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New technologies brought new challenges. There was no social network in the 2000s and before. No retweet button, no "curated" timeline that showed you what you

New technologies brought new challenges. There was no social network in the 2000s and before. No retweet button, no "curated" timeline that showed you what you "like". YouTube did not try to push more videos like the ones you watched previously until the mid 2010s. Free speech does not have the same meaning as before. Before it just meant that you could say whatever you wanted. Now people use it implicitly to mean that they can say whatever they want, but also that they are entitled to have their thoughts broadcasted at large using the amplification mechanisms I mentioned above. While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible. If you think about it, before social networks, amplification was done through TV and newspapers, and those have editorial boards that filters the content they share. If a newspaper's staff is pro-environment, they can prevent any columnist writing anything that denies climate change, and it's not controversial. However the problem is how do we decide who can get free amplification and who can't? Based on what? My preference would be that no one is, and we go back to uncurated things and to an internet where you have to look for the things you want to read/watch, versus getting content pushed onto you.

rayiner 6y ago
You’re mischaracterizing how free speech was viewed in the recent past. “Free speech” (as a cultural value, I’m not talking about the first amendment) was about the marketplace of ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketplace_of_ideas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketplace_of_ideas. It meant a free market in ideas, where the dominant ideas arise from competition. What you call “amplification” is just something that makes the marketplace more efficient—it allows ideas to disseminate faster so people can decide which are the good ones and the bad ones. The curation you mention is the antithesis of a free market of ideas.
- canjobear 6y ago
  I understand the theoretical argument, but empirically do you think the quality of ideas that people believe has increased from (say) 2000 to 2020? It seems like there's a lot more going on than just faster dissemination, and the way information travels these days might have introduced new asymmetries and inefficiencies.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    I think the quality of ideas has improved. We focus on disinformation, but social media gets used for a lot of other things. Reading a dry article on police brutality (which let’s face it, people just skipped over in the past) is a lot less impactful than seeing something shared by a friend. I think we’re overestimating the effect of social media. A certain group of highly educated urban liberals is shocked by Trump. (And I don’t say this pejoratively. My college educated friends were literally despondent after he was elected.) And they’re looking for an explanation. And it so happened that social media became a major force around the same time. But I think that’s mostly, though not completely, a coincidence. Social media didn’t create Trump. Right wing populism is happening all over the world, in Europe, India, etc. Its a reaction to liberalism and globalism that’s been brewing for decades. And social media didn’t create Trump’s audience. My mom, a 70-year old Bangladeshi woman who has voted straight ticket Democrat since she was naturalized, thinks Trump is too unpolished, but loves his “energy” and “vigor.” She thinks he would be a “great President” if he could “implement his ideas.” My mom doesn’t have a Twitter account. (I think she’d love Boris Johnson, i.e. Trump with a bit more polish and competent.) She didn’t get this from Breitbart. She watches CNN in a loop all day. Social media isn’t not a factor, but I think folks overestimate how much of a factor.
    - saluk 6y ago
      I'm not surprised at how your mom reacts to Trump. I'm surprised so many young people believe that covid is no big deal. I agree with you that the quality of our ideas has improved, but I also disagree in that the spread of our bad ideas has also improved. Concepts that were held by a fringe of society in the past, like the idea that the Earth is flat have grown their own communities who have interests in keeping those ideas alive. Ideas, bad and good, have gotten a lot stickier. With stickier ideas, the marketplace becomes worse, because nothing ever gets pruned out of it. Too much energy is spent on limiting the growth of bad ideas than can be spent on refining the better ideas.
      - tux1968 6y ago
        > I'm surprised so many young people believe that covid is no big deal. Have you ever entertained the idea that perhaps you're wrong and they're right? I mean it's at least possible that you've been lead to the wrong conclusion by systemic errors that have yet to be identified, and perhaps wont be for many years into the future.
- mattigames 6y ago
  That's not how it works in reality, in reality a lot of gullible people who before internet would have spend their whole lives without hearing the "flat earth theory" now have access to internet and are quickly influenced by a lot of stupid theories because they are pretty bad at distinguishing bad ones from good ones; although just to be clear that is more a failure of the education system than anything else (e.g Japan has near 0 flat-earthers unlike America)
  - nunja 6y ago
    Exactly. People seems to forget that the social landscape of people using Internet in 90/2000s was totally different. As far as I remember, internet was then populated by idealist early adopters, gamers / tech savvy hobbyists. Part of this pool translated to conservative boomers and now Internet is considered as a serious thing.
  - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
    > are quickly influenced by a lot of stupid theories because they are pretty bad at distinguishing bad ones from good ones; Actually this is an interesting problem to think about; what, then, did these people believe before they could get access to crazier ideas? I think you'll find the answer was still, "what they were told to believe". The answer hasn't changed from then to now, we're simply far more aware of being upset at the answer. In a way the problem that was always there has been revealed and some people don't like the loss of control over these people's opinions. Me personally I'm an advocate of "let go, stop controlling, see how things turn out" and then fix the real problems that appear, rather than creating worse problems by squeezing the play doh too tightly. It has the upside of being morally defensible rather than having the air of "I destroyed your life for your own good."
- tunesmith 6y ago
  You're defining "dominant ideas" as the ones that make people the angriest and get the most clicks! That's not the same as quality. That's entirely how those amplification algorithms exist!
  - mmmeff 6y ago
    We need to invest in education to vaccinate the population against deception via clickbait.
    - mattigames 6y ago
      Yep, countries with a greater average IQ have much less people believing dumb theories (e.g about bill gates and covid-19), countries like Japan and South Korea. All countries that reduced funds for public education years ago in a short-sighted attempt to save money are seeing it's dire consequences, and now amplified thanks to the internet.
      - rayiner 6y ago
        Everyone who could vote in 2016 grew up in an age of ever increasing educational funding: https://images.app.goo.gl/ovrFXSUJaJ8tHBTBA https://images.app.goo.gl/ovrFXSUJaJ8tHBTBA
        mattigames 6y ago
        Teachers still complain they have to pay for school supplies from their pockets [0] [1], and if the money is not going to them I wouldn't really call it educational funding [0] https://amp.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/528u9w/teachers_of_reddit_can_you_support_yourself/ https://amp.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/528u9w/teachers_o... [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/time.com/longform/teaching-in-america/%3famp=true https://www.google.com/amp/s/time.com/longform/teaching-in-a...
        rayiner 6y ago
        If you mean “school fiscal responsibility” and not “educational funding” then say that. They are two different things with different solutions.
- glenstein 6y ago
  I don't think I agree that they are mischaracterizing how free speech understood, and I don't think that distinction you are drawing identifies a new idea incompatible with what they are saying. Free speech encompasses a lot of things depending on what you want to emphasize, including a notion in a healthy democracy the best ideas survive critical scrutiny. As other have mentioned, I think however plausible that conception of speech was then, it's utterly ignorant of the problems we're facing today, where ideas spread for reasons that have nothing to do with merit. If anything, I would think you would want to agree with the person you are replying to that the spread of ideas is not due to good ones rising to the top in a marketplace that is selecting for quality.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    Two keys to an actual functional market place, as you allude to, involves both good faith engagement (you aren't going to convince somebody deliberately out to cause harm to stop with a well reasoned argument) and critical evaluation (something that is practically non existent on most of the internet)
  - legolas2412 6y ago
    > As other have mentioned, I think however plausible that conception of speech was then, it's utterly ignorant of the problems we're facing today I think it is the exact opposite. Maybe I have read too many dystopian novels like fahrenheit 451, or 1984, or read too much about Chinese govt's control of its population, but I feel that modern technology has allowed too much censorship power in hands of not just the govt, but a few corporations. And it is extremely important that we do not compromise on free speech now.
    - glenstein 6y ago
      We're dealing with the net result of a few different forces. Social media has enabled a massive avalanche of misinformation, and of this massive avalanche of misinformation, some subset of that new avalanche gets removed. The net effect is that there much more misinformation than there has ever been before. Despite the best efforts of twitter, facebook & youtube they appear to have been virtually powerless to halt the spread. The problem of social media CEOs having too much power is real, and has wrought real damage: Zuckerberg's naive ideas on speech have lead to far too much harm, and now that he's recovering from his free speech trutherism and implementing reforms it's too little, too late. Lastly I would say that if you are looking at this state of affairs and seeing 1984 or fahrenheit 451, you're seeing things wrong. There are fair examples of that, e.g. Hong Kong, mainland China. But the western internet doesn't fit that at all.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  > What you call “amplification” is just something that makes the marketplace more efficient Most efficient in generating engagement for selling banners, not in lifting up the most correct or useful ideas. Was it is, it's pure marketplace manipulation.
- enraged_camel 6y ago
  Yeah but the issue isn't good ideas and bad ideas and a marketplace where they can be disseminated. We're talking about facts and truth vs. misinformation and actual lies. And in that context, Mark Twain's saying comes to mind: a lie can travel halfway around the world before truth can finish putting on its shoes. This is infinitely more true today since the lies in question are manufactured to be as inflammatory and scandalous as possible, so as to keep their consumers engaged, and they can be spread to entire audiences with the click of a button.
- wslack 6y ago
  I don't think moving viral misinformation from chain e-mail to hyper-spread tweets via algorithm has improved the marketplace of ideas.
- SquishyPanda23 6y ago
  > What you call “amplification” is just something that makes the marketplace more efficient—it allows ideas to disseminate faster so people can decide which are the good ones and the bad ones. Can you cite empirical research showing that the process works the way you believe it does?
- btbuildem 6y ago
  That's lofty and all, but all we got in the end was Boaty Mc Boatface. Turns out the most popular things will be the most inane -- by definition, because they appeal to most people. And so we amplify beige slurry.
riffic 6y ago
> no social network in the 2000s and before This isn't really true though. Social networks have existed since the earliest days of humanity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network
nradov 6y ago
We had AOL message boards and similar forums with free amplification before social media.
- cryptoz 6y ago
  The difference in scale is so astronomically large that using 'amplification' for both of these cases is misleading at best. How many AOL users were there, total, in the 90s? Now, how many Twitter users are there, today? It's not even a fair fight. That's only one metric, another would be trust, and clout, and others. The president tweeting is different from a random AOL user posting to a message board. Totally different beasts.
  - axaxs 6y ago
    Huh? Assuming only talking about USA, AOL had more than 30 million subscribers. And that's not counting their family members/guests. Twitter claims to have 40 million active US members, a claim I doubt heavily. They aren't far off.
    - cryptoz 6y ago
      30 million subscribers who read the message boards? And they all took each post as seriously as they do a tweet today? I doubt it. You're also cherry picking from my comment and ignoring the parts about how amplification is different today than then, outside of the numbers scale. Also, I'm not comparing to just the USA twitter users either! It's a global platform. That matters. Retweets are not region-locked!
      - axaxs 6y ago
        Not just message boards, live chat! Thousands and thousands of chat rooms, and everyone on IM, and everyone FWDing inappropriate emails around. I'm not sure how old you are or if you had AOL, but it was by far the most social internet experience I'd ever had! Global users, of course, Twitter trumps it in count, no doubt. I only assumed US users because the post was about US politics.
notadev 6y ago
Wouldn't the obvious choice be to let everyone have the same access to free amplification? No one is being forced to listen, and I'd rather have the ability to ignore what I don't want to see/hear instead of a bunch of 20 somethings Engineers deciding for me.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  Whenever I see a comment like this, I have to point out that they are already deciding what you want to see and hear. On most of the platforms in question you're being suggested content by a bunch of algorithms that you can't inspect, understand, or control. And while it's not censorship, drowning signal in a flood of noise is not that different.
  - nullc 6y ago
    Suppressing in direct messages is pretty different. A lot of people I know use twitter DMs as a primary communication method for people in their own families, even inside the same household. Twitter filtering communication between family members in your home is ... well ... a perfect excuse for me to strongly encourage them to stop using twitter.
- Daishiman 6y ago
  It's impossible because amplification is a zero-sum game. There's a limited amount of attention per human being. Thus everyone vying for attention is competing in this game, and any criteria for choose one amplified voice over the other necessarily results in bias. It is a completely unavoidable artifact of our attention span and mortality, with no possible workaround. Hence why curation and bias becomes the value propositions.
  - cm2187 6y ago
    That’s a good point. In many ways it is a free market for attention span. Except that people can now pick not from a short list of established editors, but from a massive list of interesting people to follow. I think people should be the judge for who they trust and/or want to listen to. I don’t see the “but now we can’t control what they see” objection kindly.
saurik 6y ago
I agree wholeheartedly: the "right to free speech" is not the same as a "right to be heard", but we have managed to conflate the two with all of this "free amplification", as you describe; there is a big difference between someone getting to say something to their followers and that content being broadcast and even recommended by Twitter to random people. I personally believe that if a website has a recommendation algorithm that should be considered an editorial decision they are making and they should be liable for the content they recommend (and much more so than they are today: the same level of standard we hold a newspaper to should apply); but, if a user merely posts something and people have to actively choose to follow the poster, then that's on them (as the website is acting as a utility connecting consenting parties). Doing it like this (which might even be the status quo of the law if Section 230 is repealed, btw) changes what kinds of apps can be built and what businesses models are viable "at scale", but almost certainly for the better: apps that work like how Instagram used to--where you just saw content from exactly who you followed in the order they posted it... something many (if not maybe even most) users preferred but which was clearly less profitable for Facebook--seem like they should be fine and you should get to post whatever you want to the people who opted in to hear what you had to say. People who generally like recommendation systems try to defend all of their algorithmic amplification, and then the sometimes-arbitrary-feeling censorship seemingly required to make them universally viable, but here we see Twitter taking the ridiculously extreme position to even block private messages... the regulatory fallout of this political decision is going to be fascinating to watch.
- codelord 6y ago
  I believe the vast majority of the content you see on Twitter and pretty much everything you see on Facebook is from people you follow (ads excluded). Twitter/FB though use an algorithmic feed mechanism to reorder the posts which makes sense. I think they should be transparent about how they generate the feed, but I don't think you can hold them accountable for the content of a post someone made just because it got reordered to the top by an algorithm.
  - saluk 6y ago
    There are multiple levels. While I like the idea of separating seeing only what my followers post and seeing other posts, it gets really blurry when the people I follow are clicking the "like" and "retweet" buttons. I would guestimate around 30% or more of my twitter feed are posts people I follow have liked or retweeted rather than posted on their own. And the network can make that happen on its own, without an algorithm reordering content - if someone I follow is retweeting something that someone they follow retweeted.
hartator 6y ago
> I believe free amplification is terrible It's exactly what they were saying at the invention of the printing press. Amplification becoming too cheap. Maybe being on the side of censorship is always being on the wrong side of history no matter the issue. Can you remember one time in history where we now like "thanks god they censor these thoughts!"?
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  Is it the wrong side of history? Early printing is unambiguously connected with violence just as much as it is connected with intellectual freedom. Blood Libel and the associated murders of innocent jews could not have spread in the same manner without broadsheets. "It is really complicated" is the conclusion that early modern historians of information come to.
- Voloskaya 6y ago
  How exactly is press free amplification? How do I get my random opinion broadcasted to a newspaper audience? I would probably have to write an opinion column and send it to the journal, then they would read it, and decide whether or not they want to publish it. If it's the NYT for example, you can be sure that no matter how well written your piece is, they will never publish something that pushes the theory that COVID-19 is a plot by Bill Gates to put chips into everyone. But you can probably find a sketchy, low-audience journal that would. Well it's the same thing, a well known community was banned from Reddit to prevent them from using Reddit's amplification mechanism (/r/all etc), but they now have their own clone of it, with a smaller audience, that you are free to consult.
  - jorblumesea 6y ago
    I don't agree with the comparison either, but, in the 16th century just about everyone could make a broad side and disseminate whatever they wanted. Literally, wars were started because of this. Similar to today's information age propaganda wars and disinformation, physical media was used in a similar way. There are some valid comparisons here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars
macinjosh 6y ago
Perhaps, instead of outlawing new technology and modes of communication, we should produce more speech to teach people how it works so they don't get sucked in by an algorithm and believe everything they read. Those editorial boards you speak of get things wrong constantly. Limiting who can respond to them in front of an (at least) equally large audience is dangerous and a disservice to all, especially minorities. Limiting who can publish and the size of their audience is categorically a violation of free speech. There is no daylight there.
encom 6y ago
>free amplification This amplification isn't magic. You can't build an audience on YouTube (or anywhere) unless people actually care about what you have to say. And doing that is hard work.
jjtheblunt 6y ago
Usenet newsgroups were social networks, if one recalls the digressive flame wars that could result there, I'd say.
rapind 6y ago
Our problems are simply symptoms of a business model that’s out of control. If I had to choose between advertising and free speech, I’d be happy to utterly abolish advertising. Even though that means completely tearing down the current media industry. Obviously there’s middle ground to be found, but censorship is just treating the symptoms and in the dumbest possible way. We’re just digging the hole deeper and deeper.
mfer 6y ago
Who gets to choose who gets pick the things amplified or not? In today's world these folks get to have a strong influence over how people are influenced. Handling this well is very important. If people misuse that position than they can and will cause people to be influenced certain ways because of it.
- trident1000 6y ago
  People dont really understand how dangerous of a situation were in right now. When big tech platforms can amplify or decrease thoughts, sources, and even political candidates voices, they literally decide politics. Democracy is being challenged. We need to decide if we want kings or democratically elected representatives to be in charge of the country.
  - drewrv 6y ago
    > When big tech platforms can amplify or decrease thoughts, sources, and even political candidates voices, they literally decide politics. That's been happening for some time now, by algorithms that are optimized for outrage, engagement, clicks, etc.
  - root_axis 6y ago
    > People dont really understand how dangerous of a situation were in right now. When big tech platforms can amplify or decrease thoughts, Every form of media has that power, social media is not at all special in this respect. A post getting banned from twitter makes no difference to someone that gets their news from Fox News and talk radio. It's up to the people to manage their own thoughts, same as it ever was.
    - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
      > It's up to the people to manage their own thoughts, same as it ever was. So let them read what you don't want them to. If it isn't illegal or incitement of violence, it doesn't need to be removed.
ars 6y ago
> but also that they are entitled to have their thoughts broadcasted at large using the amplification mechanisms I mentioned above. Twitter is blocking this story in Direct Messages (equivalent to a private email). How is that amplification? Also, Twitter could de-prioritize tweets with the link on a global feed, while still showing them to people who follow the specific person. And that too is not amplification - you asked to see messages from that person, you should be able to see them.
cm2187 6y ago
We are not talking about next video suggestion here. We are talking about censoring direct messages or feeds people deliberately follow. Tech companies inserting their political bias in direct communications. Not amplification.
- tayo42 6y ago
  You're still free to send a text, write a letter, call. Twitter and facebook aren't public utilities. I saw an interesting comparison the other day. If this was a message board from the early 2000s, and the moderator was deleting posts, you move on, not throw a giant fit about free speech using some one else server.
  - josephg 6y ago
    Twitter and facebook have become an internet "public square", kept in monopolistic power by network effects and compulsion mechanisms stronger than casinos. Insofar as they're monopolies, they should be managed by the people as if they were a public space.
    - verdverm 6y ago
      There is prior case law to support this idea. This would be similar to the central area of a mall or when companies provided housing to workers to prevent unionization efforts. Both places were upheld as places where the First Amendment must be upheld, despite private ownership.
    - swixi 6y ago
      By what objective metric(s) do you determine that a particular website has become an internet "public square"?
      - mensetmanusman 6y ago
        When the president of a country is using it.
      - 6y ago
belorn 6y ago
When radio came the first few decades were great, but soon more and more people started to broadcast and corrupting music started to harm society. People demanded that government and only government could artfully decide whom aught to be allowed to speak to the masses and censors cracked down on unlicensed radio. Several decades later however and the enthusiasm for radio censoring lost it appeal. When television came we also had a few early decades where everything were great. There existed one or two stations, and that was it. Then suddenly a flood of people and companies started to use this new technology and harmful video nasty with violent and nude content started to hit society and people cried out once again for government to start censoring and determining whom aught to be allowed to speak to the masses. Several decades again and the enthusiasm for TV and movie censoring lost it charm. Then Internet came and everything was fine the first few decades with only a few major websites like yahoo and myspace. Then 4chan and 8chan was created and quickly people want censoring again, but this time its not the government who should determine who aught to be allowed to speak to the masses but rather a handful of companies in charge of social networks and cloud services. This is where we are now. In a few decades, I predict the enthusiasm for Internet censorship will drop a bit as it done for all previous technologies that enables unregulated amplification of speech.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dionian 6y ago
> While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible. This is so abusable. Even the best of intentions won't stop it from being abused horribly. I value twitter much less. The same thing is happening there that happened to the declining legacy media.
liquidify 6y ago
There have always be who are so fragile that they can never handle freedom. I feel sorry for you.
chmod600 6y ago
But Twitter blocked direct messages, too. Your argument somewhat makes sense for FB, depending on the details. But Twitter outright censored this content.
- throwawaymanbot 6y ago
  Twitter already "censors" Nazi content in Germany. As a private company it has rules. You cant force it to carry your message of hate/disinformation/nazism/whatever. When the gov decrees you cant say those things, the run crying. But its just a joke if you are "upset" now.
hardtke 6y ago
Stepping outside the US, there is evidence that misinformation spread of Facebook (including WhatsApp) was directly responsible for the Rohingya genocide and forced migration [1]. At what point do these platforms have an obligation to not allow themselves be used for such campaigns? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
- username90 6y ago
  Letting Facebook censor WhatsApp is like censoring SMS. Should we let private companies censor SMS messages?
bgilroy26 6y ago
I read all of the replies to you looking for a positive one to vote up and couldn't find one I think your phrasing of this new problem for our society is very clear and objective. By the power invested in me as a computer possessor with an internet connection, I declare this to be a good idea, worthy of amplification!
thaumasiotes 6y ago
> While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible. This thought is the exact reason the first amendment separately mentions freedom of "speech" (hard to accomplish much with it) and "the press" (much more effective).
gshulegaard 6y ago
I would second this and take it a step further and point out that the right to free speech is not the right to freely say whatever you want. This is particularly sticky when it comes to misinformation. Currently we have systems which make misinformation more dangerous (primarily via amplification) and a bunch of people conflating free speech with the freedom to say whatever you want. I think what we still need to explore is whether or not there is a responsibility on individuals to be factually accurate when engaged in amplified speech. What does that even mean? Do you simply need to believe what you are saying at the time? Or is the standard higher? Is this responsibility shifted if you provide a citation (where the responsibility of the cited source shoulders some of the responsibility for your derivative thoughts)? It's a particularly thorny issue. One that isn't necessarily new, but is particularly acute in contemporary times. I am against censorship, but I also recognize certain trends which seem to be deepening divides and strengthening conspiracy theories in our society.
- username90 6y ago
  Giving big tech companies even more power than they already have isn't the right move though.
  - gshulegaard 6y ago
    Never said we should. Just because they are part of the problem doesn't mean they have to be part of the solution.
biophysboy 6y ago
Yes, this exactly: social media platforms blur the boundary between communication and broadcasting, and are causing new debates over free speech.
mikenew 6y ago
> People were also stopped from sending the article in a private direct message In this instance, the solution has already reached beyond the realm of "don't allow certain things to be amplified". You literally cannot share this information even in a private 1-on-1 chat. > we go back to uncurated things Yeah. The more I reflect on things the more I think social networks are just a thing that shouldn't exist. Although, of course, here we are on hacker news talking about it. So IDK. Maybe you just can't unring that bell and we're just screwed.
- btbuildem 6y ago
  They can text it, email it, send it over messenger or whatsapp..
- RonanTheGrey 6y ago
  > The more I reflect on things the more I think social networks are just a thing that shouldn't exist. I keep ending up there too honestly. We'll always build something "like" socializing online. Humans don't stop "humaning" if you get my meaning. We really do need to figure it out though... either mostly agree it's a bad idea, or figure out how to do it without it being as destructive as it is.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
lukejduncan 6y ago
The challenge with this framing is that you're equating social media to newspapers which provide editorialization. IIRC, one of the core distinctions that allow many tech companies to avoid liability for consumer generated content is not having an editorial role. If they embrace being media companies and editors I believe different regulations will apply to tech companies than currently do.
- ip26 6y ago
  Isn't that why they are cracking down now? As social media platforms were increasingly used to spread outright lies, propaganda, and radicalization, the public started to demand social media apply editorial functions- and here we are today.
  - username90 6y ago
    "The public", it was a small group of elites. And of course big tech aren't against getting more power so they "comply", they were just waiting for the chance to do it without significant backlash.
yowlingcat 6y ago
> My preference would be that no one is, and we go back to uncurated things and to an internet where you have to look for the things you want to read/watch, versus getting content pushed onto you. What a well written response, my friend. Hats off. Perhaps EdgeRank truly was a pandora's box we should have left well enough alone. Who knew how much havoc a simple matrix determinant could cause?
Zarath 6y ago
Tell that to megacorporations? Why are prescription drugs allowed to be advertised on TV? Free speech.
airtonix 6y ago
speech is communication. communication is between two or more people. You seem to be misguided as to what Free Speech means.
4bpp 6y ago
Counterpoints: - Attention is a zero-sum game. In the past, we'd get more of our news from local papers, radio stations or lunch break gossip, resulting in a natural diversity of viewpoints. Nowadays, it's all the same social media outlets and handful of national newspapers (whose staff generally spend all day and form their opinions on Twitter, which thus winds up being upstream anyway) for everyone. Compared to what we had before, one side winds up getting free amplification anyway. - I don't think free speech as a positive right for the speaker is necessarily the correct framing; at least, it neglects half of the issue at hand. I consider it at least equally important that "free speech" protects my right as an information consumer to get exposed to as many viewpoints as possible on a matter. Right now, my sense is that national newspapers all echo the Twitterati consensus, Facebook has developed in such a way that social and increasingly technological pressure would not allow even those people on my friend list who I suspect had interesting and generally well-thought-out non-mainstream opinions to share them with me, and the rest is all conspiracy websites that are unusable as a source because they've largely been cut off from the means of establishing credibility and separating wheat from chaff via social proof. If I were a US voter (I'm not), I'd want to know whether Biden was involved in corrupt dealings. As it stands, it seems that if there were a compelling case that he was (and, well, I don't know if there is one!), the media and its allies would be working overtime to prevent me from learning about it.
phkahler 6y ago
>> and we go back to uncurated things and to an internet where you have to look for the things you want to read/watch, versus getting content pushed onto you. But people are lazy. Why write a post when you "share" some crap that came through your feed with one click. We will get to self hosted distributed social media when it becomes easier than Facebook or Twitter.
eloisius 6y ago
Okay so maybe we need to start regulating AI, or machine-curated content, or recommendation systems, but not stamping out one of the cornerstones of western intellectual culture. Free speech is certainly more important than YouTube’s engagement metrics.
- nobody9999 6y ago
  >Free speech is certainly more important than YouTube’s engagement metrics. More important to you. Wanna guess what's more important to YouTube?
  - eloisius 6y ago
    I’m not disagreeing with that, and I’m also aware that as a private company, whatever they do with their website isn’t an infringement upon first amendment rights. I’m just bristling at the parent comment who seemed to be saying that in our new AI-driven world, free speech is no longer an intrinsically valuable thing.
    - nobody9999 6y ago
      >I’m not disagreeing with that, and I’m also aware that as a private company, whatever they do with their website isn’t an infringement upon first amendment rights. I’m just bristling at the parent comment who seemed to be saying that in our new AI-driven world, free speech is no longer an intrinsically valuable thing. Those are all good points. I didn't understand GP to be claiming that ML algorithms trump free speech, which may explain why we're actually in violent agreement WRT YouTube's recommendation algorithms. I'd note that I avoid the big social media sites like the plague, and not even primarily for the toxic atmosphere. Rather, I find the business model to be inherently cynical, exploitative and destructive of communities (cf. sites like nextdoor.com). As long as the incentives (maximization of advertising dollars) favor pushing for ever higher engagement, the cycle that creates increasingly fine-tuned filter bubbles and "targeted" advertising, we're going to see less focus on free expression from large corporations, because their primary goal is to maximize profit. I believe that this model will eventually collapse and be replaced (with something better or worse, I don't know) with a different one. My concern is in the damage that this will do to our discourse and societal cohesion in the meantime. Which points to larger problems with our economic model. Maximizing short-term profit is fetishized as all-important, regardless of potential downsides[0]. That focus legitimizes predatory behavior based on the (incorrect) idea that captialism is necessarily a zero-sum game. This distorts the economy and the culture, pitting us against each other in surprising (and very destructive) ways. I am most certainly not advocating that we abandon capitalism, as its had a largely positive effect on health, wealth, technological advancement and a host of other areas. Rather, I believe we need to change the incentives around markets to encourage a broader, fairer capitalism that creates increased prosperity for everyone, rather than those already at the top. [0] From a long-term perspective, focusing primarily on short-term extraction of value from the economy is self-defeating. Primarily because our economy's success is based on consumer spending (~70% of the US' GDP is consumer spending). Through wage suppression, rent-seeking and (a good thing) automation, we're reducing the ability of larger and larger segments of the population to contribute to that 2/3+ of the economy. If unchecked, we'll eventually get to the point where wealth and income are so concentrated that we won't be able to sustain that model and everyone will lose. Because there are only so many pairs of jeans, lava lamps, snow globes, raisins, cars, houses or pizza pies that any one individual or household can use. This argues for a much broader distribution of economic resources (wages, access to capital, safety nets, infrastructure, etc., etc., etc.) than we have now. This could provide enormous benefits to those who have the least and, in the long-term, those who have the most. Beyond that, it can create a stronger, more resilient economy for everyone.
verroq 6y ago
If you have free speech but no-one is allowed to hear it. Is it still free speech? How is this any different to “you are free to speak but you’ll be murdered after you do”. You’re still free to “speak”, you’ll just die after. Freedom of speech right?
3131s 6y ago
I believe free amplification is terrible. Why? So that poor people can't be heard?
- Voloskaya 6y ago
  You are confused with the meaning of "free" in this context.
  - 3131s 6y ago
    I'm not.

rayiner 6y ago

You’re mischaracterizing how free speech was viewed in the recent past. “Free speech” (as a cultural value, I’m not talking about the first amendment) was about the marketplace of ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketplace_of_ideas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketplace_of_ideas. It meant a free market in ideas, where the dominant ideas arise from competition. What you call “amplification” is just something that makes the marketplace more efficient—it allows ideas to disseminate faster so people can decide which are the good ones and the bad ones. The curation you mention is the antithesis of a free market of ideas.

canjobear 6y ago
I understand the theoretical argument, but empirically do you think the quality of ideas that people believe has increased from (say) 2000 to 2020? It seems like there's a lot more going on than just faster dissemination, and the way information travels these days might have introduced new asymmetries and inefficiencies.
- rayiner 6y ago
  I think the quality of ideas has improved. We focus on disinformation, but social media gets used for a lot of other things. Reading a dry article on police brutality (which let’s face it, people just skipped over in the past) is a lot less impactful than seeing something shared by a friend. I think we’re overestimating the effect of social media. A certain group of highly educated urban liberals is shocked by Trump. (And I don’t say this pejoratively. My college educated friends were literally despondent after he was elected.) And they’re looking for an explanation. And it so happened that social media became a major force around the same time. But I think that’s mostly, though not completely, a coincidence. Social media didn’t create Trump. Right wing populism is happening all over the world, in Europe, India, etc. Its a reaction to liberalism and globalism that’s been brewing for decades. And social media didn’t create Trump’s audience. My mom, a 70-year old Bangladeshi woman who has voted straight ticket Democrat since she was naturalized, thinks Trump is too unpolished, but loves his “energy” and “vigor.” She thinks he would be a “great President” if he could “implement his ideas.” My mom doesn’t have a Twitter account. (I think she’d love Boris Johnson, i.e. Trump with a bit more polish and competent.) She didn’t get this from Breitbart. She watches CNN in a loop all day. Social media isn’t not a factor, but I think folks overestimate how much of a factor.
  - saluk 6y ago
    I'm not surprised at how your mom reacts to Trump. I'm surprised so many young people believe that covid is no big deal. I agree with you that the quality of our ideas has improved, but I also disagree in that the spread of our bad ideas has also improved. Concepts that were held by a fringe of society in the past, like the idea that the Earth is flat have grown their own communities who have interests in keeping those ideas alive. Ideas, bad and good, have gotten a lot stickier. With stickier ideas, the marketplace becomes worse, because nothing ever gets pruned out of it. Too much energy is spent on limiting the growth of bad ideas than can be spent on refining the better ideas.
    - tux1968 6y ago
      > I'm surprised so many young people believe that covid is no big deal. Have you ever entertained the idea that perhaps you're wrong and they're right? I mean it's at least possible that you've been lead to the wrong conclusion by systemic errors that have yet to be identified, and perhaps wont be for many years into the future.
mattigames 6y ago
That's not how it works in reality, in reality a lot of gullible people who before internet would have spend their whole lives without hearing the "flat earth theory" now have access to internet and are quickly influenced by a lot of stupid theories because they are pretty bad at distinguishing bad ones from good ones; although just to be clear that is more a failure of the education system than anything else (e.g Japan has near 0 flat-earthers unlike America)
- nunja 6y ago
  Exactly. People seems to forget that the social landscape of people using Internet in 90/2000s was totally different. As far as I remember, internet was then populated by idealist early adopters, gamers / tech savvy hobbyists. Part of this pool translated to conservative boomers and now Internet is considered as a serious thing.
- RonanTheGrey 6y ago
  > are quickly influenced by a lot of stupid theories because they are pretty bad at distinguishing bad ones from good ones; Actually this is an interesting problem to think about; what, then, did these people believe before they could get access to crazier ideas? I think you'll find the answer was still, "what they were told to believe". The answer hasn't changed from then to now, we're simply far more aware of being upset at the answer. In a way the problem that was always there has been revealed and some people don't like the loss of control over these people's opinions. Me personally I'm an advocate of "let go, stop controlling, see how things turn out" and then fix the real problems that appear, rather than creating worse problems by squeezing the play doh too tightly. It has the upside of being morally defensible rather than having the air of "I destroyed your life for your own good."
tunesmith 6y ago
You're defining "dominant ideas" as the ones that make people the angriest and get the most clicks! That's not the same as quality. That's entirely how those amplification algorithms exist!
- mmmeff 6y ago
  We need to invest in education to vaccinate the population against deception via clickbait.
  - mattigames 6y ago
    Yep, countries with a greater average IQ have much less people believing dumb theories (e.g about bill gates and covid-19), countries like Japan and South Korea. All countries that reduced funds for public education years ago in a short-sighted attempt to save money are seeing it's dire consequences, and now amplified thanks to the internet.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      Everyone who could vote in 2016 grew up in an age of ever increasing educational funding: https://images.app.goo.gl/ovrFXSUJaJ8tHBTBA https://images.app.goo.gl/ovrFXSUJaJ8tHBTBA
      - mattigames 6y ago
        Teachers still complain they have to pay for school supplies from their pockets [0] [1], and if the money is not going to them I wouldn't really call it educational funding [0] https://amp.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/528u9w/teachers_of_reddit_can_you_support_yourself/ https://amp.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/528u9w/teachers_o... [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/time.com/longform/teaching-in-america/%3famp=true https://www.google.com/amp/s/time.com/longform/teaching-in-a...
        rayiner 6y ago
        If you mean “school fiscal responsibility” and not “educational funding” then say that. They are two different things with different solutions.
glenstein 6y ago
I don't think I agree that they are mischaracterizing how free speech understood, and I don't think that distinction you are drawing identifies a new idea incompatible with what they are saying. Free speech encompasses a lot of things depending on what you want to emphasize, including a notion in a healthy democracy the best ideas survive critical scrutiny. As other have mentioned, I think however plausible that conception of speech was then, it's utterly ignorant of the problems we're facing today, where ideas spread for reasons that have nothing to do with merit. If anything, I would think you would want to agree with the person you are replying to that the spread of ideas is not due to good ones rising to the top in a marketplace that is selecting for quality.
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  Two keys to an actual functional market place, as you allude to, involves both good faith engagement (you aren't going to convince somebody deliberately out to cause harm to stop with a well reasoned argument) and critical evaluation (something that is practically non existent on most of the internet)
- legolas2412 6y ago
  > As other have mentioned, I think however plausible that conception of speech was then, it's utterly ignorant of the problems we're facing today I think it is the exact opposite. Maybe I have read too many dystopian novels like fahrenheit 451, or 1984, or read too much about Chinese govt's control of its population, but I feel that modern technology has allowed too much censorship power in hands of not just the govt, but a few corporations. And it is extremely important that we do not compromise on free speech now.
  - glenstein 6y ago
    We're dealing with the net result of a few different forces. Social media has enabled a massive avalanche of misinformation, and of this massive avalanche of misinformation, some subset of that new avalanche gets removed. The net effect is that there much more misinformation than there has ever been before. Despite the best efforts of twitter, facebook & youtube they appear to have been virtually powerless to halt the spread. The problem of social media CEOs having too much power is real, and has wrought real damage: Zuckerberg's naive ideas on speech have lead to far too much harm, and now that he's recovering from his free speech trutherism and implementing reforms it's too little, too late. Lastly I would say that if you are looking at this state of affairs and seeing 1984 or fahrenheit 451, you're seeing things wrong. There are fair examples of that, e.g. Hong Kong, mainland China. But the western internet doesn't fit that at all.
rbanffy 6y ago
> What you call “amplification” is just something that makes the marketplace more efficient Most efficient in generating engagement for selling banners, not in lifting up the most correct or useful ideas. Was it is, it's pure marketplace manipulation.
enraged_camel 6y ago
Yeah but the issue isn't good ideas and bad ideas and a marketplace where they can be disseminated. We're talking about facts and truth vs. misinformation and actual lies. And in that context, Mark Twain's saying comes to mind: a lie can travel halfway around the world before truth can finish putting on its shoes. This is infinitely more true today since the lies in question are manufactured to be as inflammatory and scandalous as possible, so as to keep their consumers engaged, and they can be spread to entire audiences with the click of a button.
wslack 6y ago
I don't think moving viral misinformation from chain e-mail to hyper-spread tweets via algorithm has improved the marketplace of ideas.
SquishyPanda23 6y ago
> What you call “amplification” is just something that makes the marketplace more efficient—it allows ideas to disseminate faster so people can decide which are the good ones and the bad ones. Can you cite empirical research showing that the process works the way you believe it does?
btbuildem 6y ago
That's lofty and all, but all we got in the end was Boaty Mc Boatface. Turns out the most popular things will be the most inane -- by definition, because they appeal to most people. And so we amplify beige slurry.

riffic 6y ago

> no social network in the 2000s and before This isn't really true though. Social networks have existed since the earliest days of humanity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network

nradov 6y ago

We had AOL message boards and similar forums with free amplification before social media.

cryptoz 6y ago
The difference in scale is so astronomically large that using 'amplification' for both of these cases is misleading at best. How many AOL users were there, total, in the 90s? Now, how many Twitter users are there, today? It's not even a fair fight. That's only one metric, another would be trust, and clout, and others. The president tweeting is different from a random AOL user posting to a message board. Totally different beasts.
- axaxs 6y ago
  Huh? Assuming only talking about USA, AOL had more than 30 million subscribers. And that's not counting their family members/guests. Twitter claims to have 40 million active US members, a claim I doubt heavily. They aren't far off.
  - cryptoz 6y ago
    30 million subscribers who read the message boards? And they all took each post as seriously as they do a tweet today? I doubt it. You're also cherry picking from my comment and ignoring the parts about how amplification is different today than then, outside of the numbers scale. Also, I'm not comparing to just the USA twitter users either! It's a global platform. That matters. Retweets are not region-locked!
    - axaxs 6y ago
      Not just message boards, live chat! Thousands and thousands of chat rooms, and everyone on IM, and everyone FWDing inappropriate emails around. I'm not sure how old you are or if you had AOL, but it was by far the most social internet experience I'd ever had! Global users, of course, Twitter trumps it in count, no doubt. I only assumed US users because the post was about US politics.

notadev 6y ago

Wouldn't the obvious choice be to let everyone have the same access to free amplification? No one is being forced to listen, and I'd rather have the ability to ignore what I don't want to see/hear instead of a bunch of 20 somethings Engineers deciding for me.

AlexandrB 6y ago
Whenever I see a comment like this, I have to point out that they are already deciding what you want to see and hear. On most of the platforms in question you're being suggested content by a bunch of algorithms that you can't inspect, understand, or control. And while it's not censorship, drowning signal in a flood of noise is not that different.
- nullc 6y ago
  Suppressing in direct messages is pretty different. A lot of people I know use twitter DMs as a primary communication method for people in their own families, even inside the same household. Twitter filtering communication between family members in your home is ... well ... a perfect excuse for me to strongly encourage them to stop using twitter.
Daishiman 6y ago
It's impossible because amplification is a zero-sum game. There's a limited amount of attention per human being. Thus everyone vying for attention is competing in this game, and any criteria for choose one amplified voice over the other necessarily results in bias. It is a completely unavoidable artifact of our attention span and mortality, with no possible workaround. Hence why curation and bias becomes the value propositions.
- cm2187 6y ago
  That’s a good point. In many ways it is a free market for attention span. Except that people can now pick not from a short list of established editors, but from a massive list of interesting people to follow. I think people should be the judge for who they trust and/or want to listen to. I don’t see the “but now we can’t control what they see” objection kindly.

saurik 6y ago

I agree wholeheartedly: the "right to free speech" is not the same as a "right to be heard", but we have managed to conflate the two with all of this "free amplification", as you describe; there is a big difference between someone getting to say something to their followers and that content being broadcast and even recommended by Twitter to random people. I personally believe that if a website has a recommendation algorithm that should be considered an editorial decision they are making and they should be liable for the content they recommend (and much more so than they are today: the same level of standard we hold a newspaper to should apply); but, if a user merely posts something and people have to actively choose to follow the poster, then that's on them (as the website is acting as a utility connecting consenting parties). Doing it like this (which might even be the status quo of the law if Section 230 is repealed, btw) changes what kinds of apps can be built and what businesses models are viable "at scale", but almost certainly for the better: apps that work like how Instagram used to--where you just saw content from exactly who you followed in the order they posted it... something many (if not maybe even most) users preferred but which was clearly less profitable for Facebook--seem like they should be fine and you should get to post whatever you want to the people who opted in to hear what you had to say. People who generally like recommendation systems try to defend all of their algorithmic amplification, and then the sometimes-arbitrary-feeling censorship seemingly required to make them universally viable, but here we see Twitter taking the ridiculously extreme position to even block private messages... the regulatory fallout of this political decision is going to be fascinating to watch.

codelord 6y ago
I believe the vast majority of the content you see on Twitter and pretty much everything you see on Facebook is from people you follow (ads excluded). Twitter/FB though use an algorithmic feed mechanism to reorder the posts which makes sense. I think they should be transparent about how they generate the feed, but I don't think you can hold them accountable for the content of a post someone made just because it got reordered to the top by an algorithm.
- saluk 6y ago
  There are multiple levels. While I like the idea of separating seeing only what my followers post and seeing other posts, it gets really blurry when the people I follow are clicking the "like" and "retweet" buttons. I would guestimate around 30% or more of my twitter feed are posts people I follow have liked or retweeted rather than posted on their own. And the network can make that happen on its own, without an algorithm reordering content - if someone I follow is retweeting something that someone they follow retweeted.

hartator 6y ago

> I believe free amplification is terrible It's exactly what they were saying at the invention of the printing press. Amplification becoming too cheap. Maybe being on the side of censorship is always being on the wrong side of history no matter the issue. Can you remember one time in history where we now like "thanks god they censor these thoughts!"?

UncleMeat 6y ago
Is it the wrong side of history? Early printing is unambiguously connected with violence just as much as it is connected with intellectual freedom. Blood Libel and the associated murders of innocent jews could not have spread in the same manner without broadsheets. "It is really complicated" is the conclusion that early modern historians of information come to.
Voloskaya 6y ago
How exactly is press free amplification? How do I get my random opinion broadcasted to a newspaper audience? I would probably have to write an opinion column and send it to the journal, then they would read it, and decide whether or not they want to publish it. If it's the NYT for example, you can be sure that no matter how well written your piece is, they will never publish something that pushes the theory that COVID-19 is a plot by Bill Gates to put chips into everyone. But you can probably find a sketchy, low-audience journal that would. Well it's the same thing, a well known community was banned from Reddit to prevent them from using Reddit's amplification mechanism (/r/all etc), but they now have their own clone of it, with a smaller audience, that you are free to consult.
- jorblumesea 6y ago
  I don't agree with the comparison either, but, in the 16th century just about everyone could make a broad side and disseminate whatever they wanted. Literally, wars were started because of this. Similar to today's information age propaganda wars and disinformation, physical media was used in a similar way. There are some valid comparisons here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars

macinjosh 6y ago

Perhaps, instead of outlawing new technology and modes of communication, we should produce more speech to teach people how it works so they don't get sucked in by an algorithm and believe everything they read. Those editorial boards you speak of get things wrong constantly. Limiting who can respond to them in front of an (at least) equally large audience is dangerous and a disservice to all, especially minorities. Limiting who can publish and the size of their audience is categorically a violation of free speech. There is no daylight there.

encom 6y ago

>free amplification This amplification isn't magic. You can't build an audience on YouTube (or anywhere) unless people actually care about what you have to say. And doing that is hard work.

jjtheblunt 6y ago

Usenet newsgroups were social networks, if one recalls the digressive flame wars that could result there, I'd say.

rapind 6y ago

Our problems are simply symptoms of a business model that’s out of control. If I had to choose between advertising and free speech, I’d be happy to utterly abolish advertising. Even though that means completely tearing down the current media industry. Obviously there’s middle ground to be found, but censorship is just treating the symptoms and in the dumbest possible way. We’re just digging the hole deeper and deeper.

mfer 6y ago

Who gets to choose who gets pick the things amplified or not? In today's world these folks get to have a strong influence over how people are influenced. Handling this well is very important. If people misuse that position than they can and will cause people to be influenced certain ways because of it.

trident1000 6y ago
People dont really understand how dangerous of a situation were in right now. When big tech platforms can amplify or decrease thoughts, sources, and even political candidates voices, they literally decide politics. Democracy is being challenged. We need to decide if we want kings or democratically elected representatives to be in charge of the country.
- drewrv 6y ago
  > When big tech platforms can amplify or decrease thoughts, sources, and even political candidates voices, they literally decide politics. That's been happening for some time now, by algorithms that are optimized for outrage, engagement, clicks, etc.
- root_axis 6y ago
  > People dont really understand how dangerous of a situation were in right now. When big tech platforms can amplify or decrease thoughts, Every form of media has that power, social media is not at all special in this respect. A post getting banned from twitter makes no difference to someone that gets their news from Fox News and talk radio. It's up to the people to manage their own thoughts, same as it ever was.
  - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
    > It's up to the people to manage their own thoughts, same as it ever was. So let them read what you don't want them to. If it isn't illegal or incitement of violence, it doesn't need to be removed.

ars 6y ago

> but also that they are entitled to have their thoughts broadcasted at large using the amplification mechanisms I mentioned above. Twitter is blocking this story in Direct Messages (equivalent to a private email). How is that amplification? Also, Twitter could de-prioritize tweets with the link on a global feed, while still showing them to people who follow the specific person. And that too is not amplification - you asked to see messages from that person, you should be able to see them.

cm2187 6y ago

We are not talking about next video suggestion here. We are talking about censoring direct messages or feeds people deliberately follow. Tech companies inserting their political bias in direct communications. Not amplification.

tayo42 6y ago
You're still free to send a text, write a letter, call. Twitter and facebook aren't public utilities. I saw an interesting comparison the other day. If this was a message board from the early 2000s, and the moderator was deleting posts, you move on, not throw a giant fit about free speech using some one else server.
- josephg 6y ago
  Twitter and facebook have become an internet "public square", kept in monopolistic power by network effects and compulsion mechanisms stronger than casinos. Insofar as they're monopolies, they should be managed by the people as if they were a public space.
  - verdverm 6y ago
    There is prior case law to support this idea. This would be similar to the central area of a mall or when companies provided housing to workers to prevent unionization efforts. Both places were upheld as places where the First Amendment must be upheld, despite private ownership.
  - swixi 6y ago
    By what objective metric(s) do you determine that a particular website has become an internet "public square"?
    - mensetmanusman 6y ago
      When the president of a country is using it.
    - 6y ago

belorn 6y ago

When radio came the first few decades were great, but soon more and more people started to broadcast and corrupting music started to harm society. People demanded that government and only government could artfully decide whom aught to be allowed to speak to the masses and censors cracked down on unlicensed radio. Several decades later however and the enthusiasm for radio censoring lost it appeal. When television came we also had a few early decades where everything were great. There existed one or two stations, and that was it. Then suddenly a flood of people and companies started to use this new technology and harmful video nasty with violent and nude content started to hit society and people cried out once again for government to start censoring and determining whom aught to be allowed to speak to the masses. Several decades again and the enthusiasm for TV and movie censoring lost it charm. Then Internet came and everything was fine the first few decades with only a few major websites like yahoo and myspace. Then 4chan and 8chan was created and quickly people want censoring again, but this time its not the government who should determine who aught to be allowed to speak to the masses but rather a handful of companies in charge of social networks and cloud services. This is where we are now. In a few decades, I predict the enthusiasm for Internet censorship will drop a bit as it done for all previous technologies that enables unregulated amplification of speech.

deleted 6y ago
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dionian 6y ago

> While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible. This is so abusable. Even the best of intentions won't stop it from being abused horribly. I value twitter much less. The same thing is happening there that happened to the declining legacy media.

liquidify 6y ago

There have always be who are so fragile that they can never handle freedom. I feel sorry for you.

chmod600 6y ago

But Twitter blocked direct messages, too. Your argument somewhat makes sense for FB, depending on the details. But Twitter outright censored this content.

throwawaymanbot 6y ago
Twitter already "censors" Nazi content in Germany. As a private company it has rules. You cant force it to carry your message of hate/disinformation/nazism/whatever. When the gov decrees you cant say those things, the run crying. But its just a joke if you are "upset" now.

hardtke 6y ago

Stepping outside the US, there is evidence that misinformation spread of Facebook (including WhatsApp) was directly responsible for the Rohingya genocide and forced migration [1]. At what point do these platforms have an obligation to not allow themselves be used for such campaigns? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

username90 6y ago
Letting Facebook censor WhatsApp is like censoring SMS. Should we let private companies censor SMS messages?

bgilroy26 6y ago

I read all of the replies to you looking for a positive one to vote up and couldn't find one I think your phrasing of this new problem for our society is very clear and objective. By the power invested in me as a computer possessor with an internet connection, I declare this to be a good idea, worthy of amplification!

thaumasiotes 6y ago

> While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible. This thought is the exact reason the first amendment separately mentions freedom of "speech" (hard to accomplish much with it) and "the press" (much more effective).

gshulegaard 6y ago

I would second this and take it a step further and point out that the right to free speech is not the right to freely say whatever you want. This is particularly sticky when it comes to misinformation. Currently we have systems which make misinformation more dangerous (primarily via amplification) and a bunch of people conflating free speech with the freedom to say whatever you want. I think what we still need to explore is whether or not there is a responsibility on individuals to be factually accurate when engaged in amplified speech. What does that even mean? Do you simply need to believe what you are saying at the time? Or is the standard higher? Is this responsibility shifted if you provide a citation (where the responsibility of the cited source shoulders some of the responsibility for your derivative thoughts)? It's a particularly thorny issue. One that isn't necessarily new, but is particularly acute in contemporary times. I am against censorship, but I also recognize certain trends which seem to be deepening divides and strengthening conspiracy theories in our society.

username90 6y ago
Giving big tech companies even more power than they already have isn't the right move though.
- gshulegaard 6y ago
  Never said we should. Just because they are part of the problem doesn't mean they have to be part of the solution.

biophysboy 6y ago

Yes, this exactly: social media platforms blur the boundary between communication and broadcasting, and are causing new debates over free speech.

mikenew 6y ago

> People were also stopped from sending the article in a private direct message In this instance, the solution has already reached beyond the realm of "don't allow certain things to be amplified". You literally cannot share this information even in a private 1-on-1 chat. > we go back to uncurated things Yeah. The more I reflect on things the more I think social networks are just a thing that shouldn't exist. Although, of course, here we are on hacker news talking about it. So IDK. Maybe you just can't unring that bell and we're just screwed.

btbuildem 6y ago
They can text it, email it, send it over messenger or whatsapp..
RonanTheGrey 6y ago
> The more I reflect on things the more I think social networks are just a thing that shouldn't exist. I keep ending up there too honestly. We'll always build something "like" socializing online. Humans don't stop "humaning" if you get my meaning. We really do need to figure it out though... either mostly agree it's a bad idea, or figure out how to do it without it being as destructive as it is.
deleted 6y ago
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lukejduncan 6y ago

The challenge with this framing is that you're equating social media to newspapers which provide editorialization. IIRC, one of the core distinctions that allow many tech companies to avoid liability for consumer generated content is not having an editorial role. If they embrace being media companies and editors I believe different regulations will apply to tech companies than currently do.

ip26 6y ago
Isn't that why they are cracking down now? As social media platforms were increasingly used to spread outright lies, propaganda, and radicalization, the public started to demand social media apply editorial functions- and here we are today.
- username90 6y ago
  "The public", it was a small group of elites. And of course big tech aren't against getting more power so they "comply", they were just waiting for the chance to do it without significant backlash.

yowlingcat 6y ago

> My preference would be that no one is, and we go back to uncurated things and to an internet where you have to look for the things you want to read/watch, versus getting content pushed onto you. What a well written response, my friend. Hats off. Perhaps EdgeRank truly was a pandora's box we should have left well enough alone. Who knew how much havoc a simple matrix determinant could cause?

Zarath 6y ago

Tell that to megacorporations? Why are prescription drugs allowed to be advertised on TV? Free speech.

airtonix 6y ago

speech is communication. communication is between two or more people. You seem to be misguided as to what Free Speech means.

4bpp 6y ago

Counterpoints: - Attention is a zero-sum game. In the past, we'd get more of our news from local papers, radio stations or lunch break gossip, resulting in a natural diversity of viewpoints. Nowadays, it's all the same social media outlets and handful of national newspapers (whose staff generally spend all day and form their opinions on Twitter, which thus winds up being upstream anyway) for everyone. Compared to what we had before, one side winds up getting free amplification anyway. - I don't think free speech as a positive right for the speaker is necessarily the correct framing; at least, it neglects half of the issue at hand. I consider it at least equally important that "free speech" protects my right as an information consumer to get exposed to as many viewpoints as possible on a matter. Right now, my sense is that national newspapers all echo the Twitterati consensus, Facebook has developed in such a way that social and increasingly technological pressure would not allow even those people on my friend list who I suspect had interesting and generally well-thought-out non-mainstream opinions to share them with me, and the rest is all conspiracy websites that are unusable as a source because they've largely been cut off from the means of establishing credibility and separating wheat from chaff via social proof. If I were a US voter (I'm not), I'd want to know whether Biden was involved in corrupt dealings. As it stands, it seems that if there were a compelling case that he was (and, well, I don't know if there is one!), the media and its allies would be working overtime to prevent me from learning about it.

phkahler 6y ago

>> and we go back to uncurated things and to an internet where you have to look for the things you want to read/watch, versus getting content pushed onto you. But people are lazy. Why write a post when you "share" some crap that came through your feed with one click. We will get to self hosted distributed social media when it becomes easier than Facebook or Twitter.

eloisius 6y ago

Okay so maybe we need to start regulating AI, or machine-curated content, or recommendation systems, but not stamping out one of the cornerstones of western intellectual culture. Free speech is certainly more important than YouTube’s engagement metrics.

nobody9999 6y ago
>Free speech is certainly more important than YouTube’s engagement metrics. More important to you. Wanna guess what's more important to YouTube?
- eloisius 6y ago
  I’m not disagreeing with that, and I’m also aware that as a private company, whatever they do with their website isn’t an infringement upon first amendment rights. I’m just bristling at the parent comment who seemed to be saying that in our new AI-driven world, free speech is no longer an intrinsically valuable thing.
  - nobody9999 6y ago
    >I’m not disagreeing with that, and I’m also aware that as a private company, whatever they do with their website isn’t an infringement upon first amendment rights. I’m just bristling at the parent comment who seemed to be saying that in our new AI-driven world, free speech is no longer an intrinsically valuable thing. Those are all good points. I didn't understand GP to be claiming that ML algorithms trump free speech, which may explain why we're actually in violent agreement WRT YouTube's recommendation algorithms. I'd note that I avoid the big social media sites like the plague, and not even primarily for the toxic atmosphere. Rather, I find the business model to be inherently cynical, exploitative and destructive of communities (cf. sites like nextdoor.com). As long as the incentives (maximization of advertising dollars) favor pushing for ever higher engagement, the cycle that creates increasingly fine-tuned filter bubbles and "targeted" advertising, we're going to see less focus on free expression from large corporations, because their primary goal is to maximize profit. I believe that this model will eventually collapse and be replaced (with something better or worse, I don't know) with a different one. My concern is in the damage that this will do to our discourse and societal cohesion in the meantime. Which points to larger problems with our economic model. Maximizing short-term profit is fetishized as all-important, regardless of potential downsides[0]. That focus legitimizes predatory behavior based on the (incorrect) idea that captialism is necessarily a zero-sum game. This distorts the economy and the culture, pitting us against each other in surprising (and very destructive) ways. I am most certainly not advocating that we abandon capitalism, as its had a largely positive effect on health, wealth, technological advancement and a host of other areas. Rather, I believe we need to change the incentives around markets to encourage a broader, fairer capitalism that creates increased prosperity for everyone, rather than those already at the top. [0] From a long-term perspective, focusing primarily on short-term extraction of value from the economy is self-defeating. Primarily because our economy's success is based on consumer spending (~70% of the US' GDP is consumer spending). Through wage suppression, rent-seeking and (a good thing) automation, we're reducing the ability of larger and larger segments of the population to contribute to that 2/3+ of the economy. If unchecked, we'll eventually get to the point where wealth and income are so concentrated that we won't be able to sustain that model and everyone will lose. Because there are only so many pairs of jeans, lava lamps, snow globes, raisins, cars, houses or pizza pies that any one individual or household can use. This argues for a much broader distribution of economic resources (wages, access to capital, safety nets, infrastructure, etc., etc., etc.) than we have now. This could provide enormous benefits to those who have the least and, in the long-term, those who have the most. Beyond that, it can create a stronger, more resilient economy for everyone.

verroq 6y ago

If you have free speech but no-one is allowed to hear it. Is it still free speech? How is this any different to “you are free to speak but you’ll be murdered after you do”. You’re still free to “speak”, you’ll just die after. Freedom of speech right?

3131s 6y ago

I believe free amplification is terrible. Why? So that poor people can't be heard?

Voloskaya 6y ago
You are confused with the meaning of "free" in this context.
- 3131s 6y ago
  I'm not.