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The situation as I see it is that we’ve essentially created a new, digital place that we spend half our lives living in. And it started with very little infrast

The situation as I see it is that we’ve essentially created a new, digital place that we spend half our lives living in. And it started with very little infrastructure. Facebook and Google have created a lot of the infrastructure we need “for free” - in exchange for doing surveillance capitalism. It’s like if big megacorps owned the roads outside your house and tracked you and advertised to you as soon as you set foot outdoors. And they will ban you from using the road outside if an AI doesn’t like something you do. Apple made a fiefdom with a harsh 30% tax of any trades inside their walls. - and once you’re inside, it’s very expensive to leave. The whole situation is crying out for some sort of civic process. If we live part of our lives in cyberspace, we need a voice in how those spaces are governed. Something “By the people, for the people.” We don’t let corporations run towns in the real world and do this sort of thing. It’s entirely consistent to want to bring democratic values online too.

thephyber 5y ago
IMHO this is all wrong. We already have a framework for physical networking services that does this: Common Carrier. It doesn’t and shouldn’t apply to companies other than “dumb pipe” utilities. No company which can or does do any moderation of content should be governed by CC laws. You seem to think forcing all companies on the internet to maximize democratic values is somehow either possible or a good idea. I can’t see how that could be implemented without destroying every company’s ability to build a brand, to enforce their own contractual terms. Example: you local church/temple website that accepts with user-generated comments would be forced to allow and keep every comment submitted, no matter how offensive to the members or the faith the church practices. Non-believers would be able to deface the service in a way that trespassing laws prevent IRL. This compelled democratic values maximization concept doesn’t exist in the offline world so you would have to build the logical/rational foundations for doing it from scratch. Obviously the church/temple example is contrived and those are far from Big Tech companies, but if you assert that some services are required to retain all offensive content and others aren’t, then you need to develop a litmus test, which I argue is futile. And from where I stand, demanding a civic process is really strange considering most civic processes in the USA are deteriorating while Big Tech is doing the opposite.
- josephg 5y ago
  Yeah, those are good points but a participatory democracy doesn’t mean communities (like a church group) can’t govern themselves. It means literally the opposite of that. As an example, in Germany nudity is much less of a taboo than in the US. Facebook has a blanket ban on nudity for American cultural reasons. A nudist event in Berlin can be argued for and against in Berlin by the communities involved. They can talk about it in council, protest, write letters, vote or get politically involved. On Facebook people can’t effectively do any of those things. They just enforce America’s squeamishness from on high. If Facebook and Twitter want to be an online version of the public square, people need the right to govern our own communities online as we do offline. I like Reddit’s moves in this direction with community moderation of subreddits. I’m not a free speech absolutist - I like that entire subreddits can still be banned if they become too toxic (as we saw recently). But this makes people really angry because Reddit’s internal governance is entirely unaccountable. An unelected monarch is ruling over a bunch of small community run spaces. The next healthy step is for the monarch to be replaced with a board of directors or something - who are themselves accountable to the users. But like all kings throughout time, reddit has no incentive to do that. And on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube it’s much worse. At scale, the editorial choices made by their content algorithms are inordinately powerful, invisible and actively destructive to society. I don’t know the right way to reign in this stuff. But I’m worried that if we don’t, society at large won’t survive the partisanship, extremism and conspiracy thinking that these editorial algorithms en masse create. I agree there’s something deeply wrong in Washington. I wish us technologists were making things better instead of making things worse.
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  I don't think all companies should be forced to maximize democratic values, but the ones like Facebook that have become so large that they are used by 2/3 of the people in the country absolutely should. A local website with a few hundred users shouldn't be held to the same standards as one that has made itself a dominant factor in public discourse.
  - thephyber 5y ago
    Again, I think your preference requires a litmus test to decide which services should and which shouldn’t. I don’t agree that FB should be a content neutral platform. Just because there are network effects and social media is common do not mean they are “the” town square. They are more like a private mall where lots of people are allowed, but some people have been banned for trespassing.
verve_rat 5y ago
This seems entirely reasonable to me. Take, for example, Youtube channels getting shut down for no apparent reason. It seems very sensible for there to be a low cost and binding tribunal independent of Google to appeal to.

thephyber 5y ago

IMHO this is all wrong. We already have a framework for physical networking services that does this: Common Carrier. It doesn’t and shouldn’t apply to companies other than “dumb pipe” utilities. No company which can or does do any moderation of content should be governed by CC laws. You seem to think forcing all companies on the internet to maximize democratic values is somehow either possible or a good idea. I can’t see how that could be implemented without destroying every company’s ability to build a brand, to enforce their own contractual terms. Example: you local church/temple website that accepts with user-generated comments would be forced to allow and keep every comment submitted, no matter how offensive to the members or the faith the church practices. Non-believers would be able to deface the service in a way that trespassing laws prevent IRL. This compelled democratic values maximization concept doesn’t exist in the offline world so you would have to build the logical/rational foundations for doing it from scratch. Obviously the church/temple example is contrived and those are far from Big Tech companies, but if you assert that some services are required to retain all offensive content and others aren’t, then you need to develop a litmus test, which I argue is futile. And from where I stand, demanding a civic process is really strange considering most civic processes in the USA are deteriorating while Big Tech is doing the opposite.

josephg 5y ago
Yeah, those are good points but a participatory democracy doesn’t mean communities (like a church group) can’t govern themselves. It means literally the opposite of that. As an example, in Germany nudity is much less of a taboo than in the US. Facebook has a blanket ban on nudity for American cultural reasons. A nudist event in Berlin can be argued for and against in Berlin by the communities involved. They can talk about it in council, protest, write letters, vote or get politically involved. On Facebook people can’t effectively do any of those things. They just enforce America’s squeamishness from on high. If Facebook and Twitter want to be an online version of the public square, people need the right to govern our own communities online as we do offline. I like Reddit’s moves in this direction with community moderation of subreddits. I’m not a free speech absolutist - I like that entire subreddits can still be banned if they become too toxic (as we saw recently). But this makes people really angry because Reddit’s internal governance is entirely unaccountable. An unelected monarch is ruling over a bunch of small community run spaces. The next healthy step is for the monarch to be replaced with a board of directors or something - who are themselves accountable to the users. But like all kings throughout time, reddit has no incentive to do that. And on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube it’s much worse. At scale, the editorial choices made by their content algorithms are inordinately powerful, invisible and actively destructive to society. I don’t know the right way to reign in this stuff. But I’m worried that if we don’t, society at large won’t survive the partisanship, extremism and conspiracy thinking that these editorial algorithms en masse create. I agree there’s something deeply wrong in Washington. I wish us technologists were making things better instead of making things worse.
TheCoelacanth 5y ago
I don't think all companies should be forced to maximize democratic values, but the ones like Facebook that have become so large that they are used by 2/3 of the people in the country absolutely should. A local website with a few hundred users shouldn't be held to the same standards as one that has made itself a dominant factor in public discourse.
- thephyber 5y ago
  Again, I think your preference requires a litmus test to decide which services should and which shouldn’t. I don’t agree that FB should be a content neutral platform. Just because there are network effects and social media is common do not mean they are “the” town square. They are more like a private mall where lots of people are allowed, but some people have been banned for trespassing.

verve_rat 5y ago

This seems entirely reasonable to me. Take, for example, Youtube channels getting shut down for no apparent reason. It seems very sensible for there to be a low cost and binding tribunal independent of Google to appeal to.