3 ms·

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.

> 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.