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I mean, yes, but also… Not specifically related to this “child protection” thing, but you can’t deny that the free flow of information also leads to some prett

• hnhg 1y ago
  Look at the positives: now you are aware that every channel is full of misinformation and propaganda and treat it all as such. That gives you better media literacy than previous generations who tended to trust everything that was given to them "from above" - it enables us to be more intellectually mature and honest with ourselves about the nature and history of news media, even if you might not actually find that pleasant or convenient to deal with.
  • considerdevs 1y ago
    True, awareness of misinformation is higher today. But, being aware that all channels are polluted with misinformation doesn’t automatically make someone better at distinguish the truth. Also older generation automatically are not buying everything they see https://www.mpg.de/24132917/0205-bild-online-misinformation-149835-x1 https://www.mpg.de/24132917/0205-bild-online-misinformation-... Actually, having "misinfo everywhere" goggles can push people think that everything is propaganda or nothing can be trusted. This is also one way Russia and China is using its propaganda: give so much multi meaning information that normal governance information is also considered as something that cannot be trusted. Or atleast trying.
    • hnhg 1y ago
      I concede that but awareness is a better starting position for potential improvement rather than ignorance. I guess we are agreeing on the substance but I am taking an optimistic view rather than a pessimistic one. I accept that I might be very misguided.
• INTPenis 1y ago
  Life itself leads to both good and bad things. But it's not worth making life worse by denying people freedom of communication and privacy.
• _w1tm 1y ago
  > I do think the Elon Musk approach (“just let people decide for themselves”) is very naive at best. I thought the Elon Musk approach was to control the algorithm and decide for his users what they see. Or just ban journalists he dislikes.
  • raffraffraff 1y ago
    Except they can't choose for their kids, or at least, not easily. Google basically own the android ecosystem and they don't want to provide any controls that could be used to limit their ability to generate as revenue. Look at Chrome's extensions. Try blocking domains. Your only hope is to use the god-awful Google Family controls AND NextDNS AND an adblocking mobile browser. These days some parents are trying to get schools to ban phones, because individual parents can't, "or my little Tommy will be the only one without a phone". So you then have to worry about what other kids have access to. Porn in private WhatsApp channels etc.
    • tomatocracy 1y ago
      The biggest problem with giving kids phones is that it opens them up to potential non stop bullying over WhatsApp/iMessage/etc. And yet the online safety act doesn't even claim to try to "do something" about that (not that it would be possible anyway but that didn't stop them elsewhere).
    • iteria 1y ago
      As a parent who using family link, I don't find it bad or inadequate. What is bad about it. How is it unfit for purpose? My child literally has no access to anything I don't want her to. If I had a complaint, it's that tracking her media consumption on YouTube is a PITA. The whole "my kid will be left out" thing is so bizarre to me. So what? My kid is already banned from Roblox and that means of her whole circle, she's the only one who doesn't play and oh well. When I was a child it wasn't uncommon for a child to be without something their peer group had usually for money reasons. I don't see technology as any different. Kid has stuff their friends don't and vice versa. That's why I get mad about age restriction laws on the internet. I do want to introduce my child to some of these things in a supervised way so I can teach her about them. Something I can't do if it's literally illegal because other parents decided to shove a phone/tablet in their kid's face and walk away. I know way too many parents who never bother to use parental controls and learn that they're not actually will to live through their kid's whining about their restrictions.
• thdhhghgbhy 1y ago
  "just let people decide for themselves” is not new, the idea goes way back to John Stuart Mill at least. The "marketplace of ideas".
  • tomatocracy 1y ago
    It was also the prevailing attitude to speech in the UK until the past 10-15 years.
• rustystump 1y ago
  I dont buy the misinformation/propaganda argument as the past was far far worse on all fronts in that regard than today. Additionally, most platforms are highly censored and curated being the exact opposite of free flow of information. I think the let people decide for themselves is the best option as any alternative is by definition tyranny/control and why the parent quote is so spot on.
  • considerdevs 1y ago
    You got a point, though I am not sure which things you are referring to. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi tried to have tight control in east Berlin but eventually failed. China is doing currently the full scale automated information gathering and control against Uighur Muslims. Not sure how China is using propaganda for the Chinese themselves. Also NSA uses mass surveillance already at the moment for foreigners and internal political opponents. But propaganda as a weapon is not a thing to underestimate. As investigated e.g. Jessika Aro https://www.igpub.com/putins-trolls/ https://www.igpub.com/putins-trolls/ and some might argue about the role of election interference for the Trump election and re-election as well. Even highly educated people are susceptible to propaganda eventhough they consider not https://www.mpg.de/24132917/0205-bild-online-misinformation-149835-x1 https://www.mpg.de/24132917/0205-bild-online-misinformation-... So, if the leaders are dictators and hates people, it wont be good with or without new surveillance laws as there are already existing ways to do that.
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• _Algernon_ 1y ago
  The issue with social media isn't the free flow of information but the amplification of certain information — the information that tends to make you angry. The amplification is the cause of echo chambers, spreading of misinformation and disinformation, etc. It makes possible what in essence is a distributed denial of service attack on the human brain. Sure, chain emails existed before, but they had a pretty low ceiling of how many it would reach. It didn't scale well. In other words, you should regulate the amplification mechanism ("algorithm"), not what information is allowed to be said. I think forcing platforms to go back to subscribe+reverse chronological feeds would be a pretty good start.
  • TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
    Genuinely astounding how few commenters here understand that the outrage is deliberate and curated because outrage improves messaging persuasiveness. All of the corporate-owned social media platforms have censorship, curation, and selection policies which impose an editorial slant on what's boosted and what isn't. All of them. No exceptions. None of them offer anything resembling a free, open, flow of information. (Mastodon does, or at least tries to, but it has very little reach compared to others.) And all of them are poisoned by the output of huge well-funded bot farm networks posting harmful content. Whether it's anti-vax nonsense, climate change denial, inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric, divisive political rage bait of all kinds, or covert propaganda designed to look reasonable and pull people into a rabbit hole of fake activism and misinformation, all of these networks are acting as a public brainwashing service for political ends. There is no "marketplace of ideas." Nothing that happens on social media is truly organic and bottom-up. And this is not an accident. These are primarily influence, behaviour modification, and persuasion networks, tailored using personal profiling, but disguised as entertainment and social connection, and allowing just enough dissent from the official party lines to create a superficial veneer of free speech. This process is essentially unregulated. There used to be some FTC oversight, but there isn't any more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_web_brigades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_web_brigades
• miki123211 1y ago
  Knives help you cook delicious food, knives can also help you stab your partner to death. This doesn't mean knives should be banned (though, ironically enough, the UK believes otherwise). Different technologies are in different places on the "societal usefullness versus danger" spectrum. Nuclear weapons are obviously on the "really fricking dangerous" side, no country lets a civilian own them. Forks are obviously on the "useful" side, even though you can technically use one to gouge somebody's eye out. What's the right tradeoff for guns, printing presses, typewriters and social media companies is a matter of some debate.
  • hdgvhicv 1y ago
    The U.K. doesn’t ban knives. It has an age limit to buy them, and bans carrying them in public without a lawful excuse.
    • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
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      • monkey_monkey 1y ago
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        • deleted 1y ago
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        • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
          And I bet you felt really accomplished and proud about yourself with that insult to a random person on the internet. The peak of your intellectual capabilities. You know what they say, people who have no value to add in a conversation, can only attack other people.
          • monkey_monkey 1y ago
• mgaunard 1y ago
  Let's not be overly dramatic. The main misinformation you see on the Internet is attention-grabbing women pretending to care about you and people trying to misrepresent mass-made white-label Chinese stuff as indie original designs. Few people spread hate other than to say our society is a disaster and we'd be better off with communism or anarchy which has been typical discourse of young men since the dawn of the modern age. In general I've found much higher quality of content on the Internet than elsewhere, with genuine testimonies, in-depth analyses, and a variety of opinions and experiences. Whenever I watch the news on TV I am appalled by how superficial and one-sided it is, sometimes misunderstanding the issue altogether, completely out of touch and misrepresenting reality.
• heavyset_go 1y ago
  > Every platform these days is full to the brim with misinformation and propaganda (which ends up in mainstream media as well), deliberately making many of us hateful and sometimes violent. The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm. I remember what it was like before the internet, and misinformation and propaganda were just as pervasive and perverse, except you couldn't be sure about it unless you read a book, did actual research or talked to an expert, and you sure as shit weren't going to change anyone's mind or at least be able to say "you're wrong and here's why" when you hear obvious bullshit. IMO, there was a big change in the nature of harmful misinformation once you could Google things like "did convenience store workers really celebrate on 9/11" when that particular urban myth spread in the aftermath of the attack. I do agree that the nature and vector of misinformation and propaganda are different. The ways in which we're wrong and dumb changed, but we were just as wrong and dumb before the internet, and we were statistically more hateful and violent then, too.
• somenameforme 1y ago
  The free flow of information isn't driving extremism, it's echo chambers. People have a tendency of surrounding themselves with only those who already agree with them on some topic, so that a heavily partisan position suddenly becomes 'moderate.' This is how you have people simultaneously claiming, for instance, that the US is becoming more liberal than ever, and that it's becoming more conservative than ever. You can also see this with the perception gap [1]. Those who are most involved in politics tend to be the paradoxically least knowledgeable about what 'the other side' thinks and believes. Typical contemporary examples would be republicans thinking democrats want to defund the police, or democrats thinking republicans are against immigration. When you have contrary ideas bouncing against each other, poor ideas are easily demonstrated to be such - and you get a more realistic view of what people 'on the other side' actually think and believe. It naturally tempers against radicalism. But when you start to control information, you get the opposite. This is made even worse by the sort of people that find themselves on a life trajectory to go work, let alone volunteer, for the 'Ministry of Truth'. They tend to be the exact sorts that want to create information bubbles and echo chambers. ---- In general I think the truth tends to trickle up, even if it might get a bit dirty on the way there. I'd appeal to places like the USSR on that. They not only directly controlled absolutely all published information, but strictly controlled migration in and out of the country, informers everywhere making people terrified of speaking their mind, and just generally had a rock solid grip on information. The result? People still knew they were all full of shit. There's a great series of jokes from the era here. [2] On of my favorites, "Why do we need two central newspapers, Truth (Pravda) and News (Izvestiya) if both are organs of the same Party? Because in Truth there is no news, and in News there is no truth." [1] - https://perceptiongap.us/ https://perceptiongap.us/ [2] - https://johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm https://johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm
  • Ray20 1y ago
    > The result? People still knew they were all full of shit. It's just that the purpose of all this totalitarian control wasn't so that people wouldn't know. It was so that people couldn't do anything about it even if they knew. The result was achieved, the measures you listed as examples worked effectively.
• openmymind_net 1y ago
  [dead]
• ang_cire 1y ago
  > the free flow of information also leads to some pretty terrible things Being alive is a prerequisite to being able to suffer, die, etc. None of the things you listed are unique to free flows of information, in fact misinformation and propaganda are even worse in a closed loop of information. Look at North Korea, and tell me that they'd be worse off propaganda-wise if they had unfettered access to internet. > The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm. No, the entities flooding social media have also flooded all the pre-internet, closed-loop media as well. Right-wing propaganda like Fox News, Alex Jones (first started his radio show in 1996), and literally the entire Cold War-era Red Scare propaganda, on radio and tv, all predated social media. And those were not free-flow channels, the information they put out was 100% controlled by the owners.
• account42 1y ago
  > you can’t deny I can and I will. The free flow of information doesn't get people to do bad things, teaching people to blindly trust information from authorities does.