is done within the boundaries of the country's values and laws. So your statement of "Religion is already banned in places such as France" -without further characterisation- is clearly inflamatory and false.
If there were a law that banned cross shaped objects, and then someone said "well, we aren't banning a religious symbol! All things in a cross shape are banned" this would obviously be a dishonest argument.
We don't have to play games here, or be dishonest about what the purpose of the ban was.
> was triggered by the rise of radical islam
Ok, so then you agree that it was literally created to target certain religion practices... That is what people are saying. That is a target law, meant to attack a certain religious group, specifically that of "fundamentalist islam".
It was meant to attack some representation of fundamentalist Islam.
Most Muslims do not believe in the requirement for burqas and niqabs. There is no such prescription in the Qur'an itself, only a requirement for modesty that some fundamentalists interpret as full concealment.
> The case for free speech absolutism has never looked more questionable
I do not see free speech absolutism, I see a hidden agenda.
Facebook is a platform used as a hate spreading megaphone. That is the reality that is being defended, free speech is, sadly, a red herring for many people.
Let defend whistleblowers, let defend the free press, and stop pretending that Facebook represent freedom of speech values, because it does not.
Defending absolute freedom of speech but then telling a platform what it should say it's at best native at worst willingly damaging.
Facebook already has tons of policies for civil conduct that will get you the boot.
Every platform does.
This was never a case of free speech absolution - I think those doing that are straw manning it a little bit because they want to stop the ability for people to have controversial opinions.
'The Challenge' probably boils down to how to deal with otherwise nominal speech, that at scale, can have problems.
For example, total fabrications about COVID vaccines.
Having the opinion: "I think the vaccine is harmful" - is not so bad - hey, it's just an opinion.
But when you make a vide with all sorts of lies in it, and it causes 200M people to believe the vaccine is an instrument of government control and that it has nothing to do with COVID etc. ... well then it becomes a public health issue.
That's a problem.
When foreign actors use to misinform to change the outcomes of elections, obviously that's a problem.
>Perhaps we need more journalists and not National Enquirer-type ones.
I totally agree. But I think even now it's too little, too late. HN loved Glenn Greenwald, and then immediately turned against him overnight because he dared to say bad words about a Democratic presidential candidate.
Facebook is a very large company, and is taking large amount of advertiser cash. That is true.
That money would otherwise go to publishers (possibly true, although I suspect it would go to google.)
What the author fails to back up is the either facebook/democracy argument.
facebook could attempt to editorialise all content, to give a specific bias to the news feed. But I don't see any evidence that it is, barring the bias towards "virality". (again I'm not convinced that's a function of facebook, I think its a function of society.)
Virtually all publishers (be it paper, radio, tv or internets) are privately funded. They all make editorial decisions about the content they commission, edit and syndicate. I suspect the argument is that because there are more than one of them, its not a concentrator of power. Unlike these entities, facebook doesn't actually wield power, its far to incoherent. It allows certain content to flourish, which has a similar effect, perhaps.
I am uncomfortable with facebook the website, its trivially easy to create organise and operate a group that is contrary to the health of wider society (what the subject is, it entirely left to the reader's preconceptions of what bad is.)
I don't think facebook is the antithesis of democracy. Far from it, we are seeing more people voting. What we are seeing is western democracies struggling with people finding their own voices.
We are also seeing many extreme opinions. Most of them emerging after being amplified to catch eyeballs. Some of it is being driven by facebook, but a lot is being driven by the twitter->pundit->journalist->politician->journalist->pundit feedback loop.
"Is Facebook a publisher or just a platform that connects people?"
That's exactly the core question in legal cases so far. If it's recognized as a publisher, it can be held accountable for it's editorial decisions. If it's just a platform, that accountability is delegated to the people posting on that platform.
The big issue is that Facebook will purport to be one or the other depending on the context. As a publisher, for instance, it's protected by free speech rights. As a neutral platform, it can deny that it disrupts the news industry.
This is is exactly what has happened thus far. Facebook says A before Congress, and B in court cases. [1]
> What the author fails to back up is the either facebook/democracy argument.
Yes, the article falls short.
So, the question to ask is this: "How does FB even get away with this chameleon like behavior all these years?" and the answer is: careful exploitation of the legal framework.
An innate consequence of a democracy - to be more specific, any self-governing society with a majority vote - is that the process of law making are governed through models as described in game theory. Laws aren't "designed" and decreed in isolation of one another, they are often the result of bargaining, negotiations and compromise. Laws are also written by multiple representatives who often landed their chairs through complex power dynamics with their constituencies, interest groups and so on.
So, unless you're willing to dismiss democracy for a technocracy, the legal framework will never truly be "engineered" towards some ideal equilibrium through the eyes of experts. In a democracy, law making will always be a "work in progress" that represents the state of a public debate.
Facebook isn't a "political institution" as it is described in the article. At least, not in the formal sense of the word. But it is very much a participant in the same public debate that shapes law making. And it will unscrupuously use the flaws in the legal system to its own advantage as a private actor.
This leads to a big question: "How do other participants in a democracy feel about Facebook doing this?" This a moral question, though, and it is based on value attribution. So, the result is many different answers that don't easily converge into a compromise either.
Paradoxically, it's this disparity in opinions within the public debate that allows Facebook to keep doing what it does without being hindered.
> I don't think facebook is the antithesis of democracy.
Personally, I think that Facebook does hold a shared, moral responsibility.
Suppose your parents aren't at a home and you decide to host a party. People flock to your house. Not just your friends, but also friends of friends. And maybe people you don't really know. Including people who do not really care about blasting loud music at night, or even vandalizing cars two streets down the road.
You might think "it's not my responsibility how others behave", but you will def have angry neighbours coming down at you over you not minding who came through your door that night.
Facebook's design, architecture, principles,... allow anyone to partake in the party, but they don't provide the proper affordances to watch the door - e.g. moderation, archiving and findability of posted content,... - and they don't provide it either for private moderation, or public law enforcement.
By extension, news publishers do make the same cardinal sin by putting a "comments section" below any and all news articles without proper moderation.
The Web isn't an affair of a few million early adopters anymore. It's frequented by billions today. And this dynamic brings different, very complex moral questions that can't be readily be answered with "people are responsible enough, they will figure it out for themselves."
> Personally, I think that Facebook does hold a shared, moral responsibility.
I agree 100%
> news publishers do make the same cardinal sin by putting a "comments section" below any and all news articles without proper moderation
Again I agree.
The broad thrust of your argument is correct. I failed to argue the point about responsibility correctly.
If you ever take time to read the "community guidelines" that facebook have, you'll see that they are actually really good. I would quite like to live in an environment where they are applied ubiquitously, equally and quickly.
Which leads me on to your point about responsibility. Facebook has a set of rules, but is not willing to apply them (in the case of celebs and politicians) or unable to in the case of individuals. For individuals I have sympathy, thats a hard problem to crack. For politicians, there is no excuse.
Boy do I hate that phrase. It's absolutely incorrect from a neuroscience perspective. Words can in fact hurt you, and, depending on circumstances, cause long term psychological damage. Here's a place to start to learn more if you want: https://www.td.org/insights/the-neuroscience-of-reward-and-t...
Hurt has acquired multiple meanings. The phrase you hate refers to "hurt" of the bone-breaking variety. To me, that makes it clear. But maybe it's confusing.
Fun! Yup, metaphors can be great and apt. We can extend the word “harm” to any desired degree, and find motivations like this.
Then if we bring the new variable value (harm includes psychological harm) back to an older equation (words can never harm me), we can derive anything (the phrase is now wrong).
There is no logic police to stop us from doing this when it’s useful.
Another example: “beer will get me drunk”. I hate this phrase, so let’s fix it.
First, I can say that being “drunk” is similar to being “in love”. It has many similarities, after all, and I think those justify equivalence. From there, I can say that being “in love” is after all very similar to being “loved”.
Bringing it back, my statement is now “beer will get me loved”. It’s the clever hack underpinning many great nights.
It may well be harmful, but your reasoning seems spurious. It would imply that "marijuana can be so harmful that is made illegal almost everywhere in the world".
>Can they prevent you from learning about a local city council candidate by blocking that person from advertising? Absolutely.
If you remove moderation rules, there won't be blocking. However we fall in the other extreme with fake news and obsceneties taking over. The loudest and most provocative win because that's what makes the news. At least that's the logic.
Is the root of the problem that no one elected Facebook to be moderators? And now that it is so big, it has become a problem because it has an overbearing affect on people?
So essentially the monopolistic argument is a justification for government to grab back control.
I can't help to see this as a growing pain for global companies becoming bigger than countries. FB has 2.9 billion users. Only 10% are in the US. It has such
a reach beyond borders that countries are freaking out, afraid to lose sovereignty over their citizens.
Not quite so, Somebody, ultimately, will define the agenda.
Maybe now is an algorithm, some person censoring news or posts for fcbk, but if you involve the government, any government, they will define the agenda.
So, the most you can get from that deal is to choose who would you want to be your master.
With algorithms at least we - still - have the out of sight factor, some things the algo doesn't "see" or "understand" (quite few probably), but if involve governments, specially the american government, with thousands and thousands of interests, some of them even confronted; you could end with some franken-facebook promoting several hundred of agendas from who-god-knows.
I have no solutions, but I can tell you, there are problems ahead.
This is absurd. Just stop using Facebook yourself. It's by far the most democratic reaction you can have. Arguing for bringing in the use of government violence against them is unethical to the point of being evil.
People complaining about this issue don't seem to understand how the Internet works. Facebook is not the Internet and restricting "hate speech" (a notoriously vague concept) will only result in people going elsewhere. There is no universe where the average person goes back to thinking CNN/NYT is the sole arbiter of news. Period. The only way to ensure such a scenario would make the Soviet Union blush.
These are technological realities. You can continue to lament them, or you can accept networked information as inevitable and start dealing with your new reality.
My first reaction was rather visceral based on the title, but I calmed down significantly after I read the article as the interviewee's position is a little more nuanced. Clearly, the article editor's made the title more clickable than it had to be. Guy is arguing that monopoly powers are bad and FB appears to match that definition.
Most importantly, the interviewee states "I think monopoly is a worldview." And I happen to agree as I have a tendency to believe that too much power in too few hands tends to make things worse.
Maybe someone who works or has worked the big F can answer this: what do FB employees think about news like this and how the world sees what they do? Have they drank the kool aid and think facebook is great for the world or just think that the work they specifically do doesn't cause the negatives?
Given the number of Republicans supporting the current "what evidence, just hand me the election" self-coup attempt, I honestly think that around half of Americans have decided they don't want democracy, because the wrong guy might win.
Democracy would require something like Facebook for frequent referendums. The USA and most Western countries (all?) have republics. Sometimes I wonder what functional modern organizations actually use democracy.
I am sick that "hate speech" is an alleged problem because some people read something on the net they didn't like. I also don't like the people that write it. But the reaction to it is just infantile and the exchange of ideas is degraded.
The nature of the medium has intrinsic properties and that means that if you broadcast opinions, you always get pushback. It doesn't mean there is or is no justification for it. It is the trivial result of connecting everyone on the planet.
Be it differences or misunderstandings, there simply is no authority that would be accepted to enact a rule that you have to adhere to certain official statements about health, elections or Santa Clause.
As bas as some terrorist deeds may be, the continuation of decreasing liberty for security we tried for some decades is counterproductive and devoid of any results. Change it or lets yourself be classified as insane already.
Not a fan of facebook, but if you don't like it, you can just not use it. Doesn't mean you have the right to dictate how others use media. And don't think you are different to other historic mistakes of curbing speech.
The problem is industrial-scale disinformation campaigns manipulating public opinion and discrediting every single thing you can imagine, grinding the free exchange of ideas to a halt at every turn.
Its a DDOS attack on that very same free exchange of ideas you mention.
They are not public forums. You me and three other self-appointed bicycle fanatics are not having a lively discussion about cycling shoes in the New York Times, subject to oversight from the New York Times.
I see your point, but the post i replied to blamed social networks for ‘ddos of misinformation’. I am seeing the same in mainstream media. The only difference is - they think they can hold on to the mic forever.
>industrial-scale disinformation campaigns manipulating public opinion and discrediting every single thing you can imagine
This is just a fancy way of saying "people saying things I don't like".
>grinding the free exchange of ideas to a halt at every turn.
How so? Like GP said, you can just not use facebook and freely exchange ideas with your peers through other channels. Sure, some of your peers might have a different opinion than you, and (gasp!) you might even be unable to change their mind, but that's just how it is.
You seem amusingly unaware of how various organisations of questionable intent have farmed microtargeting to influence elections and referendums.
If this was "people saying things I don't like" it would be absolutely fine. People say things I don't like on HN all the time, and I either ignore them or debate with them - which is how it should be.
But that's not what this is about. This is about political PR machines with unusual wealth lying to Facebook users on an industrial scale to control what they believe and how they act.
But perhaps you think lying to people on an industrial scale is ok?
Some of the problem is youtube promoting a 'common man' Alex Jones 15bn times because he drives youtube's advertising revenue. And some of the problem is russia running active disinformation campaigns and organising competing protesters to fight in the streets.
If this happened in the 70's, you bet people would have had a problem with it.
Propaganda is bad, but I very much prefer easily identifiable propaganda that the absolute circus show we have now, mainly because the former is easier to counter.
> This is about political PR machines with unusual wealth lying to Facebook users on an industrial scale to control what they believe and how they act.
It doesn't control how people act, but for the rest this is exactly what mass media was always doing, influencing beliefs and opinions of the masses, never able to criticize powerful and wealthy where it truly mattered. Facebook only made this space a bit more diverse, actually letting some criticism in, weakening mass media influence. But it's ridiculous to think this affected "democracy", the US isn't even considered to be a democracy outside of the US, but more like a capitalist-ruled police country.
> This is just a fancy way of saying "people saying things I don't like"
Not just "I don't like", but things that "aren't true". There's a difference, and it's important.
> How so? Like GP said, you can just not use facebook and freely exchange ideas with your peers through other channels.
The how is that the constant exposure to lies makes people doubt everything. A lie is easy to fabricate, will create controversy, and social media will reward that controversy and show that lie to even more people. A truth usually requires more research, and given that more people agree with it it will create less controversy, less engagement and the platforms will not reward that content.
That's how you end up with what you have now: people living in completely different realities because the things that spread the most are lies. You can't have a free exchange of ideas if people don't agree in basic facts of reality.
We really can't ignore the damage that social media is doing to society by dismissing the concerns as "well it's just that people have different opinions". It's not about the opinions, it's about the type of content that gets rewarded now.
Maybe people wouldn't so easily believe in alternative narratives if people in power didn't also lie all the time? No one believes in the media anymore for a reason. People don't believe in scientists anymore for a reason. People don't believe in most government officials anymore for a reason.
You can find many examples of continued and relentless lies from all these classes of people over the years and decades. Is it really a surprise that people will stop listening to them?
That depends on the post. For instance, I believe that democracy is a mistake and we should be ruled by an authoritarian king. You probably believe this to be a lie, and that I'm likely being manipulated by social media. But I believe what I believe through a series of reasonable and logical arguments from my perspective.
So why do I believe it? Because it makes sense to me. I would guess that it's the same for everyone else. By trying to prevent this lie from being spread you are rejecting the fact that I reached this conclusion in a valid manner because you don't agree with it.
> I believe that democracy is a mistake and we should be ruled by an authoritarian king. You probably believe this to be a lie
That's an opinion, not a lie. A lie would be saying "pigs grow on trees", "in a monarchy the king is chosen in an election every four years" or "the earth is flat", to put some examples.
> So why do I believe it? Because it makes sense to me.
What is it then, people believe lies because it makes sense to them or because other people lie?
>What is it then, people believe lies because it makes sense to them or because other people lie?
Because reality is not so clear cut as "pigs grow on trees". No one is claiming anything as ludicrous as pigs grow on trees in our political debates. Disagreeing with most of the narrative on climate change is not the same as saying pigs grow on trees, for instance.
If reality is not so clear cut, then a constant exposure to lies would not help anyone to better understand it. Which is my point: it's not that people are now trusting an alternative source of information because they lied previously, it's that there's so much misinformation and lies that people don't even know what they can trust, and even basic facts get doubted. That is serious damage for democracy.
That's fine. Humanity has survived much bigger problems in the past, and I'm sure we'll be able to get by just fine now. And as an added note, as I personally have no appreciation for democracy, in my opinion anything that diminishes its power in people's minds is eminently desirable.
Where did I say that I wanted speech censored and controlled and people not allowing to disagree? I'm saying that I disagree with social media incentivizing the spread of lies and controversy. I'm not discussing what is a lie and what is not, I am just saying that by the nature of social media the content that gets more visibility is the content that generates more engagement, not necessarily the content that is more true or has more consensus.
In other words, do I think you should be able to say that "the earth is flat"? Yes. Do I think that social media should give more visibility to content that says "the earth is flat" than to content that says "well it is not flat" just because the first generates more engagement? No. It's not the speech that's harmful, is the selective amplification that social media does.
You are not discussing what a lie is, and what is not, but someone will have to, if measures against the "selective amplification" of lies were to be implemented. That is a fact.
That's precisely the point I'm making, nobody needs to decide what is a lie or what is not. Social media amplifies lies not by knowing what is a lie, but because of their nature. Lies generate more controversy and more discussion, true facts generate agreement but not a lot of discussion and engagement. Reduce the importance of "engagement metrics" in the algorithms that show you content, make them as straightforward as possible (chronological order for example), reduce or eliminate suggestions of "content you might like" and only show content you explicitly subscribed to. At no point anyone needs to say "this is a lie/truth", you just need to change incentives.
>That's how you end up with what you have now: people living in completely different realities because the things that spread the most are lies.
If we would put restrictions on social media and let the big media companies decide what is "consensus reality" like they are so vehemently arguing for, then everybody would also be living in a fake reality, the only difference is that it would be the same for everyone, which might obscure the fakeness for a while. I agree it's a difficult subject but I genuinely think the current situation is at least a little bit better.
Restrictions on social media doesn't mean that it is big media companies the one that decide, necessarily. I think it would actually give more power to the people to decide what is the consensus reality, but this time organically: instead of giving importance to ideas that generate engagement, give importance to ideas that people agree with. If those ideas come from an independent group that manages to grow via people agreeing with it instead of generating controversy for the sake of it, so be it.
Of course it will be difficult and not straightforward, and there will be challenges to control big media, but at least we align the incentives in the good direction. The current situation is awful: chaos and a push towards polarization, because that's what generates engagement.
If people are unknowingly being manipulated how do you know you aren't being manipulated also? There are plenty of examples of manipulative and fake news coming from both traditional and alternative media.
If everyone is being manipulated how do you stop misinformation in a fair manner? We can't even agree on what is information and what is misinformation. Surely you understand how stopping misinformation is bad if people can't agree on what it actually is, right?
>Controversial ones can prove themselves with facts/science.
The details matter, but as a rule I disagree with this. Some facts are obvious, like pigs not growing on trees, but others aren't, like climate change. Science has been corrupted for decades and I don't believe it to be a proper arbiter of truth in certain areas, particularly ones that can't be tested against reality easily, such as climate change.
You probably disagree with me, which makes my "bar for misinformation" different than yours. And I'm guessing that we won't be able to bridge that gap through reason and logic.
You seem pretty fine with accepting the corrupt science to deliver your message over the internet it invented.
You are right, we won’t agree, because you haven’t got a point. What you first replied to and where you’re at now are unrelated positions.
This is a classic “bring them to your level and beat them with experience” situation. You’ve moved the goal posts to climate change now. I’m not taking up that fight.
You’ve basically just said: reason and logic have been corrupted, so we can’t agree in mere reason and logic. You’ll find your position doesn’t take you anywhere nice. But I appreciate the discussion we’ve had up to this point.
>People are being (unknowingly) manipulated and the sheer quantity of misinformation is being mistaken for evidence of truth.
This is something you said that I originally replied to. We don't agree on what constitutes truth, so we can't have a reasonable conversation, and we also can't fairly judge what is and isn't misinformation, because we don't agree on the basics.
This is the point I'm making. I don't believe that climate science is nearly as valid as everything that goes into making my computer work, because my computer works. I have evidence in the real world that my computer works, so all the physics that went into it must be pretty solid. I don't have evidence that climate science works, because climate scientists can't run their models 100 years into the future, see what happens, then change a variable and run it again to see what changes (with the same accuracy that you'd have if you ran the experiment in real life). Their models are fundamentally less powerful than anything that went into making my computer work by the very nature of the discipline.
Most of politics falls way closer to climate science in terms of its power as a science than it does to the physics that goes into a computer. This, fundamentally, is why "truth" and "misinformation" when talking about politics is generally pointless. There are very few discussions in current day politics that are about truths as solid as what makes a computer work. Most of it are around fields like climate science, economics, social science, which are all softer (and thus more corruptible) fields.
The reason I said we won't be able to have a reasonable and logical discussion about this is because you probably disagree with everything I just said, and you likely won't really change your mind about it. I certainly won't change my mind about it, so we're forever stuck not being able to reconcile our different views of the world in regards to the relationship between politics and science, and thus we'll never be able to reach 'ground truth' from which we could then work up towards stopping the spread of misinformation. A general notion of truth itself has to be agreed upon before we can have reasonable and logical discussions about this subject, but that likely won't happen.
I think there is always common ground. There are always agreeable facts. I think there are two divergent points being made here:
- Facts and truth how we agree on them and how and why they influence policy decisions.
- Politics: what is the best way to convince (or unconvinced) people of a particular policy and progress a particular agenda (usually party or individual based).
I think anytime you find yourself stating “I’ll never change my view” I’d recommend a moment of pause.
Putting climate change to one side. Flat earth, 5G causing coronavirus, Bill gates trying to mind control your kids are all easily proved factually incorrect. Facebook could easily limit the spread of the this stuff. Sure we can save the more controversial things for later when more than 94% consensus is reached (in the instance of climate change)
Well, how do you know that 5G doesn't cause Coronavirus when it's February and no one knows anything about the virus? We now know that both subjects are unrelated, but I followed this virus from early January and it took the general population 2 WHOLE MONTHS to pick up on it. Those 2 months were filled with conspiracy theorists, and actually a huge number of them turned out to be right, like the very existence and seriousness of the virus itself.
Similarly, at the time masks widely agreed upon to be ineffective. Anyone seen with a mask outside was looked at weirdly, anyone buying masks or telling people to buy masks was called a conspiracy theorist. Reasonable people at the time were lied to by their own government into believing that masks weren't important, because the government didn't want to compete with their own population since they were running short on supply. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321...
The point is, out of your reasonable examples of things that are obviously false, I can already take issue with one of them because it depends on when you would apply the censorship. If it's February and you're applying censorship to "5G causes Coronavirus", you're also probably applying it to "buy N95 masks", and you're also probably applying it to "don't let Chinese people into our airports, avoid Chinese people altogether" because it's racist, even though that's the correct thing that should have been done, instead of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNMdg4morQs.
My point is, facts and truth are fluid, especially in new situations that we don't know anything about. And especially when politics are involved. By June everyone understood that lockdowns and social distancing were good and necessary, except that the entirety of media, academia, and elite society in general decided to give up on this for the George Floyd protests. If truth can bend this easily once it's convenient, why should I take it seriously at all?
So I reaffirm my point that I will absolutely not change my mind on this, and without giving it any pause. Truth doesn't exist when we're talking about politics, and trying to pretend that it does is naive. You're naive for believing that it exists. It's all about power and what's convenient for people in power (the media, academia and elite society), it's absolutely not about truth, and this year of all years should have woken you up to this fact.
I’ll go and enjoy my truth in a country with no outbreak.
The problems you speak of are US problems. Good luck on the way down, there is a long way to fall for you guys.
Some fun points for you to not change your mind on:
- China mandated masks in January (as did Taiwan). No conspiracy or confusion, that was a US thing...
- Radio waves causing a virus... there is zero evidence of that ever happening. So why would anyone believe it now... or ever
- actually none of the conspiracy theories were ever correct. Not one of them. Nor were they plausible to anyone outside of the lower educated half of the US.
It’s funny you turned out to be an example of why these things need to be fixed. Read some world news. Go look at New Zealand and Australia, or Taiwan or Korea if you want to see what countries that follow facts and truth rather than ... whatever fluid-truth mess you are trying to articulate.
>- China mandated masks in January (as did Taiwan). No conspiracy or confusion, that was a US thing...
Yes, and the US didn't for a long time because of no supplies. Chinese citizens bought out all masks in January and early February and shipped them to China, and while we were saying that this was going on and that the government should focus on not letting that happen, the media, academia and elite society called everyone racists for suggesting that and that masks weren't important.
>Radio waves causing a virus... there is zero evidence of that ever happening. So why would anyone believe it now... or ever
>actually none of the conspiracy theories were ever correct. Not one of them. Nor were they plausible to anyone outside of the lower educated half of the US.
Factually false. But why would I bother explaining.
>It’s funny you turned out to be an example of why these things need to be fixed.
It's as I said previously, we won't be able to have a reasonable and logical discussion. I'm glad you finally agree with me. I will also say this: I will not have my views "fixed". The more you try to impose censorship, the more people will speak out against it. You are, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, by the very fact that you believe science can be used to accurately shape policy, part of an elite class of individuals in the world that is scared the "lower educated half" is coming for you, and they are, because your class is corrupt beyond belief and their time is coming.
You are repeating US domestic BS. There isn’t a lower half in my country. We have high minimum wage, free health care, and lots of masks even though Chinese live here too. No ones coming for me and my kind because we haven’t disenfranchised a huge portion of our population... instead we have compulsory voting.
Honestly, please read some Taiwanese news... why didn’t they have a mask shortage? Or HK or Singapore? You quote complete nonsense like it’s fact.
5G suppresses the immune system... so Wouldn’t the outbreak have been bigger in Shanghai and Guangzhou that have the largest 5G installation and population in the world... but no, instead they had one of the smallest outbreaks per capita. I’m happy to keep feeding you knowledge for the all the hair brain ideas you present.
Please do explain the factual nature of the conspiracy theories... your answer implies you don’t actually have an explanation.
> This is just a fancy way of saying "people saying things I don't like".
No it's not, unless you also think somebody aiming a high pressure fire hose at you is just a fancy way of moisturizing your face. There are differences in quality and quantity that you're just glossing over by claiming that some generalization applies.
I think OP is referring to things like coordinated propagation of articles/post about how Trump won this election, and that the election was rigged. Democracy depends on most citizens believing the election process is fair and free so if some organization is spending tens of millions of dollars and using psychographics to convince people otherwise, they are by definition trying to destroy the concept of democracy.
Democracy also depends on elections not being rigged. There's plenty of credible evidence that things were off this election if you bothered to look into the claims. There's obviously also plenty of false stuff, but that doesn't mean that all of it is false.
I haven’t see any credible evidence. Neither has the Justice Department. I wonder if it’s possible that a president who has a history of lying dozens of times a day is lying again...
I think that the issue is misinformation and propaganda not hate speech.
Perhaps a start would be forbidding PACs, lobbyists, and politicians from posting things that are factually untrue. That wouldn't fix everything since the majority of misinformation is twisting facts rather than outright falsehoods, but it could at least help.
Let's be honest for a second, we saw enough leaks that upfront prove that Silicon Valley is not a political tool for radical left wing ideology. Not only the whole industry is breaking up but the state itself is going through a severe crisis.
At some point we will have to face the truth. Companies should not be allowed to use platform protections to becoming lobbying companies. That's how they are able to erase people like Bernie, Tulsi, Wang ... they keep pushing crony politicians that can be easily bought up.
No, it certainly is not a tool for left wing ideology in any form, radical or not. The other way around I would say. They employ psychologists to tell them how to appease and use activists to foster their image.
I believe most engineers have a left wing political position for that matter, although I dislike these classifications and that doesn't mean it is still true for publicly traded companies.
And of course big tech would try to reduce anonymity, get people to sign up for their ident services, want to impose closed systems for security and "left wing" people eat that up like candy. Politicians too, although maybe for different reasons again.
I wonder if you'd be as nonchalant with those same "terrorist deeds" if you or one of your loved ones was caught in the crossfire. We've already seen how some targeted posts by the military can spark genocide in places such as Myanmar. We've also witnessed how prolonged exposure to hate speech can drive a teenager to cross state lines and shoot two people in Kenosha, WI.
At which point do we put our libertarian fantasies aside and say enough is enough?
Not that much has changed, except that people now rely on centralized, AI-driven funnels of information and entertainment.
Democracy has always been fragile, barely functional, easily corrupted, warped by money. The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis. This is the best inoculation against totalitarianism.