9 ms·
It's chilling how quickly the tech industry has coalesced around oppressive and biased social media censorship policies. A scant few years ago, the tech industr
by beefee 6y ago
It's chilling how quickly the tech industry has coalesced around oppressive and biased social media censorship policies. A scant few years ago, the tech industry was a beacon of free expression.
- ryandrake 6y agoYou know what’s also chilling? Major tech platforms choosing to publish, amplify, and normalize: white supremacy, antisemitism, serious calls to violently overthrow democracy, conspiracies about the deep state cabal of satan-worshiping pedophiles, the health benefits of drinking bleach, denial of well understood scientific facts, etc. These things are fine for the town square, since people have free speech, but nobody should be handing them a megaphone that reaches 7 billion people. Free speech does not mean you are entitled to have your speech broadcast to a global audience.
- dougk16 6y agoWho gets the megaphone? My answer is either everybody or nobody. :)
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoEven harder: Who gets to decide who gets the megaphone? I see the problems with "nobody, therefore everybody gets the megaphone", but I see nobody that I actually trust to decide who gets it...
- chrononaut 6y agoThe trouble in my opinion comes when these social networks begin to promote content to the user algorithmically. My Twitter feed is filled with content from users I do not follow. It makes up the majority of my feed. Likely, even if it was content that I was following, the most "engaging", or oftentimes "enraging" content, would be the content shown first. If social networks were largely just content crafted by the people I follow, it would then be more representative towards a digital representation of the in-person social structures that would or do exist. They make much less money that way though. Your average user would probably also use it less.
- whateveracct 6y agoi mean, in the literal sense most people don't get megaphones, so nobody seems fair to me
- baud147258 6y agowhich mythical social media platform choose the amplify and publish "white supremacy, antisemitism, serious calls to violently overthrow democracy", because those I know were and are removing such content
- whatthesmack 6y agoSeriously. That is stuff that nearly everybody's against and is a constant boogeyman brought up by many on the left, but they can't ever seem to demonstrate that it is a pervasive problem. Nobody admits to being a white supremacist because it's basically universally denounced. But those same folks will happily excuse the whole BLM/Antifa rioting during 2020 where billions of dollars in property damage was caused and dozens of people died.
- easterncalculus 6y agoHonest question, what are you referring to when in regards to published/public content? All of these topics you've mentioned are and always have been far away from trending ('amplified', 'normalized') pages. You can't go anywhere on these sites and see these topics without searching for them, and when you do the hashtags are either immediately taken over by the rest of the users on the site or taken off of trending deliberately by administrators, often both. Can you provide one example of these topics consistently being 'amplified' or 'normalized' by one of the major tech platforms? I'm talking public content, not private groups. Posts that are 'amplified', not just present. You can find posts from anyone about anything online, so I don't really see what separates these private facebook groups from something like a mailing list. It doesn't seem "normalized" at all.
- ryandrake 6y agoI’m going by what the article said: “Facebook spent the past year allowing election conspiracies and far-right militia activity to proliferate on its platform, laying the groundwork for the broader radicalization that fueled the Capitol insurrection in the first place.” Facebook exercises editorial control (moderation) of what user-provided content is published on its site. Therefore if something is there, it’s because their moderation system allowed it to be there. I don’t use Facebook myself so I can’t provide a first-hand example, but it’s increasingly being reported that this content spreads virally through these platforms’ recommendation rabbit-holes and through promotion by end users.
- easterncalculus 6y agoI also don't use Facebook which is why I was asking. Supposedly after some more research it seems that Facebook has a feature that actually recommends private groups to people, which I was not aware of. It's interesting that they choose to do that, then.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- simple_phrases 6y agoWeird, I distinctly remember Twitter, Facebook and Google removing Islamic religious content under the guise of stopping terrorism a decade ago. What I don't remember is the current free speech absolutist crowd objecting to such censorship. In fact, I remember them cheering those companies on.
- oji0hub 6y agoPeople don't care until they are censored themselves. "First they came for the..."
- Amezarak 6y agoThis isn’t so. I and many other free speech proponents did not support that. There were people supporting it, but to the best of my knowledge they appear to mainly be the same people supporting censorship now.
- chandra381 6y agoBecause they are largely hypocrites. In fact a lot of them identify more with the capitol rioters being delatformed and are scared that they could be next in line, and this was not the case with ISIS for example.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bananabreakfast 6y agoIt's chilling how quickly radical terrorist groups have coalesced around using social media to coordinate their hatred and their attacks. A scant few years ago, America actively fought terrorists instead of encouraging and facilitating them.
- trident5000 6y agoYes, the terrorists who caused 1-2 billion in damage this summer and destroyed peoples livelihoods with a dozen deaths over a false narrative according to public and easily accessible FBI statistics, and also the terrorists who stormed the capital. Both sets of terrorists who are coordinating on all of the platforms.
- ceejayoz 6y agoWhere is this $20B number coming from? It doesn't appear to reflect reality. https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a455-4067-b06a-66f9db4cea9c.html https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a4...
- trident5000 6y agoI stand corrected and edited. Its still a non trivial amount and apparently "most expensive riot in history" according to your source.
- ceejayoz 6y agoThere's some apples to oranges going on there. You'll see in the top ten list several listings in April 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated. Counting these (and the many, many other cities they took place in in 1968) separately, while lumping together "protests that took place in 140 U.S. cities this spring", is fairly hard to justify. You should also consider what else your preferred news sources may have blown out by a similarly inaccurate 10-20x amount about the BLM protests.
- eplanit 6y ago
- TameAntelope 6y agoWhat is the bias, beyond "anti-terrorism"?
- osgovernment 6y agoTwitter and Facebook never claimed to be the anti-censorship platforms. If you want anti-censorship then you look for platforms designed for this, not hope that the government strips business rights in order to make it so.
- JohnBooty 6y agoIt's chilling how quickly misinformation merchants, hostile foreign agents, and other bad actors coalesced around using popular mainstream social media as the world's most effective megaphone. A scant few years ago, they lacked a direct communications channel by which they could radicalize the average American.
- exporectomy 6y agoHow can you explain the radical leftists of the 1960's then? Somehow the Russians (Soviets) must have (I assume you believe it was caused by them) had a communications channel by which they could radicalize all those college students.
- JohnBooty 6y agoWhat? What you typed bears little resemblance to anything I claimed. Yes, I lumped hostile foreign countries in with other sorts of hostile actors. However, I did not claim that they were the only kinds of hostile actors. Nor did I even claim that they were the worst. Summarizing my views as "the Russians cause everything" is... just wow.
- Consultant32452 6y agoI think it's simultaneously funny and I feel a bit of empathy for them. They imagined puppies and rainbows on their free speech platform, but what they got was Donald Trump tweeting his way into the White House. They facilitated that and it's gotta be a big punch in the gut to people who consider him literally hitler, an existential threat, etc. When they looked around their very liberal cities they felt like they were the 99%, but a shocking reality check came for them.
- redelbee 6y agoI agree with your use of “chilling” but more in the traditional sense when it comes to expression: that any censorship/bans/etc will likely have a chilling effect on this type of speech. In this case I think “this type of speech” comes down to people expressing their violent fantasies or plans, and I don’t think it’s bad if we have less of that particular kind of speech. As the classic argument goes, however, you can’t have it both ways with both total freedom of speech and some kind of moderating censorship. All that said, if we can make our way past the obvious consequences of limiting speech we might get to a more interesting place. In particular I’m more interested in how social media moderation might change our opinions and laws about speech itself. Does everyone’s speech deserve to be treated the same way by the algorithms that decide what gets traction and what doesn’t? Should the algorithms or platforms themselves be restricted in their “speech” in some way? How do we square our desire to allow corporations to develop algorithms to increase commerce when those same algorithms also necessarily foment rage and violence? I don’t think it’s worth arguing whether free speech is worth protecting (it is, despite the evils you also have to protect) but I do think it’s worth considering how we think about what constitutes speech when commerce, social media platforms, and algorithms come into play.
- esyir 6y agoI would like to believe you that this would be even handed at all violent talk and extremism, but blm from just months back stands as a major counterpoint.
- potency 6y agoI'd argue that this has been creeping for a while. At first it's used to ban blatantly illegal posts and obvious spam. However the power to moderate is easily abused. Big Tech is now effectively punishing wrong-think, and it doesn't even have to happen on the platform in question.
- tomc1985 6y agoSociety has been steadily picking off free speech diehards. I think the turning point is when reddit started cracking down
- zarkov99 6y agoIts going to get worse: https://youtu.be/-wThP4i80Tw?t=25 https://youtu.be/-wThP4i80Tw?t=25
- konjin 6y ago>A scant few years ago, the tech industry was a beacon of free expression. It wasn't. Not since the 00s and at that point social media was small enough that rooting for the underdog was rooting for themselves.