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And this is the other side of the famed tech desire to collect tons of info but refuse to give it to the government. We get disinterested social networks allowi

And this is the other side of the famed tech desire to collect tons of info but refuse to give it to the government. We get disinterested social networks allowing fake news that cause direct harm, created by anonymous users who they don't want to reveal. I am a strong privacy advocate, but the idea we should give corporations our data while hiding it from the government is kinda ludicrous when you look at the results.

matthewdgreen 6y ago
The fact that every online interaction (almost unavoidably) gives valuable data to corporations is bad enough. I do not understand why you would want to compound the damage by pouring that information directly into the hands of the government.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  I am for keeping personal information siloed and ideally offline as much as possible. I am not sure that it is good to make it impossible to trace where online information came from though.
  - chii 6y ago
    if somebody "anonymously" taped banners and posters on the street espousing messages, would it make sense to have a camera record every public space and identify who placed those banners there?
    - silvester23 6y ago
      I'm not 100% sure where I stand on the issue but that analogy falls a little flat - the potential reach of a couple of posters on a couple of streets is much smaller than that of posts online.
      - chii 6y ago
        so you're saying that as long as you can limit the reach of a message, anonymity is fine? Where and who decides that line? I think society should either accept that if there should be anonymity, that there must also be free speech (which includes free speech you may not like). And the inverse is also true - that if there's no anonymity, then there can be no free speech (including free speech you _do_ like).
        jamespo 6y ago
        This might shock you but the world is full of shades of grey
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      I think in the physical space there's a lot of ways investigators can discover this information after the fact, whether it be interviewing witnesses, looking for forensic evidence (fingerprints, DNA), etc. Things that, arguably, are not privacy violating, but can be acquired in investigating a specific problem. The difference in the digital space is that Twitter/Facebook/etc. have all that forensic data... and then just refuse to provide it.
konjin 6y ago
>We get disinterested social networks allowing fake news that cause direct harm, created by anonymous users who they don't want to reveal. You should probably look at the historical cases about harm and speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States >The Court, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., held that Schenck's criminal conviction was constitutional. The statute only applied to successful obstructions of the draft, but common-law precedents allowed prosecution for attempts that were dangerously close to success. Attempts made by speech or writing could be punished like other attempted crimes; the First Amendment did not protect speech encouraging men to resist induction, because, "when a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right."[7] In other words, the court held, the circumstances of wartime allow greater restrictions on free speech than would be allowed during peacetime, if only because new and greater dangers are present. Reminder that the US has been at war since 2001. The harm caused by whoever is the perpetrator of the moral panic of the moment always pales in comparison to the harm caused by the response to it. Let a thousand Russian bots post on facebook, it will cause less damage to society than a single deleted post.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  You do realize that Schenck v US is no longer the current standard for restriction on speech, right? Brandenburg v Ohio tightens the restrictions to "imminent lawless action", and the underlying philosophy exhibited in "publishing critical speech of the government in war isn't constitutional" was implicitly repudiated by NY Times v US.

matthewdgreen 6y ago

The fact that every online interaction (almost unavoidably) gives valuable data to corporations is bad enough. I do not understand why you would want to compound the damage by pouring that information directly into the hands of the government.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
I am for keeping personal information siloed and ideally offline as much as possible. I am not sure that it is good to make it impossible to trace where online information came from though.
- chii 6y ago
  if somebody "anonymously" taped banners and posters on the street espousing messages, would it make sense to have a camera record every public space and identify who placed those banners there?
  - silvester23 6y ago
    I'm not 100% sure where I stand on the issue but that analogy falls a little flat - the potential reach of a couple of posters on a couple of streets is much smaller than that of posts online.
    - chii 6y ago
      so you're saying that as long as you can limit the reach of a message, anonymity is fine? Where and who decides that line? I think society should either accept that if there should be anonymity, that there must also be free speech (which includes free speech you may not like). And the inverse is also true - that if there's no anonymity, then there can be no free speech (including free speech you _do_ like).
      - jamespo 6y ago
        This might shock you but the world is full of shades of grey
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    I think in the physical space there's a lot of ways investigators can discover this information after the fact, whether it be interviewing witnesses, looking for forensic evidence (fingerprints, DNA), etc. Things that, arguably, are not privacy violating, but can be acquired in investigating a specific problem. The difference in the digital space is that Twitter/Facebook/etc. have all that forensic data... and then just refuse to provide it.

konjin 6y ago

>We get disinterested social networks allowing fake news that cause direct harm, created by anonymous users who they don't want to reveal. You should probably look at the historical cases about harm and speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States >The Court, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., held that Schenck's criminal conviction was constitutional. The statute only applied to successful obstructions of the draft, but common-law precedents allowed prosecution for attempts that were dangerously close to success. Attempts made by speech or writing could be punished like other attempted crimes; the First Amendment did not protect speech encouraging men to resist induction, because, "when a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right."[7] In other words, the court held, the circumstances of wartime allow greater restrictions on free speech than would be allowed during peacetime, if only because new and greater dangers are present. Reminder that the US has been at war since 2001. The harm caused by whoever is the perpetrator of the moral panic of the moment always pales in comparison to the harm caused by the response to it. Let a thousand Russian bots post on facebook, it will cause less damage to society than a single deleted post.

jcranmer 6y ago
You do realize that Schenck v US is no longer the current standard for restriction on speech, right? Brandenburg v Ohio tightens the restrictions to "imminent lawless action", and the underlying philosophy exhibited in "publishing critical speech of the government in war isn't constitutional" was implicitly repudiated by NY Times v US.