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I read the whole thing but stopped taking it seriously after this line: > Only the original author may remove content they produce. This has some pretty bad i

I read the whole thing but stopped taking it seriously after this line: > Only the original author may remove content they produce. This has some pretty bad implications if we think about obvious content problems like child abuse. And sure, algorithms can remove this from people’s feeds, but what about the victims? Am I the only person who thinks this is a giant, glaring hole in this whole argument?

pedybr2 4y ago
No, I think you are right. I think it is a very important function of a society to decide on things that should not be public or even illegal. This has always been the case and child abuse is the most obvious example.
derbOac 4y ago
I read that with a bit of nuance, like "only the original author or someone who has taken control of their resources" or something although you're right that some care would be needed in considering a statement like that. I understood the statement relative to the case where someone else centralized ultimately has control of your content, like Twitter. The other extreme is some decentralized equivalent to the case of hard-encrypted files that are only openable to a person with special knowledge. There's lots of grey there, and decentralization opens up lots of questions, like "does any one person really have control over content in a decentralized system?" I guess the comment seemed too fuzzy to me to be interpreted in much detail, so I was willing to flow with it, at least to some level.
poisonborz 4y ago
Almost this whole issue boils down to this, "do we need, and if, how do we handle forced content removal". And I have to say I'm on the freedom side here. Just like with encryption, you can't have a "trusted" middle men with a backdoor. You can't trust a state, a corporation, a "committee of wise men". You can't have a central dependable authoriser for a complex, abstract entity like content. There are two forces at play here, general public ("everyone else outside the poster") and law enforcement. - Groups will always be able to flag/hide/shadowban content. Yes this is not not scaleable to millions of people/posts (without masses of slave wage moderators or automation, both which would make ample mistakes). But I also think that communities are not scaleable to millions of people/posts. For all the necessary "common space", it is, and probably should be "the frontier/wild west". Clients might be restricted from accessing it or may have filtering safeguards. - Law enforcement should have the right to pursue people posting illegal content in real life, and remove it on their behalf with whatever means they have at hand - no matter if in the US, Europe, China or North Korea. But they should be only able to do this via their own (black-hat) methods and not built-in switches served conveniently by the network protocol. Just because the digital world allows complete control, that doesn't mean society should utilise it for its own steering. In the end my guess is that such debates are kind of needless/theoretical - the world will gravitate to some similar kind of self-balancing anyway, like how it did with digital content piracy.
- krapp 4y ago
  Arguing that law enforcement should be forced to remove content via hacking is literally trusting middlemen with a backdoor. If you can't trust states, you can't trust law enforcement. If you can trust law enforcement to use "black hat" methods, you can trust them to interact legally with a company and have an API.
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    But why, in an open protocol, spend engineering resources making it easier for them? I get why Big Tech does it: they need the .gov in their court when regulations come up in the legislature, and they want the fat .mil contracts. People hacking for fun in their spare time don't have the same motivations.
    - krapp 4y ago
      Because we live in a society under the rule of law for which law enforcement's ability to enforce laws is generally seen as a good thing. The proper place to add 'friction' in that process is legislation - requiring a warrant, for instance. But there's nothing inherently unjust or malign about law enforcement being able to easily perform its duties (given a legitimate context) or even for companies to give law enforcement the means to police illegal content online, that's their job, nor is the cause of liberty necessarily served by making it arbitrarily difficult. But if you need a purely technical argument, because requiring law enforcement to use black-hat methods means requiring maintaining a minimal level of unsafety for the protocol.
      - ElevenLathe 4y ago
        To each their own. Personally, if I'm hacking on a hobby project, the last thing I want to do is read government standards documents and set up meetings with law enforcement IT people. If I were forced to do so, I would just start model railroading instead.
- iso1631 4y ago
  > Law enforcement should have the right to pursue people posting illegal content in real life It's not the 90s cyberpunk era any more. The internet is real life.
erlich 4y ago
It was odd that someone like Jack could make such a naive statement. Makes me think he's been a bit disconnected from all this for a while. Maybe he assumed that illegal content was an obvious exception. However, illegal content differs between countries. And severe censorship is usually of illegal content. But if read literally, its pretty abhorrent.

pedybr2 4y ago

No, I think you are right. I think it is a very important function of a society to decide on things that should not be public or even illegal. This has always been the case and child abuse is the most obvious example.

derbOac 4y ago

I read that with a bit of nuance, like "only the original author or someone who has taken control of their resources" or something although you're right that some care would be needed in considering a statement like that. I understood the statement relative to the case where someone else centralized ultimately has control of your content, like Twitter. The other extreme is some decentralized equivalent to the case of hard-encrypted files that are only openable to a person with special knowledge. There's lots of grey there, and decentralization opens up lots of questions, like "does any one person really have control over content in a decentralized system?" I guess the comment seemed too fuzzy to me to be interpreted in much detail, so I was willing to flow with it, at least to some level.

poisonborz 4y ago

Almost this whole issue boils down to this, "do we need, and if, how do we handle forced content removal". And I have to say I'm on the freedom side here. Just like with encryption, you can't have a "trusted" middle men with a backdoor. You can't trust a state, a corporation, a "committee of wise men". You can't have a central dependable authoriser for a complex, abstract entity like content. There are two forces at play here, general public ("everyone else outside the poster") and law enforcement. - Groups will always be able to flag/hide/shadowban content. Yes this is not not scaleable to millions of people/posts (without masses of slave wage moderators or automation, both which would make ample mistakes). But I also think that communities are not scaleable to millions of people/posts. For all the necessary "common space", it is, and probably should be "the frontier/wild west". Clients might be restricted from accessing it or may have filtering safeguards. - Law enforcement should have the right to pursue people posting illegal content in real life, and remove it on their behalf with whatever means they have at hand - no matter if in the US, Europe, China or North Korea. But they should be only able to do this via their own (black-hat) methods and not built-in switches served conveniently by the network protocol. Just because the digital world allows complete control, that doesn't mean society should utilise it for its own steering. In the end my guess is that such debates are kind of needless/theoretical - the world will gravitate to some similar kind of self-balancing anyway, like how it did with digital content piracy.

krapp 4y ago
Arguing that law enforcement should be forced to remove content via hacking is literally trusting middlemen with a backdoor. If you can't trust states, you can't trust law enforcement. If you can trust law enforcement to use "black hat" methods, you can trust them to interact legally with a company and have an API.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  But why, in an open protocol, spend engineering resources making it easier for them? I get why Big Tech does it: they need the .gov in their court when regulations come up in the legislature, and they want the fat .mil contracts. People hacking for fun in their spare time don't have the same motivations.
  - krapp 4y ago
    Because we live in a society under the rule of law for which law enforcement's ability to enforce laws is generally seen as a good thing. The proper place to add 'friction' in that process is legislation - requiring a warrant, for instance. But there's nothing inherently unjust or malign about law enforcement being able to easily perform its duties (given a legitimate context) or even for companies to give law enforcement the means to police illegal content online, that's their job, nor is the cause of liberty necessarily served by making it arbitrarily difficult. But if you need a purely technical argument, because requiring law enforcement to use black-hat methods means requiring maintaining a minimal level of unsafety for the protocol.
    - ElevenLathe 4y ago
      To each their own. Personally, if I'm hacking on a hobby project, the last thing I want to do is read government standards documents and set up meetings with law enforcement IT people. If I were forced to do so, I would just start model railroading instead.
iso1631 4y ago
> Law enforcement should have the right to pursue people posting illegal content in real life It's not the 90s cyberpunk era any more. The internet is real life.

erlich 4y ago

It was odd that someone like Jack could make such a naive statement. Makes me think he's been a bit disconnected from all this for a while. Maybe he assumed that illegal content was an obvious exception. However, illegal content differs between countries. And severe censorship is usually of illegal content. But if read literally, its pretty abhorrent.