11 ms·

Ok. Lets enlarge youre analogy. So, its ok to censorship any public speach?

keenmaster 6y ago
That's a big jump from what I said. Here's an expansion of what I said, in my own words. The only people who wielded the "massive megaphone everywhere" before the advent of social media were traditional media organizations (and organizations with disproportionate access to traditional media). These media organizations were relatively professional, with relatively high standards for reporting. They undoubtedly had biases which led to problematic filtering and distortion of the information that they presented. However, with the democratization of media comes to new problems. We no longer have a professional class synthesizing and filtering the information that we see. Any one of us can wield the massive megaphone now, but there is a huge heterogeneity in that usage. The most passionate partisans, the most nefarious nation states, the Dunningest of Dunning-Krugers,...will use the megaphone the most. Since most people are at least somewhat impressionable, this presents a problem. Whereas before the media would impress upon people with (somewhat problematically) filtered information, now social media is impressing upon people with radically unfiltered garbage misinformation. We have to admit that this is an existential problem for our democracy. Only then can we begin to solve it. I am not asking for mass-censorship. I am asking for the system of social media to be redesigned in such a way to mitigate the above problems.
- meowface 6y ago
  This is the inevitable, unavoidable course of human progress. Letters to telegram to telephone to TV to email to blogs to social media. Eventually we'll all have some wearable device and constantly sharing one-to-many in that way, and later it'll be driven by neural implants. The more you connect people and enable one-to-many communication and information distribution, the more you increase the chance of "viral" ideas propagating, be they (in one's view) good or bad ones. The harm imposed by Facebook mostly has to do with the fact that they're a for-profit company, and particularly a for-profit company that doesn't charge users, causing them to acquire revenue in ways that are extremely prone to perverse incentives. More people gaining the capability to be exposed to more information from more people isn't the problem. I mean, sure, it causes problems and isn't what we're evolved to properly handle, but it's not inherently a bad thing or something that necessitates megamayors policing the distribution streams. (Barring some exceptions in extreme scenarios where death has a high chance of being imminent.) At some point we'll probably have at least one popular decentralized P2P communication medium / social media platform, backed by cryptography, and there'll be no central authority able to control communication in any way, besides governments arresting people or taking other security measures. Zuckerberg-like figures will be irrelevant in these systems, but they'll still exhibit the same properties you describe. It won't be possible for anyone to redesign these systems to mitigate what you see are issues inherent to unrestricted democratization of communication and information. Shouldn't we prepare for this eventuality and accept that this is the asymptote of human civilization, rather than asking gatekeepers to clean things up during this interregnum where the gatekeepers happen to hold a lot of power? It's like growing up with helicopter parents you cling onto despite the fact that you're going to have to face the world on your own when you turn 18.
  - keenmaster 6y ago
    "At some point we'll probably have at least one popular decentralized P2P communication medium / social media platform thing, backed by cryptography, and there'll be no central authority able to control communication in any way" There's not a chance that would ever get traction with a majority of people. The "normies" would be revolted by what they find on there, and trolls would have no one to troll but other trolls. Only the biggest trolls enjoy trolling other trolls. That's what 4chan is for. What you described is a more sophisticated version of 4chan which will have such gruesome content that half of 4chan's userbase would turn away in shock.
    - meowface 6y ago
      Will it happen in the next 10 years? Probably not. But will something like this exist within 100 years, especially as the public grows increasingly wary of shady for-profit social media companies? I think it probably will, and I think it'll probably be used by at least 30% of the population, and perhaps much more. I'm not suggesting this would function like an anonymous imageboard (though there'll still be plenty of things like those for people who want them), either. Imagine using the app Signal without having to rely on Signal's servers or having to own a mobile phone. You'd use it just like you do now; there'd just be no middlemen between you and the people you talk to. The same can be true of Twitter or anything else. People would still have some control over what they see and don't see; they're not going to see everything from everyone at all times, unless they specifically decide to use such an app. We just need to wait a few decades for those alternatives to become much more polished and user-friendly for the average person. The trend towards mesh-like, blockchain-like, decentralized, distributed, P2P networking seems pretty clear. I think the majority of things will probably still remain centralized even in a century, since there are many advantages to centralization, but these alternative mesh worlds are only going to get bigger and bigger. It's definitely a complex issue, and many of these future decentralized apps may end up re-implementing some aspects of centralization through elections of volunteer moderators or some other kind of democratized system, but in those cases at least the mayors will actually be elected and have limited terms and could be recalled, unlike Zuckerberg.
gremlinsinc 6y ago
Any? No, Some? Yes. I saw a youtube video where a nazi chick literally said she didn't believe in the Holocaust, but thinks gas chambers for Jews was a pretty good idea. WTF?! Someone standing at a podium calling for people to willy nilly execute a specific race/ethnic class, should probably be thrown in jail, or we get 1940 all over again.

That's a big jump from what I said. Here's an expansion of what I said, in my own words. The only people who wielded the "massive megaphone everywhere" before the advent of social media were traditional media organizations (and organizations with disproportionate access to traditional media). These media organizations were relatively professional, with relatively high standards for reporting. They undoubtedly had biases which led to problematic filtering and distortion of the information that they presented. However, with the democratization of media comes to new problems. We no longer have a professional class synthesizing and filtering the information that we see. Any one of us can wield the massive megaphone now, but there is a huge heterogeneity in that usage. The most passionate partisans, the most nefarious nation states, the Dunningest of Dunning-Krugers,...will use the megaphone the most. Since most people are at least somewhat impressionable, this presents a problem. Whereas before the media would impress upon people with (somewhat problematically) filtered information, now social media is impressing upon people with radically unfiltered garbage misinformation. We have to admit that this is an existential problem for our democracy. Only then can we begin to solve it. I am not asking for mass-censorship. I am asking for the system of social media to be redesigned in such a way to mitigate the above problems.

meowface 6y ago
This is the inevitable, unavoidable course of human progress. Letters to telegram to telephone to TV to email to blogs to social media. Eventually we'll all have some wearable device and constantly sharing one-to-many in that way, and later it'll be driven by neural implants. The more you connect people and enable one-to-many communication and information distribution, the more you increase the chance of "viral" ideas propagating, be they (in one's view) good or bad ones. The harm imposed by Facebook mostly has to do with the fact that they're a for-profit company, and particularly a for-profit company that doesn't charge users, causing them to acquire revenue in ways that are extremely prone to perverse incentives. More people gaining the capability to be exposed to more information from more people isn't the problem. I mean, sure, it causes problems and isn't what we're evolved to properly handle, but it's not inherently a bad thing or something that necessitates megamayors policing the distribution streams. (Barring some exceptions in extreme scenarios where death has a high chance of being imminent.) At some point we'll probably have at least one popular decentralized P2P communication medium / social media platform, backed by cryptography, and there'll be no central authority able to control communication in any way, besides governments arresting people or taking other security measures. Zuckerberg-like figures will be irrelevant in these systems, but they'll still exhibit the same properties you describe. It won't be possible for anyone to redesign these systems to mitigate what you see are issues inherent to unrestricted democratization of communication and information. Shouldn't we prepare for this eventuality and accept that this is the asymptote of human civilization, rather than asking gatekeepers to clean things up during this interregnum where the gatekeepers happen to hold a lot of power? It's like growing up with helicopter parents you cling onto despite the fact that you're going to have to face the world on your own when you turn 18.
- keenmaster 6y ago
  "At some point we'll probably have at least one popular decentralized P2P communication medium / social media platform thing, backed by cryptography, and there'll be no central authority able to control communication in any way" There's not a chance that would ever get traction with a majority of people. The "normies" would be revolted by what they find on there, and trolls would have no one to troll but other trolls. Only the biggest trolls enjoy trolling other trolls. That's what 4chan is for. What you described is a more sophisticated version of 4chan which will have such gruesome content that half of 4chan's userbase would turn away in shock.
  - meowface 6y ago
    Will it happen in the next 10 years? Probably not. But will something like this exist within 100 years, especially as the public grows increasingly wary of shady for-profit social media companies? I think it probably will, and I think it'll probably be used by at least 30% of the population, and perhaps much more. I'm not suggesting this would function like an anonymous imageboard (though there'll still be plenty of things like those for people who want them), either. Imagine using the app Signal without having to rely on Signal's servers or having to own a mobile phone. You'd use it just like you do now; there'd just be no middlemen between you and the people you talk to. The same can be true of Twitter or anything else. People would still have some control over what they see and don't see; they're not going to see everything from everyone at all times, unless they specifically decide to use such an app. We just need to wait a few decades for those alternatives to become much more polished and user-friendly for the average person. The trend towards mesh-like, blockchain-like, decentralized, distributed, P2P networking seems pretty clear. I think the majority of things will probably still remain centralized even in a century, since there are many advantages to centralization, but these alternative mesh worlds are only going to get bigger and bigger. It's definitely a complex issue, and many of these future decentralized apps may end up re-implementing some aspects of centralization through elections of volunteer moderators or some other kind of democratized system, but in those cases at least the mayors will actually be elected and have limited terms and could be recalled, unlike Zuckerberg.

gremlinsinc 6y ago

Any? No, Some? Yes. I saw a youtube video where a nazi chick literally said she didn't believe in the Holocaust, but thinks gas chambers for Jews was a pretty good idea. WTF?! Someone standing at a podium calling for people to willy nilly execute a specific race/ethnic class, should probably be thrown in jail, or we get 1940 all over again.