9 ms·

The Internet Will Be the Death of Us

65 points by RestlessMind 8y ago

olivermarks 8y ago
The NYT appears to be running multiple op eds promoting censorship and restrictions on internet free speech. Kara Swisher thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18341673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18341673
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bdndndnndnd 8y ago
  Can you expect anything else? The op ed team is going fully nuts with the midterms. Total shill mode.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- apatters 8y ago
  This is the opinion of one man, not the NYT. But there are so many things that are wrong about his opinion! 1. There was never a "hell of not being able to turn off" email. Nor is there one for social media. There are push notifications implemented as defaults in contexts where they shouldn't be, by hungry marketers and product managers. There's a war for your attention and as long as unscrupulous marketers live and breathe, there always will be. Censorship doesn't solve this. Better software does! 2. The argument that online forums create murderers/criminals is an old bogeyman in new clothes. Remember when conservative reactionaries tried to convince us that D&D promoted Satanism? And then that video games created murderers? This is the same, repeatedly disproven argument. Sane, mentally healthy people don't read incel forums and become murderers. Censorship doesn't solve this, either. Better health care and hard, frank discussion about the problems in our society do. And censorship works directly against open discussion. 3. These flawed arguments are used to call for "better policing" of ideas on the Internet. We don't need this. Policing inevitably means regulations which entrench the most well-funded incumbents and make it harder for new services to complete with better ideas. Yes, Twitter definitely needs to police itself better. So does Facebook. But in the meantime, you can deactivate your account and leave, and maybe even switch to an upstart competitor like Mastodon, which millions of people have already done. That's what needs to be easier. Censorship laws will make it harder. If we close the door now we consign ourselves to a future with largely the same incumbents as the present, and that's a recipe for failure. That really would be the death of our society.
  - skookumchuck 8y ago
    There used to be calls to ban comic books because they were corrupting the youth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent "Seduction of the Innocent is a book by American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, published in 1954, that warned that comic books were a negative form of popular literature and a serious cause of juvenile delinquency. The book was taken seriously at the time, and was a minor bestseller that created alarm in parents and galvanized them to campaign for censorship. At the same time, a U.S. Congressional inquiry was launched into the comic book industry."
    - throwaway8879 8y ago
      A somewhat non-related question. Do you guys think a book like Rushdie's Satanic Verses would ever be printed today? I was thinking about this today morning.
      - pjc50 8y ago
        Yes, absolutely. The nearest parallel to Rushdie would be someone like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali The challenge is probably getting something as subtle as Satanic Verses printed; there's a market for overt islamophobia, but they're not interested in analytical heretical views of actual muslims.
  - intended 8y ago
    I propose a simple law - there is no software fix that will not harm human beings, if said fix aims to target a human neural failing. Any such fix will only open the way for additional vectors of attack. Eventually the myriad vectors of attack for which we must defend, will result in being overwhelmed. > Sane, mentally healthy people don't read incel forums and become murderers True - on average. Its worth remembering that we figured out how to convert engineers and educated people into suicide bombers. The internet and our platforms though excel at efficiently polarizing people. While the great many of us may not feel the tug, it is just a matter of probability that decides who gets pulled by these algorithms into the dark reaches of the propaganda world. I've effectively lost good friends to the world of 4chan and the invasive viruses that have taken over the discourse there.
- matt4077 8y ago
  The NYT doesn't centrally decide to embark on this or that campaign. For the columnists, it's important to remember that they don't work at NYT's offices, and they don't participate in meeting etc. Quite literally, their job is writing whatever comes into their mind, then faxing or sending it to their editor. In response, they get money. If you see a sudden burst of articles regarding a subject, it may not be a conspiracy, but rather: - Different people having the same reaction to some set of events - Coincidence - Our tendency to find more and more examples once we have noticed any sort of trend
- drb91 8y ago
  “internet free speech“ What is this? Personally, I find that lack of moderation sucks for everyone. If you want to join Gab and say whatever you want you are more than welcome.
bdndndnndnd 8y ago
I am shadow banned
eksemplar 8y ago
I don’t think the internet is the problem, it’s the centralisation and focus on dopamine addiction. I mean, the internet used to be a place where people shared deep meaningful content that interested them. Sure, your rock collection or biology blog on the different frog species of some random island probably aren’t interesting to most people, but the effort spent on those digital journals and the insights they provided is the internet at its best. Social media on the other hand is the internet at its worst. What value can you ever have within the limited confines of a twitter chat? And what value does the ability for billions of anonymous people commenting and/or liking really add to anything? I’ve been around since before eternal September, so I know it can be valuable, but that was probably the last time it was. I think reddit speaks volumes of the status of social media these days. Almost everywhere you go, it feels like strangers waste their time trying to push whatever political agenda they have, and it works on the internet, because in the internet you don’t notice the people who ignore you and simply walk away. You’re only ever confronted by the people who respond. I’ve noticed that over time, this simple fact destroys anonymous social media. I say anonymous but I probably should say strangers instead, because Facebook is just as bad. I’ve removed friends on Facebook that where alt-right, just like I’ve cut them out of my life because I didn’t want to debate whether holocaust was real every time I saw them, so these people certainly noticed the impact of their opinions, but all the thousands of hateful bastards and trolls who post nonsense on the few history groups I follow might as well be anonymous and will never know that I disprove of them. Because I’m not going to waste my time on them, I’ll just walk away. It’s been a while since I’ve even been to reddit. I’ve had wonderful conversations on there, but these days you can barely make it three posts into something before it’s about some crackpot political issue. Just look at /r/technology, it used to be a slow version of HN that also featured arstechica articles, now it’s a political hellhole, and it’s getting worse, probably because I’m not the only person leaving. I’m not sure what can be done though. Censorship isn’t a great option, but I have to agree with the NYT that it’s not working out great right now. More than a 100 people died of the measles in Europe this year because a bunch of fools got together on the internet and decided vaccines were bad, and that’s just the start of it. I doubt we’ll really succeed though, I fully expect a lot of the less regulated countries to go full cyberpunk dystopia in the next 25 years, and I think it’ll give a huge advantage to the pro-censorship countries who don’t have to deal with the nonsense, but they’ll fit right into the cyberpunk dystopia, won’t they?
parshimers 8y ago
> . While Sayoc carved out ugly niches on Facebook and Twitter, Bowers found even safer harbor for his racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic passions on Gab, a two-year-old social network that has served as a nursery for white nationalists. pretending people couldn't find places to air antisemitic or white nationalist sentiments before the internet, or that the internet makes it easier, is silly. if anything the internet makes it harder for these fools, because now if they show their faces or use their real names, they're doxed and harangued at every turn by an internet lynchmob. > I don’t know exactly how we square free speech and free expression — which are paramount — with a better policing of the internet, but I’m certain that we need to approach that challenge with more urgency than we have mustered so far. Democracy is at stake. So are lives. right, as opposed to the rosy times before the internet, with timothy mcveigh, the DC sniper, and the unabomber. or how about john wayne gacy? why this guy is paid to spew inane opinions like this is beyond me
- wiz21c 8y ago
  I really don't understand why you're being downvoted. There are so many ways to be/become a crimminal, internet is just the last one. That's just part of human history (although it's a side we don't like).
- matt4077 8y ago
  > [..] that the internet makes it easier, is silly If the internet does not make it easier, nor does it make it possible, or cheaper... Then why would anybody do it? I very much think it is silly instead to pretend that whatever Plan B these people would have had to find community with like-minded low-lifes, would, almost by definition be worse than their "Plan A".
- tomjen3 8y ago
  Because the NYT loaths nerds, because we took away their nice, respectful, secure jobs by destroying newspaper monopolies and taking away their advertising. So they will do everything to destroy the internet, or better yet to be the ones who control it, even turning the NYT into yellow journalism.
ablation 8y ago
> "It was on the internet — on Facebook, to be exact — that Alek Minassian posted a pledge of allegiance to the “incel rebellion,” which refers to the resentments of “involuntarily celibate” men who can’t interest the women around them in sex. He then used a van to mow down and kill 10 people in Toronto in April." That is one of the most pathetic and miserable things I've ever read.
- sascha_sl 8y ago
  There's a bit more to it than you might think, and not in a good way. Here's an excellent video essay on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0
username90 8y ago
If by "Death of Us" he meant the newspapers then he is probably correct. Otherwise I am not sure what he is trying to say, violence is as low as ever: https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95379&page=1 https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95379&page=1 It is possible that the Internet has increased politically motivated killings, but articles making broad judgement on all of society based on a couple of anecdotes without proper data is just sensationalist nonsense.
- wiz21c 8y ago
  yup : "Robert Bowers, accused of murdering 11 Jewish Americans in Pittsburgh the morning after Sayoc’s arrest, stoked his madness and nurtured his bloody fantasies in that same online vortex." as if there were no other, much older, much more efficient, way to become a killer. Such as : education (think about special forces training), brainwashing (think about suicide attacks), political activism (think about political terrorism in the 60's/70's in europe), etc. problem with that kind of articles is that it makes it more acceptable to track everything on the web.
  - matt4077 8y ago
    There having been equivalent evils before the internet does nothing to disprove the thesis of it causing harm. Even if you could show that the internet, is net positive (pun intended), I don't see how that would be an argument against possible further improvements. Analogy: People being killed in accidents with horses is not an argument for disregarding traffic deaths. Nor can that fact be used to argue against seat belts or airbags. Only if someone were proposing to go back to horse & carriage would it make sense to reference total effects. If "the internet" wants to avoid the fate of more regulation, it is most sensible to take its critics' worries serious, and to try to find ways to be a positive force in the world without inviting the sort heavy-handed regulations that will otherwise follow. As but one example, see spam, or child pornography: in those areas, tech companies, users, and governments found ways to effectively work together mostly without resorting to draconian measures. For an example of such a process failing, look at the EU's recent "link tax": Because the tech community has been so adamantly opposed to taking journalism's existential fears into account, this rather unwieldy regulation will become law. This could have been avoided if, for example, ad blockers had settled for blocking only dangerous and/or the most annoying ads, an approach that could have easily reduced annoyances by 80%+ while costing publishers far less. Or micropayments that actually work, and users to use them. Etc.
Uhrheber 8y ago
The same was said about books and leaflets in the hands of the masses, when typography emerged.
- cimmanom 8y ago
  And in some ways it did then too... well, at least once enough people learned to read for it to be possible to distribute information to the “masses” via text. Look up the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” on Wikipedia.
- twtw 8y ago
  Not every curve is a straight line. This is always the response to any hint that technology isn't the greatest thing ever. But it's like a no-op. The questions that it leaves open: 1. Were the people saying it earlier wrong? 3. Assuming they were wrong, is there any reason to suspect that their wrongness has any relationship with the wrongness of people questioning the effects of a different technology hundreds of years later?
  - Digit-Al 8y ago
    What happened to 2?
    - twtw 8y ago
      No idea.
- yifanl 8y ago
  Is that necessarily wrong though? Propaganda by word of mouth is less effective than propaganda by handing out pamphlets is less effective than propaganda by obscure internet forums is less effective than propaganda by mainstream internet forums. And at some point, it becomes more effective than our ability to combat it.
- charlesism 8y ago
  Printing press: http://theconversation.com/five-of-the-most-violent-moments-of-the-reformation-71535 http://theconversation.com/five-of-the-most-violent-moments-... Radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_propaganda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_propaganda
hajderr 8y ago
No people are the problem! No?
- twtw 8y ago
  I think I see what you are trying to do here, but I don't find it particularly effective. When people say stuff like "guns don't kill people, people kill people," in my experience they usually mean something like "what is happening to our society that (apparently) many more people are deciding to go shoot a lot of people? Isn't that a better thing to investigate than guns, given that gun control laws haven't (typically) been loosened over the years?" In this framing, the article is analyzing exactly the same question, so it doesn't make sense to try to deflect it - it's already seeking the explanation as the deflection you are mocking. And for what it's worth, it seems valuable to try to understand what is going on - why are there so many people that become mass shooters? Has this rate increased?
esotericn 8y ago
The term that seems to be used for this is "radicalisation". i.e., someone was just going about their everyday life, and then they were exposed to information that (rightly or wrongly) sent them down a path of developing strong political views and evangelising them. One thing I always come back to when considering this, is that it's _really hard_ for me to rationalise why this should be true. I can use the Internet without going crazy (I hope. This is obviously self-classified). I think most people can, but even if that's not true, there's certainly a large set of individuals who _don't_ form insane political views and try to push them on others. What's different in the individuals that seem to be really strongly affected by taking part in extreme "communities", or are even drawn to them in the first place? What makes someone want to assume the worst of their fellow man? Where does all this anger come from?
- summerdown2 8y ago
  I wonder if it's a similar psychological effect to that seen in the smoke filled room experiments, where someone is sat in a room and smoke starts coming under the door. If they're on their own, they investigate. If the room is full of actors who treat it as nothing, the one subject of the experiment tends to do nothing also. It turns out it's really hard for some people (maybe all people?) to go against the flow of a crowd. And if you combine that with the rise of clickbait, learning algorithms and social media, it suddenly becomes really easy to find yourself in a filter bubble surrounded by a very annoyed and consipiracy-believing crowd.
  - esotericn 8y ago
    Pretty good theory. I suppose I'm uncomfortable with it, because it implies that some people just inherently have far less agency than others (disconnected from external factors like appearance, capital, etc), and that has all sorts of far-reaching implications...
  - jonathanstrange 8y ago
    I believe this is essentially what is going on right now, and I do believe that these effects are currently the biggest threat to democracy. Fringe opinions and downright stupidity are entering the "mainstream", they are being "discussed" right now on forums like reddit's /r/unpopularopinion. But I don't believe that censorship are good solutions. Strong moderation is needed to keep a forum interesting and worthwhile reading, but that's a practical issue. Government censorship goes way too far. There should rather be laws that prohibit the use of certain online marketing tools in political campaigns. For example, it should be a punishable felony to use viral marketing in political campaigns that involves any kind of fake comments, replication bots, deliberately falsified news, or fake accounts not tied to real persons. Maybe these tools should also be prohibited for ordinary marketing - IANAL but I think in many countries they already are -, but they should definitely be strictly prohibited in political campaigns. Right now, it seems that e.g. in the US almost anything goes in political campaigns as long as no foreigners are involved, and we know from the Cambridge Analytica case that some companies act like mercenaries for hire without any conscience or care for democracy. That's what needs to be addressed, not the lunatics and crackpots on forums who will always exist.
skookumchuck 8y ago
I'm far, far more concerned with dying from cancer, alzheimer's, car crashes, the flu, hospital mistakes, etc., than a terrorist. Statistically, in America, terrorist killings are right down there at the bottom.
- twtw 8y ago
  And yet they motivate all the decisions. Here we are, 17 years later, still in a "state of emergency" and the TSA has become normal.
  - pmorici 8y ago
    TSA style airport security screening was put in place in the 1970's. The main thing that happened after 9/11 is they changed from using private security firms to having the federal government oversee it.
    - twtw 8y ago
      You and I have a very different idea of "TSA style." Prior the 9/11, there were essentially no restrictions on what you could carry onboard, and you weren't required to show ID. An associate of mine regularly carried his chainsaw on planes well after the 70s (needed for his occupation) - let me know how that goes today.
- charlesism 8y ago
  Youtube, Twitter and FB stoke extremism. I'm concerned friction between the left and right escalates into another civil war. I'm concerned that the rise of nationalists leads to another world war. If we continue to move in the coming decade the same direction we have the past decade, both outcomes are likely.
krona 8y ago
This is a pretty pathetic piece but ends with the same question that is discussed in both Fukuyama's and Jonathan Haidt's latest books: Is liberal democracy compatible with social media? We don't know because we've never tried it before, but we're about to find out.
- amelius 8y ago
  > we're about to find out But would we know if social media are the cause of all problems? All we have is a correlation.
  - krona 8y ago
    Social media isn't a cause because there is nothing you can do with it that couldn't be done before it existed. However it doesn't mean that it makes some things more or less likely. There are numerous studies at the individual level attributing the rise of various mental health problems to social media. That's not really debatable at this point; what is more interesting are the social repercussions, looking at the effects on whole populations. This is one of the topics of the books I mention.
- tomjen3 8y ago
  If not, doesn't it prove that democracy isn't compatible with, well, people? Alternatively, lets add political opinions to the list of things you can't discriminate on, we are halfway there with religious beliefs, and move on.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
hamilyon2 8y ago
Ironically, author who talks about prejudices and biases uses "Russian" as synonym to false. I should not be one who says that, but such usage simply perpetuates undeserved negative attitude to everything Russian. Which is sad, there is a lot of genuine, true and sincere in Russian culture.
paganel 8y ago
> and gives prejudices the shimmer of ideals. I think the same thing was said back when the printing press was invented, and I think they were right (if you were a Catholic back then you could look at a guy like Luther like a prejudiced idealist), as there is a pretty good correlation between the first use of the printing press in Europe and the European wars of religion. I'd say that in the long term we were better off.
Dowwie 8y ago
Social media technology is a great enabler. Arguments and positions contrary to the norm are down-voted or moderated out. The filter bubble is nearly impenetrable. This was accomplished through architecture and design.
- charlesism 8y ago
  I believe the opposite is the problem: thanks to social media, everyone is exposed to countless comments to which they are in mortal opposition. Everyone feels besieged. It's difficult to keep your head in a disagreement when you feel there is some horribly misguided revolution going on, and you're part of a small band of hold-outs. It's not just that we spend too much time online with people who will nod at us in agreement. It's that we spend too much time in a state of rage, bickering with people who won't, and are unlikely to ever.
jillesvangurp 8y ago
Luddites from the New York Times. They are part of the problem, not the solution. The problem is unfiltered and biased information/opinion that is passed as facts and the resulting information bubbles that are dividing society. E.g. the NYT played no small part in the information bubble that caused Trump to emerge and win an election.
sureaboutthis 8y ago
Along these same lines, some of you may be interested in the two-part series on PBS by Frontline. The Facebook Dilemma https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/facebook-dilemma/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/facebook-dilemma/
IlCano 8y ago
The problem is not the Internet itself but the spread and userbase, some simple solutions: Make mobile internet super expensive. Make fast internet at home, outside of special apps(Netflix, games, etc) expensive. Everyone should be able to buy a ticket online but watching HD VR videos of their hatepreacher - Im not so sure. More free/cheap entertainment for the working class - football, soccer baseball and basketball on free over the air TV.
aklemm 8y ago
From observing a lot of really crazy people on Facebook (generally people who post political stuff that is clearly false like pizzagate), I think the simple combination of communicating in memes along with the enabling of large networks of conspiracy-minded types to spread those memes is possibly the root of the problem. This is surprising, because it would have been hard to guess something so simple would have such an effect and that so many would fall on the wrong side of it.
aklemm 8y ago
For all of us who recoil at the idea of any censorship at all, how do we grapple with the possibility that the Internet spreads more disinformation than truth? If that’s the actual conclusion, what do we do then? Edit: Stated more accurately as a proposition, the Internet spreads enough disinformation to undo the good brought about by the true information that it also spreads.
LiterallyDoge 8y ago
Paywall bye.

65 points by RestlessMind 8y ago

The NYT appears to be running multiple op eds promoting censorship and restrictions on internet free speech. Kara Swisher thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18341673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18341673

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bdndndnndnd 8y ago
Can you expect anything else? The op ed team is going fully nuts with the midterms. Total shill mode.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
apatters 8y ago
This is the opinion of one man, not the NYT. But there are so many things that are wrong about his opinion! 1. There was never a "hell of not being able to turn off" email. Nor is there one for social media. There are push notifications implemented as defaults in contexts where they shouldn't be, by hungry marketers and product managers. There's a war for your attention and as long as unscrupulous marketers live and breathe, there always will be. Censorship doesn't solve this. Better software does! 2. The argument that online forums create murderers/criminals is an old bogeyman in new clothes. Remember when conservative reactionaries tried to convince us that D&D promoted Satanism? And then that video games created murderers? This is the same, repeatedly disproven argument. Sane, mentally healthy people don't read incel forums and become murderers. Censorship doesn't solve this, either. Better health care and hard, frank discussion about the problems in our society do. And censorship works directly against open discussion. 3. These flawed arguments are used to call for "better policing" of ideas on the Internet. We don't need this. Policing inevitably means regulations which entrench the most well-funded incumbents and make it harder for new services to complete with better ideas. Yes, Twitter definitely needs to police itself better. So does Facebook. But in the meantime, you can deactivate your account and leave, and maybe even switch to an upstart competitor like Mastodon, which millions of people have already done. That's what needs to be easier. Censorship laws will make it harder. If we close the door now we consign ourselves to a future with largely the same incumbents as the present, and that's a recipe for failure. That really would be the death of our society.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  There used to be calls to ban comic books because they were corrupting the youth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent "Seduction of the Innocent is a book by American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, published in 1954, that warned that comic books were a negative form of popular literature and a serious cause of juvenile delinquency. The book was taken seriously at the time, and was a minor bestseller that created alarm in parents and galvanized them to campaign for censorship. At the same time, a U.S. Congressional inquiry was launched into the comic book industry."
  - throwaway8879 8y ago
    A somewhat non-related question. Do you guys think a book like Rushdie's Satanic Verses would ever be printed today? I was thinking about this today morning.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      Yes, absolutely. The nearest parallel to Rushdie would be someone like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali The challenge is probably getting something as subtle as Satanic Verses printed; there's a market for overt islamophobia, but they're not interested in analytical heretical views of actual muslims.
- intended 8y ago
  I propose a simple law - there is no software fix that will not harm human beings, if said fix aims to target a human neural failing. Any such fix will only open the way for additional vectors of attack. Eventually the myriad vectors of attack for which we must defend, will result in being overwhelmed. > Sane, mentally healthy people don't read incel forums and become murderers True - on average. Its worth remembering that we figured out how to convert engineers and educated people into suicide bombers. The internet and our platforms though excel at efficiently polarizing people. While the great many of us may not feel the tug, it is just a matter of probability that decides who gets pulled by these algorithms into the dark reaches of the propaganda world. I've effectively lost good friends to the world of 4chan and the invasive viruses that have taken over the discourse there.
matt4077 8y ago
The NYT doesn't centrally decide to embark on this or that campaign. For the columnists, it's important to remember that they don't work at NYT's offices, and they don't participate in meeting etc. Quite literally, their job is writing whatever comes into their mind, then faxing or sending it to their editor. In response, they get money. If you see a sudden burst of articles regarding a subject, it may not be a conspiracy, but rather: - Different people having the same reaction to some set of events - Coincidence - Our tendency to find more and more examples once we have noticed any sort of trend
drb91 8y ago
“internet free speech“ What is this? Personally, I find that lack of moderation sucks for everyone. If you want to join Gab and say whatever you want you are more than welcome.

bdndndnndnd 8y ago

I am shadow banned

eksemplar 8y ago

I don’t think the internet is the problem, it’s the centralisation and focus on dopamine addiction. I mean, the internet used to be a place where people shared deep meaningful content that interested them. Sure, your rock collection or biology blog on the different frog species of some random island probably aren’t interesting to most people, but the effort spent on those digital journals and the insights they provided is the internet at its best. Social media on the other hand is the internet at its worst. What value can you ever have within the limited confines of a twitter chat? And what value does the ability for billions of anonymous people commenting and/or liking really add to anything? I’ve been around since before eternal September, so I know it can be valuable, but that was probably the last time it was. I think reddit speaks volumes of the status of social media these days. Almost everywhere you go, it feels like strangers waste their time trying to push whatever political agenda they have, and it works on the internet, because in the internet you don’t notice the people who ignore you and simply walk away. You’re only ever confronted by the people who respond. I’ve noticed that over time, this simple fact destroys anonymous social media. I say anonymous but I probably should say strangers instead, because Facebook is just as bad. I’ve removed friends on Facebook that where alt-right, just like I’ve cut them out of my life because I didn’t want to debate whether holocaust was real every time I saw them, so these people certainly noticed the impact of their opinions, but all the thousands of hateful bastards and trolls who post nonsense on the few history groups I follow might as well be anonymous and will never know that I disprove of them. Because I’m not going to waste my time on them, I’ll just walk away. It’s been a while since I’ve even been to reddit. I’ve had wonderful conversations on there, but these days you can barely make it three posts into something before it’s about some crackpot political issue. Just look at /r/technology, it used to be a slow version of HN that also featured arstechica articles, now it’s a political hellhole, and it’s getting worse, probably because I’m not the only person leaving. I’m not sure what can be done though. Censorship isn’t a great option, but I have to agree with the NYT that it’s not working out great right now. More than a 100 people died of the measles in Europe this year because a bunch of fools got together on the internet and decided vaccines were bad, and that’s just the start of it. I doubt we’ll really succeed though, I fully expect a lot of the less regulated countries to go full cyberpunk dystopia in the next 25 years, and I think it’ll give a huge advantage to the pro-censorship countries who don’t have to deal with the nonsense, but they’ll fit right into the cyberpunk dystopia, won’t they?

parshimers 8y ago

> . While Sayoc carved out ugly niches on Facebook and Twitter, Bowers found even safer harbor for his racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic passions on Gab, a two-year-old social network that has served as a nursery for white nationalists. pretending people couldn't find places to air antisemitic or white nationalist sentiments before the internet, or that the internet makes it easier, is silly. if anything the internet makes it harder for these fools, because now if they show their faces or use their real names, they're doxed and harangued at every turn by an internet lynchmob. > I don’t know exactly how we square free speech and free expression — which are paramount — with a better policing of the internet, but I’m certain that we need to approach that challenge with more urgency than we have mustered so far. Democracy is at stake. So are lives. right, as opposed to the rosy times before the internet, with timothy mcveigh, the DC sniper, and the unabomber. or how about john wayne gacy? why this guy is paid to spew inane opinions like this is beyond me

wiz21c 8y ago
I really don't understand why you're being downvoted. There are so many ways to be/become a crimminal, internet is just the last one. That's just part of human history (although it's a side we don't like).
matt4077 8y ago
> [..] that the internet makes it easier, is silly If the internet does not make it easier, nor does it make it possible, or cheaper... Then why would anybody do it? I very much think it is silly instead to pretend that whatever Plan B these people would have had to find community with like-minded low-lifes, would, almost by definition be worse than their "Plan A".
tomjen3 8y ago
Because the NYT loaths nerds, because we took away their nice, respectful, secure jobs by destroying newspaper monopolies and taking away their advertising. So they will do everything to destroy the internet, or better yet to be the ones who control it, even turning the NYT into yellow journalism.

ablation 8y ago

> "It was on the internet — on Facebook, to be exact — that Alek Minassian posted a pledge of allegiance to the “incel rebellion,” which refers to the resentments of “involuntarily celibate” men who can’t interest the women around them in sex. He then used a van to mow down and kill 10 people in Toronto in April." That is one of the most pathetic and miserable things I've ever read.

sascha_sl 8y ago
There's a bit more to it than you might think, and not in a good way. Here's an excellent video essay on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0

username90 8y ago

If by "Death of Us" he meant the newspapers then he is probably correct. Otherwise I am not sure what he is trying to say, violence is as low as ever: https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95379&page=1 https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95379&page=1 It is possible that the Internet has increased politically motivated killings, but articles making broad judgement on all of society based on a couple of anecdotes without proper data is just sensationalist nonsense.

wiz21c 8y ago
yup : "Robert Bowers, accused of murdering 11 Jewish Americans in Pittsburgh the morning after Sayoc’s arrest, stoked his madness and nurtured his bloody fantasies in that same online vortex." as if there were no other, much older, much more efficient, way to become a killer. Such as : education (think about special forces training), brainwashing (think about suicide attacks), political activism (think about political terrorism in the 60's/70's in europe), etc. problem with that kind of articles is that it makes it more acceptable to track everything on the web.
- matt4077 8y ago
  There having been equivalent evils before the internet does nothing to disprove the thesis of it causing harm. Even if you could show that the internet, is net positive (pun intended), I don't see how that would be an argument against possible further improvements. Analogy: People being killed in accidents with horses is not an argument for disregarding traffic deaths. Nor can that fact be used to argue against seat belts or airbags. Only if someone were proposing to go back to horse & carriage would it make sense to reference total effects. If "the internet" wants to avoid the fate of more regulation, it is most sensible to take its critics' worries serious, and to try to find ways to be a positive force in the world without inviting the sort heavy-handed regulations that will otherwise follow. As but one example, see spam, or child pornography: in those areas, tech companies, users, and governments found ways to effectively work together mostly without resorting to draconian measures. For an example of such a process failing, look at the EU's recent "link tax": Because the tech community has been so adamantly opposed to taking journalism's existential fears into account, this rather unwieldy regulation will become law. This could have been avoided if, for example, ad blockers had settled for blocking only dangerous and/or the most annoying ads, an approach that could have easily reduced annoyances by 80%+ while costing publishers far less. Or micropayments that actually work, and users to use them. Etc.

Uhrheber 8y ago

The same was said about books and leaflets in the hands of the masses, when typography emerged.

cimmanom 8y ago
And in some ways it did then too... well, at least once enough people learned to read for it to be possible to distribute information to the “masses” via text. Look up the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” on Wikipedia.
twtw 8y ago
Not every curve is a straight line. This is always the response to any hint that technology isn't the greatest thing ever. But it's like a no-op. The questions that it leaves open: 1. Were the people saying it earlier wrong? 3. Assuming they were wrong, is there any reason to suspect that their wrongness has any relationship with the wrongness of people questioning the effects of a different technology hundreds of years later?
- Digit-Al 8y ago
  What happened to 2?
  - twtw 8y ago
    No idea.
yifanl 8y ago
Is that necessarily wrong though? Propaganda by word of mouth is less effective than propaganda by handing out pamphlets is less effective than propaganda by obscure internet forums is less effective than propaganda by mainstream internet forums. And at some point, it becomes more effective than our ability to combat it.
charlesism 8y ago
Printing press: http://theconversation.com/five-of-the-most-violent-moments-of-the-reformation-71535 http://theconversation.com/five-of-the-most-violent-moments-... Radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_propaganda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_propaganda

hajderr 8y ago

No people are the problem! No?

twtw 8y ago
I think I see what you are trying to do here, but I don't find it particularly effective. When people say stuff like "guns don't kill people, people kill people," in my experience they usually mean something like "what is happening to our society that (apparently) many more people are deciding to go shoot a lot of people? Isn't that a better thing to investigate than guns, given that gun control laws haven't (typically) been loosened over the years?" In this framing, the article is analyzing exactly the same question, so it doesn't make sense to try to deflect it - it's already seeking the explanation as the deflection you are mocking. And for what it's worth, it seems valuable to try to understand what is going on - why are there so many people that become mass shooters? Has this rate increased?

esotericn 8y ago

The term that seems to be used for this is "radicalisation". i.e., someone was just going about their everyday life, and then they were exposed to information that (rightly or wrongly) sent them down a path of developing strong political views and evangelising them. One thing I always come back to when considering this, is that it's _really hard_ for me to rationalise why this should be true. I can use the Internet without going crazy (I hope. This is obviously self-classified). I think most people can, but even if that's not true, there's certainly a large set of individuals who _don't_ form insane political views and try to push them on others. What's different in the individuals that seem to be really strongly affected by taking part in extreme "communities", or are even drawn to them in the first place? What makes someone want to assume the worst of their fellow man? Where does all this anger come from?

summerdown2 8y ago
I wonder if it's a similar psychological effect to that seen in the smoke filled room experiments, where someone is sat in a room and smoke starts coming under the door. If they're on their own, they investigate. If the room is full of actors who treat it as nothing, the one subject of the experiment tends to do nothing also. It turns out it's really hard for some people (maybe all people?) to go against the flow of a crowd. And if you combine that with the rise of clickbait, learning algorithms and social media, it suddenly becomes really easy to find yourself in a filter bubble surrounded by a very annoyed and consipiracy-believing crowd.
- esotericn 8y ago
  Pretty good theory. I suppose I'm uncomfortable with it, because it implies that some people just inherently have far less agency than others (disconnected from external factors like appearance, capital, etc), and that has all sorts of far-reaching implications...
- jonathanstrange 8y ago
  I believe this is essentially what is going on right now, and I do believe that these effects are currently the biggest threat to democracy. Fringe opinions and downright stupidity are entering the "mainstream", they are being "discussed" right now on forums like reddit's /r/unpopularopinion. But I don't believe that censorship are good solutions. Strong moderation is needed to keep a forum interesting and worthwhile reading, but that's a practical issue. Government censorship goes way too far. There should rather be laws that prohibit the use of certain online marketing tools in political campaigns. For example, it should be a punishable felony to use viral marketing in political campaigns that involves any kind of fake comments, replication bots, deliberately falsified news, or fake accounts not tied to real persons. Maybe these tools should also be prohibited for ordinary marketing - IANAL but I think in many countries they already are -, but they should definitely be strictly prohibited in political campaigns. Right now, it seems that e.g. in the US almost anything goes in political campaigns as long as no foreigners are involved, and we know from the Cambridge Analytica case that some companies act like mercenaries for hire without any conscience or care for democracy. That's what needs to be addressed, not the lunatics and crackpots on forums who will always exist.

skookumchuck 8y ago

I'm far, far more concerned with dying from cancer, alzheimer's, car crashes, the flu, hospital mistakes, etc., than a terrorist. Statistically, in America, terrorist killings are right down there at the bottom.

twtw 8y ago
And yet they motivate all the decisions. Here we are, 17 years later, still in a "state of emergency" and the TSA has become normal.
- pmorici 8y ago
  TSA style airport security screening was put in place in the 1970's. The main thing that happened after 9/11 is they changed from using private security firms to having the federal government oversee it.
  - twtw 8y ago
    You and I have a very different idea of "TSA style." Prior the 9/11, there were essentially no restrictions on what you could carry onboard, and you weren't required to show ID. An associate of mine regularly carried his chainsaw on planes well after the 70s (needed for his occupation) - let me know how that goes today.
charlesism 8y ago
Youtube, Twitter and FB stoke extremism. I'm concerned friction between the left and right escalates into another civil war. I'm concerned that the rise of nationalists leads to another world war. If we continue to move in the coming decade the same direction we have the past decade, both outcomes are likely.

krona 8y ago

This is a pretty pathetic piece but ends with the same question that is discussed in both Fukuyama's and Jonathan Haidt's latest books: Is liberal democracy compatible with social media? We don't know because we've never tried it before, but we're about to find out.

amelius 8y ago
> we're about to find out But would we know if social media are the cause of all problems? All we have is a correlation.
- krona 8y ago
  Social media isn't a cause because there is nothing you can do with it that couldn't be done before it existed. However it doesn't mean that it makes some things more or less likely. There are numerous studies at the individual level attributing the rise of various mental health problems to social media. That's not really debatable at this point; what is more interesting are the social repercussions, looking at the effects on whole populations. This is one of the topics of the books I mention.
tomjen3 8y ago
If not, doesn't it prove that democracy isn't compatible with, well, people? Alternatively, lets add political opinions to the list of things you can't discriminate on, we are halfway there with religious beliefs, and move on.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

hamilyon2 8y ago

Ironically, author who talks about prejudices and biases uses "Russian" as synonym to false. I should not be one who says that, but such usage simply perpetuates undeserved negative attitude to everything Russian. Which is sad, there is a lot of genuine, true and sincere in Russian culture.

paganel 8y ago

> and gives prejudices the shimmer of ideals. I think the same thing was said back when the printing press was invented, and I think they were right (if you were a Catholic back then you could look at a guy like Luther like a prejudiced idealist), as there is a pretty good correlation between the first use of the printing press in Europe and the European wars of religion. I'd say that in the long term we were better off.

Dowwie 8y ago

Social media technology is a great enabler. Arguments and positions contrary to the norm are down-voted or moderated out. The filter bubble is nearly impenetrable. This was accomplished through architecture and design.

charlesism 8y ago
I believe the opposite is the problem: thanks to social media, everyone is exposed to countless comments to which they are in mortal opposition. Everyone feels besieged. It's difficult to keep your head in a disagreement when you feel there is some horribly misguided revolution going on, and you're part of a small band of hold-outs. It's not just that we spend too much time online with people who will nod at us in agreement. It's that we spend too much time in a state of rage, bickering with people who won't, and are unlikely to ever.

jillesvangurp 8y ago

Luddites from the New York Times. They are part of the problem, not the solution. The problem is unfiltered and biased information/opinion that is passed as facts and the resulting information bubbles that are dividing society. E.g. the NYT played no small part in the information bubble that caused Trump to emerge and win an election.

sureaboutthis 8y ago

Along these same lines, some of you may be interested in the two-part series on PBS by Frontline. The Facebook Dilemma https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/facebook-dilemma/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/facebook-dilemma/

IlCano 8y ago

The problem is not the Internet itself but the spread and userbase, some simple solutions: Make mobile internet super expensive. Make fast internet at home, outside of special apps(Netflix, games, etc) expensive. Everyone should be able to buy a ticket online but watching HD VR videos of their hatepreacher - Im not so sure. More free/cheap entertainment for the working class - football, soccer baseball and basketball on free over the air TV.

aklemm 8y ago

From observing a lot of really crazy people on Facebook (generally people who post political stuff that is clearly false like pizzagate), I think the simple combination of communicating in memes along with the enabling of large networks of conspiracy-minded types to spread those memes is possibly the root of the problem. This is surprising, because it would have been hard to guess something so simple would have such an effect and that so many would fall on the wrong side of it.

aklemm 8y ago

For all of us who recoil at the idea of any censorship at all, how do we grapple with the possibility that the Internet spreads more disinformation than truth? If that’s the actual conclusion, what do we do then? Edit: Stated more accurately as a proposition, the Internet spreads enough disinformation to undo the good brought about by the true information that it also spreads.

LiterallyDoge 8y ago

Paywall bye.