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Until now censorship advocates have restricted themselves to demanding that institutions that already have the power to censor use this power. The idea that we
by amadeuspagel 6y ago
Until now censorship advocates have restricted themselves to demanding that institutions that already have the power to censor use this power. The idea that we should systematically centralize information, to make it possible to censor it, is new and worse. And why stop at IPFS? What about HTTP? Maybe it's not such a good idea to allow everyone to have a website. Look at 8chan. Maybe it would be better if all discussion happened under the benevolent moderation of facebook and youtube.
I would have thought that even people who are in favor of some censorship recognize that most censorship is not "benevolent". That even though they might dislike that IPFS will make it harder for facebook and youtube to decide what people are allowed to think, they would like that it will also make it harder for the governments of russia and china, and that this would more then make up for it.
- winstonstimes 6y agoA good example of the hypocracy of facebook is, while they censor content for the good of all, they run an onion site-- facebookcorewwwi.onion to evade censorship by others.
- cmehdy 6y agoAs much as facebook is a thing I love to hate, I don't see the problem there. It's not because you have an onion site that you are forced to allow any content whatsoever, and in fact many onion services explicitly forbid certain types of content for good reasons. You're free to not connect to their platform either way (and to be subject to their limitations regarding contents and behaviour), whereas setting up an onion service can be about stuff that people aren't free to avoid (i.e. censorship by the only ISP they might have, by a state, etc). There's no issue with consistency there.
- zaroth 6y agoStill amazing that they brute force generated that onion address.
- dnautics 6y agowhy is that hypocrisy? Even if facebook censors, it's plausible that their positios is that they want to let you opt-in to censorship. an onion site lets you use the site that they censor on an opt-in basis. (I opted out of facebook just over a month ago).
- winstonstimes 6y agoThe hypocrisy is that the company chooses to fight the 'free speech' fight by evading the censorship of governments when it benefits them and censors those it disagrees with otherwise.
- convolvatron 6y agoa system that simultaneously depends on the opinions of the populace (consumer choice, voting) to make good decisions, and can't trust those same people to make a well informed choice is kind of at odds with itself
- specialist 6y agoAny discussion of Freedom Speeches™ must also account for inauthentic speech. Trolls, bots, socket puppets, propaganda, gaming the algorithmic recommenders, flooding the zone with bullshit, etc.
- vorpalhex 6y agoAnd who is fit to determine the trolls and propaganda?
- specialist 6y agoSelf determination. Sign your works. Anything unsigned is gossip, or worse.
- convolvatron 6y agoit doesn't seem clear from the recent political situation in the US that owning up to your lies does anything but give them more strength.
- specialist 6y agoYup. My goal is to break feedback loops. Authenticated speech empowers us (the receiver). Like spam filters for news (outrage). I don't care if other people are gas huffing QAnon, just so long as I don't have to ever hear about it.
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- 0x445442 6y agoIt seems the current pro-censorship group has a fairly homogeneous political slant as evidenced by the author's statement: > It’s offered a megaphone to those promoting dangerous ideas like white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other anti-LGBTQ positions, and sometimes outright Nazism. This group always seems to willfully ignore or is ignorant of 20th century history WRT Russian and China.
- xfitm3 6y agoIf you want to predict the future just look at history. The belief that somehow these groups will get it right and aren't inherently harmful is false. At my prior job we were fairly big (1000+) and had internal meetings more or less instructing people how to vote. We had a significant social reach and the ability to promote arbitrary articles such as news. We had editorial guidelines forcing us to be politically biased. As much as I disagree with the current president I do think there was some sort of attempt at manipulation. Whether it was successful or not is beyond my ability to analyze.
- betwixthewires 6y agoI also find it interesting how the spread of extreme ideology is characterized as being the result of the free flow of information, when a cursory look at the situation shows that it is not the case. There are sites such as this one where anyone can pretty much say anything they like, and you don't see this phenomenon here. Where you do see this phenomenon is on sites where algorithms control the spread of information directly based on business incentives centered around attention grabbing and emotional reaction, and less commonly (but increasingly more commonly) sites that outright require ideological conformity to participate.
- specialist 6y agoaka monetizing outrage.
- mplanchard 6y agoI’m not disagreeing with your general point, but this is definitively not a site where anyone can pretty much say what they like. Individuals flag posts and comments, which can keep them from showing up. The mods here are very active, responding to user reports and dealing with content that breaks the site guidelines. IMO that moderation is what makes this site generally tolerable, as compared to other discussion forums on the internet. It’s possible I misinterpreted you and you meant “anything they like” in the sense of being able to hold (almost) any opinion and be able to express it, provided it’s expressed politely and in good faith. In that case, I would still argue that it’s only the selective moderation of impoliteness and poor faith arguments that keeps this site bearable.
- dredds 6y agoBut that's the paradox. Who said an uncensorable IPFS will not become completely overloaded by corporate and government propaganda? How is it harder for them than individuals to create any narrative that suits their agenda? IPFS is not a panacea to powerful overlords.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoUncensorable by governments doesn't imply unmoderated by anyone whatsoever. You can have someone ejecting trolls and propaganda but not censoring legitimate speech, as long as it's someone you trust. And, importantly, not everyone has to trust the same party -- if they start censoring something you think they shouldn't then, unlike censorship by government or corporate monopolists, you can go and get it somewhere else.
- root_axis 6y agoThat's literally the exact system we have right now at the http level.
- tachyonbeam 6y agoFor now.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago> That's literally the exact system we have right now at the http level. And you might notice that the http level is not where the existing problem occurs.
- root_axis 6y agoI don't think there is a problem, at least not a technology problem.
- Ekaros 6y agoIn the end it will government which ends up picking and controlling the censorship. And then it will pick your poison. USA, some European, some Middle-Eastern, Chinese, Russian? I wouldn't trust any of them, not to even mention raising Africa and Americas... Or other East-Asian... Likely it will devolve to regional or country specific centralized web with those currently in the lead making the decisions. That doesn't sound too great...
- xfitm3 6y agoI'd fight for the right for 8chan to exist. Everyone deserves the right to be stupid, even if they're abusing it.
- BobbyJo 6y agoAn interesting counter point: the marginal cost of stupidity rises with the technological advancement of society.
- tomp 6y agoDoes it? Do you have any data to support that? I thought about what you said, and immediately connected it with several other claims of things that also rise with tech advancement... marginal impact of weapons, medicine, intelligence, entrepreneurship/luck, sports, games, entertainment, communications... So if the marginal impact of everything rises, then maybe that’s just the way of technology? It increases leverage. But then in relative terms, all those things still have the same impact? Or maybe the ratios between them change (e.g. weapons/nukes became more more powerful than communications)? Or maybe there’s other areas that massively reduced in marginal impact (e.g. production of food)...
- SubiculumCode 6y agoThere is an idea out there that it is always easier to destroy than it is to create or maintain order. As technology progresses, the power to destroy, create, or maintain increases, but do they increase at the same rate? It very well may be that the power to destroy has vastly outgrown are ability to create or maintain. Case in point, our nuclear bombs could kill most of us within the hour, yet science is barely learning how to stop the great killer, aging. Will we get to a point where any individual can order a few parts and kill millions? It seems inevitable if we continue along our current trajectory. Agreat Scifi book that explores these questions is Rainbows end [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End
- tobmlt 6y agoAt this level of approximation, so to rises the wealth of society to afford such stupidity.
- betwixthewires 6y agoReading the article, the view hinges on a gross mischaracterization: that a free speech environment has led to extremism and death. But this is absolutely not the case. First of all, the websites where the vast majority of extreme ideas are shared are not free speech environments. Second, the people who do bad things do it because they're damaged, or disillusioned, or some other personal motivator, the only difference now is that we can read and understand their view (not implying that we should be sympathetic, only understand even if we vehemently agree). Another point I have a bit of a gripe with is that the person fails to point out the misdeeds associated with the ideology he (probably) is more sympathetic towards. Interestingly, the view that people should not be able to freely share ideas with one another and judge ideas on their merit with their own cognitive capacity seems to be common among those sympathetic to this ideology. I wonder how the author feels about those people controlling the environments where discussion happens and policing discussion on extreme topics sympathetic to themselves.
- tachyonbeam 6y agoThere's a possibility that if instead of discussing and debating ideas we disagree with, we repress them and try to bury them, it will just form a darker, more extreme underground network. Extremism isn't some new thing. Right now certain political viewpoints are allowed to be discussed and others are not. The Overton window is very small. That leads people who disagree to try to find each other and band together, form some kind of opposition. Because their opinions are repressed, they stay insulated in their bubbles (as do people with mainstream opinions). The isolation leads to extremism. If you look at the polarization of politics in the united states, both sides hate each other and they won't talk. Maybe if there was some kind of discourse, things wouldn't be so bad. Right now the only words exchanged are insults, all republicans are alt-right, all democrats are communists. It wasn't always like that. It used to be possible for people who vote differently to be friends, or even live in the same household.
- api 6y agoThat is exactly right. It also gives them an intellectual martyrdom card and a veneer of coolness. If you want the next hip counterculture that all the kids are into to be Naziism, by all means suppress it. Nazis don’t deserve to be handed the “2 Live Crew effect.” For those who don’t know this was a mediocre booty rap group whose record went triple platinum after attempts were made to ban it. A parent poster raised another great point: the echo chambers that are full of this toxic stuff are themselves not free speech zones. They are heavily moderates safe spaces for specific ideologies and cultures. I am not convinced that this stuff would fare so well on a level intellectual playing field. It’s asinine. On a final note it’s important to point out that the original explosion of e.g. Qanon happened not via some decentralized free speech zone or even the chans (where it was always ironic or a prank for most) but on social platforms with algorithmic timeline. The algorithmic timeline is what has really ruined online discourse and promoted an explosion of insanity. Discourse on these sites is not equals but is weighted toward what will maximize engagement. Trolling, demagoguery, shock mongering, and various forms of “porn” (outrage porn, fear porn) are what maximizes engagement. The algorithmic timeline would be extremely hard to implement in a decentralized system. That’s perhaps a good thing. It might look more like the genuinely flat forum world of the old Internet where discourse was comparatively far more reasonable.
- okennedy 6y agoI agree with your sentiment that this can be a slippery slope, but I also think that you (and TFA) are glossing over an important point: there's a huge difference between distribution infrastructure and discovery infrastructure. The internet was full of conspiracy theories, crackpots, and silliness, well before the facebooks, youtubes, and so forth. The key difference is that these were hard to find. Early on, the most effective discovery infrastructure was based on hand-curated indexes (e.g., [1,2]). These moved slowly and were hard to game. Now, those same indexes are generated by algorithms, the gaming of which has spawned an entire cottage industry. The parent's viewpoint and TFA are not incompatible, as long as we don't assume that content distribution and content discovery have to come from the same service. The open internet survived for over 2 decades without bringing down democracy. At the same time, it would be a good idea to see a bit more editorial responsibility from services driving discovery. Better still, if hosting and discovery are decoupled, there's no network effects or content archive creating a captive audience if editorial power is abused. Tying things back to TFA, and perhaps the point that you're trying to make here, amadeuspagel: IPFS seems mostly aimed at providing hosting infrastructure rather than discovery. I'll emphasize the point again: censorship-free hosting has been largely unproblematic for the past two decades. What's been getting us into trouble now is discovery without editorial review (and forcibly tying discovery to hosting). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!#Founding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!#Founding [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User%27s_Guide_and_Catalog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User%27s_Guide_...
- lallysingh 6y agoI think this is it exactly. It's not the content, it's the sociopathic drive for engagement that promotes it.