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I think EFF should look for improvements to their communication on this topic. They need to be providing much more practical leadership guidance. The ideologi

I think EFF should look for improvements to their communication on this topic. They need to be providing much more practical leadership guidance. The ideological goals don't need compromise -- but the practical reality is that our society _needs_ an organization like EFF to be at the forefront on these topics -- advocating for better abstractions to help shape how we as a society should think and deal with these complex issues. EFF shouldn't be effectively silencing itself by becoming a voice that just repeats platitudes. This article to me felt like the right wing response to gun violence events "we send our thoughts and prayers but let's not politicize this tragedy". In particular -- there are simple ways to avoid worry over the "slippery slope" associated with defining policies that apply different rules to different users -- you can espouse policy frameworks that are explicitly parameterized by impact (impact is a bit fuzzy to capture in truth but conceptually clear -- and simple proxies suffice to communicate the concept -- in most cases the number of followers is a reasonably close conceptual proxy for a social network). If you have 70 million followers and you say "let's punish immigrants" it's just simply a different thing than if you say the same thing and you have 10 followers -- pretending there "must not exist" a different framework for responding to events that occur on such vastly different scales is not practical and it's actually a failure to provide good advice here on an ideological level -- because we _know_ that these events are different and project meaningfully different risk profiles onto the world. There is not a clear ideological reason to falsely pretend that "the same thing" is happening when two users with such vastly different impact publish the exact same sequence of words ... The threat model for "danger of communication" is based on impact and so should be the policy frameworks aimed at managing these risks.

xpe 6y ago
> EFF shouldn't be effectively silencing itself by becoming a voice that just repeats platitudes. I don't follow how this is tantamount to silencing itself. Would you explain?
- breatheoften 6y ago
  The context as I see it -- one of the largest (if not the largest) social media megaphones controlled by a single human was recently silenced because of a recognition that this megaphone was being actively used to cause widespread harm. The eff response to these actions is to emphasize that such blocking should be allowed so long as a consistent set of rules is used to perform blocking for this reason across a whole network. And they suggest the communication scale of the actor being blocked should not be a factor in the management criteria applied to the speech flowing across a given channel. That's a principled position but it's also ludicrous - and it's impossible to take advice from that position which can then be applied to the real world. It's as tho they've said "yes, we acknowledge that free speech faces limits -- such as no yelling fire in a crowded theater -- but we do not acknowledge the existence of crowded theaters". What kind of advice are we left to take from such philosophizing? Text sent over the largest of megaphones is just not the same thing as text sent over the much smaller megaphones available to most social media users. Taking the EFF position espoused here to an extreme for illustration -- suppose Alice decides to use the emergency broadcast system as her personal twitter account for a day. With her every message all the cell phones in the country buzz an emergency broadcast alert letting us know what Alice wants to say. She exercises her right to political speech to let us all know that she thinks birth control pills are evil -- and in so doing she consumes some seconds of attention from 300 million people. At the same time -- she cross-posts to her twitter where she is followed by 50 people. The EFF are more or less suggesting that the same principles and rules should apply to her twitter posts and her emergency broadcast system posts. But in reality -- do we consider these information publishing channels directly comparable? Are we forced to accept that because these are both information publishing channels -- the set of things Alice is allowed to say on both channels must be the same? Obviously we are not forced to take this position. And obviously this is a bit of a silly example since we all already know that different rules apply to the emergency broadcasting network -- yet we don't use the word "censor" to describe the set of things we don't want Alice to send out over the emergency broadcast network -- and why is that? Going back to my claim that they are silencing themselves -- I think the EFF position in this article is basically abstract philosophy and that they are going out of their way to avoid addressing any of the specifics required to guide action in the real world. They had an opportunity to say something useful -- instead they said nothing in more words.
agiroth 6y ago
I found their response underwhelming as well. I am tentatively willing to accept that these are simply applications of free speech and section 230, provided that the EFF prompt governments to write legal frameworks for what these platforms can and cannot do. It is not acceptable to have companies this large, and this influential, 100% unaccountable to democracy.
- xpe 6y ago
  > It is not acceptable to have companies this large, and this influential, 100% unaccountable to democracy. Perhaps I'm not understanding you, but as written, this is not true. First, Congress can pass laws. Second, outside of legislation, there are democratic-capitalistic feedback mechanisms as well: people can 'vote with their feet'; decide what services to use, recommend, and criticize. So I think you meant something else? To be clear, I'm not defending these companies, and I do support intelligent (as opposed to reactionary), targeted (as opposed to blunt), principled (as opposed to arbitrary), and simple (as opposed to byzantine, inscrutable) regulations.

xpe 6y ago

> EFF shouldn't be effectively silencing itself by becoming a voice that just repeats platitudes. I don't follow how this is tantamount to silencing itself. Would you explain?

breatheoften 6y ago
The context as I see it -- one of the largest (if not the largest) social media megaphones controlled by a single human was recently silenced because of a recognition that this megaphone was being actively used to cause widespread harm. The eff response to these actions is to emphasize that such blocking should be allowed so long as a consistent set of rules is used to perform blocking for this reason across a whole network. And they suggest the communication scale of the actor being blocked should not be a factor in the management criteria applied to the speech flowing across a given channel. That's a principled position but it's also ludicrous - and it's impossible to take advice from that position which can then be applied to the real world. It's as tho they've said "yes, we acknowledge that free speech faces limits -- such as no yelling fire in a crowded theater -- but we do not acknowledge the existence of crowded theaters". What kind of advice are we left to take from such philosophizing? Text sent over the largest of megaphones is just not the same thing as text sent over the much smaller megaphones available to most social media users. Taking the EFF position espoused here to an extreme for illustration -- suppose Alice decides to use the emergency broadcast system as her personal twitter account for a day. With her every message all the cell phones in the country buzz an emergency broadcast alert letting us know what Alice wants to say. She exercises her right to political speech to let us all know that she thinks birth control pills are evil -- and in so doing she consumes some seconds of attention from 300 million people. At the same time -- she cross-posts to her twitter where she is followed by 50 people. The EFF are more or less suggesting that the same principles and rules should apply to her twitter posts and her emergency broadcast system posts. But in reality -- do we consider these information publishing channels directly comparable? Are we forced to accept that because these are both information publishing channels -- the set of things Alice is allowed to say on both channels must be the same? Obviously we are not forced to take this position. And obviously this is a bit of a silly example since we all already know that different rules apply to the emergency broadcasting network -- yet we don't use the word "censor" to describe the set of things we don't want Alice to send out over the emergency broadcast network -- and why is that? Going back to my claim that they are silencing themselves -- I think the EFF position in this article is basically abstract philosophy and that they are going out of their way to avoid addressing any of the specifics required to guide action in the real world. They had an opportunity to say something useful -- instead they said nothing in more words.

agiroth 6y ago

I found their response underwhelming as well. I am tentatively willing to accept that these are simply applications of free speech and section 230, provided that the EFF prompt governments to write legal frameworks for what these platforms can and cannot do. It is not acceptable to have companies this large, and this influential, 100% unaccountable to democracy.

xpe 6y ago
> It is not acceptable to have companies this large, and this influential, 100% unaccountable to democracy. Perhaps I'm not understanding you, but as written, this is not true. First, Congress can pass laws. Second, outside of legislation, there are democratic-capitalistic feedback mechanisms as well: people can 'vote with their feet'; decide what services to use, recommend, and criticize. So I think you meant something else? To be clear, I'm not defending these companies, and I do support intelligent (as opposed to reactionary), targeted (as opposed to blunt), principled (as opposed to arbitrary), and simple (as opposed to byzantine, inscrutable) regulations.