It's not unchecked free speech. Instead, it's unchecked curation by media and social media companies with the goal of engagement.
As long as media companies get the most benefit from people engaging with content, they will continue to promote information that is damaging to society. It may even be true information but when the goal is engagement, it's purpose will be to enrage and divide because that's what's engaging.
Limiting speech will not cause this issue to go away. It's bigger than just misinformation. The core issue is the underlying system that values engagement over all things. That is, the advertising system.
Companies that make their money selling ads while providing content to engage have a perverse incentive to make society worse. This is the bad seed that needs removal.
This business model should be illegal. It's already trivially unethical.
>It's not unchecked free speech. Instead, it's unchecked curation by media and social media companies with the goal of engagement.
Unchecked free speech has always been an issue, which is why even in America, where free speech occupies one of the highest rankings of competing social virtues by dint of history, there are still a litany of narrow carve outs.
Do you lie to your business parters in the context of a transaction? We hit you with fraud, misrepresentation, or any number of torts. Do you threaten someone with bodily harm? Oh boy. Cyberbullying? Depending on your state, that might be a problem. Lying while under oath or to a federal agent? That's potentially a few years behind bars.
So yes, unrestricted 'say anything lmao' free speech does not exist. It has never existed. It will never exist.
Everyone who does us the disservice of trotting it out as if it does exist is creating a strawman which distracts us from a more honest conversation.
Which isn't 'should there be a line at all?' It's 'where should that line be drawn?'
It's not unchecked free speech. Instead, it's unchecked curation by media and social media companies with the goal of engagement.
Try teaching non-elite undergrads sometime, and particularly assignments that require some sense of epistemology, and you'll discover that the vast majority of people have pretty poor personal epistemic hygiene—it's not much required in most people, most of the time, in most jobs.
Netflix doesn't sell ads (and doesn't rely on user-generated content, so they can't really threaten democracy), but if you read interviews with executives, they also seem to be optimizing for maximum time spent on the service.
Apple, too, reportedly told developers it's increasingly looking for Apple Arcade games that will "keep users hooked" over a long period. [1]
Consequently, I'm not convinced removing ad-supported media will fix the problem of companies optimizing for engagement at all costs. Humans are stupid, and so we're more willing to pay for services where we spend lots of time, irrespective of the quality of that time.
Which includes...the New York Times. And all other media companies.
> This business model should be illegal. It's already trivially unethical.
By this criterion, pretty much all newspapers that have ever existed should be illegal. Also pretty much all TV channels. If this is a problem, it's been a problem since long before Facebook and Twitter.
The subtle underlying problem is all the people out there curating cogent arguments about the problem on social media, meaning countless hours spent avoiding the legwork.
Hi HN. Hi Reddit. Hi Facebook. Hi tech workers who have to constantly re-invent the wheel.
I’m sick of “both sides” and every one in between projecting and deflecting.
You all want to look at the problem in society, look in the mirror, cause you’re a part of it too. Say and do other things rather than demand other people do and say other things.
American people and politicians are on the same page: nothing is my fault, and it’s only my problem if I get paid for fixing it.
> The core issue is the underlying system that values engagement over all things ... the advertising system.
I don't think you're digging deep enough here. It's not the business model. It's the technology.
We've invented technology that can, to a significant degree, control people. It is as addictive as hard drugs and people will just keep coming back to their dealer for more and more digital crack.
But it's worse than simply heroin or crack cocaine. It gives the dealers not just the power to keep people coming back for more, but also gives them far, far more control over not just what those people do, but what those people think.
The large companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc) aren't in the business of search or social media. Nor are they in the business of advertisement. Their business model is selling complete control over people at the population level. At some point it will stop being a business model and start being a self sustaining model of raw power that strips us of our humanity.
We need to take a hard stance to all attempts at psychological manipulation via technology. A/B testing to see how changes affect behaviour should be seen as morally repugnant as selling crack cocaine to children.
I agree with your diagnosis, but perhaps not your treatment plan. You seem to think that making the social networks’ business model illegal would not be a violation of free speech, but that the social networks limiting distribution of misinformation would be a violation of free speech. Am I interpreting you correctly?
I take your meaning as, what we see on social media is not Free Speech, it is advertising subsidized Commercially Promoted Speech. That also means that preventing the promoted distribution is not limiting Free Speech (although as a private business they could do that with some liability as well).
Basically, the people complaining that their speech is being blocked were allowed to select the terms for debate based on their chosen meanings. Maybe the meaning of Free Speech as standing on a box in the town square needs to be taken back... but the Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech so it seems like that boat has sailed (for commercial and political reasons).
I think this has a lot to do with the platforms vs. publishers issue, and the Section 230 dustup we're about to see.
IMO any platform whose owners have enough editorial control for these engagment-hacking techniques to be useful (the ability to decide what gets seen, what doesn't, and who sees what) should be treated as a publisher, not a platform.
This doesn't have to kill online communities generally. As long as we can distinguish between editorial control and freedom of association (i.e. the ability to ban rule-breakers and people we don't like) I don't see why effective moderation wouldn't be possible.
You think billionaire magnates and state actors who fund a lot of this divisive content care about advertising profits? No, in fact they have the deepest pockets and will be the last ones standing regardless on what you do with twitter and such. They don't need twitter, its focus on engagement just makes their efforts more cost effective. Cut that off and they'll refocus on buying national and local TV networks or whatever else gets eyeballs and attention.
I think you are being a bit generous here. It isn't society doing the diagnosing. It's just a group of highly privileged individuals. It's one disinformation entity demanding privileged position in the disinformation space.
All state propagandists complain about disinformation. Whether it is the bbc or chinese propaganda organizations or russian or whatever. They all claim to be worried about and fight against disinformation just like the nytimes. After all, if you are fighting disinformation, then you must not be party to disinformation. But we all know that's a lie.
> That is, the advertising system.
Nope. Disinformation/propaganda/yellow journalism/etc predates the modern age of advertisement. In the past, newspapers were funded by wealthy business people, politicians or government. And they were all created to further the aims of their creator via propaganda. Ask yourself who created the nytimes and why?
> This business model should be illegal.
Nope. You are being misled by disinformation. It's not the business model or the profit generating mechanism. It's the nature of the business itself. News/media/etc exist to manipulate people. It was created to tell people how they should think or feel about events. To guide the herd.
Also, engagement was important long before social media.
Yes, currently the 2nd amendment only guarentees that no censorship comes from government. We need a stronger guarantee: no censorship on any public discourse from any party. Not any kind, because even well intentioned censorship causes problems! Using reddit as an example: suppose there is a subreddit A that discuss news and politics, and the mods ban racist comments. If you are a racist, will you change your racist way if you found your post banned? No, of course not. You would just be indignant and find/make another subreddit B that is more tolerant of racism. The subreddit B is provided the same tools subreddit A uses for censoring racist posts, and abuse these tools to censor any voices that argue against racism. You can no longer be convinced to abandon racism because you are stuck in your comfort zone and anyone who argue against racism are just SJW or special snowflakes in your eyes and their opinions are automatically dismissed by your brain.
I come from a country where a free speech was never really a thing, and I tell you, americans, this: you don't value it enough.
Restrictions on free speech inevitably lead to some form of censorship, and any form of censorship inevitably leads to the population being subjected to some 'official' version of 'truth'. This 'truth', however, is carefully curated to coerce the population to act in a certain way.
So when Twitter or Facebook start 'fact checking' posts, you shouldn't say 'Twitter is a private company, 1st amendment doesn't apply to it', you should grab pitchforks and put their censorship efforts to rest.
Artists in the soviet era had to employ all kinds of allegories and humor to communicate their experience without being reprimanded by KGB censors. I'll take free speech over assigning any group the power to arbitrate what is considered "disinformation".
Can't I believe both things? I believe that Free Speech is one of the most important rights we have, but I also believe that people utilize their free speech to mislead and do harm.
While it would be nice to believe that "the solution is simple more free speech", and that the truth will win out in the end, is not fully backed up by the evidence. Lies can be carefully crafted to exploit the way human brains work, to mislead people into believing them... the truth is limited, because it has to be true.
So what do we do? I am not able to read the article, but it sounds like they are arguing for some limits on free speech. I share the concerns that people on here, like yourself, have about that. So what techniques can we use to stop misinformation that don't rely on limiting free speech? We can't just sit back and hope the truth will come through, we have too many examples in history to know that doesn't always happen.
If we just sit back and wait for the truth to win out, we might end up in a world where the people using free speech to mislead grab enough power to stop people from using the truth to fight their misinformation.
It was particularly bizarre when Facebook anointed Snopes as an official fact checker, and then Snopes proceeded to "fact check" posts by the Babylon Bee as "fake news". (The Babylon Bee is a humor web site and clearly labeled as such.)
It's worth listening to the people from censorship-heavy countries. The US is better off for not having censorship. Free speech is messy. But it beats the alternative.
It's useful to read what the extremists have to say, if you read the extremists from both sides. You can still read Dabiq, ISIL's magazine, online. (That may have backfired. Their position was, it's a war to the death between our Islam and everybody else. The opposition agreed and crushed them.) It's worth reading what the gun rights people have to say. (Do not carry with a round in the chamber is good advice.) What the "defund the cops" people have to say. What the cop-rights people have to say. What QAnon has to say. What the "FEMA Death Train" people have to say. (Those big windowless railroad cars are car carriers. One believer followed one and put a video on Youtube, and was dismayed when it reached an unloading point and new cars came out.) What the "FEMA coffins" people were excited about. (That was a private storage yard for grave liners. Turned out FEMA doesn't stock coffins, just body bags, and not enough of them for the peak of the coronavirus epidemic.)
Within those extreme points you find the BLM people (who have had it with being shot and harassed), the white supremacists (who are mostly working-class guys who saw their way of life evaporate), the evangelicals (who right now are rudderless, having latched onto Trump, who represents their fears but not their values), and the Universal Basic Income people (that used to be called the "dole" in the UK). All have legitimate grievances. Within that perimeter lies reality. Those people are exploitable by politicians who don't have good solutions but can direct their anger.
That goes back a very long way. Read Shakespeare's version of Caesar's funeral oration.
I find it very interesting (but understandable) that tech people, obsessed with data and informed decision-making, are essentially stating that "this time will be different" when arguing for speech restrictions. Despite all the decades of history of these sorts of things going sideways, somehow we're still optimistic that this time we'll get it right.
Or just stop using their services? I like that we've just sort of accepted that Facebook and Twitter are trans-government institution level monopolies and that there's nothing we can do about it, or have better alternatives. There's no mandatory reason to have a twitter or facebook, there's plenty of ways you can connect with someone. And I'd happily trade online messaging for personal communication especially if I'm concerned about censorship and privacy rights from that institution.
This is like saying: I come from a country where free market was never a real thing and you should oppose even the slightest regulation, anti-trust laws etc.
I too grew up without free speech in a dictatorship and believe fervently in free speech. However I believe too that dictating to a company what speech they can have or can't have on their platform is a violation of free speech in itself. It is their right to disagree with someone's opinion and to deny them access to their platform. If we disagree with that action we punish with our eyeballs, or our wallets or we build our own.
That these platforms are so huge is a problem for sure but doesn't automatically classify them as institutions owned by the public. There are other ways to deal with companies that get too big.
I came into the article expecting to hate it, but the author eventually kind of won me over. She doesn't think Americans should abandon free speech, but she does think we should approach it more like Germany and France.
> Germany and France have laws that are designed to prevent the widespread dissemination of hate speech and election-related disinformation. “Much of the recent authoritarian experience in Europe arose out of democracy itself,” explains Miguel Poiares Maduro [...] “The Nazis and others were originally elected. In Europe, there is historically an understanding that democracy needs to protect itself from anti-democratic ideas.”
We used to have free speech in the 1960s in Canada but we removed this. We created an opening to start policing speech.
Why are Canadian's so polite? Because you can go to prison for up to 2 years though more often than not it's just compensation. AKA "including compensation for injury to dignity, feelings and self-respect"
Hurting someone's feelings will send you to a non-judicial court where you do not have innocent until proven guilty. You must prove you didn't do it. Though it seems literally the only way to not be charged is to threaten taking it to the supreme court.
Worse yet, it has also created the 'you're a racist' thing. In order to silence your political opponents out of fear of being brought up on these charges. You get called a racist.
Coming from a country where free speech "was never really a thing" implies that your government either stops you from conveying X, retaliates, or is unwilling to protect you from another entity doing the same.
I find it strange that anyone in that situation would equate it with social media sites removing or flagging content published on their platform.
It's ironic that Emily Bazelon, the author of this essay, is the granddaughter of the late influential federal judge David Bazelon. Judge Bazelon was a well-known progressive and a well-known free speech proponent. Although his granddaughter shares his broadly progressive worldview, her position on this issue is different.
The evolution from David to Emily reflects that of the US left as a whole. Most people like to praise free speech as a theory. In practice, it is a tool for those who don't occupy the commanding heights of a culture to push back against those who do. When the New Left was ascendant in the 1960s and 1970s, promotion of free speech was an important component of its rise to cultural power. Now that its intellectual descendants occupy the commanding heights, they view it as a threat rather than an asset.
Given how much the issue of free speech comes up here on HN -- especially regarding Twitter, Facebook, and politics -- I think this is a really important article for people to read.
It's long, but is extremely nuanced and shows that the issue is far more complex than just "the solution to offensive speech is more speech".
One key takeaway is in the middle:
> [Free speech is] a fundamentally optimistic vision: Good ideas win. The better argument will prove persuasive. There’s a countertradition, however. It’s alert to the ways in which demagogic leaders or movements can use propaganda, an older term that can be synonymous with disinformation. A crude authoritarian censors free speech. A clever one invokes it to play a trick, twisting facts to turn a mob on a subordinated group and, in the end, silence as well as endanger its members. Looking back at the rise of fascism and the Holocaust in her 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt focused on the use of propaganda to “make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism.”
> In other words, good ideas do not necessarily triumph in the marketplace of ideas. “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing,” the philosopher Jason Stanley and the linguist David Beaver argue in their forthcoming book, “The Politics of Language.”
But most of all the article shows that the history of free speech in the US is not simple at all -- and that our current view of it is very different from the period of 1949-1987 when broadcasters were subject to the "fairness doctrine", which I think most people today aren't even aware of.
IMHO free speech needs accountability and massive increases in education resources to be effective.
Without accountability, the loudest voices can set what is true to many. This congregates power into the already powerful, until new means of information dissemination are created to allow new voices. However those too will need the same accountability or will fall to the same issues. You can see this with the rise of every new medium for information. From newspapers to books to movies and music to each new major social media platform.
Without education resources, there is a much lowered threshold for people accepting information provided to them as truth. We need to globally, but especially in America, increase education of the sciences and critical thinking. Maybe it's too late for entire generations today but the future can be very bright.
Unfortunately the premise of the title will most likely provoke an emotional response from many, to which the concept of unfettered free speech is inalienable, even the discussion of the problematic side effects it can create.
It seems like the author is bending over backwards to advocate _some_ censorship over unfettered free speech.
Yet, I don't see free speech as being the issue here at all. The truth is that when a significant percentage of the population holds regressive views, they'll seek out and amplify people who pander to those views to the exclusion of all others.
This has gotten more irritating for the moderate mainstream with the advent of internet, but the root of the problem always is the presence of a core critical mass of the electorate that espouses those views.
I really hope people take this article seriously and not just knee jerk react to the idea that unobstructed free speech is totally perfect. The idea that there should be no consequences for spewing vitriol and using lies to back it up is insane. It's been demonstrated time and time again that people can't fact check every single statement and this fact is used by malicious actors to manipulate people to their ends.
Its also really strange because for every other system we have, we accept legislatively enforced boundaries. There are constraints around the manufacturing of drugs, food products, vehicles, etc. We have regulations around pollution.
Even for abstract ideas, we socially agree on norms. Nobody would think it's acceptable to just called somebody the n word (or some other derogatory word) in the work place. Healthy companies tend to get rid of 'brilliant jerks' who yell or bully other employees, despite their technical competence. Why? Because we understand that this attitude creates a corrosive environment that is fundamentally not beneficial for the good of the group. We even understand this in personal relationships. We break up with people who lie to us and manipulate us.
If we look at the issue from the other side, the problem with censorship is the central idea of a civilizing mission on the belief that government and only government can really artfully determine who ought to speak to the masses in the interest of the expansion of knowledge.
The misguided belief in the superiority of government wisdom about who should speak to many has happened before. With radio it was unlicensed radio stations that corrupted youths with rebellious thoughts and strange music. With TV and movies it was commercial publisher corrupting youths with violence and nudity. Now with the Internet it is bubbles that corrupt youths with disinformation and falsehoods.
The enthusiasm for radio censorship is dead. TV censorship died relative recently. Internet censorship however is starting to gain popularity, but I strongly suspect it will crash in a few decades just like radio and TV did. Future people will look back on the misguided belief in the superiority of a handful companies and wonder how it ever could gain popularity.
There are not a lot of causes that I'm willing to die for, but freedom of speech is one of them. It is the most fundamental human right from which all other human rights are derived. The moment you lose your absolute right to question authority is the moment you lose the ability to protect your other rights.
That's ironic coming from the nyt, with their heavily biased front page. Even people who agree 100% with the nyt's point of view should be offended by it. I'm more interested in facts than confirmation bias of what I believe. I don't consider them a reliable source of news.
Note that an article can be disinformation even if all the information in the article is correct - by simply cherry-picking which facts to present. An example from several years ago: "Half of All Corporations Paid No Income Tax" which was factually correct. Another fact omitted from the many articles on this was "half of all corporations lost money". Income tax is not owed when losing money.
A problem is the inherent asymmetry in the ease with which one can create a believable lie and the difficulty of ensuring that its refutation reaches everywhere the lie has reached.
You can easily tie up the fact checkers and refuters with what amounts to a denial of service attack.
Should one curtail free speech ? My opinion is no, but one needs to realize what we sign up for when we do that.
1. What should be the role, if any, of governments in censorship? The US supposedly has a rule of "none". But there are exceptions. Some kinds of porno. Threats against individuals. Incitement to riot. All of which can be over-used to chill speech.
2. What should be the role of private companies? This is tied in with the role of monopolies. If there were 50 Facebook or Twitter like services, none with more than 20% market share, this would not be a problem. Maybe this is an antitrust problem.
3. Should anonymous speech be as protected as thoroughly as non-anonymous speech? The US has a tradition of protecting anonymous speech. This is partly because the Federalist Papers, and "Common Sense", were published under pseudonyms. Much of the problems with "fake news", from whatever direction, come from concealed sources. Spam, in all media, comes from anonymous sources. Of course, if you publish under your own name, you may face harassment and reprisals.
The promise of the internet and social media was that it would broaden people's horizons. That has certainly failed so far, but I wonder if it is at all possible to create a social media platform that drives genuine, deep interaction.
I think it would have to be based on curated, pseudo-anonymous conversations with some strong ground rules.
Information is cheap. As recently as 20 years ago, the best source of general knowledge was a set of encyclopedias, at home if you could afford it, or at a library if you could not. Wikipedia is far from perfect, but it is generally as good as encyclopedias were, and far more broad. You could tell a similar story about the news, and many other things.
What does it mean when information is cheap? I'm not an expert, but I think it means that propaganda is cheap too. I wish people were better able to recognize propaganda and brain washing.
The truth does not battle falsehoods with facts, but with emotions. Hate, anger, fear, and distrust are used to prepare the soil for the seeds of propaganda.
It seems like the brain is hardwired to find 'interesting' things, like counterfactuals. Conspiracy theories are the ultimate counterfactual. I admit that I find conspiracy theories to be interesting as well; but I use them to inform my opinion about motivation, not facts.
> "In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most merciful, (...) to Macron, the leader of the infidels, I ' executed one of your hellhounds who dared to belittle Muhammad, calm his fellow human beings before a harsh punishment is inflicted on you.
If you don’t like free speech or any of the other protected rights in the US Constitution, you can always go to a country that doesn’t have such things.
Why wouldn’t you want to? It seems getting rid of our rights is to make things better, right? So, why not go and see how awesome it is in such places?
The core issue is actually by allowing companies to harvest hyper individualized information about you, so then they can then design algorithms to maximize engagement by exploiting our psychology, and thus harvest our attention and clicks...
Literally if we just started to pay for stuff we’d see this problem improved. The consequences of the current model is that the internet has become the modern equivalent of a welfare state, in the sense that our experiences are sponsored by our wealthy corporate benefactors. Clearly not a good recipe for civic engagement.
So, as consumers we should pay for things if we want to have nice stuff, and also businesses simply shouldn’t be able to follow literally every person in the world around, as they stroll around the internet, and write down and share what they’re looking at. That could be done by creating liability around data collection/protection, as in the case if HIPPA, or outright banning the technology that enables ad tech at scale. I’m sure people here have much better ideas than this, I’m just offering an ethos.
Also the internet itself should be treated as a public utility. The sad thing is by not paying, we’re still paying, just in less direct ways, since the ad tech that sponsors our internet lives still has to get money from somewhere...
I'm worried that this situation is going to get a great deal worse. A flurry of disinformation and online noise is somewhat manageable so long as it is coming from humans, who may be paid by a state or an enterprise to drive engagement with controversial topics.
It's going to get a million times worse when this gets automated.
Right now the quantity of disinformation is practically limited by the human capacity to post stuff online, but GPT-3 style automation will remove this limitation, and we will live in a world of all noise, no signal. Our knee-jerk adherence to "free speech" is opening up a dangerous scenario where we are more vulnerable than anyone else to what is effectively a DDOS on our minds.
I explored this topic in more detail in an essay of mine, where I lay out that a world of Anonymity + GPT-3 can undermine free speech by drowning out real human views and opinions with machine-generated, human-looking propaganda. https://jayriverlong.github.io/2020/07/24/gpt3.html
"The age of disinformation" is the crucial fulcrum on which the entire premise rests. There is not more disinformation today than there was in days past. In fact, it is easier to check and see if something is true (not using self professed fact checkers and the priesthood of truth and fact, but by looking around and using your mental faculties) than it was when I was a teenager.
How many of you are old enough to remember bullshit like "if you ask a cop if they're a cop they have to tell you" or "you heard about the kid who's intestines got sucked out of his butthole in a swimming pool"? I remember people telling you things and you just went with it. It used to be very easy to lie. People made stuff up all the time, and said things that someone else made up that they believed.
To use the European context and Nazi Germany example, there is a big difference between then and now. That time was very much like my adolescence was with regard to access to information. Disinformation can spread wildly in an environment where people cannot verify it.
Currently, I could probably unilaterally get the equivalent of a university education in any field for free if I were so inclined, just by searching around on the internet. We do not live in an age of disinformation, we live in an age of unbelievable information availability, power structures and hierarchies once existed to enable the dissemination of information, and the ones that currently exist are beginning to show their cracks, simply because information can be effortlessly obtained at miniscule cost. I honestly believe we are living through social upheaval as a direct result of this revolution, and we haven't even seen the beginning. Making the majority literate was very, very hard. Making the next few generations well educated is something so easy it is probably best to just let people do it for themselves. I truly believe we will not need formal education within 100 years, people will just want to learn things and learn them at a whim.
I don't usually like to attribute motive, but I find it suspicious that it is the very institutions and organizations hammering away at this premise that stand to lose the most from this information revolution we are beginning to undergo. It is very convenient when the old entities with a grip on what people know and don't know happen to be the ones telling you not to trust your own judgment and defer to their own.
[+] [-] throwaway13337|5 years ago|reply
It's not unchecked free speech. Instead, it's unchecked curation by media and social media companies with the goal of engagement.
As long as media companies get the most benefit from people engaging with content, they will continue to promote information that is damaging to society. It may even be true information but when the goal is engagement, it's purpose will be to enrage and divide because that's what's engaging.
Limiting speech will not cause this issue to go away. It's bigger than just misinformation. The core issue is the underlying system that values engagement over all things. That is, the advertising system.
Companies that make their money selling ads while providing content to engage have a perverse incentive to make society worse. This is the bad seed that needs removal.
This business model should be illegal. It's already trivially unethical.
[+] [-] ABCLAW|5 years ago|reply
Unchecked free speech has always been an issue, which is why even in America, where free speech occupies one of the highest rankings of competing social virtues by dint of history, there are still a litany of narrow carve outs.
Do you lie to your business parters in the context of a transaction? We hit you with fraud, misrepresentation, or any number of torts. Do you threaten someone with bodily harm? Oh boy. Cyberbullying? Depending on your state, that might be a problem. Lying while under oath or to a federal agent? That's potentially a few years behind bars.
So yes, unrestricted 'say anything lmao' free speech does not exist. It has never existed. It will never exist.
Everyone who does us the disservice of trotting it out as if it does exist is creating a strawman which distracts us from a more honest conversation.
Which isn't 'should there be a line at all?' It's 'where should that line be drawn?'
[+] [-] jseliger|5 years ago|reply
Try teaching non-elite undergrads sometime, and particularly assignments that require some sense of epistemology, and you'll discover that the vast majority of people have pretty poor personal epistemic hygiene—it's not much required in most people, most of the time, in most jobs.
We evolved to form tribes, not to be "right." Jonathan's Haidt's The Righteous Mind deals with this topic well. https://jakeseliger.com/2012/03/25/jonathan-haidts-the-right...
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|5 years ago|reply
Apple, too, reportedly told developers it's increasingly looking for Apple Arcade games that will "keep users hooked" over a long period. [1]
Consequently, I'm not convinced removing ad-supported media will fix the problem of companies optimizing for engagement at all costs. Humans are stupid, and so we're more willing to pay for services where we spend lots of time, irrespective of the quality of that time.
---
1: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/30/apple-arcade-game-strat...
[+] [-] pdonis|5 years ago|reply
Which includes...the New York Times. And all other media companies.
> This business model should be illegal. It's already trivially unethical.
By this criterion, pretty much all newspapers that have ever existed should be illegal. Also pretty much all TV channels. If this is a problem, it's been a problem since long before Facebook and Twitter.
[+] [-] goBackwards00|5 years ago|reply
The subtle underlying problem is all the people out there curating cogent arguments about the problem on social media, meaning countless hours spent avoiding the legwork.
Hi HN. Hi Reddit. Hi Facebook. Hi tech workers who have to constantly re-invent the wheel.
I’m sick of “both sides” and every one in between projecting and deflecting.
You all want to look at the problem in society, look in the mirror, cause you’re a part of it too. Say and do other things rather than demand other people do and say other things.
American people and politicians are on the same page: nothing is my fault, and it’s only my problem if I get paid for fixing it.
[+] [-] desipis|5 years ago|reply
I don't think you're digging deep enough here. It's not the business model. It's the technology.
We've invented technology that can, to a significant degree, control people. It is as addictive as hard drugs and people will just keep coming back to their dealer for more and more digital crack.
But it's worse than simply heroin or crack cocaine. It gives the dealers not just the power to keep people coming back for more, but also gives them far, far more control over not just what those people do, but what those people think.
The large companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc) aren't in the business of search or social media. Nor are they in the business of advertisement. Their business model is selling complete control over people at the population level. At some point it will stop being a business model and start being a self sustaining model of raw power that strips us of our humanity.
We need to take a hard stance to all attempts at psychological manipulation via technology. A/B testing to see how changes affect behaviour should be seen as morally repugnant as selling crack cocaine to children.
[+] [-] tshaddox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kurthr|5 years ago|reply
Basically, the people complaining that their speech is being blocked were allowed to select the terms for debate based on their chosen meanings. Maybe the meaning of Free Speech as standing on a box in the town square needs to be taken back... but the Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech so it seems like that boat has sailed (for commercial and political reasons).
[+] [-] specialist|5 years ago|reply
Correct.
The Freedom Speeches™ food fight is just a useful distraction, to head off any structural reforms.
Similarly, all the pearl clutching over fact checking and truthiness and bias is completely misguided, serving to crowd out useful technical reforms.
Actual journalism (reporting) is very simple:
Any medium claiming to be "news" must have built-in support.[+] [-] non-cotton|5 years ago|reply
IMO any platform whose owners have enough editorial control for these engagment-hacking techniques to be useful (the ability to decide what gets seen, what doesn't, and who sees what) should be treated as a publisher, not a platform.
This doesn't have to kill online communities generally. As long as we can distinguish between editorial control and freedom of association (i.e. the ability to ban rule-breakers and people we don't like) I don't see why effective moderation wouldn't be possible.
[+] [-] clusterfish|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blockmeifyoucan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disown|5 years ago|reply
I think you are being a bit generous here. It isn't society doing the diagnosing. It's just a group of highly privileged individuals. It's one disinformation entity demanding privileged position in the disinformation space.
All state propagandists complain about disinformation. Whether it is the bbc or chinese propaganda organizations or russian or whatever. They all claim to be worried about and fight against disinformation just like the nytimes. After all, if you are fighting disinformation, then you must not be party to disinformation. But we all know that's a lie.
> That is, the advertising system.
Nope. Disinformation/propaganda/yellow journalism/etc predates the modern age of advertisement. In the past, newspapers were funded by wealthy business people, politicians or government. And they were all created to further the aims of their creator via propaganda. Ask yourself who created the nytimes and why?
> This business model should be illegal.
Nope. You are being misled by disinformation. It's not the business model or the profit generating mechanism. It's the nature of the business itself. News/media/etc exist to manipulate people. It was created to tell people how they should think or feel about events. To guide the herd.
Also, engagement was important long before social media.
[+] [-] thayne|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gatvol|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kofejnik|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hechang1997|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Andrew_nenakhov|5 years ago|reply
Restrictions on free speech inevitably lead to some form of censorship, and any form of censorship inevitably leads to the population being subjected to some 'official' version of 'truth'. This 'truth', however, is carefully curated to coerce the population to act in a certain way.
So when Twitter or Facebook start 'fact checking' posts, you shouldn't say 'Twitter is a private company, 1st amendment doesn't apply to it', you should grab pitchforks and put their censorship efforts to rest.
[+] [-] l33tbro|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cortesoft|5 years ago|reply
While it would be nice to believe that "the solution is simple more free speech", and that the truth will win out in the end, is not fully backed up by the evidence. Lies can be carefully crafted to exploit the way human brains work, to mislead people into believing them... the truth is limited, because it has to be true.
So what do we do? I am not able to read the article, but it sounds like they are arguing for some limits on free speech. I share the concerns that people on here, like yourself, have about that. So what techniques can we use to stop misinformation that don't rely on limiting free speech? We can't just sit back and hope the truth will come through, we have too many examples in history to know that doesn't always happen.
If we just sit back and wait for the truth to win out, we might end up in a world where the people using free speech to mislead grab enough power to stop people from using the truth to fight their misinformation.
[+] [-] nradov|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Babylon_Bee
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
It's useful to read what the extremists have to say, if you read the extremists from both sides. You can still read Dabiq, ISIL's magazine, online. (That may have backfired. Their position was, it's a war to the death between our Islam and everybody else. The opposition agreed and crushed them.) It's worth reading what the gun rights people have to say. (Do not carry with a round in the chamber is good advice.) What the "defund the cops" people have to say. What the cop-rights people have to say. What QAnon has to say. What the "FEMA Death Train" people have to say. (Those big windowless railroad cars are car carriers. One believer followed one and put a video on Youtube, and was dismayed when it reached an unloading point and new cars came out.) What the "FEMA coffins" people were excited about. (That was a private storage yard for grave liners. Turned out FEMA doesn't stock coffins, just body bags, and not enough of them for the peak of the coronavirus epidemic.)
Within those extreme points you find the BLM people (who have had it with being shot and harassed), the white supremacists (who are mostly working-class guys who saw their way of life evaporate), the evangelicals (who right now are rudderless, having latched onto Trump, who represents their fears but not their values), and the Universal Basic Income people (that used to be called the "dole" in the UK). All have legitimate grievances. Within that perimeter lies reality. Those people are exploitable by politicians who don't have good solutions but can direct their anger.
That goes back a very long way. Read Shakespeare's version of Caesar's funeral oration.
[+] [-] remarkEon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hilife89|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afurculita|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkobia|5 years ago|reply
That these platforms are so huge is a problem for sure but doesn't automatically classify them as institutions owned by the public. There are other ways to deal with companies that get too big.
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|5 years ago|reply
> Germany and France have laws that are designed to prevent the widespread dissemination of hate speech and election-related disinformation. “Much of the recent authoritarian experience in Europe arose out of democracy itself,” explains Miguel Poiares Maduro [...] “The Nazis and others were originally elected. In Europe, there is historically an understanding that democracy needs to protect itself from anti-democratic ideas.”
[+] [-] juniper_strong|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sleepysysadmin|5 years ago|reply
Why are Canadian's so polite? Because you can go to prison for up to 2 years though more often than not it's just compensation. AKA "including compensation for injury to dignity, feelings and self-respect"
Hurting someone's feelings will send you to a non-judicial court where you do not have innocent until proven guilty. You must prove you didn't do it. Though it seems literally the only way to not be charged is to threaten taking it to the supreme court.
Worse yet, it has also created the 'you're a racist' thing. In order to silence your political opponents out of fear of being brought up on these charges. You get called a racist.
In BC they even teach kids in school to be right-wing is to be a racist: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/racism-a-right-wing-value-b-c-...
Then you can see why no right-wing parties are represented in their elections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_British_Columbia_general_...
[+] [-] datschmo|5 years ago|reply
I find it strange that anyone in that situation would equate it with social media sites removing or flagging content published on their platform.
[+] [-] 015UUZn8aEvW|5 years ago|reply
The evolution from David to Emily reflects that of the US left as a whole. Most people like to praise free speech as a theory. In practice, it is a tool for those who don't occupy the commanding heights of a culture to push back against those who do. When the New Left was ascendant in the 1960s and 1970s, promotion of free speech was an important component of its rise to cultural power. Now that its intellectual descendants occupy the commanding heights, they view it as a threat rather than an asset.
[+] [-] crazygringo|5 years ago|reply
It's long, but is extremely nuanced and shows that the issue is far more complex than just "the solution to offensive speech is more speech".
One key takeaway is in the middle:
> [Free speech is] a fundamentally optimistic vision: Good ideas win. The better argument will prove persuasive. There’s a countertradition, however. It’s alert to the ways in which demagogic leaders or movements can use propaganda, an older term that can be synonymous with disinformation. A crude authoritarian censors free speech. A clever one invokes it to play a trick, twisting facts to turn a mob on a subordinated group and, in the end, silence as well as endanger its members. Looking back at the rise of fascism and the Holocaust in her 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt focused on the use of propaganda to “make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism.”
> In other words, good ideas do not necessarily triumph in the marketplace of ideas. “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing,” the philosopher Jason Stanley and the linguist David Beaver argue in their forthcoming book, “The Politics of Language.”
But most of all the article shows that the history of free speech in the US is not simple at all -- and that our current view of it is very different from the period of 1949-1987 when broadcasters were subject to the "fairness doctrine", which I think most people today aren't even aware of.
[+] [-] dagmx|5 years ago|reply
IMHO free speech needs accountability and massive increases in education resources to be effective.
Without accountability, the loudest voices can set what is true to many. This congregates power into the already powerful, until new means of information dissemination are created to allow new voices. However those too will need the same accountability or will fall to the same issues. You can see this with the rise of every new medium for information. From newspapers to books to movies and music to each new major social media platform.
Without education resources, there is a much lowered threshold for people accepting information provided to them as truth. We need to globally, but especially in America, increase education of the sciences and critical thinking. Maybe it's too late for entire generations today but the future can be very bright.
Unfortunately the premise of the title will most likely provoke an emotional response from many, to which the concept of unfettered free speech is inalienable, even the discussion of the problematic side effects it can create.
[+] [-] hannofcart|5 years ago|reply
Yet, I don't see free speech as being the issue here at all. The truth is that when a significant percentage of the population holds regressive views, they'll seek out and amplify people who pander to those views to the exclusion of all others.
This has gotten more irritating for the moderate mainstream with the advent of internet, but the root of the problem always is the presence of a core critical mass of the electorate that espouses those views.
[+] [-] ironman1478|5 years ago|reply
Its also really strange because for every other system we have, we accept legislatively enforced boundaries. There are constraints around the manufacturing of drugs, food products, vehicles, etc. We have regulations around pollution.
Even for abstract ideas, we socially agree on norms. Nobody would think it's acceptable to just called somebody the n word (or some other derogatory word) in the work place. Healthy companies tend to get rid of 'brilliant jerks' who yell or bully other employees, despite their technical competence. Why? Because we understand that this attitude creates a corrosive environment that is fundamentally not beneficial for the good of the group. We even understand this in personal relationships. We break up with people who lie to us and manipulate us.
[+] [-] belorn|5 years ago|reply
The misguided belief in the superiority of government wisdom about who should speak to many has happened before. With radio it was unlicensed radio stations that corrupted youths with rebellious thoughts and strange music. With TV and movies it was commercial publisher corrupting youths with violence and nudity. Now with the Internet it is bubbles that corrupt youths with disinformation and falsehoods.
The enthusiasm for radio censorship is dead. TV censorship died relative recently. Internet censorship however is starting to gain popularity, but I strongly suspect it will crash in a few decades just like radio and TV did. Future people will look back on the misguided belief in the superiority of a handful companies and wonder how it ever could gain popularity.
[+] [-] chroem-|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|5 years ago|reply
Note that an article can be disinformation even if all the information in the article is correct - by simply cherry-picking which facts to present. An example from several years ago: "Half of All Corporations Paid No Income Tax" which was factually correct. Another fact omitted from the many articles on this was "half of all corporations lost money". Income tax is not owed when losing money.
[+] [-] gnicholas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srean|5 years ago|reply
You can easily tie up the fact checkers and refuters with what amounts to a denial of service attack.
Should one curtail free speech ? My opinion is no, but one needs to realize what we sign up for when we do that.
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
1. What should be the role, if any, of governments in censorship? The US supposedly has a rule of "none". But there are exceptions. Some kinds of porno. Threats against individuals. Incitement to riot. All of which can be over-used to chill speech.
2. What should be the role of private companies? This is tied in with the role of monopolies. If there were 50 Facebook or Twitter like services, none with more than 20% market share, this would not be a problem. Maybe this is an antitrust problem.
3. Should anonymous speech be as protected as thoroughly as non-anonymous speech? The US has a tradition of protecting anonymous speech. This is partly because the Federalist Papers, and "Common Sense", were published under pseudonyms. Much of the problems with "fake news", from whatever direction, come from concealed sources. Spam, in all media, comes from anonymous sources. Of course, if you publish under your own name, you may face harassment and reprisals.
Those are questions worth thinking about.
[+] [-] mrfusion|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csours|5 years ago|reply
I think it would have to be based on curated, pseudo-anonymous conversations with some strong ground rules.
Information is cheap. As recently as 20 years ago, the best source of general knowledge was a set of encyclopedias, at home if you could afford it, or at a library if you could not. Wikipedia is far from perfect, but it is generally as good as encyclopedias were, and far more broad. You could tell a similar story about the news, and many other things.
What does it mean when information is cheap? I'm not an expert, but I think it means that propaganda is cheap too. I wish people were better able to recognize propaganda and brain washing.
The truth does not battle falsehoods with facts, but with emotions. Hate, anger, fear, and distrust are used to prepare the soil for the seeds of propaganda.
It seems like the brain is hardwired to find 'interesting' things, like counterfactuals. Conspiracy theories are the ultimate counterfactual. I admit that I find conspiracy theories to be interesting as well; but I use them to inform my opinion about motivation, not facts.
[+] [-] easytiger|5 years ago|reply
https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2020/10/17/attentat-d...
> "In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most merciful, (...) to Macron, the leader of the infidels, I ' executed one of your hellhounds who dared to belittle Muhammad, calm his fellow human beings before a harsh punishment is inflicted on you.
[+] [-] gonational|5 years ago|reply
Why wouldn’t you want to? It seems getting rid of our rights is to make things better, right? So, why not go and see how awesome it is in such places?
France is doing great, I hear.
[+] [-] asimpletune|5 years ago|reply
Literally if we just started to pay for stuff we’d see this problem improved. The consequences of the current model is that the internet has become the modern equivalent of a welfare state, in the sense that our experiences are sponsored by our wealthy corporate benefactors. Clearly not a good recipe for civic engagement.
So, as consumers we should pay for things if we want to have nice stuff, and also businesses simply shouldn’t be able to follow literally every person in the world around, as they stroll around the internet, and write down and share what they’re looking at. That could be done by creating liability around data collection/protection, as in the case if HIPPA, or outright banning the technology that enables ad tech at scale. I’m sure people here have much better ideas than this, I’m just offering an ethos.
Also the internet itself should be treated as a public utility. The sad thing is by not paying, we’re still paying, just in less direct ways, since the ad tech that sponsors our internet lives still has to get money from somewhere...
Edited for clarity
[+] [-] riverlong|5 years ago|reply
It's going to get a million times worse when this gets automated.
Right now the quantity of disinformation is practically limited by the human capacity to post stuff online, but GPT-3 style automation will remove this limitation, and we will live in a world of all noise, no signal. Our knee-jerk adherence to "free speech" is opening up a dangerous scenario where we are more vulnerable than anyone else to what is effectively a DDOS on our minds.
I explored this topic in more detail in an essay of mine, where I lay out that a world of Anonymity + GPT-3 can undermine free speech by drowning out real human views and opinions with machine-generated, human-looking propaganda. https://jayriverlong.github.io/2020/07/24/gpt3.html
[+] [-] betwixthewires|5 years ago|reply
How many of you are old enough to remember bullshit like "if you ask a cop if they're a cop they have to tell you" or "you heard about the kid who's intestines got sucked out of his butthole in a swimming pool"? I remember people telling you things and you just went with it. It used to be very easy to lie. People made stuff up all the time, and said things that someone else made up that they believed.
To use the European context and Nazi Germany example, there is a big difference between then and now. That time was very much like my adolescence was with regard to access to information. Disinformation can spread wildly in an environment where people cannot verify it.
Currently, I could probably unilaterally get the equivalent of a university education in any field for free if I were so inclined, just by searching around on the internet. We do not live in an age of disinformation, we live in an age of unbelievable information availability, power structures and hierarchies once existed to enable the dissemination of information, and the ones that currently exist are beginning to show their cracks, simply because information can be effortlessly obtained at miniscule cost. I honestly believe we are living through social upheaval as a direct result of this revolution, and we haven't even seen the beginning. Making the majority literate was very, very hard. Making the next few generations well educated is something so easy it is probably best to just let people do it for themselves. I truly believe we will not need formal education within 100 years, people will just want to learn things and learn them at a whim.
I don't usually like to attribute motive, but I find it suspicious that it is the very institutions and organizations hammering away at this premise that stand to lose the most from this information revolution we are beginning to undergo. It is very convenient when the old entities with a grip on what people know and don't know happen to be the ones telling you not to trust your own judgment and defer to their own.