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Thank you very much for your thoughtful reply. I appreciate your note about the history of "shouting fire in a crowded theater" as well. As someone who was try

Thank you very much for your thoughtful reply. I appreciate your note about the history of "shouting fire in a crowded theater" as well. As someone who was trying to open Facebook's eyes to their shortcomings at the time, what do you see as the larger lesson we can glean? It seems likely that blindness (for any reason) to the specific cultural dangers of new tech will become harder and not easier to spot as time goes on and these large organizations become further convinced of the completeness of their own understanding. I'd be curious to hear what you've learned generally that we can apply next time.

dannyobrien 3y ago
I believed, and still believe, that speech and content moderation simply isn't possible at the scales and staffing that Facebook and other tech companies of the 2010s want to operate. Civil society organizations struggled at the time to match and warn Facebook, but I don't think they can scale up either. I was at a human rights-related event the other day and somebody talked about leaving behind the "trashfire" of the Facebook Oversight Board. I can believe it -- it's the sort of solution that you end up having to knit together at those scales. If we seriously believe we can create some sort of global speech government, why haven't we? Conversations are intimate, contextual, and should be far more directly under the local control of the speakers. This feels counter-intuitive to many when we see modern genocides like Myanmar and Facebook (and before it, Rwanda and short-wave radio) where mass media played its part in fanning the flames. But censorship and control are temporary fixes to those deeper problems -- and it's a solution that feels more comfortable the further you get from the details of each disaster, or the closer and more familiar you are with those with the power to censor. My instincts (and my work) assumes a lot of the problems come, as you say, from the centralization of these large tech organizations, but of course there are also plenty of challenges at the more human level. It's significant for me that Western traditions of free speech emerged from decades of vicious religious wars, and appear to be more stable than the cycles of repression and counter-repression that proceeded them.
- bradrn 3y ago
  > Conversations are intimate, contextual, and should be far more directly under the local control of the speakers. Fair enough… but what about people who use Facebook as a way of broadcasting information? (Such as Ashin Wirathu in the linked article.) To me, that case feels very different to ‘intimite, contextual conversations’. And it is fundamental to Facebook’s design that it blurs the distinction between these two cases. Is the answer then to restrict such things more severely than ordinary conversations? I really have no idea. But our current way of doing things doesn’t seem to be working very well at all.

dannyobrien 3y ago

I believed, and still believe, that speech and content moderation simply isn't possible at the scales and staffing that Facebook and other tech companies of the 2010s want to operate. Civil society organizations struggled at the time to match and warn Facebook, but I don't think they can scale up either. I was at a human rights-related event the other day and somebody talked about leaving behind the "trashfire" of the Facebook Oversight Board. I can believe it -- it's the sort of solution that you end up having to knit together at those scales. If we seriously believe we can create some sort of global speech government, why haven't we? Conversations are intimate, contextual, and should be far more directly under the local control of the speakers. This feels counter-intuitive to many when we see modern genocides like Myanmar and Facebook (and before it, Rwanda and short-wave radio) where mass media played its part in fanning the flames. But censorship and control are temporary fixes to those deeper problems -- and it's a solution that feels more comfortable the further you get from the details of each disaster, or the closer and more familiar you are with those with the power to censor. My instincts (and my work) assumes a lot of the problems come, as you say, from the centralization of these large tech organizations, but of course there are also plenty of challenges at the more human level. It's significant for me that Western traditions of free speech emerged from decades of vicious religious wars, and appear to be more stable than the cycles of repression and counter-repression that proceeded them.

bradrn 3y ago
> Conversations are intimate, contextual, and should be far more directly under the local control of the speakers. Fair enough… but what about people who use Facebook as a way of broadcasting information? (Such as Ashin Wirathu in the linked article.) To me, that case feels very different to ‘intimite, contextual conversations’. And it is fundamental to Facebook’s design that it blurs the distinction between these two cases. Is the answer then to restrict such things more severely than ordinary conversations? I really have no idea. But our current way of doing things doesn’t seem to be working very well at all.