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I think that there's an element of validation and indoctrination that is a serious concern here. In addition to an overall significant lowering of the discourse

I think that there's an element of validation and indoctrination that is a serious concern here. In addition to an overall significant lowering of the discourse around things by allowing garbage quality trolls and other horrible comments, and in addition to bullying, aggressive behavior, stalking, and other things that are broadly considered unpleasant, this kind of behavior breeds more of this behavior. Consider someone growing up on the internet. The more they're exposed to this sort of content, the more it will be normalized in their mind. The more they're exposed to this sort of content, the more likely susceptible people are to be radicalized by it, and to grow into the same sort of troll. Hiding or suppressing low-quality content creates a herd immunity effect. It prevents a shift of the Overton Window to where "generally allowable discourse" suddenly includes timestamping the most "salacious" parts of a child's video, or telling people to actually kill themselves, or sharing their purely racist, hate-filled viewpoints. While you may rather be exposed to it because you have the strength and capability to view it as a curiosity and a sociological study, the impressionable among us maybe deserve to not be bombarded with garbage, and we may have a moral duty to at least make some effort to minimize indoctrination and radicalization on these platforms.

Haga 8y ago
And we would have gotten away with new humans in a new utopia if it weren't for those meddling kids.
lr4444lr 8y ago
If you're "growing up on the Internet", the major problem is probably your negligent parents who don't monitor your Internet usage or teach you about trust, not the stupid and immature trolls typing to you.
- edoceo 8y ago
  IME it's difficult as one or two parents to out weigh 100s of other voices.
colechristensen 8y ago
This is one of the reasons I think anonymity on the Internet is a bad thing. Not that I am saying it should be banned, but it should not be the norm. Much of the toxicity simply would not happen, could be prosecuted, or could be filtered if a "real person" attribute was widely available.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  Toxic comments can be just as common in non-anonymous forums and venues. Facebook produces a lot of toxicity, for example. Further consider; the Internet is much less anonymous then twenty years ago and that hasn't stopped the overall level of toxicity imo. The type of person who spontaneously makes toxic comments spontaneously will still make them when forced to use their real name (they'll just suffer more from it). The provocateur, those who calculatedly elicit toxicity, is always going to be here too - no matter many Russians Facebook filters. One factor is that once one person begins attack another person, both using real names, both people have a hard time backing down, especially if they know each in real life or if they are semi-public figures. For a lot of people, admitting that they are wrong is a huge hurdle - and these tend to be the people who engage in toxicity in the first place.
  - colechristensen 8y ago
    ...and people have been jerks since there were people, I am not implying that people being unpleasant was created by anonymous commenting. However there would be quite a bit of backpressure against certain kinds of Internet toxicity if people were less anonymous.
- odessacubbage 8y ago
  you need only look as far back as the covington incident to see that 'real people' are hardly inhibited from vile and abusive behavior just as long as they believe themselves to be on the right side of the mob. this has been the case since time immemorial. in my admittedly anecdotal experience, fully anon communities are far more respectful & a have a better standard of decorum than communities with high standards of verification, even and perhaps especially in dealing with the sorts of topics that tend to make more highly regulated forums collapse into flame wars. real name communities are prone to witch hunts, purity tests and all sorts of hysteria full of very real life consequences. anons just call you a retarded faggot.
rjf72 8y ago
As you are clearly blurring the lines between this specific issues and a more general one, I'm going to reference the latter and exclusively the latter. There's a wide gulf between pedophilia and then jumping into appeals against the ever more amorphous 'hate speech.' So on that note it's interesting that in the early 20th century if you look at support in the US for eugenics it was practically a who's who of academia: The Carnegie Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, W.E.B. Du Bois, Harvard, Stanford, etc, etc. [1] One might argue that such views were "purely racist, hate-filled viewpoints." The very reason freedom of speech was such a revolutionary concept is because authority figures, since time immemorial, have been able to propagate bad ideas and manipulate the general population by making false statements which could not be challenged. In contemporary times a good example of this is Iraq. Our invasion was precipitated based on fabricated evidence and appeals to authority of the sort 'x intelligence agencies have proven beyond any doubt that Iraq has or is pursuing nuclear weapons of mass destruction.' After the fact when an individual [2] tasked with investigating whether Iraq was or was not trying to purchase uranium (he found they absolutely were not and reported as such - the government would go on to claim they were trying to purchase uranium), a government official outed his wife as a covert CIA operative (which the Washington Post would go on to publish) not only potentially endangering her, but terminating her career. In the case of eugenics it wasn't so much a conspiracy rather than that authority and academia were simply collectively wrong, as has also often occurred. Censorship benefits those in power and only those in power. Those in power choosing to try to inhibit censorship, as happened with the first amendment, was quite the revolution! The point of free speech is to ensure that not only with the good comes the bad, but also that with the bad comes the good. When you begin to tolerate censorship by one side - you very much risk that the side doing the censoring is the bad. And in efforts to obtain only the good, you end up with only the bad. In today's world, free speech and corporations are becoming a major new issue. An ever larger percent of all human communication is digital, and digital communication is extremely monopolized. This means, for instance, that the US government could effectively circumvent the first amendment by simply pressuring a single company rather than passing a law against the dissemination of any given viewpoint. It also means that a very small handful of people could end censoring or otherwise manipulating public discourse for billions. That is exactly what the first amendment sought to prevent; only the founding fathers could never have imagined a corporation (under which two people have majority control) having more power over speech than any government in the world. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_C._Wilson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_C._Wilson
raxxorrax 8y ago
I think there is no evidence of the mechanisms you describe. That could have been a text written about books shortly after Gutenberg. The kids will flee the garden eventually anyway and "allowable discourse" is quite subjective. You will never create a child-proof youtube. Those kids will eclipse your abilities and understanding at some point. It would be better to create a separate platform
- riffraff 8y ago
  don't we have decades of evidence from online communities showing that? From usenet to reddit, many communities that tolerate abusive conduct degenerate, as the "bad behaviour" is normalized and becomes accepted. The fact that you can't create a child-proof YT doesn't mean you shouldn't strive to keep negative behaviour at bay.
  - cf141q5325 8y ago
    > don't we have decades of evidence from online communities showing that? In my experience the community changes as a whole, but not the individual actors. Once a community tips the member base changes. People displeased with the behavior leave and people attracted to it join.
- codetrotter 8y ago
  > I think there is no evidence of the mechanisms you describe. Which part? If we are talking about this part: >> I think that there's an element of validation and indoctrination that is a serious concern here. Then I think there is evidence of that being true. Take for example “incels”. They gather in online forums where they construct a worldview built entirely on misogyny, entitlement and hate. The ideas they are spreading among themselves are much worse than probably most of those people would come up with on their own. In their echo chambers they validate these ideas to one-another and make them seem acceptable. https://www.ft.com/content/d71f3156-f94d-11e8-af46-2022a0b02a6c https://www.ft.com/content/d71f3156-f94d-11e8-af46-2022a0b02...
  - m712 8y ago

Haga 8y ago

And we would have gotten away with new humans in a new utopia if it weren't for those meddling kids.

lr4444lr 8y ago

If you're "growing up on the Internet", the major problem is probably your negligent parents who don't monitor your Internet usage or teach you about trust, not the stupid and immature trolls typing to you.

edoceo 8y ago
IME it's difficult as one or two parents to out weigh 100s of other voices.

colechristensen 8y ago

This is one of the reasons I think anonymity on the Internet is a bad thing. Not that I am saying it should be banned, but it should not be the norm. Much of the toxicity simply would not happen, could be prosecuted, or could be filtered if a "real person" attribute was widely available.

joe_the_user 8y ago
Toxic comments can be just as common in non-anonymous forums and venues. Facebook produces a lot of toxicity, for example. Further consider; the Internet is much less anonymous then twenty years ago and that hasn't stopped the overall level of toxicity imo. The type of person who spontaneously makes toxic comments spontaneously will still make them when forced to use their real name (they'll just suffer more from it). The provocateur, those who calculatedly elicit toxicity, is always going to be here too - no matter many Russians Facebook filters. One factor is that once one person begins attack another person, both using real names, both people have a hard time backing down, especially if they know each in real life or if they are semi-public figures. For a lot of people, admitting that they are wrong is a huge hurdle - and these tend to be the people who engage in toxicity in the first place.
- colechristensen 8y ago
  ...and people have been jerks since there were people, I am not implying that people being unpleasant was created by anonymous commenting. However there would be quite a bit of backpressure against certain kinds of Internet toxicity if people were less anonymous.
odessacubbage 8y ago
you need only look as far back as the covington incident to see that 'real people' are hardly inhibited from vile and abusive behavior just as long as they believe themselves to be on the right side of the mob. this has been the case since time immemorial. in my admittedly anecdotal experience, fully anon communities are far more respectful & a have a better standard of decorum than communities with high standards of verification, even and perhaps especially in dealing with the sorts of topics that tend to make more highly regulated forums collapse into flame wars. real name communities are prone to witch hunts, purity tests and all sorts of hysteria full of very real life consequences. anons just call you a retarded faggot.

rjf72 8y ago

As you are clearly blurring the lines between this specific issues and a more general one, I'm going to reference the latter and exclusively the latter. There's a wide gulf between pedophilia and then jumping into appeals against the ever more amorphous 'hate speech.' So on that note it's interesting that in the early 20th century if you look at support in the US for eugenics it was practically a who's who of academia: The Carnegie Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, W.E.B. Du Bois, Harvard, Stanford, etc, etc. [1] One might argue that such views were "purely racist, hate-filled viewpoints." The very reason freedom of speech was such a revolutionary concept is because authority figures, since time immemorial, have been able to propagate bad ideas and manipulate the general population by making false statements which could not be challenged. In contemporary times a good example of this is Iraq. Our invasion was precipitated based on fabricated evidence and appeals to authority of the sort 'x intelligence agencies have proven beyond any doubt that Iraq has or is pursuing nuclear weapons of mass destruction.' After the fact when an individual [2] tasked with investigating whether Iraq was or was not trying to purchase uranium (he found they absolutely were not and reported as such - the government would go on to claim they were trying to purchase uranium), a government official outed his wife as a covert CIA operative (which the Washington Post would go on to publish) not only potentially endangering her, but terminating her career. In the case of eugenics it wasn't so much a conspiracy rather than that authority and academia were simply collectively wrong, as has also often occurred. Censorship benefits those in power and only those in power. Those in power choosing to try to inhibit censorship, as happened with the first amendment, was quite the revolution! The point of free speech is to ensure that not only with the good comes the bad, but also that with the bad comes the good. When you begin to tolerate censorship by one side - you very much risk that the side doing the censoring is the bad. And in efforts to obtain only the good, you end up with only the bad. In today's world, free speech and corporations are becoming a major new issue. An ever larger percent of all human communication is digital, and digital communication is extremely monopolized. This means, for instance, that the US government could effectively circumvent the first amendment by simply pressuring a single company rather than passing a law against the dissemination of any given viewpoint. It also means that a very small handful of people could end censoring or otherwise manipulating public discourse for billions. That is exactly what the first amendment sought to prevent; only the founding fathers could never have imagined a corporation (under which two people have majority control) having more power over speech than any government in the world. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_C._Wilson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_C._Wilson

raxxorrax 8y ago

I think there is no evidence of the mechanisms you describe. That could have been a text written about books shortly after Gutenberg. The kids will flee the garden eventually anyway and "allowable discourse" is quite subjective. You will never create a child-proof youtube. Those kids will eclipse your abilities and understanding at some point. It would be better to create a separate platform

riffraff 8y ago
don't we have decades of evidence from online communities showing that? From usenet to reddit, many communities that tolerate abusive conduct degenerate, as the "bad behaviour" is normalized and becomes accepted. The fact that you can't create a child-proof YT doesn't mean you shouldn't strive to keep negative behaviour at bay.
- cf141q5325 8y ago
  > don't we have decades of evidence from online communities showing that? In my experience the community changes as a whole, but not the individual actors. Once a community tips the member base changes. People displeased with the behavior leave and people attracted to it join.
codetrotter 8y ago
> I think there is no evidence of the mechanisms you describe. Which part? If we are talking about this part: >> I think that there's an element of validation and indoctrination that is a serious concern here. Then I think there is evidence of that being true. Take for example “incels”. They gather in online forums where they construct a worldview built entirely on misogyny, entitlement and hate. The ideas they are spreading among themselves are much worse than probably most of those people would come up with on their own. In their echo chambers they validate these ideas to one-another and make them seem acceptable. https://www.ft.com/content/d71f3156-f94d-11e8-af46-2022a0b02a6c https://www.ft.com/content/d71f3156-f94d-11e8-af46-2022a0b02...
- m712 8y ago