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Hey, thanks for your work, but I have one big issue: You use the term "propaganda" like it's something that can be determined objectively and algorithmically t

by Kelon 9y ago

Hey, thanks for your work, but I have one big issue: You use the term "propaganda" like it's something that can be determined objectively and algorithmically the way that spam can. That's very concerning to me, seeing as mega corps like Facebook and Google are also starting to implement questionable protections against what they consider to be propaganda. And similarly, they also group them together with other issues like terrorism, hate speech, etc. That's exactly why decentralized and uncensored forms of communication are so important right now. How are you planning to determine what is propaganda? By your own perception? Will you refer to a team of "independent experts" as the arbiters of truth?

Arathorn 9y ago
I probably mangled this in the blog: the whole point of the decentralised reputation work we are planning in the future is to let users define and curate their own content filtering, deliberately making it entirely subjective and avoiding any objective or moral absolute attempts at filtering. This is what is so exciting about the decentralised use cases of Matrix: one man's freedom fighter is clearly another man's terrorist, and it is not up to us to be an objective arbiter. Instead, the plan is to let users themselves define their filters: inheriting reputation data from other people whose opinion they trust, and defining their own rules too. Critically, we want to visualise for users the shape of the filter bubble that they end up defining - so they can see what the rest of the world thinks of the content they read. This would be something like: "98% of the world thinks this content is factually false, but we're showing it to you because you've strongly aligned yourself with Bob, who thinks it's the best thing ever"... but presented in such a way that it's interesting and fun to the user rather than a boring nag. Obviously the last bit is a client UX problem, but the fact remains that it's critical to build the underlying infrastructure for tracking reputation data in a morally relative and neutral manner. Hope this makes it clearer. We are absolutely not in the business of defining "propaganda" ourselves. But we let users set themselves up as experts (independent or otherwise) as they desire, and it's then up to users to mix their own blend of reputation data based on who they rate.
- Kelon 9y ago
  Thank you very much for your reply. Highly interesting ideas there! Sounds a little like part of the system Daniel Suarez devised in Daemon and Freedom™ :) Two principal problems are probably Big Money gaming the system and people not wanting to publicly disclose their views. In the worst case your scheme might end up serving age-old staples of propaganda: Falsely implying a consensus and the establishment of authority (of the most trusted users). I'll keep a look out for how you try to deal with that in the future.
  - Arathorn 9y ago
    Interesting - will check out Suarez. You're right that doing this in a privacy protecting manner is going to be Hard: by definition it's asking users to disclose their views - although this doesn't have to be to the general public; it could be an opt in thing: eg "Alice wants to subscribe to your reputation data - Yes/No". Storing the reputation data so that it doesn't become a honeypot of metadata is harder however. There is absolutely the problem that widely trusted people would use their position to push an agenda, deliberately or unintentionally. This is inevitable, as far as I can see, given we are assuming there are no moral absolutes here. So the best we can do is to ensure that users have visibility on the amount and shape of content being filtered out, access to whichever 'authorities' they chose to trust, and make it easy to view the world from different viewpoints. Fun problems! I can't wait for Matrix to properly focus on it.

by Kelon 9y ago

Arathorn 9y ago

I probably mangled this in the blog: the whole point of the decentralised reputation work we are planning in the future is to let users define and curate their own content filtering, deliberately making it entirely subjective and avoiding any objective or moral absolute attempts at filtering. This is what is so exciting about the decentralised use cases of Matrix: one man's freedom fighter is clearly another man's terrorist, and it is not up to us to be an objective arbiter. Instead, the plan is to let users themselves define their filters: inheriting reputation data from other people whose opinion they trust, and defining their own rules too. Critically, we want to visualise for users the shape of the filter bubble that they end up defining - so they can see what the rest of the world thinks of the content they read. This would be something like: "98% of the world thinks this content is factually false, but we're showing it to you because you've strongly aligned yourself with Bob, who thinks it's the best thing ever"... but presented in such a way that it's interesting and fun to the user rather than a boring nag. Obviously the last bit is a client UX problem, but the fact remains that it's critical to build the underlying infrastructure for tracking reputation data in a morally relative and neutral manner. Hope this makes it clearer. We are absolutely not in the business of defining "propaganda" ourselves. But we let users set themselves up as experts (independent or otherwise) as they desire, and it's then up to users to mix their own blend of reputation data based on who they rate.

Kelon 9y ago
Thank you very much for your reply. Highly interesting ideas there! Sounds a little like part of the system Daniel Suarez devised in Daemon and Freedom™ :) Two principal problems are probably Big Money gaming the system and people not wanting to publicly disclose their views. In the worst case your scheme might end up serving age-old staples of propaganda: Falsely implying a consensus and the establishment of authority (of the most trusted users). I'll keep a look out for how you try to deal with that in the future.
- Arathorn 9y ago
  Interesting - will check out Suarez. You're right that doing this in a privacy protecting manner is going to be Hard: by definition it's asking users to disclose their views - although this doesn't have to be to the general public; it could be an opt in thing: eg "Alice wants to subscribe to your reputation data - Yes/No". Storing the reputation data so that it doesn't become a honeypot of metadata is harder however. There is absolutely the problem that widely trusted people would use their position to push an agenda, deliberately or unintentionally. This is inevitable, as far as I can see, given we are assuming there are no moral absolutes here. So the best we can do is to ensure that users have visibility on the amount and shape of content being filtered out, access to whichever 'authorities' they chose to trust, and make it easy to view the world from different viewpoints. Fun problems! I can't wait for Matrix to properly focus on it.