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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 evidenc

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?
slg 6y ago
>I remain a free speech maximalist. What does this mean? Do you oppose laws against defamation, child pornography, fraud, violent threats, etc? No developed nation has truly free speech. The debate is where the line is drawn. Pretending it is a binary choice just ends up hiding all the smaller choices that we could make that could actually lead to a better society. EDIT: There is irony in "free speech maximalists" downvoting questions like this rather than trying to answer them.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Do we really have to go to asinine level of detail given that freedom of speech has been a constitutionally protected right for over 230 years? We have plenty of legal precedent for what should be protected. There's no reason to move those markers. Ethiopia has many problems and Facebook is but one. I think social media is toxic, but not because it allows freedom of speech. Social media rewards virality and outrage is inherently and unfortunately one of the most viral things you can put out on social media. The problem is the platform, not the speech.
  - slg 6y ago
    I would argue the fact that the rules were first created 230+ years ago is an argument in favor of reevaluating them not an argument in favor of them being infallible. The laws were written before social media, the internet, and the foundations go back to before any real form of mass media. What is the harm in questioning if our laws are setup in the best possible way?
    - chrisco255 6y ago
      I would argue that the founders were students of Greek and Roman history which preceded them by almost 2000 years. The lessons encoded in the bill of rights were in fact, timeless and speak to the innate nature of human beings. As a species we haven't evolved much in 200K years. Freedom of speech is an important check against a monopoly on ideas. Propaganda is one of the most powerful and dangerous forces and the only way to fight it is with opposing propaganda or debate. Freedom of speech guarantees the right to have that debate. The printing press was a form of mass media. The problem is not the speech on social media. The problem is the platform. Who knows if social media will even be a thing in 10 years? It could just be a temporary fad in history, like disco, that just fades away. It already is starting to wane. More people are tuning out and gen Z is just not as into Facebook or Twitter as my gen was. The need to protect speech and debate will always be essential, however.
jnwatson 6y ago
Before, the Soviets simply didn't have any mechanism to get 100 million American voter impressions. Facebook delivered that on a silver platter, with narrowly sliced demos, purposefully curated by a Facebook sales team. The message and the basic mechanism is the same, but the scale is what turns this from merely concerning into serious discussion about the end of democracy.
- baryphonic 6y ago
  > Before, the Soviets simply didn't have any mechanism to get 100 million American voter impressions. They didn't? Back in the 60s, around half of the US population (100M people) watched the national nightly news on a regular basis from the three networks. What's easier: convincing three networks to run a fake story sympathetic to Soviet interests, or convincing 100M people of something through "impressions?" And keep in mind that for decades, Western journalists (mostly in newspapers or magazines) parroted stories about how the Soviet Union was advanced and prosperous, when the reality was starkly different. Reality only penetrated through when samizdat, arguably the social media of its day, was able to funnel Khrushchev's so-called Secret Speech into Western hands. That and Gulag Archipelago really tarnished the image of the Soviet Union in spite of coverage from journalists. Also, quick aside: I remain highly perplexed that otherwise intelligent people in the tech industry believe so strongly in the power of social media to "program" people just by virtue of "number of impressions." Hacker News is the only place on the Internet where I might see side-by-side stories where social media advertising is called out as essentially fraud and also that social media advertising is bringing about the end of civilization because some Russian Bots paid for some Facebook ads. I don't get it. Getting anyone to commit to anything beyond cheap talk is extremely difficult (and even the cheap talk part is hard if it doesn't confer some status).
  - quantified 6y ago
    Based on FB algorithms, I think "impressions" have won convincingly.
    - baryphonic 6y ago
quantified 6y ago
It's not just state actors, but all kinds of neighborhood ones too. OP topic was non-state. Speech before Facebook, Twitter et al wasn't restricted in the sense of being actively prevented, there was just much more friction to getting it out widely.

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?

slg 6y ago

>I remain a free speech maximalist. What does this mean? Do you oppose laws against defamation, child pornography, fraud, violent threats, etc? No developed nation has truly free speech. The debate is where the line is drawn. Pretending it is a binary choice just ends up hiding all the smaller choices that we could make that could actually lead to a better society. EDIT: There is irony in "free speech maximalists" downvoting questions like this rather than trying to answer them.

chrisco255 6y ago
Do we really have to go to asinine level of detail given that freedom of speech has been a constitutionally protected right for over 230 years? We have plenty of legal precedent for what should be protected. There's no reason to move those markers. Ethiopia has many problems and Facebook is but one. I think social media is toxic, but not because it allows freedom of speech. Social media rewards virality and outrage is inherently and unfortunately one of the most viral things you can put out on social media. The problem is the platform, not the speech.
- slg 6y ago
  I would argue the fact that the rules were first created 230+ years ago is an argument in favor of reevaluating them not an argument in favor of them being infallible. The laws were written before social media, the internet, and the foundations go back to before any real form of mass media. What is the harm in questioning if our laws are setup in the best possible way?
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    I would argue that the founders were students of Greek and Roman history which preceded them by almost 2000 years. The lessons encoded in the bill of rights were in fact, timeless and speak to the innate nature of human beings. As a species we haven't evolved much in 200K years. Freedom of speech is an important check against a monopoly on ideas. Propaganda is one of the most powerful and dangerous forces and the only way to fight it is with opposing propaganda or debate. Freedom of speech guarantees the right to have that debate. The printing press was a form of mass media. The problem is not the speech on social media. The problem is the platform. Who knows if social media will even be a thing in 10 years? It could just be a temporary fad in history, like disco, that just fades away. It already is starting to wane. More people are tuning out and gen Z is just not as into Facebook or Twitter as my gen was. The need to protect speech and debate will always be essential, however.

jnwatson 6y ago

Before, the Soviets simply didn't have any mechanism to get 100 million American voter impressions. Facebook delivered that on a silver platter, with narrowly sliced demos, purposefully curated by a Facebook sales team. The message and the basic mechanism is the same, but the scale is what turns this from merely concerning into serious discussion about the end of democracy.

baryphonic 6y ago
> Before, the Soviets simply didn't have any mechanism to get 100 million American voter impressions. They didn't? Back in the 60s, around half of the US population (100M people) watched the national nightly news on a regular basis from the three networks. What's easier: convincing three networks to run a fake story sympathetic to Soviet interests, or convincing 100M people of something through "impressions?" And keep in mind that for decades, Western journalists (mostly in newspapers or magazines) parroted stories about how the Soviet Union was advanced and prosperous, when the reality was starkly different. Reality only penetrated through when samizdat, arguably the social media of its day, was able to funnel Khrushchev's so-called Secret Speech into Western hands. That and Gulag Archipelago really tarnished the image of the Soviet Union in spite of coverage from journalists. Also, quick aside: I remain highly perplexed that otherwise intelligent people in the tech industry believe so strongly in the power of social media to "program" people just by virtue of "number of impressions." Hacker News is the only place on the Internet where I might see side-by-side stories where social media advertising is called out as essentially fraud and also that social media advertising is bringing about the end of civilization because some Russian Bots paid for some Facebook ads. I don't get it. Getting anyone to commit to anything beyond cheap talk is extremely difficult (and even the cheap talk part is hard if it doesn't confer some status).
- quantified 6y ago
  Based on FB algorithms, I think "impressions" have won convincingly.
  - baryphonic 6y ago

quantified 6y ago

It's not just state actors, but all kinds of neighborhood ones too. OP topic was non-state. Speech before Facebook, Twitter et al wasn't restricted in the sense of being actively prevented, there was just much more friction to getting it out widely.