6 ms·

I think one of the reasons why folks are mad at Facebook is it uncovered the uncomfortable truth that freedom of speech is not a first-order good. I used to be

I think one of the reasons why folks are mad at Facebook is it uncovered the uncomfortable truth that freedom of speech is not a first-order good. I used to be a free speech maximalist, but it is clear that lack of education and aggressive state-actor PsyOps is simply too high a hurdle to overcome. I wouldn't be surprised if when historians look back in 50 years, that they determine that the Pandora's box of free information interchange from the Internet hastened the end of free society.

loceng 6y ago
Freedom of speech vs. freedom of reach.
- jnwatson 6y ago
  speech x money = reach. The Supreme Court of the US decided that freedom of speech implies freedom of reach, including the financial means to do so.
  - dwaltrip 6y ago
    speech x technology x money = reach
  - loceng 6y ago
    Which gets balanced out greatly with policy proposals like Andrew Yang's Democracy Dollars, where every eligible voter gets allocated $100/year to contribute to the politician(s) of their choosing.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  It's really the same thing. Freedom of the press is also right there in the First Amendment, implying the right to reach an audience with a message.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    At least with the press, historically, the editor was a human being (generally with a known set of allegiances), rather than an algorithm; and people had to pay for their news, which kept the publisher accountable. If people had multiple (interoperable) Facebooks to choose from, and had to pay for them based on how often they visited the site, I imagine the news / social media landscape would look a lot different.
  - loceng 6y ago
    Sure but not wherever you want, e.g. a privately owned platform doesn't prevent freedom of the press, just not on their private property - just like if a business requires a mask for you to enter/be served, they don't have to allow you on their property if you don't follow their rules.
rexpop 6y ago
> lack of education and aggressive state-actor PsyOps Are there media which are not susceptible to PsyOps? (Edit: for example, print or online newspapers, television, etc. They arguably, by setting a higher standard of rational and investigative rigor, produce fewer propaganda sock-puppets but, by that same token, coalesce trust into personages which can, in one fell swoop, be assassinated or—in the case of Ellen Degeneres—persuaded to reiterate state propaganda.) And, are only state-actors to blame? After all, Facebook themselves were experimenting with emotion manipulation[0], and transnational corporations have at least as sophisticated branding, PR, and propaganda departments. 0. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-emotion-study-breached-ethical-guidelines-researchers-say https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...
- COGlory 6y ago
  This strikes me as a rational comment, and I don't understand why its being downvoted. Perhaps I'm missing something?
  - htnsao 6y ago
    Just the usual pettiness.
  - rexpop 6y ago
    I cannot tell you how gratifying it is to see my words described as "rational." Many technologists have a Right-Libertarian bent which rests on a fundamentally irrational trust in the ethics of the private firm, as a reflective validation of their own unimpeachable ethics. In short, they hate to be reminded that private corporations are unaccountable, and dangerously unethical. It can make it very hard to sleep at night. Edit: I mean, there are probably other factors at play, too. 1. https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideo...
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    It seems to be assuming everyone knows the context about Ellen, which they may not - I don't.
baryphonic 6y ago
I remain a free speech maximalist. Bad ideas and aggressive state actors (doing "PsyOps" or otherwise) were the norm before social media. I see no hard evidence that social media has made any of these problems much worse, other than making people much more paranoid about state actors and the uneducated. (In reality, the traditional press has seeded much of this paranoia. Traditional press feels threatened by social media competition, and so has spent over a decade now raising the hue and cry about social media's "dangers"; they apparently wish to retain their monopoly on fear- and rage-inducing mind viruses only for themselves.) Furthermore, I see no evidence that in the absence of free speech, state actors will be less aggressive or people will be more educated. I see plenty of evidence that both would get worse in a regime of restricted speech.
- lehi 6y ago
  > I see no hard evidence that social media has made any of these problems much worse https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-measles-us-california-outbreak-vaccine-new-york-disneyland/static/img/measles_us_2000.png https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-measles-us-california...
  - radicalcentrist 6y ago
    I see what you're getting at, but I wouldn't consider this very compelling evidence. Plenty has happened in the past ten years that isn't attributable to social media.
    - mannykannot 6y ago
      The thesis being considered here neither implies or is dependent on all bad outcomes being attributable to social media.
- Causality1 6y ago
  I am as well but I don't think that's the central issue here. Some governments don't agree but I believe there's a vast gulf between posting about how much you hate those lazy left-handed people and actively calling for left-handed people to be murdered in the street. Facebook is not a free speech maximalist company. They just decided to operate in this region without bothering to enforce their own rules to it or even publish the rules in the native language. Should we as Westerners punish them for that? Can we, legally? Let's remove all the moral grey area and pretend Dropbox Fake-country was hosting vast amounts of child pornography and doing nothing about it because the local legal authorities let them and Dropbox HQ just didn't care. Could we do anything about it?
javajosh 6y ago
>lack of education and aggressive state-actor PsyOps... Very succinctly put, but it deserves adding something else: the horribleness of the human spirit. Centralized information control by a meritocracy that mostly got it right (modulo all the bigotry) characterizes the mid-twentieth century West, and this idealized, sanitized view of ourselves was optimistic in the extreme. Indeed, I think we can characterize that controlled optimism as morphing from future-tech-worship (50's) to self-worship as the boomers subsumed the hippy ideals along with the apparently easy money they earned in the wealthiest society Earth has ever known. Now instead of morphing into something else, it is the central control that is changing, and we are seeing why, despite its very real flaws, the benevolent dictatorship of even flawed institutions is preferable to the cynical, hateful chaos that reigns when individuals get a chance to shout their bile to the world. I'm not entirely sure all is lost, however. Perhaps we can have our cake (absolute freedom of speech) and eat it too (some sort of moral standard) by introducing social norms no-one has even thought of yet. For example, I would personally love it if cancel culture would turn its gaze not to sexual harrassers, but to the more obvious problem of baseless accusers: those who make accusations without any proof, not even bad proof. Such people should be shunned by society, and not listened to ever again, for they have squandered their right to speak. Within academia, something similar might work when a researcher publishes deeply flawed research, they should be expelled from academia. If the academy doesn't maintain a high standard, then the entire thing could come crashing down (and that's already happening in slow motion). If a whole field refuses to do this (psychology, social sciences) then those entire fields should be dropped, lest they damage the reputation of the other fields of the academy. This sounds harsh, but I think its fair, and it lets us have nice things a little bit longer.
1123581321 6y ago
It’s safer to distribute and multiply the psy-ops targets instead of having centralized weak points with regulatory power that can be captured. Free speech ultimately improves our information.
htnsao 6y ago
<I wouldn't be surprised if when historians look back in 50 years, that they determine that the Pandora's box of free information interchange from the Internet hastened the end of free society.> Exactly. And they'll say internet-spread panic caused the unnecessary collapse of the world economy in 2020 -- very similiar to the panic of Y2K, but amplified by 20 years of progress in social media. Meanwhile, in other non-reported news, ~2.7 million more humans were born this week. And about ~1.2 million died this week from regular non-covid causes. [1] [1] https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths
dgudkov 6y ago
Free speech by itself doesn't mean much without amplification. I don't think we've got free speech wrong. But with Facebook and other social media we've got amplification wrong.
sershe 6y ago
Interesting, I have actually come to similar, but even broader, conclusion and that was not a comfortable realization. I come from Russia so I used to be a democracy absolutist, but based on the recent social-media-influenced grassroots (and astroturf) movements, I've realized that the American democracy and many others only worked so well because they had so many de-facto small, arbitrary/authoritarian filters. Speech is one of them - if you were fringe 30 years ago your message and movement would simply never get thru the editors / party machines / etc.; but I think it applies broader in a sense that people were far more insulated from actual decision making. I now view a workable democracy as something that should be more like a technocracy with good feedback mechanisms, and not like something that should actually give "people" "power". Exhibit A: people on Facebook.

loceng 6y ago

Freedom of speech vs. freedom of reach.

jnwatson 6y ago
speech x money = reach. The Supreme Court of the US decided that freedom of speech implies freedom of reach, including the financial means to do so.
- dwaltrip 6y ago
  speech x technology x money = reach
- loceng 6y ago
  Which gets balanced out greatly with policy proposals like Andrew Yang's Democracy Dollars, where every eligible voter gets allocated $100/year to contribute to the politician(s) of their choosing.
chrisco255 6y ago
It's really the same thing. Freedom of the press is also right there in the First Amendment, implying the right to reach an audience with a message.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  At least with the press, historically, the editor was a human being (generally with a known set of allegiances), rather than an algorithm; and people had to pay for their news, which kept the publisher accountable. If people had multiple (interoperable) Facebooks to choose from, and had to pay for them based on how often they visited the site, I imagine the news / social media landscape would look a lot different.
- loceng 6y ago
  Sure but not wherever you want, e.g. a privately owned platform doesn't prevent freedom of the press, just not on their private property - just like if a business requires a mask for you to enter/be served, they don't have to allow you on their property if you don't follow their rules.

rexpop 6y ago

> lack of education and aggressive state-actor PsyOps Are there media which are not susceptible to PsyOps? (Edit: for example, print or online newspapers, television, etc. They arguably, by setting a higher standard of rational and investigative rigor, produce fewer propaganda sock-puppets but, by that same token, coalesce trust into personages which can, in one fell swoop, be assassinated or—in the case of Ellen Degeneres—persuaded to reiterate state propaganda.) And, are only state-actors to blame? After all, Facebook themselves were experimenting with emotion manipulation[0], and transnational corporations have at least as sophisticated branding, PR, and propaganda departments. 0. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-emotion-study-breached-ethical-guidelines-researchers-say https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...

COGlory 6y ago
This strikes me as a rational comment, and I don't understand why its being downvoted. Perhaps I'm missing something?
- htnsao 6y ago
  Just the usual pettiness.
- rexpop 6y ago
  I cannot tell you how gratifying it is to see my words described as "rational." Many technologists have a Right-Libertarian bent which rests on a fundamentally irrational trust in the ethics of the private firm, as a reflective validation of their own unimpeachable ethics. In short, they hate to be reminded that private corporations are unaccountable, and dangerously unethical. It can make it very hard to sleep at night. Edit: I mean, there are probably other factors at play, too. 1. https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideo...
- perl4ever 6y ago
  It seems to be assuming everyone knows the context about Ellen, which they may not - I don't.

baryphonic 6y ago

I remain a free speech maximalist. Bad ideas and aggressive state actors (doing "PsyOps" or otherwise) were the norm before social media. I see no hard evidence that social media has made any of these problems much worse, other than making people much more paranoid about state actors and the uneducated. (In reality, the traditional press has seeded much of this paranoia. Traditional press feels threatened by social media competition, and so has spent over a decade now raising the hue and cry about social media's "dangers"; they apparently wish to retain their monopoly on fear- and rage-inducing mind viruses only for themselves.) Furthermore, I see no evidence that in the absence of free speech, state actors will be less aggressive or people will be more educated. I see plenty of evidence that both would get worse in a regime of restricted speech.

lehi 6y ago
> I see no hard evidence that social media has made any of these problems much worse https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-measles-us-california-outbreak-vaccine-new-york-disneyland/static/img/measles_us_2000.png https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-measles-us-california...
- radicalcentrist 6y ago
  I see what you're getting at, but I wouldn't consider this very compelling evidence. Plenty has happened in the past ten years that isn't attributable to social media.
  - mannykannot 6y ago
    The thesis being considered here neither implies or is dependent on all bad outcomes being attributable to social media.
Causality1 6y ago
I am as well but I don't think that's the central issue here. Some governments don't agree but I believe there's a vast gulf between posting about how much you hate those lazy left-handed people and actively calling for left-handed people to be murdered in the street. Facebook is not a free speech maximalist company. They just decided to operate in this region without bothering to enforce their own rules to it or even publish the rules in the native language. Should we as Westerners punish them for that? Can we, legally? Let's remove all the moral grey area and pretend Dropbox Fake-country was hosting vast amounts of child pornography and doing nothing about it because the local legal authorities let them and Dropbox HQ just didn't care. Could we do anything about it?

javajosh 6y ago

>lack of education and aggressive state-actor PsyOps... Very succinctly put, but it deserves adding something else: the horribleness of the human spirit. Centralized information control by a meritocracy that mostly got it right (modulo all the bigotry) characterizes the mid-twentieth century West, and this idealized, sanitized view of ourselves was optimistic in the extreme. Indeed, I think we can characterize that controlled optimism as morphing from future-tech-worship (50's) to self-worship as the boomers subsumed the hippy ideals along with the apparently easy money they earned in the wealthiest society Earth has ever known. Now instead of morphing into something else, it is the central control that is changing, and we are seeing why, despite its very real flaws, the benevolent dictatorship of even flawed institutions is preferable to the cynical, hateful chaos that reigns when individuals get a chance to shout their bile to the world. I'm not entirely sure all is lost, however. Perhaps we can have our cake (absolute freedom of speech) and eat it too (some sort of moral standard) by introducing social norms no-one has even thought of yet. For example, I would personally love it if cancel culture would turn its gaze not to sexual harrassers, but to the more obvious problem of baseless accusers: those who make accusations without any proof, not even bad proof. Such people should be shunned by society, and not listened to ever again, for they have squandered their right to speak. Within academia, something similar might work when a researcher publishes deeply flawed research, they should be expelled from academia. If the academy doesn't maintain a high standard, then the entire thing could come crashing down (and that's already happening in slow motion). If a whole field refuses to do this (psychology, social sciences) then those entire fields should be dropped, lest they damage the reputation of the other fields of the academy. This sounds harsh, but I think its fair, and it lets us have nice things a little bit longer.

1123581321 6y ago

It’s safer to distribute and multiply the psy-ops targets instead of having centralized weak points with regulatory power that can be captured. Free speech ultimately improves our information.

htnsao 6y ago

<I wouldn't be surprised if when historians look back in 50 years, that they determine that the Pandora's box of free information interchange from the Internet hastened the end of free society.> Exactly. And they'll say internet-spread panic caused the unnecessary collapse of the world economy in 2020 -- very similiar to the panic of Y2K, but amplified by 20 years of progress in social media. Meanwhile, in other non-reported news, ~2.7 million more humans were born this week. And about ~1.2 million died this week from regular non-covid causes. [1] [1] https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths

dgudkov 6y ago

Free speech by itself doesn't mean much without amplification. I don't think we've got free speech wrong. But with Facebook and other social media we've got amplification wrong.

sershe 6y ago

Interesting, I have actually come to similar, but even broader, conclusion and that was not a comfortable realization. I come from Russia so I used to be a democracy absolutist, but based on the recent social-media-influenced grassroots (and astroturf) movements, I've realized that the American democracy and many others only worked so well because they had so many de-facto small, arbitrary/authoritarian filters. Speech is one of them - if you were fringe 30 years ago your message and movement would simply never get thru the editors / party machines / etc.; but I think it applies broader in a sense that people were far more insulated from actual decision making. I now view a workable democracy as something that should be more like a technocracy with good feedback mechanisms, and not like something that should actually give "people" "power". Exhibit A: people on Facebook.