7 ms·

Something big is brewing. I think there is going to be a big push to reign in social media. I've thought long about this and can only think of one way to regul

by kaiju0 6y ago

Something big is brewing. I think there is going to be a big push to reign in social media. I've thought long about this and can only think of one way to regulate them. I would propose that people are allowed x degrees of separation. As a regular user I can only go n+2 connections. After that the content is not seen no matter how popular. It will kill virility but should reign in stupidity being broadcast. To increase your separation score you must merit it with a reason and stick to it.

CyberDildonics 6y ago
If that was a legal rule for the internet it would make it illegal for most people to communicate with each other. I don't think this idea is well thought through. That would actually be the government regulating speech and arguably freedom of assembly.
- vineyardmike 6y ago
  Its not regulating the speech, its regulating the audience. You have the right to speak, not the right to be heard.
  - stale2002 6y ago
    Thats basically the same thing. For example, if the government made newspapers illegal, that would technically be "limiting the audience", but it would still be unconstitutional.
    - zwm 6y ago
      I think the flaw is to compare old medium to today's technology. If it was, we wouldn't be having this conversation. What can we try then iterate?
      - stale2002 6y ago
        > I think the flaw is to compare old medium to today's technology. Courts apply laws to new technology all the time. And in this situation, it is very obvious that the courts would rule government restrictions on social media, that make it illegal for people to broadcast on social media, would be unconstitutional. > What can we try then Well we can't ban people from using social media, or for broadcasting to many people. That would very obviously be unconstitutional.
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    The first amendment also protects freedom of association. You don't have a right for people to hear you, but the government doesn't have an unlimited power to restrict your ability to actually reach people. If government prevents people hearing you speak, that's a pretty serious curb on freedom of association.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    The point is the government doesn't get to decide who is allowed to listen.
  - CyberDildonics 6y ago
    You have the right to be heard by people that want to hear you. Nothing says you have to be broadcast or promoted and nothing says you can impose on people who don't want to hear you, but the government telling people they can't talk to certain other people is not the same thing. Also, in another comment you said "This is also great for hiding and suppressing organization of social uprising. This would have totally suppressed all the BLM content this summer." Is this sarcasm and you are contradicting yourself or do you actually think it would have been great to suppress BLM organization and protests?
bigbubba 6y ago
> It will kill virility Virility is great if social contagions are assumed benign. I think that's an assumption many no longer make.
trentnix 6y ago
It will kill virility but should reign in stupidity being broadcast. Why do they have a responsibility to 'reign in stupidity' in the first place? Who gets to decide what's stupid and what's not? I understand removing illegal content. I understand providing guidelines around content that may not be acceptable for minors. I understand removing (or compartmentalizing) content that is "off topic" (such as a platform dedicated to eSports not wanting traditional sports content). But every attempt that can be made to 'reign in stupidity' means censorship of one form or another and will inevitably be abused.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  > It will kill virility I really wonder if it will do that. Probably not.
  - bradwood 6y ago
    Perhaps the poster meant "vitality"
vineyardmike 6y ago
This is also great for hiding and suppressing organization of social uprising. This would have totally suppressed all the BLM content this summer.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > This is also great for hiding and suppressing organization of social uprising. This would have totally suppressed all the BLM content this summer. I'm not so sure about that. That kind of policy would definitely put the breaks on uncoordinated viral peer-to-peer spread, but that just might lead to resurgence of coordinating organizations acting as clearinghouses for such things. That could be good, at least in places with decent civil liberties, since I believe broadcast speech is bit like code: it's better when there's some peer review and sanity checks before it's distributed.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  > This would have totally suppressed all the BLM content this summer. How do you know that? Civil rights and protest movements in general have traditionally not relied on social media or even digital communication of any sort. Couldn't the mechanisms once employed to organize activists still work today? The answer is yes, they can. I know for a fact the Baptist church down the street from me participated in organizing many of the protests in my city this summer.
- joshuakelly 6y ago
  Strongly doubt that would have been a net effect considering the amount of corporate attention and support was received. Ferguson in 2014 might be a better example case, where there was little to no corporate involvement. Your point is true though, no doubt. People often retort that no one cares about decentralization, well we're going to find out if that's really true over the rest of the decade.
elliekelly 6y ago
I don’t think the FTC is (or ever will) reign in how “far” content can spread. The FTC is a consumer protection agency so they are most definitely focused on advertising and data collection, not user-generated content or misinformation.
g_p 6y ago
This seems interesting - clearly the friction in sharing everything with everyone is far lower online than before. Before, you had to consume finite resources (time, energy, postage stamps, etc.) to tell someone else about something. This gave a natural rate limit. As a thought experiment, what if the degrees of separation were less rigidly enforced, but people's "power of voice" decays the further it goes from those who directly follow them, resulting in a similar result? Then for every user, there's a probability they'll see or not see a given post (significantly reducing as the degree of separation increases). Clearly this isn't ideal and there's compounding factors (if you have 3 friends share it, should that probability be additive?) Share rate limits in WhatsApp led to people imploring others to copy paste fake news to share it to others, so clearly this isn't as simple as limiting normal shares.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  Any governmental rules restricting who can talk to whom or to how many others will run into first amendment issues, at least in the USA.
  - g_p 6y ago
    Not disagreeing, but I do wonder how the first amendment sits with regards to no guaranteed audience - you can likely be free to say something, while still having others free not to amplify it indefinitely. To an extent I think the big digital platforms already do this, just in a non transparent way, to try to curate the most engaging and click-worthy content, rather than the most thought provoking.
- nathanyz 6y ago
  Friction is exactly what I believe the end answer is for social media, fake news, viral video, etc. Prior to the Internet, all communication included substantially larger amounts of friction. Broadcasting your opinion required acquiring TV, Radio, or Newspaper time/space. Sure there were low cost alternatives like standing in the public square and shouting your beliefs, but that is a far cry from tweeting out something hateful from the comfort of your couch while you eat pizza and watch unlimited streaming video content. The friction was both a drag on productivity AND a safety mechanism to prevent mass spread of inaccurate or low quality content. I feel like the Internet removed all of that friction which is great in many cases, but particularly bad for accuracy of information. It's like the gossip that used to spread through towns by word of mouth, can now become truth within days just by going viral. And once enough people hear the same thing, isn't it now true? Perception is reality. Just look to the divisions in the world. Each side when talking amongst themselves has one truth while the opposing side has a completely different one. Doesn't matter which truth is accurate when both sides are unified in their belief that it is their side's story that is correct. Friction is necessary, to at least slow the contagion of inaccurate information. Right now the incentives are misaligned. Viral content that makes the consumer feel good provides the most economic return for companies like Google and Facebook. While the system is setup to reward this, how could you expect a profit seeking business to do anything else but optimize for it?
processing 6y ago
So all content that is not in the "stupidity" classifier (who decides that?) also loses its chance to be surfaced? I think this needs to be thought through some more.
SkyPuncher 6y ago
> As a regular user I can only go n+2 connections. How do you define this? Seems impossible to define and easy to circumvent. ---- By your own definition, I wouldn't be able to see or respond to your content since we're likely separated by more than two degrees.
kodah 6y ago
Personally I'd like to go back to an age before social media. It seems social media has had limited substantive success for anyone and has really created more problems than it's worth. Historically I've avoided expressing my views on abolishment but now people are trying to develop fear-mongering strategies around decentralization, so here I am back at abolition. I'd love to find a happy medium but I don't think it's possible. Social media companies, search companies, national news (who is dependent on social media for income), politicians (who are dependent on social media for likes and shares), and law enforcement working in coordination to do an arbitrarily good thing (disrupt the flow of misinformation) was both eye opening and terrifying. These tools can be used for good but they're also the keystone tools of autocracy and are used largely for reasons that require interpretation and narrative following. My point is that we don't need these kind of problems. We have space exploration ahead of us, major advancements in technology are still needed, and we need a continuum of people who are willing to work together despite whatever differences they may have ideologically and otherwise. I don't think limiting scope or killing virility will achieve these ends.
- asciident 6y ago
  So I like social media, and get a lot of benefit from it. I like that it's free and supported by targeted ads, rather than a paid service. Since we disagree, and I imagine there are many people with the same opinions as both you and me, why not make it opt-in, so you only encounter social media if you choose to make an account, and then still only see it if you go to it and/or install it intentionally? Wait, that's how it is now...
  - kodah 6y ago
    Social media isn't opt-in though. Facebook has routinely collected data on non-Facebook users, my name/likeness/content can appear on social media without my consent, and there are hardly controls for protecting such things in any meaningful sense. I deleted Instagram months ago and I have friends that have routinely told me that profile is still up, just in a limited capacity. How is this opt-in? An even better example of it's non-opt-in nature is that I went as far as to ban all social media via my VPN and router. The result was unexpected when looking at American news, it often quotes from and derives sources from social media. Reading news articles that were mostly Twitter statements or reactions made it hard to discern what the articles were even about in the first place.
jedberg 6y ago
> I would propose that people are allowed x degrees of separation. That's an absolutely terrible idea. For example, I doubt you and I are two degrees away. I would have never seen this. I doubt I have two degrees of separation from most of the interesting content posted on this site.
- Firerouge 6y ago
  Exactly, if you restrict access based on degrees of separation, you're essentially restricting access to information by geography, which is sure to reinforce regional differences and radicalize people further by hiding dissenting opinions
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    Pre social media, we lived in a world where information was generally separated by geography. Your comment suggests that by returning to such a state, it would result in increased radicalisation. The implication is therefore that social media has decreased radicalisation. I’m not sure I agree.
    - jedberg 6y ago
      Social media has both increased and decreased radicalization at the same time. For those who already had radical ideas, who previously couldn't find others with the same ideas, they are now more radicalized (think conspiracy theories and so on). For those with open minds, it's allowed them to learn new things from people far away with very different ideas.
      - jlarocco 6y ago
        > For those with open minds, it's allowed them to learn new things from people far away with very different ideas. It can do that, but that can also backfire because the current social media platforms aren't trustworthy or transparent. Advertising, "influencers", fake likes, bots, and all of that let small fringe groups amplify and normalize their ideas, so when open minded people come along, they see thousands of likes and hundreds of people promoting some idea, and they can get the impression it's a much more popular or common idea than it really is. In other words, social media makes it very easy for a vocal minority to push their views on people, and it's nearly impossible for other users to discover when that's happening.
aliabs 6y ago
This is an awful idea lol wut. That limits the free flow of information as well as ideation.
tqi 6y ago
1. Who gets to decide who does or does not have merit? What criteria would you use? 2. "Rein", not "reign," and "virality", not "virility."
mikem170 6y ago
I've always thought that their algorithms are the biggest problems - when someone else gets to choose what you see. (That's also why I think it's far to go after their common carrier status if they do this.) It would be better to be able to manage your own feed, things like chronological order, filtering, etc.
topkai22 6y ago
I'm not sure that would do much to reign in virality given the number of mega accounts there are- how much of twitter is n+2 from Donald Trump, for example?
viraptor 6y ago
> As a regular user I can only go n+2 connections. You just killed the whole dating app industry. And job boards. And regional marketplaces.

by kaiju0 6y ago

CyberDildonics 6y ago

If that was a legal rule for the internet it would make it illegal for most people to communicate with each other. I don't think this idea is well thought through. That would actually be the government regulating speech and arguably freedom of assembly.

vineyardmike 6y ago
Its not regulating the speech, its regulating the audience. You have the right to speak, not the right to be heard.
- stale2002 6y ago
  Thats basically the same thing. For example, if the government made newspapers illegal, that would technically be "limiting the audience", but it would still be unconstitutional.
  - zwm 6y ago
    I think the flaw is to compare old medium to today's technology. If it was, we wouldn't be having this conversation. What can we try then iterate?
    - stale2002 6y ago
      > I think the flaw is to compare old medium to today's technology. Courts apply laws to new technology all the time. And in this situation, it is very obvious that the courts would rule government restrictions on social media, that make it illegal for people to broadcast on social media, would be unconstitutional. > What can we try then Well we can't ban people from using social media, or for broadcasting to many people. That would very obviously be unconstitutional.
- roywiggins 6y ago
  The first amendment also protects freedom of association. You don't have a right for people to hear you, but the government doesn't have an unlimited power to restrict your ability to actually reach people. If government prevents people hearing you speak, that's a pretty serious curb on freedom of association.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  The point is the government doesn't get to decide who is allowed to listen.
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  You have the right to be heard by people that want to hear you. Nothing says you have to be broadcast or promoted and nothing says you can impose on people who don't want to hear you, but the government telling people they can't talk to certain other people is not the same thing. Also, in another comment you said "This is also great for hiding and suppressing organization of social uprising. This would have totally suppressed all the BLM content this summer." Is this sarcasm and you are contradicting yourself or do you actually think it would have been great to suppress BLM organization and protests?

bigbubba 6y ago

> It will kill virility Virility is great if social contagions are assumed benign. I think that's an assumption many no longer make.

trentnix 6y ago

It will kill virility but should reign in stupidity being broadcast. Why do they have a responsibility to 'reign in stupidity' in the first place? Who gets to decide what's stupid and what's not? I understand removing illegal content. I understand providing guidelines around content that may not be acceptable for minors. I understand removing (or compartmentalizing) content that is "off topic" (such as a platform dedicated to eSports not wanting traditional sports content). But every attempt that can be made to 'reign in stupidity' means censorship of one form or another and will inevitably be abused.

jacquesm 6y ago
> It will kill virility I really wonder if it will do that. Probably not.
- bradwood 6y ago
  Perhaps the poster meant "vitality"

vineyardmike 6y ago

This is also great for hiding and suppressing organization of social uprising. This would have totally suppressed all the BLM content this summer.

ardy42 6y ago
> This is also great for hiding and suppressing organization of social uprising. This would have totally suppressed all the BLM content this summer. I'm not so sure about that. That kind of policy would definitely put the breaks on uncoordinated viral peer-to-peer spread, but that just might lead to resurgence of coordinating organizations acting as clearinghouses for such things. That could be good, at least in places with decent civil liberties, since I believe broadcast speech is bit like code: it's better when there's some peer review and sanity checks before it's distributed.
bigbubba 6y ago
> This would have totally suppressed all the BLM content this summer. How do you know that? Civil rights and protest movements in general have traditionally not relied on social media or even digital communication of any sort. Couldn't the mechanisms once employed to organize activists still work today? The answer is yes, they can. I know for a fact the Baptist church down the street from me participated in organizing many of the protests in my city this summer.
joshuakelly 6y ago
Strongly doubt that would have been a net effect considering the amount of corporate attention and support was received. Ferguson in 2014 might be a better example case, where there was little to no corporate involvement. Your point is true though, no doubt. People often retort that no one cares about decentralization, well we're going to find out if that's really true over the rest of the decade.

elliekelly 6y ago

I don’t think the FTC is (or ever will) reign in how “far” content can spread. The FTC is a consumer protection agency so they are most definitely focused on advertising and data collection, not user-generated content or misinformation.

g_p 6y ago

This seems interesting - clearly the friction in sharing everything with everyone is far lower online than before. Before, you had to consume finite resources (time, energy, postage stamps, etc.) to tell someone else about something. This gave a natural rate limit. As a thought experiment, what if the degrees of separation were less rigidly enforced, but people's "power of voice" decays the further it goes from those who directly follow them, resulting in a similar result? Then for every user, there's a probability they'll see or not see a given post (significantly reducing as the degree of separation increases). Clearly this isn't ideal and there's compounding factors (if you have 3 friends share it, should that probability be additive?) Share rate limits in WhatsApp led to people imploring others to copy paste fake news to share it to others, so clearly this isn't as simple as limiting normal shares.

throwaway201103 6y ago
Any governmental rules restricting who can talk to whom or to how many others will run into first amendment issues, at least in the USA.
- g_p 6y ago
  Not disagreeing, but I do wonder how the first amendment sits with regards to no guaranteed audience - you can likely be free to say something, while still having others free not to amplify it indefinitely. To an extent I think the big digital platforms already do this, just in a non transparent way, to try to curate the most engaging and click-worthy content, rather than the most thought provoking.
nathanyz 6y ago
Friction is exactly what I believe the end answer is for social media, fake news, viral video, etc. Prior to the Internet, all communication included substantially larger amounts of friction. Broadcasting your opinion required acquiring TV, Radio, or Newspaper time/space. Sure there were low cost alternatives like standing in the public square and shouting your beliefs, but that is a far cry from tweeting out something hateful from the comfort of your couch while you eat pizza and watch unlimited streaming video content. The friction was both a drag on productivity AND a safety mechanism to prevent mass spread of inaccurate or low quality content. I feel like the Internet removed all of that friction which is great in many cases, but particularly bad for accuracy of information. It's like the gossip that used to spread through towns by word of mouth, can now become truth within days just by going viral. And once enough people hear the same thing, isn't it now true? Perception is reality. Just look to the divisions in the world. Each side when talking amongst themselves has one truth while the opposing side has a completely different one. Doesn't matter which truth is accurate when both sides are unified in their belief that it is their side's story that is correct. Friction is necessary, to at least slow the contagion of inaccurate information. Right now the incentives are misaligned. Viral content that makes the consumer feel good provides the most economic return for companies like Google and Facebook. While the system is setup to reward this, how could you expect a profit seeking business to do anything else but optimize for it?

processing 6y ago

So all content that is not in the "stupidity" classifier (who decides that?) also loses its chance to be surfaced? I think this needs to be thought through some more.

SkyPuncher 6y ago

> As a regular user I can only go n+2 connections. How do you define this? Seems impossible to define and easy to circumvent. ---- By your own definition, I wouldn't be able to see or respond to your content since we're likely separated by more than two degrees.

kodah 6y ago

Personally I'd like to go back to an age before social media. It seems social media has had limited substantive success for anyone and has really created more problems than it's worth. Historically I've avoided expressing my views on abolishment but now people are trying to develop fear-mongering strategies around decentralization, so here I am back at abolition. I'd love to find a happy medium but I don't think it's possible. Social media companies, search companies, national news (who is dependent on social media for income), politicians (who are dependent on social media for likes and shares), and law enforcement working in coordination to do an arbitrarily good thing (disrupt the flow of misinformation) was both eye opening and terrifying. These tools can be used for good but they're also the keystone tools of autocracy and are used largely for reasons that require interpretation and narrative following. My point is that we don't need these kind of problems. We have space exploration ahead of us, major advancements in technology are still needed, and we need a continuum of people who are willing to work together despite whatever differences they may have ideologically and otherwise. I don't think limiting scope or killing virility will achieve these ends.

asciident 6y ago
So I like social media, and get a lot of benefit from it. I like that it's free and supported by targeted ads, rather than a paid service. Since we disagree, and I imagine there are many people with the same opinions as both you and me, why not make it opt-in, so you only encounter social media if you choose to make an account, and then still only see it if you go to it and/or install it intentionally? Wait, that's how it is now...
- kodah 6y ago
  Social media isn't opt-in though. Facebook has routinely collected data on non-Facebook users, my name/likeness/content can appear on social media without my consent, and there are hardly controls for protecting such things in any meaningful sense. I deleted Instagram months ago and I have friends that have routinely told me that profile is still up, just in a limited capacity. How is this opt-in? An even better example of it's non-opt-in nature is that I went as far as to ban all social media via my VPN and router. The result was unexpected when looking at American news, it often quotes from and derives sources from social media. Reading news articles that were mostly Twitter statements or reactions made it hard to discern what the articles were even about in the first place.

jedberg 6y ago

> I would propose that people are allowed x degrees of separation. That's an absolutely terrible idea. For example, I doubt you and I are two degrees away. I would have never seen this. I doubt I have two degrees of separation from most of the interesting content posted on this site.

Firerouge 6y ago
Exactly, if you restrict access based on degrees of separation, you're essentially restricting access to information by geography, which is sure to reinforce regional differences and radicalize people further by hiding dissenting opinions
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  Pre social media, we lived in a world where information was generally separated by geography. Your comment suggests that by returning to such a state, it would result in increased radicalisation. The implication is therefore that social media has decreased radicalisation. I’m not sure I agree.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    Social media has both increased and decreased radicalization at the same time. For those who already had radical ideas, who previously couldn't find others with the same ideas, they are now more radicalized (think conspiracy theories and so on). For those with open minds, it's allowed them to learn new things from people far away with very different ideas.
    - jlarocco 6y ago
      > For those with open minds, it's allowed them to learn new things from people far away with very different ideas. It can do that, but that can also backfire because the current social media platforms aren't trustworthy or transparent. Advertising, "influencers", fake likes, bots, and all of that let small fringe groups amplify and normalize their ideas, so when open minded people come along, they see thousands of likes and hundreds of people promoting some idea, and they can get the impression it's a much more popular or common idea than it really is. In other words, social media makes it very easy for a vocal minority to push their views on people, and it's nearly impossible for other users to discover when that's happening.

aliabs 6y ago

This is an awful idea lol wut. That limits the free flow of information as well as ideation.

tqi 6y ago

1. Who gets to decide who does or does not have merit? What criteria would you use? 2. "Rein", not "reign," and "virality", not "virility."

mikem170 6y ago

I've always thought that their algorithms are the biggest problems - when someone else gets to choose what you see. (That's also why I think it's far to go after their common carrier status if they do this.) It would be better to be able to manage your own feed, things like chronological order, filtering, etc.

topkai22 6y ago

I'm not sure that would do much to reign in virality given the number of mega accounts there are- how much of twitter is n+2 from Donald Trump, for example?

viraptor 6y ago

> As a regular user I can only go n+2 connections. You just killed the whole dating app industry. And job boards. And regional marketplaces.