4 ms·

Anyone got a steelman for this? It seems like everyone here agrees that this is generally bad but I'd love to hear the best-case opposing view.

president 5y ago
They couldn't prove misinformation so they re-interpret terminology like "misleading" and make new phrases like "vaccine-hesitancy" to defend this censorship. And the only reason it works is because the gang of inflential companies that do this have captured the entire nation.
smt88 5y ago
We can all agree it's bad, but that doesn't make it illegal. The problem is the concentration of publishing power. We should never be in a situation where a single person (Dorsey, Zuckerberg, etc.) has so much control over publishing. If we can't break up social media, we should at least enforce interoperability so that there can be free market pressure on these companies.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
If your platform is essentially a giant loudspeaker, and you see the public believing too many lies, and the lies causing damage, then it's reasonable to at least think about not giving your loudspeaker to people spreading lies. (I also think it's generally bad, but that's my attempt at a steelman.)
- josephorjoe 5y ago
  I think it is basically this. Amplifying dangerous messages has a liability. Screaming "FIRE! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire or evidence of fire is not protected speech under any sane "freedom of speech" doctrine. Giving the person screaming that a megaphone makes you complicit in the crime. Giving people the "freedom" to trick other people into causing harm to each other is not giving people freedom. It is supporting abuse. There are lines, of course... fine or otherwise, and it is a messy process to draw them. And mistakes are often made and should be called out. But it is not a weak argument to claim that supporting the spread of disinformation about public health measures during a pandemic is supporting abuse. And the problem with social media is that instead of there being 200-500 people who can hear the megaphone there are hundreds of million. Scale matters. What can be tolerated in the local pub a half hour before closing may not be tolerable on a billboard in Times Square.
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    By the way, you can in fact yell 'fire' in a crowded theater, as the original decision which this phrase refers to was overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
ThrustVectoring 5y ago
It's possible that this is the least-bad censorship option they could implement under threat of retaliation by US government leadership.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  That's OK for Twitter, but it's completely indefensible for the US government. They don't get to threaten private companies into being censors for them. The First Amendment doesn't allow it. Of course, it would take someone like Twitter refusing and this turning into a court case to end this nonsense...
  - ThrustVectoring 5y ago
    It's not like they're saying "do this exact thing or else" to Twitter - that'd be an obvious first amendment lawsuit. They're stirring up public opinion and voicing their concerns about "disinformation", and hoping that something will be done about those meddlesome posts.
gretch 5y ago
“Free and open” Twitter had it’s chance. People couldn’t handle it and then real people got hurt or died. Maybe this change seems bad on principle, but the status quo today is a known bad state which is costing lives. Hard to argue that we shouldn’t try something different given the evidence in front of us.
- dnissley 5y ago
  If people died, and this is the justification for such a policy, surely there is an analysis on how many. Could you point to one? I can't seem to find any myself, just googling around a bit.
  - gretch 5y ago
    I didn’t make this decision. And of course I don’t have this evidence. Twitter has its proprietary data and proprietary analysis of such data. Twitter would be foolish to publish it… (e.g Twitter internal memo shows X people were converted to anti-vaccine groups via its platform) how could that possibly be a good look?
    - dnissley 5y ago
      Of course, even that is only part of the information you would need to estimate deaths. You would need to further extrapolate that anti-vaccine groups were X% more likely to harm someone, etc.
- deathanatos 5y ago
  I know you are steelman-ing the argument here (& thank you), but that sounds like "the ends justify the means". (I do agree that the cost in lives here is a real, real problem. People need to own up that their actions have impact on other people…)
  - gretch 5y ago
    When you use the idiom “ends justify the means”, it summons an imagery of eugenics or genocide eg “in order to have a crime free society, we must exterminate <ethnic group> The “means” in question is Liking and Retweeting on Twitter and the “ends” is preventing vaccine misinformation. So one might reasonably conclude that _these_ ends justify _these_ means
superfrank 5y ago
I'll take a shot, I haven't thought on this too long, but here it goes. Over the past few years, I think we've seen a lot of the downsides of completely unmoderated social media. Regardless of political affiliation, I don't think I know a single person who thinks the current state of social media is healthy. With the right technologies and budget it's shockingly easy to spread misinformation, propaganda, and hateful rhetoric that will be picked up and taken to heart by some percentage of the population. That's may not be the only reason people find social media to be unhealthy in its current state, but it's definitely one of the top reasons. So, with that being said, it feels like some sort of moderation is needed. With moderation comes the idea that someone will also need to be the arbiter of truth. I'm not a huge fan of having a few social media companies fill that arbiter of truth role, but honestly, I don't have a better option. I don't think this is a perfect solution and it can definitely be abused, but I do think it's an attempt to solve a clear problem. I'd rather see them do something to try and fix it and deal with any new issues as they arise instead of just sitting back and pretending like it can't be fixed or that it isn't a problem.
bcoughlan 5y ago
When I was growing up and the web was new I was told to treat anything I read on the internet with skepticism. I believed some things as a young teenager, from the outlandish John Titor hoax to the reasonable but alarmist Peak Oil theories. I made some predictions to my friends and family that never came to pass. I learned to think skeptically the hard way. This is a phase that society has to go through that will teach the cultural lesson that we can't trust too much what we read on the internet. Not that we could trust the media institutions that came before that (in a different way). We need to learn to think for ourselves and also embrace living in the world we have always lived in, where certainty of knowledge is a rare thing.

president 5y ago

They couldn't prove misinformation so they re-interpret terminology like "misleading" and make new phrases like "vaccine-hesitancy" to defend this censorship. And the only reason it works is because the gang of inflential companies that do this have captured the entire nation.

smt88 5y ago

We can all agree it's bad, but that doesn't make it illegal. The problem is the concentration of publishing power. We should never be in a situation where a single person (Dorsey, Zuckerberg, etc.) has so much control over publishing. If we can't break up social media, we should at least enforce interoperability so that there can be free market pressure on these companies.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

If your platform is essentially a giant loudspeaker, and you see the public believing too many lies, and the lies causing damage, then it's reasonable to at least think about not giving your loudspeaker to people spreading lies. (I also think it's generally bad, but that's my attempt at a steelman.)

josephorjoe 5y ago
I think it is basically this. Amplifying dangerous messages has a liability. Screaming "FIRE! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire or evidence of fire is not protected speech under any sane "freedom of speech" doctrine. Giving the person screaming that a megaphone makes you complicit in the crime. Giving people the "freedom" to trick other people into causing harm to each other is not giving people freedom. It is supporting abuse. There are lines, of course... fine or otherwise, and it is a messy process to draw them. And mistakes are often made and should be called out. But it is not a weak argument to claim that supporting the spread of disinformation about public health measures during a pandemic is supporting abuse. And the problem with social media is that instead of there being 200-500 people who can hear the megaphone there are hundreds of million. Scale matters. What can be tolerated in the local pub a half hour before closing may not be tolerable on a billboard in Times Square.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  By the way, you can in fact yell 'fire' in a crowded theater, as the original decision which this phrase refers to was overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

ThrustVectoring 5y ago

It's possible that this is the least-bad censorship option they could implement under threat of retaliation by US government leadership.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
That's OK for Twitter, but it's completely indefensible for the US government. They don't get to threaten private companies into being censors for them. The First Amendment doesn't allow it. Of course, it would take someone like Twitter refusing and this turning into a court case to end this nonsense...
- ThrustVectoring 5y ago
  It's not like they're saying "do this exact thing or else" to Twitter - that'd be an obvious first amendment lawsuit. They're stirring up public opinion and voicing their concerns about "disinformation", and hoping that something will be done about those meddlesome posts.

gretch 5y ago

“Free and open” Twitter had it’s chance. People couldn’t handle it and then real people got hurt or died. Maybe this change seems bad on principle, but the status quo today is a known bad state which is costing lives. Hard to argue that we shouldn’t try something different given the evidence in front of us.

dnissley 5y ago
If people died, and this is the justification for such a policy, surely there is an analysis on how many. Could you point to one? I can't seem to find any myself, just googling around a bit.
- gretch 5y ago
  I didn’t make this decision. And of course I don’t have this evidence. Twitter has its proprietary data and proprietary analysis of such data. Twitter would be foolish to publish it… (e.g Twitter internal memo shows X people were converted to anti-vaccine groups via its platform) how could that possibly be a good look?
  - dnissley 5y ago
    Of course, even that is only part of the information you would need to estimate deaths. You would need to further extrapolate that anti-vaccine groups were X% more likely to harm someone, etc.
deathanatos 5y ago
I know you are steelman-ing the argument here (& thank you), but that sounds like "the ends justify the means". (I do agree that the cost in lives here is a real, real problem. People need to own up that their actions have impact on other people…)
- gretch 5y ago
  When you use the idiom “ends justify the means”, it summons an imagery of eugenics or genocide eg “in order to have a crime free society, we must exterminate <ethnic group> The “means” in question is Liking and Retweeting on Twitter and the “ends” is preventing vaccine misinformation. So one might reasonably conclude that _these_ ends justify _these_ means

superfrank 5y ago

I'll take a shot, I haven't thought on this too long, but here it goes. Over the past few years, I think we've seen a lot of the downsides of completely unmoderated social media. Regardless of political affiliation, I don't think I know a single person who thinks the current state of social media is healthy. With the right technologies and budget it's shockingly easy to spread misinformation, propaganda, and hateful rhetoric that will be picked up and taken to heart by some percentage of the population. That's may not be the only reason people find social media to be unhealthy in its current state, but it's definitely one of the top reasons. So, with that being said, it feels like some sort of moderation is needed. With moderation comes the idea that someone will also need to be the arbiter of truth. I'm not a huge fan of having a few social media companies fill that arbiter of truth role, but honestly, I don't have a better option. I don't think this is a perfect solution and it can definitely be abused, but I do think it's an attempt to solve a clear problem. I'd rather see them do something to try and fix it and deal with any new issues as they arise instead of just sitting back and pretending like it can't be fixed or that it isn't a problem.

bcoughlan 5y ago

When I was growing up and the web was new I was told to treat anything I read on the internet with skepticism. I believed some things as a young teenager, from the outlandish John Titor hoax to the reasonable but alarmist Peak Oil theories. I made some predictions to my friends and family that never came to pass. I learned to think skeptically the hard way. This is a phase that society has to go through that will teach the cultural lesson that we can't trust too much what we read on the internet. Not that we could trust the media institutions that came before that (in a different way). We need to learn to think for ourselves and also embrace living in the world we have always lived in, where certainty of knowledge is a rare thing.