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Disinformation is doing more harm to society than encrypted terrorist emails ever could. The "Disinformation vs. free speech" will be a defining balance of the

Disinformation is doing more harm to society than encrypted terrorist emails ever could. The "Disinformation vs. free speech" will be a defining balance of the next decade, even more fraught than "privacy vs. security" in cyberspace. I'm not censoring someone because they want low taxes, high taxes, disbanding the department of education, or giving every poor person a new car. There is a line to be drawn, somewhere, one when speech crosses from the expression of political thought and free thinking, and into the willful (or the amplification of willful), factually incorrect statements generated by sophisticated trolls and adversary nation-states. My personal take: The Internet is a vital tool for free expression, and as such, a "floor" of free expression should be permitted. Ensure that DNS and ISP connectivity cannot be removed from someone based on the legal expression of thought. Those are infrastructure. Youtube, Facebook, and other amplification platforms? In the short term, I don't see how we force them to host actively harmful content without recategorizing their role in society. edit to respond to iosono88 (since HN is throttling my ability to rebut): I'll keep my response simple: I also don't like payment processors being used as control mechanisms for legal activities.

iosono88 5y ago
Youve added an addendum to protect DNS and ISP both of which have been used to censor citizens. Thoughts on pulling payment processing via very generalized Chokepoint? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
wutbrodo 5y ago
> In the short term, I don't see how we force them to host actively harmful content without recategorizing their role in society. This recent flip from "Facebook et al aren't doing enough, put the screws on them" to "we can't force Facebook not to censor" is quite disingenuous. These companies and their founders are famously liberal, and were dragged kicking and screaming into ever more heavy-handed moderation, by both public opinion and veiled threats of regulation from politicians. There's plenty of statements on the record of eg Zuckerberg saying what was obvious to most of us: nobody, including Facebook, wants them in the position of deciding what is true and what is false. Leaving aside whether content moderation is a good thing, let's not pretend that the situation here is that Facebook really wanted to become the arbiter of truth and misinformation and we can't stop them from being so.
- y4mi 5y ago
  They already were at that point, regardless of what people claim. Facebook had the ability to paint whatever picture they wanted as truth by controlling what their users saw at what time. And they utilized it proudly long before COVID to increase engagement.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    Sure, and long before Covid, that was a valid (and much-expressed) criticism of them, as well as a general criticism of using non-federated platforms. But expanding explicitly into deciding what users are allowed to see and express to each other is a million times worse than the type of banal malevolence that arises from "show people what they like to see".
    - unethical_ban 5y ago
      There's the fundamental difference! I love finding the "fundamental difference". The crux, the place where philosophies diverge, where the understandings break down. I fundamentally disagree with the premise that "keeping harmful, intentional disinformation away from people" is worse than "letting people unknowingly subscribe to disinformation". I would argue, perhaps, that there should be open policies on what topics are off-limits. That Facebook, et. al. should have to document to the public what "viewpoints" and disinformation they limit - and furthermore, that more of these content-display algorithms should be auditable, competitive secrecy be damned. I wouldn't call hundreds or thousands of people dying due to disinformation-backed vaccine skepticism "banal", either.
      - wutbrodo 5y ago
        > "keeping harmful, intentional disinformation away from people" This is begging the question though. It's assuming that "harmful, intentional disinformation" is 1) well-defined and 2) always going to be determined by those with your best interests at heart. It relies on a blind faith in the fundamental and eternal moral purity of Facebook and other mega-corporations. I wholeheartedly disagree that they fit this mold. This is true even if you turn your religious passion towards government institutions instead of Facebook. Do you similarly agree that criminal trials and due process are unnecessary? After all, the same pre-hoc confidence in your ability to categorize without rigor leads to "Why would we want criminals going free due to technicalities and lawyer's tricks?". I assume you don't agree with this statement, because in that context, you've internalized the idea that institutions are both corruptible and flawed even when uncorrupted, and it behooves us as a society to have some epistemic humility instead of pretending that Truth is carved onto clay tablets and handed down from God. If you've paid any attention to the pandemic, you'd know that even a situation where government is in full control of defining "misinformation" can be consistently and significantly misleading. "Mask truther" used to mean someone who thought wearing masks was a good idea for preventing spread, discussing the lab leak hypothesis was "misinformation", the vaccines were "rushed and unsafe" until Trump was out of office, etc etc etc. It's hard to pick a topic where it wasn't trivial to front-run official advice by several months, repeatedly, over the entire pandemic. It's a bit of a paradox: The very certainty and (illusory) Truth-with-a-capital-T that you take for granted is forged through a process of skepticism, second-guessing, and constant poking at beliefs. Hamstringing that process is like killing the golden goose to make more room for all the eggs you plan to have.

iosono88 5y ago

Youve added an addendum to protect DNS and ISP both of which have been used to censor citizens. Thoughts on pulling payment processing via very generalized Chokepoint? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

wutbrodo 5y ago

> In the short term, I don't see how we force them to host actively harmful content without recategorizing their role in society. This recent flip from "Facebook et al aren't doing enough, put the screws on them" to "we can't force Facebook not to censor" is quite disingenuous. These companies and their founders are famously liberal, and were dragged kicking and screaming into ever more heavy-handed moderation, by both public opinion and veiled threats of regulation from politicians. There's plenty of statements on the record of eg Zuckerberg saying what was obvious to most of us: nobody, including Facebook, wants them in the position of deciding what is true and what is false. Leaving aside whether content moderation is a good thing, let's not pretend that the situation here is that Facebook really wanted to become the arbiter of truth and misinformation and we can't stop them from being so.

y4mi 5y ago
They already were at that point, regardless of what people claim. Facebook had the ability to paint whatever picture they wanted as truth by controlling what their users saw at what time. And they utilized it proudly long before COVID to increase engagement.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  Sure, and long before Covid, that was a valid (and much-expressed) criticism of them, as well as a general criticism of using non-federated platforms. But expanding explicitly into deciding what users are allowed to see and express to each other is a million times worse than the type of banal malevolence that arises from "show people what they like to see".
  - unethical_ban 5y ago
    There's the fundamental difference! I love finding the "fundamental difference". The crux, the place where philosophies diverge, where the understandings break down. I fundamentally disagree with the premise that "keeping harmful, intentional disinformation away from people" is worse than "letting people unknowingly subscribe to disinformation". I would argue, perhaps, that there should be open policies on what topics are off-limits. That Facebook, et. al. should have to document to the public what "viewpoints" and disinformation they limit - and furthermore, that more of these content-display algorithms should be auditable, competitive secrecy be damned. I wouldn't call hundreds or thousands of people dying due to disinformation-backed vaccine skepticism "banal", either.
    - wutbrodo 5y ago
      > "keeping harmful, intentional disinformation away from people" This is begging the question though. It's assuming that "harmful, intentional disinformation" is 1) well-defined and 2) always going to be determined by those with your best interests at heart. It relies on a blind faith in the fundamental and eternal moral purity of Facebook and other mega-corporations. I wholeheartedly disagree that they fit this mold. This is true even if you turn your religious passion towards government institutions instead of Facebook. Do you similarly agree that criminal trials and due process are unnecessary? After all, the same pre-hoc confidence in your ability to categorize without rigor leads to "Why would we want criminals going free due to technicalities and lawyer's tricks?". I assume you don't agree with this statement, because in that context, you've internalized the idea that institutions are both corruptible and flawed even when uncorrupted, and it behooves us as a society to have some epistemic humility instead of pretending that Truth is carved onto clay tablets and handed down from God. If you've paid any attention to the pandemic, you'd know that even a situation where government is in full control of defining "misinformation" can be consistently and significantly misleading. "Mask truther" used to mean someone who thought wearing masks was a good idea for preventing spread, discussing the lab leak hypothesis was "misinformation", the vaccines were "rushed and unsafe" until Trump was out of office, etc etc etc. It's hard to pick a topic where it wasn't trivial to front-run official advice by several months, repeatedly, over the entire pandemic. It's a bit of a paradox: The very certainty and (illusory) Truth-with-a-capital-T that you take for granted is forged through a process of skepticism, second-guessing, and constant poking at beliefs. Hamstringing that process is like killing the golden goose to make more room for all the eggs you plan to have.