2 ms·
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 differ
by 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.