9 ms·

A thought experiment. What’d happen if companies as Google, Facebook, Twitter etc would be banned from any form of censorship? I mean, having best-years-of-4ch

A thought experiment. What’d happen if companies as Google, Facebook, Twitter etc would be banned from any form of censorship? I mean, having best-years-of-4chan-like content everywhere. With some form of self-moderation, like subreddits, for sure. Might it be for the better? More honest and real world feel? No? It just seems very strange, the situation that platforms that have become truly global can silence people without any enforceable appeal system, using a weird mix of western moral and eastern business incentives in deciding to do so.

danaris 5y ago
The trouble is, we already know more or less what would happen: They would become even bigger breeding grounds for alt-right conspiracy theories and outright hate speech. We know this because this has already been happening. Even with the ability to remove hate speech from their platforms, this sort of content gets surfaced by their algorithms with horrifying regularity.
- wussboy 5y ago
  There is an idea in human culture that we make decisions by looking at the evidence and then changing our minds to coincide with the truth. In this world unlimited Free Speech makes sense. But humans do not do this. We make decisions based on what others around us are doing, on what the people we see as our team are doing, to show that we belong, no matter how stupid or ignorant those decisions are. In this world, unlimited Free Speech creates chaos. And that is the world we live in now. Free Speech is a good. But it is not the highest good. And the sooner we realize that the better off all humans will be.
  - barbacoa 5y ago
    The key thing here to recognize is that this unlimited free speech on platforms ended the day Trump was elected. It's presented as about hate speech or preventing misinformation but it's really about class and culture. The top 20% or so of the population, those that are employed by and control all the American mega corporations comprise the professional managerial class. There is nothing they despise more than the cultural values of the Walmart-shopping working class. When those people elected that insane clown as president is the day the professional managerial class decided they need to play a more active role in projecting their moral and cultural values onto everyone else. Incidents like the one in the article are collateral damage to this policy.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      "top 20% or so of the population, those that are employed by and control all the American mega corporations" Dont the top 2% that actually own these corporation control them?
      - barbacoa 5y ago
        It's the rank-and-file employees demanding these moderation policies too.
    - philipkglass 5y ago
      Facebook never allowed porn or even artistic nudes. YouTube only sometimes allows nudity/sex. Twitter and YouTube started scrubbing media drops from ISIS and other violent Islamist groups before Trump even had the nomination. They did so after bipartisan calls for social media to deplatform terrorist propaganda. Reddit also cracked down on Syrian civil war media around this time. The videos were often gruesome propaganda and evidence of war crimes at the same time. The reason people called on social media to remove this material instead of making it a job for law enforcement is that First Amendment protections are very broad. Praising ISIS or sharing "inspirational" videos of them killing government soldiers is not a crime if it doesn't also call for imminent lawless action. But few Americans of any political affiliation want such material to spread freely online, so it has been suppressed by other means on major platforms. I'm not endorsing or condemning how these platforms behave. I'm just pointing out that they have long suppressed material that the First Amendment protects. The timeline of moderation well predates the Trump presidency.
  - savingsPossible 5y ago
    It is also trivially the case that "due process is good, but not the highest good". Or, to take a less charged example, freedom of contracts I don't mean to be snarky, but to try to draw a line. There are goods and rights that are intrinsically important (say food, water, social life, freedom from crime) and some that are important for the maintaining of a society (contracts are a good example here). One of these "to maintain a society" freedoms is due process. Another, free speech. Both are important for their own sake, but also to check and control power. You can say, and it is reasonable to say, that not suffering the ill effects of crime is more important than having good due process. But, given that due process is an important check on those in power, whenever they say "we need to reduce due process to get better law enforcement", you should be wary. To sum up: some seemingly rational trades between values are dangerous, especially since they reduce our ability to influence society/to undo those trades.
  - EricE 5y ago
    "Free Speech is a good. But it is not the highest good. " Sunlight is ALWAYS the best disinfectant. Free speech is the first amendment in the US Constitution because those that wrote it had first hand experience what life is like without it.
    - danaris 5y ago
      That's an argument for transparency, not for unlimited free speech. It is, in fact, somewhat the opposite of what's been pushed for recently, with people like Zuckerberg wanting "privacy for me, but not for thee". Transparency allows us to see what's going on inside companies, and make sure that they're not making decisions that are to the detriment of our society as a whole. Unlimited free speech allows bigots and fascists to spread their poison unobstructed, which demonstrably helps them to recruit more people into their white supremacist, genocidal, and anti-democratic movements. Meanwhile, as a cost to maintain this "principle", thousands (and more) of real people are being hurt or killed, or having their livelihoods destroyed, simply because of the way they were born.
      - godshatter 5y ago
        >Unlimited free speech allows bigots and fascists to spread their poison unobstructed, which demonstrably helps them to recruit more people into their white supremacist, genocidal, and anti-democratic movements. Meanwhile, as a cost to maintain this "principle", thousands (and more) of real people are being hurt or killed, or having their livelihoods destroyed, simply because of the way they were born. In my opinion, the best way to give credence to these kinds of beliefs is to drive them underground. Now you have people whispering from the bushes about the topic to people they think might be swayed to join them and no one is around to counter what they are saying. The best way to keep people from believing these kinds of things is to let their proponents speak, and then call them on it. Joe Gullible will at least be able to see both sides. Similarly, the best way to unlearn bigotry is to converse with people you are bigoted towards about a range of topics. Eventually you learn that they are just people, like everyone else. The same thing could happen with politics if we stopped being shoved into bubbles (or willingly building them up). Unfortunately, advertisers don't want to place ads where contentious discussions occur and big companies don't want to lose advertising revenue, so here we are.
- seventytwo 5y ago
  It’s just happenstance that the “altright” is what has been taking advantage of places with light moderation. In the future, it just as easily could be another extremist group - maybe communists? Or fundamentalist Muslims? Of course, those currently a part of the Christian, American far right would be pleading for more regulation on free speech.
andrekandre 5y ago
once you scale up past a certain size, some kind of open democratic/lawful process seems the only fair way to do these things... though that goes against the recent trend of privitization/marketization of everything...
- kingsuper20 5y ago
  Could you design a distributed Facebook? Perhaps no scale is really needed, at least in some cases.
  - swiley 5y ago
    I haven't used Facebook in 10 years but my friends have shown me it. What's there to distribute? The chat functionality? The main feed is just a heavily curated stream of garbage that's vaguely influenced by your friend's list. It looks like there's nothing there other than this bizarre social pathology that's been continuously optimized and iterated to be as addictive as possible. For chat you have XMPP, for feeds you have RSS and webpub (mastodon.) There's ical for sharing events of course.
    - kingsuper20 5y ago
      The garbage is addictive. It seems to me that a distributed (and more secure) version needs to have something in it that would cause a network effect. The idea of Facebook seems sound, it's just hard to get everyone to agree on one and when they do it's hard to break them free.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    It doesnt need to be distributed,just needs oversight thats not commercially or politically biased
    - kingsuper20 5y ago
      >oversight thats not commercially or politically biased My firm belief is that that is impossible.
sumedh 5y ago
Do you want terrorist to live stream their terror attacks like what NZ terrorist did?
- thejackgoode 5y ago
  Who am I to judge that? My point of view is that such livestreams are currently banned for a wrong reason -- for fear of loss of advertising revenue
  - jfengel 5y ago
    To me, that sounds like exactly the right reason. Let the market decide. If somebody else wants to spend their money to host such things, they're free to do it.
- quantumwannabe 5y ago
  Facebook’s censorship didn’t stop that though. It also didn’t stop the torturers of a disabled kid in Chicago from live-streaming their brutal crime.
  - sumedh 5y ago
    It did not stop the live stream but after they took it down, it could not spread further. If we remove censorship such tragic events will spread easily.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  I’m not sure how you can compare trying to bring awareness to the world of people suffering, vs someone carrying out criminal activity via live stream.
  - sumedh 5y ago
    OP's point was to remove any form of censorship.
- EricE 5y ago
LinuxBender 5y ago
I think for a while BitChute [1] was like what you describe. There are probably other platforms created in response to censorship and I suspect they stay mostly uncensored until they get popular and/or try to monetize videos. Eventually they get enough pressure from their local governments, investors, financial institutions and will take the same path as YT or get taken down. To add to your thought experiment, maybe the platform would remain less censored for some time if it were started by an incredibly wealthy philanthropist and had no desire to make money from it. The ties to financial institutions make it hard to be a neutral platform as they will have their own policies for what content investors and advertisers find acceptable. The financial institutions are heavily inter-connected internationally. So maybe the answer is to keep the monetized content on YT and just accept that their content is heavily regulated. Then create a similar platform that is not tied to any financial institutions at all. Incorporate the company and put their headquarters and servers in a country that has minimal content regulations. The remaining challenges will be finding CDN's, DNS providers and ISP's that can also remain neutral. [1] - https://www.bitchute.com/ https://www.bitchute.com/
- kingsuper20 5y ago
  So how do you architect a system that doesn't have a single point of failure on all axis, storage/delivery/financial? It's funny how the early web thinking encompassed nuclear war but not the presence of authoritarian government in the East and a zealotic secular religion in the West.
  - LinuxBender 5y ago
    That is a great question and I think some site creators have shared your thoughts on this. I don't believe there is a single simple answer. The internet is not as distributed as some think it is. IP allocation is still controlled by a small number of governments ARIN, APNIC, RIPE NCC, AFRINIC. ISP's, DNS providers, CDN's are subject to their governments regulations and political influence. Every proposed solution I have seen ends up down some rabbit holes and obscure technologies that are generally too hard for the masses to adopt.
kingsuper20 5y ago
>I mean, having best-years-of-4chan-like content everywhere. With some form of self-moderation, like subreddits, for sure. It's an interesting thought. I rather like the idea as the different political kinks of the big companies are rather obvious. You'd still have the problem of moderation in terms of various types of pornography (country specific), automated cruft/spam and the edge conditions of various degrees of violence in videos. Of course, Usenet seemed to manage just fine. Maybe the problem is that a system like youtube or Facebook is monolithic. Placing responsibility in one groups' lap can't be a healthy thing in the long run. That, and people shouldn't get so triggered by what they see on a little screen.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > Of course, Usenet seemed to manage just fine. The amount of Usenet servers allowing binary-containing posts is next to zero because of piracy and child porn issues, and the text-only stuff never became mass-market enough to show up on the attention radar of media and wide society.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    I think this last point is key. The problem, I think - and this is pure supposition on my part - is that the algorithm that optimises for "engagement" (i.e. emotional reaction) also kinda accidentally optimises for the shady shit. You could always find shady shit on Usenet if you wanted it. But you have to go looking for it. Because there wasn't an algorithm feeding you whatever it thought would keep you interested, it wasn't front and centre. As you say, it never became mass-market enough. Because most people aren't really into the shady shit. Everyone might google for 2 girls 1 receptacle once for kicks, but it's not what most people want to see all day. Without the algorithm, it dies in user sub and most people don't even see it.
- jandrese 5y ago
  > Of course, Usenet seemed to manage just fine. Usenet collapsed under the weight of spam and trolls. People tried to keep it going with some bolted on moderation tools but they never worked very well and eventually people moved on to more moderated platforms. Even if you remove alt.binaries the rest of the Usenet had a massive spam problem that was never fully solved. Once a community grows large enough you can't get around the need for moderation, it takes far too few bad faith actors to increase the noise level beyond the point that the average person can tolerate. It doesn't take long for the quality people to leave in search of a less noisy venue.
esyir 5y ago
It's more interesting because the two have areas where they're clearly opposed. Then you watch them twist themselves into pretzels with things like Blizzard's Blitzchung fiasco. Or the NBA's position on political issues around China.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mschuster91 5y ago
> What’d happen if companies as Google, Facebook, Twitter etc would be banned from any form of censorship? Just the same what happened to 4chan and its more shady copycats: it's going to be immediately overrun by far-right extremism, misogyny, gore, violence and a lot of pedophiles. > More honest and real world feel? When I go onto the city plaza and shout a Hitler salute or that women belong in the kitchen, I'm going to be beat up or arrested. On a "censorship" or rather moderation-free platform, there are no mechanisms to enforce social norms and laws.
aww_dang 5y ago
If people can't be trusted to consume information without censorship, is that a problem with the platform or the consumer? If we accept the premise that individuals cannot be trusted with information, where does that lead us? There will always be problems in society. Taking a narrow view of exceptional circumstances, characterizing it as dangerous or "an emergency" ignores the larger picture. Given a chance for rational, open dialog, people equipped to do so can come to conclusions based upon reason. It is the natural course of the dissemination of information. I remember when the rallying cry of the hacker movement was: "Information wants to be free" Somewhere along the line we've supplanted that with gatekeeping and walled gardens. Cynics will observe that there is no gatekeeping without walled gardens. Therefore, if there was a motive for censorship and gatekeeping, walled gardens satiated the need. Can we say that there was not a pre-existing structure for censorship? The Internet may have temporarily disrupted censorship for some, but it has been a case of solve et coagula. Dissolve and reform. Where before there was a limited conduit of information via mainstream presses and televised talking heads, there is now a curated garden of content. Simulated peer groups share their views. Those that step outside of the prescribed narrative can be removed. Thus the individual need not solely trust their taking head, they can look to their peers and fulfill their desire to conform to social norms. You ask "What if it [insert-platform] wasn't censored?". As a cynic I must conclude that there would be no point to these platforms without censorship. They either wouldn't be created, or an overriding need to censor them would naturally arise. Censorship is the feature.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
Firstly, that's a false dichotomy, secondly, sensorship and moderation are distinct terms; removing pornography is not censorship. Thirdly, media firms are conducting sensorship under false pretences. So there are at least 3 degrees of separation between "you cant arbitrarily sensor invonvenient speech" and "everything turns into 4chan/b"
- thejackgoode 5y ago
  Honestly, I don't know the distinction, please explain how you see it. In both censorship and moderation, there is an authority within some platform with some autonomy (like a country or a social network or house owners meeting etc) which decides which information is acceptable and which is not. About degrees of separation: I agree, I just did a bit overdramatic illustration of outcomes.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
> Might it be for the better? More honest and real world feel? No? Nope, it'd be a shithole of the worst of the internet; advertisers would stay well away, ISPs would ban it, and it would quickly go away. Nobody wants "true" freedom. I mean Reddit tried to be a bastion of free speech and had to rein it wayyy back in, first with hate subreddits, then more recently delisting NSFW subreddits, making them much harder to discover - instead of creating filters or adding additional ways to specify why something is not safe for work. Parler likes to pretend it's a bastion of free speech, but it actively bans any LGBTQ+ content and had to start moderating or be deplatformed by the likes of Apple, Google, and their hosting party.
- h_anna_h 5y ago
  Why would it be a shithole? Just advertisers staying away would make it worth it. Reddit was much better in the past.
  - ByteJockey 5y ago
    I tend to agree with you on the desirability of sites that mostly leave people alone. But you do still need to solve the monetization issue as the site scales. Paying for accounts/to get rid of ads like old SA?
    - h_anna_h 5y ago
      > as the site scales Distributed technologies are the solution to this.
- jdsully 5y ago
  Reddit also grew to be one of the biggest sites on the internet with their low censorship policy before they started the crackdown. It’s not evidence crackdowns are necessary because they got successful first.
  - root_axis 5y ago
    Censorship is the quintessential differentiating factor of reddit's success, they simply offloaded the censoring to the users. Later on they added some global site guidelines, but reddit has always been about censorship.
baryphonic 5y ago
Honestly, I wouldn't mind some form of content moderation. But I'd prefer some honesty and objectivity in the enforcement. I've had a couple of accounts banned from social media (one on Twitter, one on YouTube). In both cases, I had no idea what policy I had supposedly violated until after I appealed, which is less transparent than a Soviet show trial. In the case of YouTube, the appeal itself got stuck in limbo, and someone at Google briefly locked my main account (rather than the "brand account" sub-account associated with the channel). The thought of having all email since 2004, my family's TV service and my domain names all ripped away from me for arbitrary, capricious and clumsy enforcement of vague policies was like an ice bath. I've migrated most of my stuff away from Google now, or at least have accounts I don't care about losing.
- Jcowell 5y ago
  Exactly , there is nothing wrong with Moderation. The problem comes there’s inconsistent enforcement and the inability to appeal and reform moderation rules in light of mistakes. Transparent moderation is probably the best.
dukeofdoom 5y ago
On twitter, in the lawsuit below, it was basically government censorship, disguised by one step, through a consulting firm working for the government. https://www.thedesertreview.com/news/u-s-senator-alex-padilla-twitter-and-others-sued-for-1st-amendment-violations-regarding-state/article_f129d9ec-d051-11eb-b280-930ef66f4071.html https://www.thedesertreview.com/news/u-s-senator-alex-padill...
seventytwo 5y ago
How would a completely rule-free economy work out? How about a completely law-free society? Tell me, in what other system of human interaction is a total lack of rules and regulations ever the optimal?
- fouric 5y ago
  None of those things are equivalent to each other. In particular, the difference between complete free speech and a lassez-faire economy or anarchism is so massive as to not be comparable.
duxup 5y ago
>More honest and real world feel? What would be more real about it?
sneak 5y ago
Editorial control over their own website is a first amendment protected right. Such a law denying them the right to determine what is on their own webpage would be unconstitutional.
- aww_dang 5y ago
  Your assertion is correct. They have editorial control over their website as a matter of free-speech. However, when the YouTube sponsored "Freedom Forum" gives the YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcikci a "free expression award" for censoring content, that's hypocritical. >@YouTube CEO @SusanWojcicki has been at the forefront of fighting hate speech and misinformation online. She’ll be honored at this year’s Free Expression Awards. https://twitter.com/1stforall/status/1378505352715571206?lang=en https://twitter.com/1stforall/status/1378505352715571206?lan... It is possible to agree with the right of a private company to control their own platform how they see fit, while disagreeing with the choices they make. That said, there are cases where platforms have censored content at the behest of government officials. In these cases it is alleged that 1st amendment rights are violated and platforms are acting as agents of the government. >These documents blow up the big lie that Big Tech censorship is ‘private’ – as the documents show collusion between a whole group of government officials in multiple states to suppress speech about election controversies. >The document shows that California state officials contacted YouTube directly to remove the video on September 24, 2020, and that YouTube seemed to respond by deleting the video on September 27, 2020 https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/ca-big-tech-biden-censorship-judicial-watch https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/ca-big-tech-biden-cen... These instances were uncovered by FOIA requests to the US government. Unfortunately, the CCP does not honor such requests.
foxhop 5y ago
A lot of Truth would be freed at the expense of a lot of noise. Information wants to be free. Privacy is equally important.
markzzerella 5y ago
Having the back end uncensored and the front end moderated freely seems reasonable.
yy727 5y ago
User-level subscribable mute and block lists. The platforms could even offer their own mute and block lists for those who wish to have the same experience as now (which would have the advantage of being completely auditable). This allows each user to tailor their experience as they feel comfortable. Outraged communities can have their moderated bubbles. Those open to alternative viewpoints are free to peruse an unmoderated stream.

danaris 5y ago

The trouble is, we already know more or less what would happen: They would become even bigger breeding grounds for alt-right conspiracy theories and outright hate speech. We know this because this has already been happening. Even with the ability to remove hate speech from their platforms, this sort of content gets surfaced by their algorithms with horrifying regularity.

wussboy 5y ago
There is an idea in human culture that we make decisions by looking at the evidence and then changing our minds to coincide with the truth. In this world unlimited Free Speech makes sense. But humans do not do this. We make decisions based on what others around us are doing, on what the people we see as our team are doing, to show that we belong, no matter how stupid or ignorant those decisions are. In this world, unlimited Free Speech creates chaos. And that is the world we live in now. Free Speech is a good. But it is not the highest good. And the sooner we realize that the better off all humans will be.
- barbacoa 5y ago
  The key thing here to recognize is that this unlimited free speech on platforms ended the day Trump was elected. It's presented as about hate speech or preventing misinformation but it's really about class and culture. The top 20% or so of the population, those that are employed by and control all the American mega corporations comprise the professional managerial class. There is nothing they despise more than the cultural values of the Walmart-shopping working class. When those people elected that insane clown as president is the day the professional managerial class decided they need to play a more active role in projecting their moral and cultural values onto everyone else. Incidents like the one in the article are collateral damage to this policy.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "top 20% or so of the population, those that are employed by and control all the American mega corporations" Dont the top 2% that actually own these corporation control them?
    - barbacoa 5y ago
      It's the rank-and-file employees demanding these moderation policies too.
  - philipkglass 5y ago
    Facebook never allowed porn or even artistic nudes. YouTube only sometimes allows nudity/sex. Twitter and YouTube started scrubbing media drops from ISIS and other violent Islamist groups before Trump even had the nomination. They did so after bipartisan calls for social media to deplatform terrorist propaganda. Reddit also cracked down on Syrian civil war media around this time. The videos were often gruesome propaganda and evidence of war crimes at the same time. The reason people called on social media to remove this material instead of making it a job for law enforcement is that First Amendment protections are very broad. Praising ISIS or sharing "inspirational" videos of them killing government soldiers is not a crime if it doesn't also call for imminent lawless action. But few Americans of any political affiliation want such material to spread freely online, so it has been suppressed by other means on major platforms. I'm not endorsing or condemning how these platforms behave. I'm just pointing out that they have long suppressed material that the First Amendment protects. The timeline of moderation well predates the Trump presidency.
- savingsPossible 5y ago
  It is also trivially the case that "due process is good, but not the highest good". Or, to take a less charged example, freedom of contracts I don't mean to be snarky, but to try to draw a line. There are goods and rights that are intrinsically important (say food, water, social life, freedom from crime) and some that are important for the maintaining of a society (contracts are a good example here). One of these "to maintain a society" freedoms is due process. Another, free speech. Both are important for their own sake, but also to check and control power. You can say, and it is reasonable to say, that not suffering the ill effects of crime is more important than having good due process. But, given that due process is an important check on those in power, whenever they say "we need to reduce due process to get better law enforcement", you should be wary. To sum up: some seemingly rational trades between values are dangerous, especially since they reduce our ability to influence society/to undo those trades.
- EricE 5y ago
  "Free Speech is a good. But it is not the highest good. " Sunlight is ALWAYS the best disinfectant. Free speech is the first amendment in the US Constitution because those that wrote it had first hand experience what life is like without it.
  - danaris 5y ago
    That's an argument for transparency, not for unlimited free speech. It is, in fact, somewhat the opposite of what's been pushed for recently, with people like Zuckerberg wanting "privacy for me, but not for thee". Transparency allows us to see what's going on inside companies, and make sure that they're not making decisions that are to the detriment of our society as a whole. Unlimited free speech allows bigots and fascists to spread their poison unobstructed, which demonstrably helps them to recruit more people into their white supremacist, genocidal, and anti-democratic movements. Meanwhile, as a cost to maintain this "principle", thousands (and more) of real people are being hurt or killed, or having their livelihoods destroyed, simply because of the way they were born.
    - godshatter 5y ago
      >Unlimited free speech allows bigots and fascists to spread their poison unobstructed, which demonstrably helps them to recruit more people into their white supremacist, genocidal, and anti-democratic movements. Meanwhile, as a cost to maintain this "principle", thousands (and more) of real people are being hurt or killed, or having their livelihoods destroyed, simply because of the way they were born. In my opinion, the best way to give credence to these kinds of beliefs is to drive them underground. Now you have people whispering from the bushes about the topic to people they think might be swayed to join them and no one is around to counter what they are saying. The best way to keep people from believing these kinds of things is to let their proponents speak, and then call them on it. Joe Gullible will at least be able to see both sides. Similarly, the best way to unlearn bigotry is to converse with people you are bigoted towards about a range of topics. Eventually you learn that they are just people, like everyone else. The same thing could happen with politics if we stopped being shoved into bubbles (or willingly building them up). Unfortunately, advertisers don't want to place ads where contentious discussions occur and big companies don't want to lose advertising revenue, so here we are.
seventytwo 5y ago
It’s just happenstance that the “altright” is what has been taking advantage of places with light moderation. In the future, it just as easily could be another extremist group - maybe communists? Or fundamentalist Muslims? Of course, those currently a part of the Christian, American far right would be pleading for more regulation on free speech.

andrekandre 5y ago

once you scale up past a certain size, some kind of open democratic/lawful process seems the only fair way to do these things... though that goes against the recent trend of privitization/marketization of everything...

kingsuper20 5y ago
Could you design a distributed Facebook? Perhaps no scale is really needed, at least in some cases.
- swiley 5y ago
  I haven't used Facebook in 10 years but my friends have shown me it. What's there to distribute? The chat functionality? The main feed is just a heavily curated stream of garbage that's vaguely influenced by your friend's list. It looks like there's nothing there other than this bizarre social pathology that's been continuously optimized and iterated to be as addictive as possible. For chat you have XMPP, for feeds you have RSS and webpub (mastodon.) There's ical for sharing events of course.
  - kingsuper20 5y ago
    The garbage is addictive. It seems to me that a distributed (and more secure) version needs to have something in it that would cause a network effect. The idea of Facebook seems sound, it's just hard to get everyone to agree on one and when they do it's hard to break them free.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  It doesnt need to be distributed,just needs oversight thats not commercially or politically biased
  - kingsuper20 5y ago
    >oversight thats not commercially or politically biased My firm belief is that that is impossible.

sumedh 5y ago

Do you want terrorist to live stream their terror attacks like what NZ terrorist did?

thejackgoode 5y ago
Who am I to judge that? My point of view is that such livestreams are currently banned for a wrong reason -- for fear of loss of advertising revenue
- jfengel 5y ago
  To me, that sounds like exactly the right reason. Let the market decide. If somebody else wants to spend their money to host such things, they're free to do it.
quantumwannabe 5y ago
Facebook’s censorship didn’t stop that though. It also didn’t stop the torturers of a disabled kid in Chicago from live-streaming their brutal crime.
- sumedh 5y ago
  It did not stop the live stream but after they took it down, it could not spread further. If we remove censorship such tragic events will spread easily.
philliphaydon 5y ago
I’m not sure how you can compare trying to bring awareness to the world of people suffering, vs someone carrying out criminal activity via live stream.
- sumedh 5y ago
  OP's point was to remove any form of censorship.
EricE 5y ago

LinuxBender 5y ago

I think for a while BitChute [1] was like what you describe. There are probably other platforms created in response to censorship and I suspect they stay mostly uncensored until they get popular and/or try to monetize videos. Eventually they get enough pressure from their local governments, investors, financial institutions and will take the same path as YT or get taken down. To add to your thought experiment, maybe the platform would remain less censored for some time if it were started by an incredibly wealthy philanthropist and had no desire to make money from it. The ties to financial institutions make it hard to be a neutral platform as they will have their own policies for what content investors and advertisers find acceptable. The financial institutions are heavily inter-connected internationally. So maybe the answer is to keep the monetized content on YT and just accept that their content is heavily regulated. Then create a similar platform that is not tied to any financial institutions at all. Incorporate the company and put their headquarters and servers in a country that has minimal content regulations. The remaining challenges will be finding CDN's, DNS providers and ISP's that can also remain neutral. [1] - https://www.bitchute.com/ https://www.bitchute.com/

kingsuper20 5y ago
So how do you architect a system that doesn't have a single point of failure on all axis, storage/delivery/financial? It's funny how the early web thinking encompassed nuclear war but not the presence of authoritarian government in the East and a zealotic secular religion in the West.
- LinuxBender 5y ago
  That is a great question and I think some site creators have shared your thoughts on this. I don't believe there is a single simple answer. The internet is not as distributed as some think it is. IP allocation is still controlled by a small number of governments ARIN, APNIC, RIPE NCC, AFRINIC. ISP's, DNS providers, CDN's are subject to their governments regulations and political influence. Every proposed solution I have seen ends up down some rabbit holes and obscure technologies that are generally too hard for the masses to adopt.

kingsuper20 5y ago

>I mean, having best-years-of-4chan-like content everywhere. With some form of self-moderation, like subreddits, for sure. It's an interesting thought. I rather like the idea as the different political kinks of the big companies are rather obvious. You'd still have the problem of moderation in terms of various types of pornography (country specific), automated cruft/spam and the edge conditions of various degrees of violence in videos. Of course, Usenet seemed to manage just fine. Maybe the problem is that a system like youtube or Facebook is monolithic. Placing responsibility in one groups' lap can't be a healthy thing in the long run. That, and people shouldn't get so triggered by what they see on a little screen.

mschuster91 5y ago
> Of course, Usenet seemed to manage just fine. The amount of Usenet servers allowing binary-containing posts is next to zero because of piracy and child porn issues, and the text-only stuff never became mass-market enough to show up on the attention radar of media and wide society.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  I think this last point is key. The problem, I think - and this is pure supposition on my part - is that the algorithm that optimises for "engagement" (i.e. emotional reaction) also kinda accidentally optimises for the shady shit. You could always find shady shit on Usenet if you wanted it. But you have to go looking for it. Because there wasn't an algorithm feeding you whatever it thought would keep you interested, it wasn't front and centre. As you say, it never became mass-market enough. Because most people aren't really into the shady shit. Everyone might google for 2 girls 1 receptacle once for kicks, but it's not what most people want to see all day. Without the algorithm, it dies in user sub and most people don't even see it.
jandrese 5y ago
> Of course, Usenet seemed to manage just fine. Usenet collapsed under the weight of spam and trolls. People tried to keep it going with some bolted on moderation tools but they never worked very well and eventually people moved on to more moderated platforms. Even if you remove alt.binaries the rest of the Usenet had a massive spam problem that was never fully solved. Once a community grows large enough you can't get around the need for moderation, it takes far too few bad faith actors to increase the noise level beyond the point that the average person can tolerate. It doesn't take long for the quality people to leave in search of a less noisy venue.

esyir 5y ago

It's more interesting because the two have areas where they're clearly opposed. Then you watch them twist themselves into pretzels with things like Blizzard's Blitzchung fiasco. Or the NBA's position on political issues around China.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mschuster91 5y ago

> What’d happen if companies as Google, Facebook, Twitter etc would be banned from any form of censorship? Just the same what happened to 4chan and its more shady copycats: it's going to be immediately overrun by far-right extremism, misogyny, gore, violence and a lot of pedophiles. > More honest and real world feel? When I go onto the city plaza and shout a Hitler salute or that women belong in the kitchen, I'm going to be beat up or arrested. On a "censorship" or rather moderation-free platform, there are no mechanisms to enforce social norms and laws.

aww_dang 5y ago

If people can't be trusted to consume information without censorship, is that a problem with the platform or the consumer? If we accept the premise that individuals cannot be trusted with information, where does that lead us? There will always be problems in society. Taking a narrow view of exceptional circumstances, characterizing it as dangerous or "an emergency" ignores the larger picture. Given a chance for rational, open dialog, people equipped to do so can come to conclusions based upon reason. It is the natural course of the dissemination of information. I remember when the rallying cry of the hacker movement was: "Information wants to be free" Somewhere along the line we've supplanted that with gatekeeping and walled gardens. Cynics will observe that there is no gatekeeping without walled gardens. Therefore, if there was a motive for censorship and gatekeeping, walled gardens satiated the need. Can we say that there was not a pre-existing structure for censorship? The Internet may have temporarily disrupted censorship for some, but it has been a case of solve et coagula. Dissolve and reform. Where before there was a limited conduit of information via mainstream presses and televised talking heads, there is now a curated garden of content. Simulated peer groups share their views. Those that step outside of the prescribed narrative can be removed. Thus the individual need not solely trust their taking head, they can look to their peers and fulfill their desire to conform to social norms. You ask "What if it [insert-platform] wasn't censored?". As a cynic I must conclude that there would be no point to these platforms without censorship. They either wouldn't be created, or an overriding need to censor them would naturally arise. Censorship is the feature.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

Firstly, that's a false dichotomy, secondly, sensorship and moderation are distinct terms; removing pornography is not censorship. Thirdly, media firms are conducting sensorship under false pretences. So there are at least 3 degrees of separation between "you cant arbitrarily sensor invonvenient speech" and "everything turns into 4chan/b"

thejackgoode 5y ago
Honestly, I don't know the distinction, please explain how you see it. In both censorship and moderation, there is an authority within some platform with some autonomy (like a country or a social network or house owners meeting etc) which decides which information is acceptable and which is not. About degrees of separation: I agree, I just did a bit overdramatic illustration of outcomes.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

> Might it be for the better? More honest and real world feel? No? Nope, it'd be a shithole of the worst of the internet; advertisers would stay well away, ISPs would ban it, and it would quickly go away. Nobody wants "true" freedom. I mean Reddit tried to be a bastion of free speech and had to rein it wayyy back in, first with hate subreddits, then more recently delisting NSFW subreddits, making them much harder to discover - instead of creating filters or adding additional ways to specify why something is not safe for work. Parler likes to pretend it's a bastion of free speech, but it actively bans any LGBTQ+ content and had to start moderating or be deplatformed by the likes of Apple, Google, and their hosting party.

h_anna_h 5y ago
Why would it be a shithole? Just advertisers staying away would make it worth it. Reddit was much better in the past.
- ByteJockey 5y ago
  I tend to agree with you on the desirability of sites that mostly leave people alone. But you do still need to solve the monetization issue as the site scales. Paying for accounts/to get rid of ads like old SA?
  - h_anna_h 5y ago
    > as the site scales Distributed technologies are the solution to this.
jdsully 5y ago
Reddit also grew to be one of the biggest sites on the internet with their low censorship policy before they started the crackdown. It’s not evidence crackdowns are necessary because they got successful first.
- root_axis 5y ago
  Censorship is the quintessential differentiating factor of reddit's success, they simply offloaded the censoring to the users. Later on they added some global site guidelines, but reddit has always been about censorship.

baryphonic 5y ago

Honestly, I wouldn't mind some form of content moderation. But I'd prefer some honesty and objectivity in the enforcement. I've had a couple of accounts banned from social media (one on Twitter, one on YouTube). In both cases, I had no idea what policy I had supposedly violated until after I appealed, which is less transparent than a Soviet show trial. In the case of YouTube, the appeal itself got stuck in limbo, and someone at Google briefly locked my main account (rather than the "brand account" sub-account associated with the channel). The thought of having all email since 2004, my family's TV service and my domain names all ripped away from me for arbitrary, capricious and clumsy enforcement of vague policies was like an ice bath. I've migrated most of my stuff away from Google now, or at least have accounts I don't care about losing.

Jcowell 5y ago
Exactly , there is nothing wrong with Moderation. The problem comes there’s inconsistent enforcement and the inability to appeal and reform moderation rules in light of mistakes. Transparent moderation is probably the best.

dukeofdoom 5y ago

On twitter, in the lawsuit below, it was basically government censorship, disguised by one step, through a consulting firm working for the government. https://www.thedesertreview.com/news/u-s-senator-alex-padilla-twitter-and-others-sued-for-1st-amendment-violations-regarding-state/article_f129d9ec-d051-11eb-b280-930ef66f4071.html https://www.thedesertreview.com/news/u-s-senator-alex-padill...

seventytwo 5y ago

How would a completely rule-free economy work out? How about a completely law-free society? Tell me, in what other system of human interaction is a total lack of rules and regulations ever the optimal?

fouric 5y ago
None of those things are equivalent to each other. In particular, the difference between complete free speech and a lassez-faire economy or anarchism is so massive as to not be comparable.

duxup 5y ago

>More honest and real world feel? What would be more real about it?

sneak 5y ago

Editorial control over their own website is a first amendment protected right. Such a law denying them the right to determine what is on their own webpage would be unconstitutional.

aww_dang 5y ago
Your assertion is correct. They have editorial control over their website as a matter of free-speech. However, when the YouTube sponsored "Freedom Forum" gives the YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcikci a "free expression award" for censoring content, that's hypocritical. >@YouTube CEO @SusanWojcicki has been at the forefront of fighting hate speech and misinformation online. She’ll be honored at this year’s Free Expression Awards. https://twitter.com/1stforall/status/1378505352715571206?lang=en https://twitter.com/1stforall/status/1378505352715571206?lan... It is possible to agree with the right of a private company to control their own platform how they see fit, while disagreeing with the choices they make. That said, there are cases where platforms have censored content at the behest of government officials. In these cases it is alleged that 1st amendment rights are violated and platforms are acting as agents of the government. >These documents blow up the big lie that Big Tech censorship is ‘private’ – as the documents show collusion between a whole group of government officials in multiple states to suppress speech about election controversies. >The document shows that California state officials contacted YouTube directly to remove the video on September 24, 2020, and that YouTube seemed to respond by deleting the video on September 27, 2020 https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/ca-big-tech-biden-censorship-judicial-watch https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/ca-big-tech-biden-cen... These instances were uncovered by FOIA requests to the US government. Unfortunately, the CCP does not honor such requests.

foxhop 5y ago

A lot of Truth would be freed at the expense of a lot of noise. Information wants to be free. Privacy is equally important.

markzzerella 5y ago

Having the back end uncensored and the front end moderated freely seems reasonable.

yy727 5y ago

User-level subscribable mute and block lists. The platforms could even offer their own mute and block lists for those who wish to have the same experience as now (which would have the advantage of being completely auditable). This allows each user to tailor their experience as they feel comfortable. Outraged communities can have their moderated bubbles. Those open to alternative viewpoints are free to peruse an unmoderated stream.