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This mentality change goes far beyond porn. A decade ago comment sections like Slashdot and Hacker News were almost unanimously in favor of keeping the internet

This mentality change goes far beyond porn. A decade ago comment sections like Slashdot and Hacker News were almost unanimously in favor of keeping the internet as unregulated and open as possible. Now it seems like every headline about social media companies attracts a lot of comments demanding regulations, restrictions, and laws to crack down on... something. Even here on HN it's common for threads about Meta to devolve into a lot of angry calls for Facebook to be "banned" for kids or for lawmakers to step in and regulate. Meanwhile, journalists and politicians love to amplify stories about tech companies doing harm to kids. Allowing, or even encouraging, something like porn on your platform is an open invitation for these journalists to put you in their sights. No company wants to be the most lax company in the space, so it's a constant game of companies tightening their standards.

uncomputation 4y ago
This is conflating two very different issues around social media regulation in my opinion. I won’t claim to know “HN’s” opinion because it will likely be as varied as its users, but there are two main camps in this area: 1. Regulate data privacy and tracking 2. Regulate porn/liability risks The first camp generally opposes Facebook for its huge collection of personal information and tracking across the web. By “regulation,” they mean make this kind of behavior illegal so I don’t have to run Facebook Container and try to cover my tracks to have privacy online. I don’t really believe these sorts of people have issues with porn online, unless their porn habits/opinions are used to profile them perhaps. The second camp is the likes of Nicholas Kristof and FOSTA-SESTA, who believe that unregulated social media will lead to sex trafficking and prostitution. I’m not gonna get into the validity of these concerns, but generally these people are not concerned about data privacy and in fact want companies to be able to identify people by name and stop any crimes facilitated via their site. You also have another curious mention of regulation for kids which I interpret as a reference to Instagram Kids. The backlash here was, from my memory, much broader than the likes of either the EFF or the porn crusaders alone and had a lot to do with the recent press about Facebook being harmful to teenage girls in particular and children in general. So, a lot of parents were upset at the idea of an entire app dedicated just to Instagram for kids. Of course, I am sure there were also people concerned that Facebook was further cementing a digital “pipeline” from childhood to adulthood where your Facebook account follows you the whole way and makes data collection and surveillance even more powerful. I also disagree with the notion that “no company wants to be the most lax company in the space.” If anything, from this post and also from sites such as OnlyFans, I think many sites “want” to host adult content in the sense of “want” meaning don’t want to turn away potential users. The issue is, as this post touches on, being associated with adult or illicit content can result in payment processors blocking your accounts and advertisers souring. You can see a milder example of this on YouTube with unsavory videos being demonetized because advertisers don’t want their ads played over a video about serial killers or racism. It’s not that YouTube is cowering at some journalist penning them as a public menace, it’s that they want advertisers’ dollars and advertisers don’t like adult content because it’s a threat to their public image. Regardless, this “race to the bottom” theory doesn’t really hold water when you consider that only Tumblr has banned adult content. Twitter and Reddit still allow it and there are even whole sites dedicated to distribution of it (OnlyFans and its clones) which have never existed before on this scale. Then again, you have things like PornHub taking down “unverified” videos after threat from Mastercard, so it’s not really clear either way. This was a very long reply I realize, but I had a lot to say I suppose.
madeofpalk 4y ago
Weird how you paint journalists spreading awareness of Bad Things Happening as the evil here. Earlier this year Twitter considered competing with OnlyFans in having a paid porn product. No company wants to be the most lax company in the space, and twitter determined it didn't have the ability to ensure that child porn wouldn't end up on the service, and they killed the effort. > "Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale" the Red Team [at Twitter] concluded I think that's a completely valid outcome - I think it's valid for no one to want to be responsible for facilitating that. https://www.theverge.com/23327809/twitter-onlyfans-child-sexual-content-problem-elon-musk https://www.theverge.com/23327809/twitter-onlyfans-child-sex...
- draw_down 4y ago
- MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago
  > Weird how you paint journalists spreading awareness of Bad Things Happening as the evil here. Counterpoint. There really is a lot of high-class clickbait in journalism though. Most is probably well-meaning and it might even be unintentional. My own anecdote: I like to listen to NPR which is a great source of civil discussion and journalism. A lot of their pieces, in the aim to be humanistic, end up bouncing from one group of (legitimate!) victims to the next. Every story is about someone with a problem, and the implied question is always what are we going to do about it? When these stories inevitably drift toward social media, that question is always directed at the company. What is TwitBookStagramTok going to do to fix ____ issue? These are legitimate questions. But you end up reaching a point where the story just doesn't end, it keeps being brought up again and again as bad press for company ______ and so of course, after a period of attrition, the company eventually performs some action to curtail the mountain of bad press. And that action is almost always heavier moderation. And when companies don't respond the conversion shifts toward regulation. And that sounds good right? But the question that doesn't get asked enough is if the company should have just ridden out the bad press and fought the regulation as a matter of principle, and if that principle is good and sound and should be embraced by our society; the question being pondered by this HackerNews thread. That's rarely the perspective offered by an entity like NPR because humanism is their form of clickbait. Neither their listeners nor their producers are much interested in that, it seems. So while "more censorship, less freedom" might not be the mantra coming from the mouths of NPR personalities, it's sort of a de facto result of their tendencies.
notacoward 4y ago
> No company wants to be the most lax company in the space This is the key observation, I think. It's a real race to the bottom, except that the bottom is a place where absolutely no actual bottoms are allowed.
q-big 4y ago
> No company wants to be the most lax company in the space Honestly, in my opinion having such a public image can also be a market advantage for such a company. For example in its early days, Reddit attracted a huge initial audience by being perceived this way and being perceived as a very pro-free-speech website.
- Kye 4y ago
  This was easier back before the proliferation of increasingly niche subreddits. It didn't even have them to begin with. A policy that works when the most niche sub is /r/technology doesn't hold up so well once subs practicing free speech increasingly come into conflict over what speech they consider acceptable. People who genuinely believe in unrestricted free speech are few and far between and tend to find some exceptions are reasonable once they see how bad people can be.
  - HardlyCurious 4y ago
    Your comment lacks any distinction between limits which are set by users or at least very decentralized vs limits set by what is mostly centralized authority. I will fight to the death to protect your right to yell obscenities in a public place, but I'll kick you out of my house for doing the same. Nothing hypocritical about that.
    - Kye 4y ago
      Did you click on the wrong reply link? I didn't say it was hypocritical for policies and norms to adapt to the realities of the situation. It was an observation without judgement.
yetanotherbro 4y ago
> A decade ago comment sections like Slashdot and Hacker News were almost unanimously in favor of keeping the internet as unregulated and open as possible. Some of those people have kids and stopped saying racial slurs and just grew up. You're talking about forums that were overwhelming inhabited by 15-22 year olds.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
I'm an individual who's opinions on unfettered anonymous speech have changed over the years, so I'll give my take. I was a "free speech absolutist" in the early 00s, which was the "default" on places like Slashdot, and later on places like Reddit and HN. The reason I changed my opinion is that I was generally surprised by the amount of real harm that can be caused by the way technology can amplify false or harmful content. Specific examples: 1. I was actually surprised by the amount of glee people would take in online harassment, things like r/jailbait and fatpeoplehate. I believe that the social norms that would have prevented the proliferation of this content "in the real world" were ineffective in the anonymous, online world. 2. I was surprised by the amount of laughable BS that got real, widespread traction, stuff like QAnon. 3. Regardless of your politics, interference from foreign powers in democratic governments is now a much more realistic and effective attack scenario. So I guess the short of it is that some "axioms" that I used to believe about free speech (e.g. "the truth will always bubble to the top in open debate") I no longer believe to be true in the way that technology can "hack" people's emotions. I definitely don't know what the right solution is, but I think that unfettered anonymous free speech on the Internet will lead to a type of society that scares me.
- caust1c 4y ago
  I'm in the same boat as you, but I have been mostly just floored by #2. The lack of critical thinking ability amongst the general population is just shocking. The fact that social media companies optimized for screen time just exacerbated the problem.
- Negitivefrags 4y ago
  I think your position is a pretty reasonable take but I’ll try to take it on as someone who still has the early 00s mentality. I think the primary argument against it basically boils down to the fact that the internet hasn’t actually changed things as much as most people of our generation who grew up with it think, and many of the changes are better, not worse. 1) For harassment, it would be hard to do worse than the harassment we had in the past. Open racism has certainly declined since the 60s/70s. There was significantly more actual violence against people during that time than today. 2) Misinformation was certainly more prevelent in the past. Did you know that in 1970 30% of Americans thought the moon landing was faked? The number now is much much lower and has only gone down. 3) The idea that foreign powers were influencing America was certainly a lot bigger in the past. The “red scare” was a thing. People were mistrusting of thier neighbours and accusations of being communist abounded. I think the main thing the internet has done is surface the craziness so that more people know about the fewer actual number of crazies.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
We want regulation for data privacy and user freedom, not for banning content someone somewhere finds offensive. We want surveillance capitalism and anti-monopoly regulation.
- justanorherhack 4y ago
  Can’t have cake and eat it too. I think the order in which these have occurred speaks to the regulators priorities.
int_19h 4y ago
Gotta be careful to distinguish between censorship and anti-trust. I very much want Meta to be regulated, or better yet, broken up - not because it "platforms Nazis" or whatever, but because it's one of the monopolists that controls a huge chunk of the Net. I actually wonder sometimes if the real reason why the tech monopolies aren't busted is because the threat of anti-trust is a very effective tool to get them to censor things without having to go through legislation.

uncomputation 4y ago

This is conflating two very different issues around social media regulation in my opinion. I won’t claim to know “HN’s” opinion because it will likely be as varied as its users, but there are two main camps in this area: 1. Regulate data privacy and tracking 2. Regulate porn/liability risks The first camp generally opposes Facebook for its huge collection of personal information and tracking across the web. By “regulation,” they mean make this kind of behavior illegal so I don’t have to run Facebook Container and try to cover my tracks to have privacy online. I don’t really believe these sorts of people have issues with porn online, unless their porn habits/opinions are used to profile them perhaps. The second camp is the likes of Nicholas Kristof and FOSTA-SESTA, who believe that unregulated social media will lead to sex trafficking and prostitution. I’m not gonna get into the validity of these concerns, but generally these people are not concerned about data privacy and in fact want companies to be able to identify people by name and stop any crimes facilitated via their site. You also have another curious mention of regulation for kids which I interpret as a reference to Instagram Kids. The backlash here was, from my memory, much broader than the likes of either the EFF or the porn crusaders alone and had a lot to do with the recent press about Facebook being harmful to teenage girls in particular and children in general. So, a lot of parents were upset at the idea of an entire app dedicated just to Instagram for kids. Of course, I am sure there were also people concerned that Facebook was further cementing a digital “pipeline” from childhood to adulthood where your Facebook account follows you the whole way and makes data collection and surveillance even more powerful. I also disagree with the notion that “no company wants to be the most lax company in the space.” If anything, from this post and also from sites such as OnlyFans, I think many sites “want” to host adult content in the sense of “want” meaning don’t want to turn away potential users. The issue is, as this post touches on, being associated with adult or illicit content can result in payment processors blocking your accounts and advertisers souring. You can see a milder example of this on YouTube with unsavory videos being demonetized because advertisers don’t want their ads played over a video about serial killers or racism. It’s not that YouTube is cowering at some journalist penning them as a public menace, it’s that they want advertisers’ dollars and advertisers don’t like adult content because it’s a threat to their public image. Regardless, this “race to the bottom” theory doesn’t really hold water when you consider that only Tumblr has banned adult content. Twitter and Reddit still allow it and there are even whole sites dedicated to distribution of it (OnlyFans and its clones) which have never existed before on this scale. Then again, you have things like PornHub taking down “unverified” videos after threat from Mastercard, so it’s not really clear either way. This was a very long reply I realize, but I had a lot to say I suppose.

madeofpalk 4y ago

Weird how you paint journalists spreading awareness of Bad Things Happening as the evil here. Earlier this year Twitter considered competing with OnlyFans in having a paid porn product. No company wants to be the most lax company in the space, and twitter determined it didn't have the ability to ensure that child porn wouldn't end up on the service, and they killed the effort. > "Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale" the Red Team [at Twitter] concluded I think that's a completely valid outcome - I think it's valid for no one to want to be responsible for facilitating that. https://www.theverge.com/23327809/twitter-onlyfans-child-sexual-content-problem-elon-musk https://www.theverge.com/23327809/twitter-onlyfans-child-sex...

draw_down 4y ago
MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago
> Weird how you paint journalists spreading awareness of Bad Things Happening as the evil here. Counterpoint. There really is a lot of high-class clickbait in journalism though. Most is probably well-meaning and it might even be unintentional. My own anecdote: I like to listen to NPR which is a great source of civil discussion and journalism. A lot of their pieces, in the aim to be humanistic, end up bouncing from one group of (legitimate!) victims to the next. Every story is about someone with a problem, and the implied question is always what are we going to do about it? When these stories inevitably drift toward social media, that question is always directed at the company. What is TwitBookStagramTok going to do to fix ____ issue? These are legitimate questions. But you end up reaching a point where the story just doesn't end, it keeps being brought up again and again as bad press for company ______ and so of course, after a period of attrition, the company eventually performs some action to curtail the mountain of bad press. And that action is almost always heavier moderation. And when companies don't respond the conversion shifts toward regulation. And that sounds good right? But the question that doesn't get asked enough is if the company should have just ridden out the bad press and fought the regulation as a matter of principle, and if that principle is good and sound and should be embraced by our society; the question being pondered by this HackerNews thread. That's rarely the perspective offered by an entity like NPR because humanism is their form of clickbait. Neither their listeners nor their producers are much interested in that, it seems. So while "more censorship, less freedom" might not be the mantra coming from the mouths of NPR personalities, it's sort of a de facto result of their tendencies.

notacoward 4y ago

> No company wants to be the most lax company in the space This is the key observation, I think. It's a real race to the bottom, except that the bottom is a place where absolutely no actual bottoms are allowed.

q-big 4y ago

> No company wants to be the most lax company in the space Honestly, in my opinion having such a public image can also be a market advantage for such a company. For example in its early days, Reddit attracted a huge initial audience by being perceived this way and being perceived as a very pro-free-speech website.

Kye 4y ago
This was easier back before the proliferation of increasingly niche subreddits. It didn't even have them to begin with. A policy that works when the most niche sub is /r/technology doesn't hold up so well once subs practicing free speech increasingly come into conflict over what speech they consider acceptable. People who genuinely believe in unrestricted free speech are few and far between and tend to find some exceptions are reasonable once they see how bad people can be.
- HardlyCurious 4y ago
  Your comment lacks any distinction between limits which are set by users or at least very decentralized vs limits set by what is mostly centralized authority. I will fight to the death to protect your right to yell obscenities in a public place, but I'll kick you out of my house for doing the same. Nothing hypocritical about that.
  - Kye 4y ago
    Did you click on the wrong reply link? I didn't say it was hypocritical for policies and norms to adapt to the realities of the situation. It was an observation without judgement.

yetanotherbro 4y ago

> A decade ago comment sections like Slashdot and Hacker News were almost unanimously in favor of keeping the internet as unregulated and open as possible. Some of those people have kids and stopped saying racial slurs and just grew up. You're talking about forums that were overwhelming inhabited by 15-22 year olds.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

I'm an individual who's opinions on unfettered anonymous speech have changed over the years, so I'll give my take. I was a "free speech absolutist" in the early 00s, which was the "default" on places like Slashdot, and later on places like Reddit and HN. The reason I changed my opinion is that I was generally surprised by the amount of real harm that can be caused by the way technology can amplify false or harmful content. Specific examples: 1. I was actually surprised by the amount of glee people would take in online harassment, things like r/jailbait and fatpeoplehate. I believe that the social norms that would have prevented the proliferation of this content "in the real world" were ineffective in the anonymous, online world. 2. I was surprised by the amount of laughable BS that got real, widespread traction, stuff like QAnon. 3. Regardless of your politics, interference from foreign powers in democratic governments is now a much more realistic and effective attack scenario. So I guess the short of it is that some "axioms" that I used to believe about free speech (e.g. "the truth will always bubble to the top in open debate") I no longer believe to be true in the way that technology can "hack" people's emotions. I definitely don't know what the right solution is, but I think that unfettered anonymous free speech on the Internet will lead to a type of society that scares me.

caust1c 4y ago
I'm in the same boat as you, but I have been mostly just floored by #2. The lack of critical thinking ability amongst the general population is just shocking. The fact that social media companies optimized for screen time just exacerbated the problem.
Negitivefrags 4y ago
I think your position is a pretty reasonable take but I’ll try to take it on as someone who still has the early 00s mentality. I think the primary argument against it basically boils down to the fact that the internet hasn’t actually changed things as much as most people of our generation who grew up with it think, and many of the changes are better, not worse. 1) For harassment, it would be hard to do worse than the harassment we had in the past. Open racism has certainly declined since the 60s/70s. There was significantly more actual violence against people during that time than today. 2) Misinformation was certainly more prevelent in the past. Did you know that in 1970 30% of Americans thought the moon landing was faked? The number now is much much lower and has only gone down. 3) The idea that foreign powers were influencing America was certainly a lot bigger in the past. The “red scare” was a thing. People were mistrusting of thier neighbours and accusations of being communist abounded. I think the main thing the internet has done is surface the craziness so that more people know about the fewer actual number of crazies.

matheusmoreira 4y ago

We want regulation for data privacy and user freedom, not for banning content someone somewhere finds offensive. We want surveillance capitalism and anti-monopoly regulation.

justanorherhack 4y ago
Can’t have cake and eat it too. I think the order in which these have occurred speaks to the regulators priorities.

int_19h 4y ago

Gotta be careful to distinguish between censorship and anti-trust. I very much want Meta to be regulated, or better yet, broken up - not because it "platforms Nazis" or whatever, but because it's one of the monopolists that controls a huge chunk of the Net. I actually wonder sometimes if the real reason why the tech monopolies aren't busted is because the threat of anti-trust is a very effective tool to get them to censor things without having to go through legislation.