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Has anyone else noticed, that we are failing to distinguish between two very different rights: 1) Free speech 2) Free and anonymous speech All of the platfor

Has anyone else noticed, that we are failing to distinguish between two very different rights: 1) Free speech 2) Free and anonymous speech All of the platforms that have big problems support the later. Maybe the problem is anonymity rather than freedom of speech. It is true that Facebook doesn't really support anonymous speech, but even there, most of the fake news spread was anonymously published. I imagine that when you read this, a dystopia of national Internet ID cards pops into your mind. However, I don't think this necessarily needs to be. I've been working on a project called push to talk: http://thobbs.cz/push-to-talk/index.html http://thobbs.cz/push-to-talk/index.html and I hope that the existence of a real persons voice behind the scenes would help. I think that youtube also has an advantage, that the distinction between anonymous speech and non-anonymous speech is clear, and the voice synthesized videos are much less popular.

kelnos 9y ago
I'm really torn on this. Plenty of non-anonymous people have posted some pretty horrible things on Facebook. And it goes the other way, too: there are plenty of people who would feel justifiably threatened and afraid to speak their true feelings if they could not be anonymous, and their contributions are often just as valuable as people who aren't anonymous.
- timthelion 9y ago
  I agree, at the same time, the Czech internet is filled with hate speech, absolutely virolic hate speech, and it is beleived by some that these comments are actually being posted by the Russian embasy in order to undermine Czech democracy. If that theory is true (and why wouldn't it be? They have the means, the incentive, and the anonymity) then how would one fight against that without breaking anonymity? Would you prefer a situation in which secret police agents tracked down troll internet users, and if they found those users to be Russia agents, they would shoot them? I might prefer that actually ;) but I'm not in charge of the secret police and so therefore its not in my capabilities to make that happen. Of course, it is possible that this conspiracy theory is false. That Czechs, or a large portion of them, actually are that hateful (also likely). If that is the case, than this country is on the edge of a genocide (against Muslims and Gypsies) far more brutal than Nazi germany. And in that case, anonymity would be a good thing for all the activists who try to fight against the hate. So you're right, that it is a very difficult question.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    Yeah, it's definitely a difficult question, and I don't claim to have a good answer. I just know that there are good arguments for both sides, and I don't know where it'd be best to draw the line. Maybe it's possible to just ignore the anonymous vs. non-anonymous question and target the speech itself: if it's hate speech, you kill it. If it's lies and misinformation masquerading as the truth, you kill it. If the poster has their real name attached to it, then you may have a legal means to ensure they stop posting things like that. If they don't, obviously it's harder, and you have to keep chasing after them as they create new anonymous accounts.
    - timthelion 9y ago
      I have another hypothesis, which is tangential to the hate speech, but rather relates to the low quality of internet information. I beleive that there is a lot of high quality content on the net, but it is hard to find. We're wading through pages and pages of low effort comments to find something that would be worth our time to read. Perhaps the problem there, is that google sucks. Google claims to organise the worlds information, but if they were actually doing so successfully, I'd almost never come across low quality content. Perhaps google needs to be more than just a search engine, perhaps chrome should actually offer the ability to filter out low quality content. Not really sure how that would work, would "reddit.com" render a blank page? But I think that it might be something like an agregator. Rather than visiting "reddit.com" you would visit "high quality memes and jokes filter" and you would get just that. And if google didn't suck, it would actually be high quality. I'm not trying to hate on google. But everyone says that it is impossible to compete with google, because their product is perfect, that it would be impossible to make a better search engine. I don't think that's true. I think there is a lot of inovation that still can happen when it comes to sorting through the internet.
      - intended 9y ago
        The information is there, but only a small fraction of people want to actually read it. Beyond a point, the scale and complexity of the information goes beyond what is required for a simple conversation. Most people want the information spoon fed to them. The issue is that they may not even be framing the correct question. To correct that they will always need to (at some point) engage with complexity. And as long as someone can meme or use cheap arguments to dodge a difficult/complex point, theres no real advantage to that level of complexity. So the only people who are digging that deep are people who want to figure something out. For them, google works just fine.

kelnos 9y ago

I'm really torn on this. Plenty of non-anonymous people have posted some pretty horrible things on Facebook. And it goes the other way, too: there are plenty of people who would feel justifiably threatened and afraid to speak their true feelings if they could not be anonymous, and their contributions are often just as valuable as people who aren't anonymous.

timthelion 9y ago
I agree, at the same time, the Czech internet is filled with hate speech, absolutely virolic hate speech, and it is beleived by some that these comments are actually being posted by the Russian embasy in order to undermine Czech democracy. If that theory is true (and why wouldn't it be? They have the means, the incentive, and the anonymity) then how would one fight against that without breaking anonymity? Would you prefer a situation in which secret police agents tracked down troll internet users, and if they found those users to be Russia agents, they would shoot them? I might prefer that actually ;) but I'm not in charge of the secret police and so therefore its not in my capabilities to make that happen. Of course, it is possible that this conspiracy theory is false. That Czechs, or a large portion of them, actually are that hateful (also likely). If that is the case, than this country is on the edge of a genocide (against Muslims and Gypsies) far more brutal than Nazi germany. And in that case, anonymity would be a good thing for all the activists who try to fight against the hate. So you're right, that it is a very difficult question.
- kelnos 9y ago
  Yeah, it's definitely a difficult question, and I don't claim to have a good answer. I just know that there are good arguments for both sides, and I don't know where it'd be best to draw the line. Maybe it's possible to just ignore the anonymous vs. non-anonymous question and target the speech itself: if it's hate speech, you kill it. If it's lies and misinformation masquerading as the truth, you kill it. If the poster has their real name attached to it, then you may have a legal means to ensure they stop posting things like that. If they don't, obviously it's harder, and you have to keep chasing after them as they create new anonymous accounts.
  - timthelion 9y ago
    I have another hypothesis, which is tangential to the hate speech, but rather relates to the low quality of internet information. I beleive that there is a lot of high quality content on the net, but it is hard to find. We're wading through pages and pages of low effort comments to find something that would be worth our time to read. Perhaps the problem there, is that google sucks. Google claims to organise the worlds information, but if they were actually doing so successfully, I'd almost never come across low quality content. Perhaps google needs to be more than just a search engine, perhaps chrome should actually offer the ability to filter out low quality content. Not really sure how that would work, would "reddit.com" render a blank page? But I think that it might be something like an agregator. Rather than visiting "reddit.com" you would visit "high quality memes and jokes filter" and you would get just that. And if google didn't suck, it would actually be high quality. I'm not trying to hate on google. But everyone says that it is impossible to compete with google, because their product is perfect, that it would be impossible to make a better search engine. I don't think that's true. I think there is a lot of inovation that still can happen when it comes to sorting through the internet.
    - intended 9y ago
      The information is there, but only a small fraction of people want to actually read it. Beyond a point, the scale and complexity of the information goes beyond what is required for a simple conversation. Most people want the information spoon fed to them. The issue is that they may not even be framing the correct question. To correct that they will always need to (at some point) engage with complexity. And as long as someone can meme or use cheap arguments to dodge a difficult/complex point, theres no real advantage to that level of complexity. So the only people who are digging that deep are people who want to figure something out. For them, google works just fine.