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HN is a bit schizophrenic on this topic. On one hand, it seems everybody wants more freedom and less surveillance, but they give FB a hard time for not monitori

HN is a bit schizophrenic on this topic. On one hand, it seems everybody wants more freedom and less surveillance, but they give FB a hard time for not monitoring content better. Hopefully these aren't the same people expressing these contradictory points of view. I'd be curious to know what both side think the ideal social network should look like.

thereddaikon 5y ago
HN isn't one person with a single set of ideals and opinions. Its a website, with many people who's worldview ranges quite drastically. Tech, like anything else in the world, is going to have a cross section of humanity in it. You have libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, traditional GOP and Dems, European Socialists and full on communists here. You can't expect such a diverse group to have a homogenous view.
- boringg 5y ago
  Exactly - every community has a diverse set of opinions (whether its discernible to the average person or not is a different question) and rarely do you find a homogenous group of individuals without a very strictly enforced control mechanism which suppress differences from being seen then creating a homogenous community.
lowkey_ 5y ago
> On one hand, it seems everybody wants more freedom and less surveillance, but they give FB a hard time for not monitoring content better. I don't think these are conflicting views: (1) Less monitoring on private messages (2) More monitoring on public posts
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > 1) Less monitoring on private messages The Facebook leaker is explicitly arguing against this though. She cites Facebook’s push for end-to-end encryption of private messages as a problem.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    It's almost as if the leaker was planted by a government.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > Facebook leaker is explicitly arguing against this though. She cites Facebook’s push for end-to-end encryption of private messages as a problem. One doesn’t have to agree 100% with an ally.
    - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      If someone is going to Congress and lobbying against end-to-end encryption of private communications, how are they an ally?
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > If someone is going to Congress and lobbying against end-to-end encryption of private communications, how are they an ally? Because they're also lobbying for other things you care about. And those things are more likely to be passed into law than the E2E encryption pieces. Taking a puritanical view on an issue is a high-risk high-reward gambit. Nine out of ten times, it ejects you from the room. One out of ten times, you will organize sufficiently to make it a wedge issue (e.g. the NRA on guns, NIMBYs, et cetera).
        CamperBob2 5y ago
        There's a gambler's fallacy at work here, though. Our Fourth Amendment right to encrypted private communications is so important that if we lose it (or give it up), any future wins in areas like corporate transparency, monopoly regulation, and net neutrality won't ultimately matter. We won't have the freedom needed to benefit from them. To the extent Haugen disagrees, she's not on "our side."
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- adventured 5y ago
  The obvious solution to #2 is encrypted private social networks that aggressively lock out the monitors. To continue the monitoring it'll require abolishing encryption, that's where the views in question (more freedom + less surveillence and more content monitoring) inevitably are going to end up conflicting and must always end up conflicting.
  - hannasanarion 5y ago
    How do you ban monitoring of public posts?
    - adventured 5y ago
      > How do you ban monitoring of public posts? I'm not suggesting you should or can in any practical way (how heavily - or not at all - that public posts should be monitored by the government is a different debate from what I was saying). I'm saying that the parent comment claiming the views are not necessarily conflicting, is incorrect. This must always conflict in the end: > I don't think these are conflicting views: (1) Less monitoring on private messages (2) More monitoring on public posts More aggressive public monitoring (along with the follow-on laws to regulate & punish a lot more things said in public) will inevitably result in a drive toward more encrypted private social networks that can't be easily monitored. Those private social networks will rely heavily on encryption. The aggressive public monitors will have to abolish encryption to then regain the high degree of mass content monitoring they used to have. Call it networks going underground, or dark; the authorities will come up with a negative naming scheme for it as they seek to castigate the shift. You can bet on the rise of mass popular encrypted private social networks (likely built around subjects/topics/ideology/x thing in common; more like groups or subreddits than mass social media today, in other words). It's coming this decade. And the response from the government toward that is quite predictable. They'll use it as another argument against encryption.
      - tytso 5y ago
        If there is a drive towards more end to end private messaging, I'm OK with that. But I wouldn't call that "social networks"; in my mind there is a huge difference between an encrypted end-to-end message between two users, an encrypted message which is sent out to a large group of users, and a public post. You can make an end-to-end message between two users perfectly secure, to the limits of engineering and the security hygine of the two users. No problem there. If you have an encrypted message sent out to a group of users, as the group of users gets larger and larger, it's more likely that one of those users might be an informant to law enforcement, or will be sloppy with their message hygine, so that after they get arrested invading the capitol on January 6th (for example), law enforcement gets access to all of their information on their phone with the pin code 1234. Still no problem as far as I'm concerned. Criminals tend to be stupid, and that's good from a societal point of view. Public posts are a different story altogether, because social networks have an economic incentive to promote "engagement". And if that engagement happens to emphasize messages that incite hate, or anger, or causes people to think that vaccines contain 5G modems, or whatever, hey, that's just good for shareholders, and in the captalist system, shareholder value (especially VC value, for startups) is the highest good, right? Well, I have some real concerns about about that. I think that corporations which are prioritizing engagement uber ales, even if that causes social harm, should be potentially regulated. And that's why it is quite possible for someone (like me) to believe that end to end encryption should be allowed, and promoted, even if it gives the FBI hives --- and at the same time, argue that public posts should be highly monitored from the perpsective of trying to get insight to whether the amplification alogirhtms might be doing something unhealthy for our society's information ecosystem.
- yawnr 5y ago
  My question is what constitutes a public post? I feel like that definition is evolving. Is a WhatsApp group with 1k members spreading disinformation still a private message?
  - tacitusarc 5y ago
    Yes.
    - WillPostForFood 5y ago
      How about a WhatsApp group with 20 family members?
      - tacitusarc 5y ago
        That is also a private message.
  - boringg 5y ago
    Yes, that is definitely a public post.
    - samhw 5y ago
      And what about 100? 25? 10?
    - nradov 5y ago
      There are plenty of private email lists with 1000+ members. Should email providers be censoring misinformation in those messages?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    The distinction between "public" and "private" is gray and messy when it comes to corporate social media platforms. Is anything really private? How do you send a message to someone in Messenger? You're not sending the HTTP request to person X. You're sending it to Facebook with metadata that says "please make this visible to person X and consider it private". Then Facebook keeps the message and decides whether or not to publish it onward to person X, and whether or not to display it to anyone else (internally, externally, in logs, etc.). It's not like a package that gets sent over to person X's house. It stays on Facebook's property at all times. When you post something to "your" feed, you're sending it to Facebook with metadata that says "please post this on my wall" or whatever. To strain an analog analogy, this is not like the telephone or even the post office, where you hand them something or send out voice packets and they just look at the recipient and forward it on to the actual person. Everything you send is sent to Facebook and kept at Facebook. Replace "Facebook" above with any social media platform or cloud service. They're fundamentally the same. I don't consider iCloud photos private. You're sending your content to Apple, not putting it in some safe that you alone control.
- ignoramous 5y ago
  > Less monitoring on private messages As pointed out on The Last Week Tonight show, private messaging apps are a cess pool of misinformation [0] especially in the developing world. But: Facebook can and does monitor private messages whenever any user flags / reports them [1]. The problem is, how effective is the mechanism given not many know it is even there. Of course, e2ee mustn't be compromised but it should also not be used as an excuse to let misinformation run amock. May be homomorphic encryption gets us there, may be UI changes do. I hope Facebook does act swiftly and decisively whatever the case, since e2ee (backdoored or not [2][3]) seems like the scape goat here. [0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/l5jtFqWq5iU https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/l5jtFqWq5iU [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25211185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25211185 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13389935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13389935 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685446
- tboyd47 5y ago
  This is probably what would have naturally happened if the CDA were never passed. Instead, we've turned internet companies into geese that lay golden eggs for the government.
- oceanplexian 5y ago
  How about (3) Less consolidation of power Personally as someone who doesn't use FB and never will, I couldn't care less if Facebook wants to track and monitor every one of their users, monetize their every movement, and ban any message they want. In a free market you'd have thousands of social networks to provide competition with all sorts of different policies and ToS. The real issue is that one company is in a skewed position of power due to a broken marketplace. Fix that problem and all the other problems are irrelevant.
  - Shish2k 5y ago
    How would thousands of competing networks deal with a government-enforced “no E2EE; wiretapping API required” law?
    - cabalamat 5y ago
      Badly, and that's the point. I'd like social media to be run by everyone having a social media server linked to their home network (imagine something like a Raspberry Pi), with it being totally decentralised and every user controlling their own server. Then if the government wants to shut it down, they have to raid everyone's home.
      - herval 5y ago
        Or, you know, just work with the ISPs to make it illegal, like with BitTorrent. Also, what you want already exists - you're free to go use Mastodon and run your own node. You can't possibly think that's a reasonable product your grandparents would be able to use.
        cabalamat 5y ago
        > Or, you know, just work with the ISPs to make it illegal, like with BitTorrent. BitTorrent certainly isn't illegal in the UK; it might be in other jurisdictions. > you're free to go use Mastodon and run your own node Would it work behind a NAT'ed router on a dynamic IP? I suspect it might not. > You can't possibly think that's a reasonable product your grandparents would be able to use. What I envisage is an SD card containing the OS + apps, you put it in the Pi, plug it into your router by ethernet, configure it via its web app, and you're ready to go. I think it ought to be possible to make it easy enough for the average person to install (certainly anyone who could install a router + internet would be able to).
- quotemstr 5y ago
  > I don't think these are conflicting views: (1) Less monitoring on private messages (2) More monitoring on public posts The same people argue that FB needs to censor more public content and wringing their hands in public over just how awful it is that in places like India, WhatsApp message forwards can spread memes that respectable people like western journalists and tech activists don't like. It's a "who, whom" thing. There's no principled stance differentiating private from public with respect to control and censorship. It's become respectable in western political discourse to demand totalitarian control over the spread of ideas. Today's activists will do or say whatever it takes in the moment to bring the boots closer to human faces forever. Anyone who values human dignity needs to oppose this movement.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    While I agree the elites are upset about losing power, there absolutely are issues of principle here. There is such a thing as legitimate authority. For example - there are people who do actual science, and other people who actually can read scientific papers and make assessments, there are people who have legitimate basic understanding of science, relationships with scientists, and consistently communicate reasonable information about that, as it relates to our world. And there are people who make stuff up. And very influential actors who will use a system without information integrity to their advantage. These people wield enormous power and fundamentally shape outcomes for everyone. Both the Truth, and the Public Good matter. While the later is more ambiguous, it's also material. The question the becomes - how do we allow yahoos in their basements to say anything they want publicly (i.e. aliens invented COVID, the vaccine will kill you), how do we allow legitimate detractors to question classical authority (i.e. ivermectin might work), how do we try to unbias information when it's politically contentious (i.e. mask policies), how do we allow politicians to speak their minds, but to not destroy their communities with irrational or completely irresponsible information (i.e. 'the vaccine isn't safe, you don't need masks, just eat healthy )'. I'm afraid we don't have the answers, but maybe some degree of 'proportional oversight' on the most public bits of information might be reasonable i.e. statements about the vaccine, when they reach a certain threshold of popularity, must have references to actual studies, or something along those lines.
- csmoak 5y ago
  How do you look at spamming private messages to many recipients, resulting in a similar effect to posting publicly? I know of bullying on FB where the harasser sends the same message to dozens of friends of the harassed. FB makes this easy to do since a list of someone's contacts are often easy to find online and there is no recourse to find or report these messages (as with a public post). To me this presents a particularly tricky double-edged sword. E2E encryption is good in many cases, but tied to an easy way to send many messages and easily-accessible lists of people to target a message to, can result in a similar but more hidden version of public posts. My guess is that this is being used today to disseminate similar content that is being restricted on public posts. As far as I can tell, restrictions to limit the number and speed of private messages have not been effective against this kind of approach, and new accounts can always be created. In some cases, these messages go to a different "inbox" for non-contacts, but not always, and this just delays the receipt of the message since, again, they cannot be found or reported. I don't know a good solution to this problem, but it's not one I've seen talked about.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    There is no solution. Either you give people e2e and let them choose to do horrible things with the privilege or not. Maybe a middle ground is that every e2e message is hashed and sent once, and if duplicate hashes are detected at scale (of the hashed message) you slow the propagation to 1 user per day.
  - Quessked73 5y ago
    Perhaps our expactation of privacy should depend on what platform we use, no e2e on public platforms (i.e. Facebook) but e2e on other platforms where an username/id/phonenumber is required, that can not be found easily. I think the main problem is users mainly using only one platform for their communication instead of choosing it on a case by case basis.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    The limits aren't always visible. In particular, its a good idea if new accounts get heavily limited in invisible ways, and it's a moderate challenge to create mass amounts of them that don't start off shadow-banned.
- hammock 5y ago
  If someone has their Twitter set on private (only followers can see content), but they accept most/all follow requests, would you consider their content in category 1 (private) or category 2 (public)?
kop316 5y ago
I would argue "HN" is not schizophrenic, "HN" is a bunch of users who have different passions and will comment/vote on different things.
- colordrops 5y ago
  We should coin this the "hive mind fallacy". Though there probably already exists a name for this.
  - deadpannini 5y ago
    "Distributed hypocrisy."
junon 5y ago
> I'd be curious to know what both side think the ideal social network should look like. I'd rather they didn't exist, honestly.
- ghaff 5y ago
  How do you define social networks? Should email mailing lists not exist either because those are absolutely social networks in a way as were BBS systems?
  - Tainnor 5y ago
    Not OP, but IMHO, the danger comes from the algorithms which lead to "engaging" content being pushed aggressively to everyone. "Engaging" can mean cat videos or "incredible looking food", but it means divisive, partisan, insincere and outright dangerous more often than not. Inasmuch as a "social network" is just people signing up to talk about certain topics and that's it, I don't have a problem with it. Internet forums of the 2000s weren't a problem necessarily. And while HN does have some "virality" mechanisms built in due to upvoting and while it is sometimes a "problem" on very divisive topics, it's not nearly on the scale of Facebook, Twitter and Co. So if it were up to me, Twitter, Facebook, Tiktok etc. should either disappear or they should at least have to revise their algorithms and open them up to public scrutiny. Or, you know, if they went back to their original purpose of just being about connecting with friends and family. But I guess you can't make money out of that.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      I take your point. But I would need more convincing that just getting rid of algorithms/recommendations/etc. would suddenly make all the problems go away.
      - junon 5y ago
        Another part of the problem is size. Older communities were miniscule compared to the billions of users each platform has now.
secondaryacct 5y ago
Maybe decentralized completely: do not talk to my kids about your BS paranoid and my kids should just see whatever kids want to see. We dont exactly need a centralized humongous social website. Im on both sides honestly: I want facebook to subside in profit of isolated more freedom-centric micro network where we can say what we want but wont impact massively crowd thinking ? Like that if monitoring must happen it happens in isolation, and if freedom must exist it s not on the same place as the other fucktards?
helen___keller 5y ago
Like any social network, HN falls into polarized, sometimes unproductive, discussion with certain topics. For HN, that's frequently discussion of big tech and their antics and discussion of censorship/moderation/surveillance. Links about the intersection of these topics, such as apple/CSAM or facebook/moderation, are most likely to have comments that devolve into polemic without much productive discussion taking place.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
newaccount2021 5y ago
HN/Twitter/Reddit is for free speech when it conforms to the prevailing zeitgeist and against it otherwise, it isn't that hard to figure out
danjac 5y ago
Maybe the ideal social network is no one big "social network", i.e. get rid of your Facebooks and Twitters and go back to small, decentralized, localized forums and interest groups running on independent, secure, open-source platforms that are easy for laypeople to set up, maintain and moderate.
- swalsh 5y ago
  I think you need both. Small decentralized topic specific forums are important. But, without a larger community people tend to not realize the outside world may not share the same opinions. That leads to this tribalist attitude of hatred of "others".
  - Tainnor 5y ago
    I'm skeptical that seeing opposite viewpoints expressed by random people on the internet leads to shared understanding or less hatred. If anything, research seems to indicate that tolerance to opposing viewpoints and revising of stereotypes comes from extended personal contact and having a shared sense of purpose, and that's difficult to achieve on the internet.
swalsh 5y ago
HN is not a single person, it's a community with a variety of members with a variety of opinions. The fact that communities tend to form consensus of opinions, especially such as subreddits, is kind of a major issue.
josephg 5y ago
> Hopefully these aren't the same people expressing these contradictory points of view. I'd be curious to know what both side think the ideal social network should look like. I see social networks (and in many ways the internet as a whole) like a new country we’ve founded. It’s a bit different from countries made out of atoms. For a start, everyone there is a dual citizen with somewhere in meatspace. And instead of community centres we build websites. But it’s a place. How are those spaces governed? Is it a democracy? No. Each social network is its own mostly benevolent corporate dictatorship. If you don’t like the rules, your only option is banishment. Healthy communities (in healthy society) need rules to keep bad actors in check. And freedom to explore and be ourselves. Healthy communities in real life use participatory processes to figure out what those rules should be. You need people to feel like they have a voice. It’ll never be perfect. And different rules will make sense for different groups. Facebook’s problem is they’re trying to be the government, the judiciary and police for billions of people from every country on the planet. There is no single set of rules and policies which will work everywhere. And even if there was, how do you police billions of people? AIs make mistakes. I don’t know how, but I think FB needs to eat humble pie and find ways for communities to decide on (and enforce) their own social norms somehow. It’d be messy and disjointed, but so are people. Reddit and discord do this - although they’re obviously very different products. Tyrannies don’t have a strong history of making choices which primarily benefit their citizens. So far, facebook’s track record hasn’t been much better. To improve, they need to acknowledge the position they’re in, learn from history and give some power back to the people who populate their site.
oceanplexian 5y ago
"Everybody" is an increasingly large group of non-technologists with a social and political agenda. It used to be in tech circles most people believe the line should be drawn at illegal content, trolling and obscenities. We don't want more freedom, we want to protect the freedoms that we are entitled to. And no one should need to defend such an obvious position against those who want to turn the web into a glorified television.
dd36 5y ago
A solution is requiring social media companies to verify the identity of users. They don’t have to require other users know the identity but the company has to. This protects against sock puppet armies and makes bans easier to enforce.
TacticalCoder 5y ago
> HN is a bit schizophrenic on this topic. What if there was a way to send private message, in a decentralized manner, and where it's not even possible to tell if the recipient has actually read the message or not? There are blockchains using ZK-proofs allowing to do that today. Not only it's decentralized so "fuck corporation surveillance/profiling" but it's also highly unlikely uncle sam and its offsprings can break the elliptic curves and ZK-cryptograhy in use by these blockchains, so "fuck state surveillance" too. But then it's using the word "blockchain", so HN is pretty much against it. And instead HN as a whole shall root for "secure" messengers that are leaking metadata like there's no tomorrow while explaining that they're the best thing since sliced bread "because they're easy to use". Go figure.
gadders 5y ago
I think what they want is more freedom for their own opinions, and more surveillance on people they disagree with.
8eye 5y ago
the future will not be censorship but categories, so people will not get banned, they will get labeled and you will filter tags out, those tags will be connected to a person, if you don’t like a tag you will see less of that persons content. this will be useful in keeping the peace. it’ll mess up dialogue but most people have a hard to with empathy these days. so maybe certain sections will have open discussions for people who are okay with seeing content from other tags, and are okay with engaging with that content. right now dating apps will forever ban your account if you engage a certain way with the opposite sex, so in many cases a match will get banned because the person they matched with did not like their content. but that does not mean someone else won’t like their content. so the people who have the most in common including their communication styles should be allowed to still engage with each other without getting banned by someone else’s arbitrary rules that are subjective depending on a persons upbringing.
munificent 5y ago
> I'd be curious to know what both side think the ideal social network should look like. I don't care what they look like as long as there's hundreds of them all on relatively equal footing. I firmly believe that most of the major problems facing society today are not caused by any features of particular companies, but by the consolidation of power in a very small number of them.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> On one hand, it seems everybody wants more freedom and less surveillance, but they give FB a hard time for not monitoring content better. That seems perfectly consistent. FB is already going all-in on surveillance and ignoring any notion of freedom; if they must destroy privacy, the least we can ask is that they actually do something useful with it.
PascLeRasc 5y ago
Please keep in mind that some of us just want bad things to happen to Facebook and don’t have a pro or anti-surveillance agenda behind that.
tboyd47 5y ago
I don't think either side has a solution. But, that doesn't mean they can't detect an obvious subterfuge from outside the community.
foobarbecue 5y ago
You are conflating schizophrenia with multiple personality disorder. This is a common, but harmful, mistake.
- gnabgib 5y ago
  Perhaps you could provide some insight into why? I don't see how multiple personality disorder is a very useful characterization when you're describing a community made up of multiple personalities.
  - foobarbecue 5y ago
    yodsanklai said HN is "schizophrenic" when accusing HN of being one body with two conflicting personalities: one that wants FB to emphasize freedom and the other that wants FB to police content. He said "Hopefully these aren't the same people expressing these contradictory points of view." (In my opinion, what's really happening is that there's some diversity of opinion among HNers, which is how it should be. As you point out, and yadsanklai implicitly admits, HN is not a single person so there is no self-contradiction or multiple personality disorder. Beyond that, it's a mark of intelligence for people to be able to change their minds, but I digress.) Schizophrenia would have been appropriate if he was accusing HN of being paranoid, hearing voices, etc. Schizophrenia is not multiple personality disorder (actually called Disassociative Identity Disorder, I just learned). I am really curious to know why people started misusing the word schizophrenia in common parlance like this.
Quessked73 5y ago
In the case of FB, I actually believe having Instagram and Facebook not e2e could be even work, if people are educated and made aware about it, while Whatsapp remains e2e. Instagram and FB are mostly "public" facing so they offer a big surface for malicious activities. (Scammers, Groomers/People seeking CSAM which are always used as a reason for more surveillance/ Trolls etc.) Whatsapp is more private and requires knowing one's phone number which ideally should be harder to get ahold of. Messaging on Instagram/FB could be compared to whispering in a crowded place, private...but not fully private. In an ideal world this would not be necessary, but there will always be a fight between surveillance and freedom. And perhaps giving up freedoms in some parts could allow us regain more freedom in others, as long as people are aware about it, which might be the biggest hurdle to tackle.
alecmuffett 5y ago
Author of original blogpost here; I am seeing a lot of discussion here about "what constitutes a public group?" and so I wrote this to help with the discussion. https://alecmuffett.com/article/15095 https://alecmuffett.com/article/15095

thereddaikon 5y ago

HN isn't one person with a single set of ideals and opinions. Its a website, with many people who's worldview ranges quite drastically. Tech, like anything else in the world, is going to have a cross section of humanity in it. You have libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, traditional GOP and Dems, European Socialists and full on communists here. You can't expect such a diverse group to have a homogenous view.

boringg 5y ago
Exactly - every community has a diverse set of opinions (whether its discernible to the average person or not is a different question) and rarely do you find a homogenous group of individuals without a very strictly enforced control mechanism which suppress differences from being seen then creating a homogenous community.

lowkey_ 5y ago

> On one hand, it seems everybody wants more freedom and less surveillance, but they give FB a hard time for not monitoring content better. I don't think these are conflicting views: (1) Less monitoring on private messages (2) More monitoring on public posts

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> 1) Less monitoring on private messages The Facebook leaker is explicitly arguing against this though. She cites Facebook’s push for end-to-end encryption of private messages as a problem.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  It's almost as if the leaker was planted by a government.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > Facebook leaker is explicitly arguing against this though. She cites Facebook’s push for end-to-end encryption of private messages as a problem. One doesn’t have to agree 100% with an ally.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    If someone is going to Congress and lobbying against end-to-end encryption of private communications, how are they an ally?
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > If someone is going to Congress and lobbying against end-to-end encryption of private communications, how are they an ally? Because they're also lobbying for other things you care about. And those things are more likely to be passed into law than the E2E encryption pieces. Taking a puritanical view on an issue is a high-risk high-reward gambit. Nine out of ten times, it ejects you from the room. One out of ten times, you will organize sufficiently to make it a wedge issue (e.g. the NRA on guns, NIMBYs, et cetera).
      - CamperBob2 5y ago
        There's a gambler's fallacy at work here, though. Our Fourth Amendment right to encrypted private communications is so important that if we lose it (or give it up), any future wins in areas like corporate transparency, monopoly regulation, and net neutrality won't ultimately matter. We won't have the freedom needed to benefit from them. To the extent Haugen disagrees, she's not on "our side."
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
adventured 5y ago
The obvious solution to #2 is encrypted private social networks that aggressively lock out the monitors. To continue the monitoring it'll require abolishing encryption, that's where the views in question (more freedom + less surveillence and more content monitoring) inevitably are going to end up conflicting and must always end up conflicting.
- hannasanarion 5y ago
  How do you ban monitoring of public posts?
  - adventured 5y ago
    > How do you ban monitoring of public posts? I'm not suggesting you should or can in any practical way (how heavily - or not at all - that public posts should be monitored by the government is a different debate from what I was saying). I'm saying that the parent comment claiming the views are not necessarily conflicting, is incorrect. This must always conflict in the end: > I don't think these are conflicting views: (1) Less monitoring on private messages (2) More monitoring on public posts More aggressive public monitoring (along with the follow-on laws to regulate & punish a lot more things said in public) will inevitably result in a drive toward more encrypted private social networks that can't be easily monitored. Those private social networks will rely heavily on encryption. The aggressive public monitors will have to abolish encryption to then regain the high degree of mass content monitoring they used to have. Call it networks going underground, or dark; the authorities will come up with a negative naming scheme for it as they seek to castigate the shift. You can bet on the rise of mass popular encrypted private social networks (likely built around subjects/topics/ideology/x thing in common; more like groups or subreddits than mass social media today, in other words). It's coming this decade. And the response from the government toward that is quite predictable. They'll use it as another argument against encryption.
    - tytso 5y ago
      If there is a drive towards more end to end private messaging, I'm OK with that. But I wouldn't call that "social networks"; in my mind there is a huge difference between an encrypted end-to-end message between two users, an encrypted message which is sent out to a large group of users, and a public post. You can make an end-to-end message between two users perfectly secure, to the limits of engineering and the security hygine of the two users. No problem there. If you have an encrypted message sent out to a group of users, as the group of users gets larger and larger, it's more likely that one of those users might be an informant to law enforcement, or will be sloppy with their message hygine, so that after they get arrested invading the capitol on January 6th (for example), law enforcement gets access to all of their information on their phone with the pin code 1234. Still no problem as far as I'm concerned. Criminals tend to be stupid, and that's good from a societal point of view. Public posts are a different story altogether, because social networks have an economic incentive to promote "engagement". And if that engagement happens to emphasize messages that incite hate, or anger, or causes people to think that vaccines contain 5G modems, or whatever, hey, that's just good for shareholders, and in the captalist system, shareholder value (especially VC value, for startups) is the highest good, right? Well, I have some real concerns about about that. I think that corporations which are prioritizing engagement uber ales, even if that causes social harm, should be potentially regulated. And that's why it is quite possible for someone (like me) to believe that end to end encryption should be allowed, and promoted, even if it gives the FBI hives --- and at the same time, argue that public posts should be highly monitored from the perpsective of trying to get insight to whether the amplification alogirhtms might be doing something unhealthy for our society's information ecosystem.
yawnr 5y ago
My question is what constitutes a public post? I feel like that definition is evolving. Is a WhatsApp group with 1k members spreading disinformation still a private message?
- tacitusarc 5y ago
  Yes.
  - WillPostForFood 5y ago
    How about a WhatsApp group with 20 family members?
    - tacitusarc 5y ago
      That is also a private message.
- boringg 5y ago
  Yes, that is definitely a public post.
  - samhw 5y ago
    And what about 100? 25? 10?
  - nradov 5y ago
    There are plenty of private email lists with 1000+ members. Should email providers be censoring misinformation in those messages?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ryandrake 5y ago
  The distinction between "public" and "private" is gray and messy when it comes to corporate social media platforms. Is anything really private? How do you send a message to someone in Messenger? You're not sending the HTTP request to person X. You're sending it to Facebook with metadata that says "please make this visible to person X and consider it private". Then Facebook keeps the message and decides whether or not to publish it onward to person X, and whether or not to display it to anyone else (internally, externally, in logs, etc.). It's not like a package that gets sent over to person X's house. It stays on Facebook's property at all times. When you post something to "your" feed, you're sending it to Facebook with metadata that says "please post this on my wall" or whatever. To strain an analog analogy, this is not like the telephone or even the post office, where you hand them something or send out voice packets and they just look at the recipient and forward it on to the actual person. Everything you send is sent to Facebook and kept at Facebook. Replace "Facebook" above with any social media platform or cloud service. They're fundamentally the same. I don't consider iCloud photos private. You're sending your content to Apple, not putting it in some safe that you alone control.
ignoramous 5y ago
> Less monitoring on private messages As pointed out on The Last Week Tonight show, private messaging apps are a cess pool of misinformation [0] especially in the developing world. But: Facebook can and does monitor private messages whenever any user flags / reports them [1]. The problem is, how effective is the mechanism given not many know it is even there. Of course, e2ee mustn't be compromised but it should also not be used as an excuse to let misinformation run amock. May be homomorphic encryption gets us there, may be UI changes do. I hope Facebook does act swiftly and decisively whatever the case, since e2ee (backdoored or not [2][3]) seems like the scape goat here. [0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/l5jtFqWq5iU https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/l5jtFqWq5iU [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25211185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25211185 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13389935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13389935 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685446
tboyd47 5y ago
This is probably what would have naturally happened if the CDA were never passed. Instead, we've turned internet companies into geese that lay golden eggs for the government.
oceanplexian 5y ago
How about (3) Less consolidation of power Personally as someone who doesn't use FB and never will, I couldn't care less if Facebook wants to track and monitor every one of their users, monetize their every movement, and ban any message they want. In a free market you'd have thousands of social networks to provide competition with all sorts of different policies and ToS. The real issue is that one company is in a skewed position of power due to a broken marketplace. Fix that problem and all the other problems are irrelevant.
- Shish2k 5y ago
  How would thousands of competing networks deal with a government-enforced “no E2EE; wiretapping API required” law?
  - cabalamat 5y ago
    Badly, and that's the point. I'd like social media to be run by everyone having a social media server linked to their home network (imagine something like a Raspberry Pi), with it being totally decentralised and every user controlling their own server. Then if the government wants to shut it down, they have to raid everyone's home.
    - herval 5y ago
      Or, you know, just work with the ISPs to make it illegal, like with BitTorrent. Also, what you want already exists - you're free to go use Mastodon and run your own node. You can't possibly think that's a reasonable product your grandparents would be able to use.
      - cabalamat 5y ago
        > Or, you know, just work with the ISPs to make it illegal, like with BitTorrent. BitTorrent certainly isn't illegal in the UK; it might be in other jurisdictions. > you're free to go use Mastodon and run your own node Would it work behind a NAT'ed router on a dynamic IP? I suspect it might not. > You can't possibly think that's a reasonable product your grandparents would be able to use. What I envisage is an SD card containing the OS + apps, you put it in the Pi, plug it into your router by ethernet, configure it via its web app, and you're ready to go. I think it ought to be possible to make it easy enough for the average person to install (certainly anyone who could install a router + internet would be able to).
quotemstr 5y ago
> I don't think these are conflicting views: (1) Less monitoring on private messages (2) More monitoring on public posts The same people argue that FB needs to censor more public content and wringing their hands in public over just how awful it is that in places like India, WhatsApp message forwards can spread memes that respectable people like western journalists and tech activists don't like. It's a "who, whom" thing. There's no principled stance differentiating private from public with respect to control and censorship. It's become respectable in western political discourse to demand totalitarian control over the spread of ideas. Today's activists will do or say whatever it takes in the moment to bring the boots closer to human faces forever. Anyone who values human dignity needs to oppose this movement.
- jollybean 5y ago
  While I agree the elites are upset about losing power, there absolutely are issues of principle here. There is such a thing as legitimate authority. For example - there are people who do actual science, and other people who actually can read scientific papers and make assessments, there are people who have legitimate basic understanding of science, relationships with scientists, and consistently communicate reasonable information about that, as it relates to our world. And there are people who make stuff up. And very influential actors who will use a system without information integrity to their advantage. These people wield enormous power and fundamentally shape outcomes for everyone. Both the Truth, and the Public Good matter. While the later is more ambiguous, it's also material. The question the becomes - how do we allow yahoos in their basements to say anything they want publicly (i.e. aliens invented COVID, the vaccine will kill you), how do we allow legitimate detractors to question classical authority (i.e. ivermectin might work), how do we try to unbias information when it's politically contentious (i.e. mask policies), how do we allow politicians to speak their minds, but to not destroy their communities with irrational or completely irresponsible information (i.e. 'the vaccine isn't safe, you don't need masks, just eat healthy )'. I'm afraid we don't have the answers, but maybe some degree of 'proportional oversight' on the most public bits of information might be reasonable i.e. statements about the vaccine, when they reach a certain threshold of popularity, must have references to actual studies, or something along those lines.
csmoak 5y ago
How do you look at spamming private messages to many recipients, resulting in a similar effect to posting publicly? I know of bullying on FB where the harasser sends the same message to dozens of friends of the harassed. FB makes this easy to do since a list of someone's contacts are often easy to find online and there is no recourse to find or report these messages (as with a public post). To me this presents a particularly tricky double-edged sword. E2E encryption is good in many cases, but tied to an easy way to send many messages and easily-accessible lists of people to target a message to, can result in a similar but more hidden version of public posts. My guess is that this is being used today to disseminate similar content that is being restricted on public posts. As far as I can tell, restrictions to limit the number and speed of private messages have not been effective against this kind of approach, and new accounts can always be created. In some cases, these messages go to a different "inbox" for non-contacts, but not always, and this just delays the receipt of the message since, again, they cannot be found or reported. I don't know a good solution to this problem, but it's not one I've seen talked about.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  There is no solution. Either you give people e2e and let them choose to do horrible things with the privilege or not. Maybe a middle ground is that every e2e message is hashed and sent once, and if duplicate hashes are detected at scale (of the hashed message) you slow the propagation to 1 user per day.
- Quessked73 5y ago
  Perhaps our expactation of privacy should depend on what platform we use, no e2e on public platforms (i.e. Facebook) but e2e on other platforms where an username/id/phonenumber is required, that can not be found easily. I think the main problem is users mainly using only one platform for their communication instead of choosing it on a case by case basis.
- fragmede 5y ago
  The limits aren't always visible. In particular, its a good idea if new accounts get heavily limited in invisible ways, and it's a moderate challenge to create mass amounts of them that don't start off shadow-banned.
hammock 5y ago
If someone has their Twitter set on private (only followers can see content), but they accept most/all follow requests, would you consider their content in category 1 (private) or category 2 (public)?

kop316 5y ago

I would argue "HN" is not schizophrenic, "HN" is a bunch of users who have different passions and will comment/vote on different things.

colordrops 5y ago
We should coin this the "hive mind fallacy". Though there probably already exists a name for this.
- deadpannini 5y ago
  "Distributed hypocrisy."

junon 5y ago

> I'd be curious to know what both side think the ideal social network should look like. I'd rather they didn't exist, honestly.

ghaff 5y ago
How do you define social networks? Should email mailing lists not exist either because those are absolutely social networks in a way as were BBS systems?
- Tainnor 5y ago
  Not OP, but IMHO, the danger comes from the algorithms which lead to "engaging" content being pushed aggressively to everyone. "Engaging" can mean cat videos or "incredible looking food", but it means divisive, partisan, insincere and outright dangerous more often than not. Inasmuch as a "social network" is just people signing up to talk about certain topics and that's it, I don't have a problem with it. Internet forums of the 2000s weren't a problem necessarily. And while HN does have some "virality" mechanisms built in due to upvoting and while it is sometimes a "problem" on very divisive topics, it's not nearly on the scale of Facebook, Twitter and Co. So if it were up to me, Twitter, Facebook, Tiktok etc. should either disappear or they should at least have to revise their algorithms and open them up to public scrutiny. Or, you know, if they went back to their original purpose of just being about connecting with friends and family. But I guess you can't make money out of that.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I take your point. But I would need more convincing that just getting rid of algorithms/recommendations/etc. would suddenly make all the problems go away.
    - junon 5y ago
      Another part of the problem is size. Older communities were miniscule compared to the billions of users each platform has now.

secondaryacct 5y ago

Maybe decentralized completely: do not talk to my kids about your BS paranoid and my kids should just see whatever kids want to see. We dont exactly need a centralized humongous social website. Im on both sides honestly: I want facebook to subside in profit of isolated more freedom-centric micro network where we can say what we want but wont impact massively crowd thinking ? Like that if monitoring must happen it happens in isolation, and if freedom must exist it s not on the same place as the other fucktards?

helen___keller 5y ago

Like any social network, HN falls into polarized, sometimes unproductive, discussion with certain topics. For HN, that's frequently discussion of big tech and their antics and discussion of censorship/moderation/surveillance. Links about the intersection of these topics, such as apple/CSAM or facebook/moderation, are most likely to have comments that devolve into polemic without much productive discussion taking place.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

newaccount2021 5y ago

HN/Twitter/Reddit is for free speech when it conforms to the prevailing zeitgeist and against it otherwise, it isn't that hard to figure out

danjac 5y ago

Maybe the ideal social network is no one big "social network", i.e. get rid of your Facebooks and Twitters and go back to small, decentralized, localized forums and interest groups running on independent, secure, open-source platforms that are easy for laypeople to set up, maintain and moderate.

swalsh 5y ago
I think you need both. Small decentralized topic specific forums are important. But, without a larger community people tend to not realize the outside world may not share the same opinions. That leads to this tribalist attitude of hatred of "others".
- Tainnor 5y ago
  I'm skeptical that seeing opposite viewpoints expressed by random people on the internet leads to shared understanding or less hatred. If anything, research seems to indicate that tolerance to opposing viewpoints and revising of stereotypes comes from extended personal contact and having a shared sense of purpose, and that's difficult to achieve on the internet.

swalsh 5y ago

HN is not a single person, it's a community with a variety of members with a variety of opinions. The fact that communities tend to form consensus of opinions, especially such as subreddits, is kind of a major issue.

josephg 5y ago

> Hopefully these aren't the same people expressing these contradictory points of view. I'd be curious to know what both side think the ideal social network should look like. I see social networks (and in many ways the internet as a whole) like a new country we’ve founded. It’s a bit different from countries made out of atoms. For a start, everyone there is a dual citizen with somewhere in meatspace. And instead of community centres we build websites. But it’s a place. How are those spaces governed? Is it a democracy? No. Each social network is its own mostly benevolent corporate dictatorship. If you don’t like the rules, your only option is banishment. Healthy communities (in healthy society) need rules to keep bad actors in check. And freedom to explore and be ourselves. Healthy communities in real life use participatory processes to figure out what those rules should be. You need people to feel like they have a voice. It’ll never be perfect. And different rules will make sense for different groups. Facebook’s problem is they’re trying to be the government, the judiciary and police for billions of people from every country on the planet. There is no single set of rules and policies which will work everywhere. And even if there was, how do you police billions of people? AIs make mistakes. I don’t know how, but I think FB needs to eat humble pie and find ways for communities to decide on (and enforce) their own social norms somehow. It’d be messy and disjointed, but so are people. Reddit and discord do this - although they’re obviously very different products. Tyrannies don’t have a strong history of making choices which primarily benefit their citizens. So far, facebook’s track record hasn’t been much better. To improve, they need to acknowledge the position they’re in, learn from history and give some power back to the people who populate their site.

oceanplexian 5y ago

"Everybody" is an increasingly large group of non-technologists with a social and political agenda. It used to be in tech circles most people believe the line should be drawn at illegal content, trolling and obscenities. We don't want more freedom, we want to protect the freedoms that we are entitled to. And no one should need to defend such an obvious position against those who want to turn the web into a glorified television.

dd36 5y ago

A solution is requiring social media companies to verify the identity of users. They don’t have to require other users know the identity but the company has to. This protects against sock puppet armies and makes bans easier to enforce.

TacticalCoder 5y ago

> HN is a bit schizophrenic on this topic. What if there was a way to send private message, in a decentralized manner, and where it's not even possible to tell if the recipient has actually read the message or not? There are blockchains using ZK-proofs allowing to do that today. Not only it's decentralized so "fuck corporation surveillance/profiling" but it's also highly unlikely uncle sam and its offsprings can break the elliptic curves and ZK-cryptograhy in use by these blockchains, so "fuck state surveillance" too. But then it's using the word "blockchain", so HN is pretty much against it. And instead HN as a whole shall root for "secure" messengers that are leaking metadata like there's no tomorrow while explaining that they're the best thing since sliced bread "because they're easy to use". Go figure.

gadders 5y ago

I think what they want is more freedom for their own opinions, and more surveillance on people they disagree with.

8eye 5y ago

the future will not be censorship but categories, so people will not get banned, they will get labeled and you will filter tags out, those tags will be connected to a person, if you don’t like a tag you will see less of that persons content. this will be useful in keeping the peace. it’ll mess up dialogue but most people have a hard to with empathy these days. so maybe certain sections will have open discussions for people who are okay with seeing content from other tags, and are okay with engaging with that content. right now dating apps will forever ban your account if you engage a certain way with the opposite sex, so in many cases a match will get banned because the person they matched with did not like their content. but that does not mean someone else won’t like their content. so the people who have the most in common including their communication styles should be allowed to still engage with each other without getting banned by someone else’s arbitrary rules that are subjective depending on a persons upbringing.

munificent 5y ago

> I'd be curious to know what both side think the ideal social network should look like. I don't care what they look like as long as there's hundreds of them all on relatively equal footing. I firmly believe that most of the major problems facing society today are not caused by any features of particular companies, but by the consolidation of power in a very small number of them.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

> On one hand, it seems everybody wants more freedom and less surveillance, but they give FB a hard time for not monitoring content better. That seems perfectly consistent. FB is already going all-in on surveillance and ignoring any notion of freedom; if they must destroy privacy, the least we can ask is that they actually do something useful with it.

PascLeRasc 5y ago

Please keep in mind that some of us just want bad things to happen to Facebook and don’t have a pro or anti-surveillance agenda behind that.

tboyd47 5y ago

I don't think either side has a solution. But, that doesn't mean they can't detect an obvious subterfuge from outside the community.

foobarbecue 5y ago

You are conflating schizophrenia with multiple personality disorder. This is a common, but harmful, mistake.

gnabgib 5y ago
Perhaps you could provide some insight into why? I don't see how multiple personality disorder is a very useful characterization when you're describing a community made up of multiple personalities.
- foobarbecue 5y ago
  yodsanklai said HN is "schizophrenic" when accusing HN of being one body with two conflicting personalities: one that wants FB to emphasize freedom and the other that wants FB to police content. He said "Hopefully these aren't the same people expressing these contradictory points of view." (In my opinion, what's really happening is that there's some diversity of opinion among HNers, which is how it should be. As you point out, and yadsanklai implicitly admits, HN is not a single person so there is no self-contradiction or multiple personality disorder. Beyond that, it's a mark of intelligence for people to be able to change their minds, but I digress.) Schizophrenia would have been appropriate if he was accusing HN of being paranoid, hearing voices, etc. Schizophrenia is not multiple personality disorder (actually called Disassociative Identity Disorder, I just learned). I am really curious to know why people started misusing the word schizophrenia in common parlance like this.

Quessked73 5y ago

In the case of FB, I actually believe having Instagram and Facebook not e2e could be even work, if people are educated and made aware about it, while Whatsapp remains e2e. Instagram and FB are mostly "public" facing so they offer a big surface for malicious activities. (Scammers, Groomers/People seeking CSAM which are always used as a reason for more surveillance/ Trolls etc.) Whatsapp is more private and requires knowing one's phone number which ideally should be harder to get ahold of. Messaging on Instagram/FB could be compared to whispering in a crowded place, private...but not fully private. In an ideal world this would not be necessary, but there will always be a fight between surveillance and freedom. And perhaps giving up freedoms in some parts could allow us regain more freedom in others, as long as people are aware about it, which might be the biggest hurdle to tackle.

alecmuffett 5y ago

Author of original blogpost here; I am seeing a lot of discussion here about "what constitutes a public group?" and so I wrote this to help with the discussion. https://alecmuffett.com/article/15095 https://alecmuffett.com/article/15095