Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail.
So you can lose credibility two ways, one by not doing any censorship because people on the internet will be the worst if you let them. Doing too much censorship is also bad because people don't like that either. Of the big causes of censorship currently, I think of things like youtubes copyright claim process and how that is routinely used as a censorship backdoor by anyone - including the police. Sometimes its not even for any good reason and done by unthinking bots. This is banning more perfectly fine content than anything the government has done. I don't understand why there isn't more pushback against that process to punish people for frivolous claims.
Even after you start to hear about an example here & there, it still feels like an isolated and insignificant example. You as a viewer don't have any way to perceive the scale, the mass of what is being blocked and diverted and modified and bowdlerized. I mean to include all the ways creators taylor their stuff and self-censor so that it will get through, not just plain take downs.
Everyone knows it happens, but you have no way to see what that really means in it's totality. I think people would push back a lot if they could see that somehow.
The moment you start fighting spam, you’re obliged to make censorship decisions.
If you look at every attempt to create "The Uncensored Free Speech Version Of [ANY_SERVICE]," they all, inevitably turned into a 4chan-like trashfire. You've got to have some kind of moderation.
Massive content sites like YouTube have a problem, the owners are a vanishingly small minority when compared to the population. If they ever have a proper public outcry they would lose in an instant. The "Algorithm" and "Automated Systems" are put in place by design to create a buffer in the minds of the people between content creators and staff. That's also why the rules are vague and sometimes randomly applied. When content creators don't know all the rules around what will hurt or help them then they are motivated to be as passive as possible via learned helplessness. A system of random punishment and ever changing rewards will keep people guessing what the "algorithm" wants and what causes strikes. How YouTube operates is a master class in mass manipulation. YouTube MUST randomly abuse people to instill a source-less fear to maintain control.
Further Reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_bonding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_woman_syndrome
It’s been the struggle for scientific progress, the breakthroughs are the exception not the rule and the reason is the culture of belief around the science of the time
The lesson I’ve most learned from science is that the questions are more interesting than the answer and the answers we have are a way to ask new questions
This is false, because Facebook is bound to your real identity.
A completely unmoderated Facebook will never be like every /b/ or /pol/ thread. People aren't quiet as outspoken with derogatory terms and pornography if it their family sees what they've written.
Random copy pasted examples:
- There are 9 billion people on the planet why don't you nuke china india and africa then get back to us
- And? I dont care what race you are, you all need to die. TMD.
- To gas glowniggers on-sight?
- Hang yourself tranny
So whats changed?
Well, I have my thoughts, but one thing is for sure, as soon as the platform itself tried to start moderating, that's when things really started changing.
Censorship, as you call it, is a requirement for any platform. It's better to call it moderation. Without it platforms would be 99% spam. I assume you support "censoring" spam so that means you support some level of moderation.
Also, can we get some common sense here? You're posting on hacker news. You're allowed to post a very narrow set of things here. There are no shitposts and memes, that's half the content of the internet being censored on this platform. Are you not outraged?
> self moderated by kicks/bans
Also smaller communities tend to be easier to keep from becoming a cesspool
Now the moment a vulnerability is known, be it social or system, it is exploited by many actors.
The moment a new business idea appears to work, it is an overnight saturated market
The internet is now driven by hustlers and monetization all the way down
RIP AOL COMOUSERVE PRODIGY GOLDEN ERA
If you're saying "we must censor abhorrent viewpoints for the good of society", I'll just counter that your viewpoints are horrible and must be suppressed, while mine are good and must be amplified. For the good of society.
What the consumer wants from those services is "free speech", but with restrictions. They want "uncensored" content with the objectionable bits removed. For some people "objectionable" means spam and pornography, for others it includes certain types of political discourse or content from certain classes of person. If people really wanted uncensored content, the dark web would be far more popular.
The only way these companies can give people both uncensored "free speech" and content moderation is to build these bubbles where freedom of speech is only freedom of one type of speech.
They're stuck in a catch-22, and I can't help but feel like they actually ARE providing the service that we demand from them to the best of their abilities.
Now that the entire population uses it, the average IQ involved has plummeted, and the political and social payoff for manipulating it with inauthentic content is huge.
boys did. the girls left those spaces (and the internet more generally, until social media became mainstream) because all the public spaces were disgusting, and all the boys sat around posting vulgarity, laughing, and wondering why there were no girls in our online spaces.
Those spaces were/are absolutely appalling sausage fests and while I don't think they should be shut down, saying "we all mostly got by" is some kind of selection or survivorship bias. YOU didn't mind. YOU got by. Polite company DID mind, and there wasn't a space online for them. You just didn't notice.
I’ve watched enough Mark Dice videos to know how bad it is, and I regret not taking the blue pill sometimes. He’s shown just about every notable case of it happening (with proof). Though he knows how to game the system to resist being taken offline and you could say it’s part of his brand.
You could say that it wouldn’t be worth the risk for others to call it out like he does because it wouldn’t add to the content, and they could slip up.
You can disagree with his politics or personality but you probably wont find a leftist channel that covers that kind of censorship. I wish the videos were more categorized, though he doesn’t do it and uses generic video titles because apparently that makes it less likely to get censored.
That being said, as a male I was on the receiving end of the same kind of garbage back then. I had a guy who was sending my mother very creepy emails with her real information just to screw with me, and this was in 98. It affected me worse than it did her, I thought he was going to ruin my life as a kid. Another guy got my email account deleted when I was 14 because I drew a picture that made fun of his art as a joke. I knew it was him because he emailed me saying he was going to do it.
I still would rather trade this internet for that one. It’s too Orwellian now.
I don’t think it’s correct to claim a sense of victimhood over your sex. Shitty people are going to be a problem for you one way or another.
I also found many more great positive experiences back then with people online than more recently. You had downs but a lot of ups. People you meet online these days tend to be more busy, edgy, creepy, or too arrogant to grace you with acknowledgement. There’s also a noticeable degree of mental illness, which lines up with the statistical trends. Which is fine but you really never know what kind of mental illness it is until it’s too late (can be genuinely dangerous). The good people are around but mostly keep to themselves.
Kicking people off was and still is censorship and moderation. Services really try hard to not kick people off now and just police the content instead.
You have made an important statement which while simple - most people don't really understand the full spectrum of implications. A substantial proportions of the people are really are ungovernable - online or otherwise, they simply stoop too low. Like they say: you cannot fix stupid.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Gentrification of the Internet by smartphone-wielding normies who were neither prepared nor equipped to deal with the established cyberspace social norms that differed from their meatspace counterparts, as massive corporations rushed to get as many people Online as possible, as fast as possible, so as to target them with advertisements and accumulate and sell their data. Once said gentrifying normies outnumbered the "Internet natives", the "New Internet Culture" subsumed nearly all of the "Old Internet Culture", leaving us where we are today.
Also, to the extent that a platform is surfacing content based on a friend or follow model, then that itself is intrinsically sufficient moderation for the spam problem (because you can simply unfriend or unfollow spam accounts).
(Spam friend requests and follows still need to be addressed, however.)
(But then, that "a lot" is there for a reason. There has been some bad behavior from the platform too.)
This statement is hysterically ahistorical. Each thing you listed had active moderation. Sysops didn't just allow anything on a board, if you posted stuff off topic or offensive (to the Sysop) it was removed with prejudice. IRC networks all had long lists of k-lines of people kicked off the network. Individual channels had their own mods with ban lists. Forums either moderated or were deluged with spam. AOL and ICQ were both highly moderated.
Just like today small networks might be uncensored free-for-alls. Even then they are/were rarely actually uncensored, it's just you might have not been censored because you aligned with the views of the owners/operators.
The only really uncensored free-for-all was Usenet and that state only existed for its first decade or so when it was limited to professionals and academics. The Eternal September turned Usenet into an unusable mess. It's corpse limps along today as a vehicle for piracy and not much else.
As for the standard pop-feminist take, I should point out that it's not so much a matter of gender or victimhood, it's a matter of how people are conditioned to respond to hostility. If your culture socializes boys[0] to respond to toxicity with more toxicity, then they will naturally push everyone else not so socialized out of the space. This creates "male spaces" that are just where the most toxic people happen to concentrate. The interests they concentrate around do not matter aside from them happening to be the color of the tile on the floor being stepped on.
[0] Or just some subset of boys
The Dem leadership has been splitting the baby for years by allowing the ever-increasing radical wing of the party to bloviate about this without ever letting meaning legislation to the floor to enact the changes this group wants, so credit where credit is due, I guess.
The article says they were "pressured", it doesn't seem to to say how that pressure was applied. To me, it reads as though compliance was not mandated, just requested. Without more info, I suppose it could be taken either way.
This was a concern in 2009, but now, 15 years later, people using platforms have only themselves to blame. Stop being part of the problem !
Similarly I don't blame FB for failing to block links to the Steele dossier, even though I think it was bogus.
"Crank vs sincere skeptic" is fallacious, as it attacks the person and not the argument.
Two justices are blatantly corrupt and should be removed from the court. Two more are there through GOP malfeasance, but there's nothing we can do about them at this point.
No other democracy has lifetime appointments for high court justices.
As far as packing the court, I am personally interested in any kind of reform that depoliticizes it somewhat, whether it be that the SCOTUS acts like the Appeals courts and is a rotation, or the appointed Justices choose a second tier of judges unanimously.
But process only does so much to prevent partisan political interference. At the end of the day, our amendment system and our Congress are broken. It will take something like a mild revolution or major systemic breakdowns to fix it.
The Biden Harris government is guilty of censorship via a third party.
The opposite. Online communities can't be healthy without moderation. Cf. Twitter.
But it wasn’t.
And everyone who looked the videos of Hunter smoking crack, and his text messages discussing Joe Biden involved in business dealings, and his relationship with his 24yo niece knew it wasn’t “Russian Disinformation”.
It was obviously real, and hidden from everyone in order to influence the election.
It was censorship at request of the government and election interference.
We don’t need the WHAT-IF it wasn’t.
The old internet was a homogeneous population. Putting the "real world" online creates dimensions of abuse potential and regulatory challenges that didn't exist when a BBS had a couple hundred users who all knew at least some of the AT Hayes codes.
Now build a Facebook and get enough users to rally to your cause, and your opinion on suppression / amplification will have some weight to throw around.
People seem to forget that Facebook is where it is because users keep showing up, and users keep showing up because the censorship gives them something they want. It's a feedback loop.
He isn't suing, and it's up to the rest of us to make our decisions based on how we feel about that.
Since when science can't be challenged, even when the challenge can be outrageously wrong?
Facebook is no different. Just bigger.
Don’t know what to tell ya. If you share breitbart hot takes, expect possible takedown for disinformation.
Flat earthers are not “legitimately questioning the science”
This is called JAQing off. “Just Asking Questions”. They’re not. They’re muddying waters, often knowingly.
As a side-note: I think limiting the term of justices would overall strengthen the supreme court's integrity and I think the right would agree. Or, at least, the right would regularly agree but they won't now - because they stuffed the court with cronies. Once the situation is in your advantage, surprise! The narrative changes.
I think anybody can tell this information wasn’t obtained fraudulently. It is notable though that the same press is currently sitting on hacked documents from Iran from the Trump campaign…
You are so full of yourself. HN is great proof that there is zero association between "self identifies as technical" and "intelligence"
Well yes, because one is trying to get to a positive outcome while the other is trying to confuse and mislead you for ideological reasons.
Your retreat into legality and semantics is telling.
You responded, you obviously think you're making a point. I hope you're one of the cranks though, because that would explain how poor your argument is.
First off, the early internet barrier wasn't "self identification", it was a minimum degree of intelligence and technical ability.
And even so, they're right to say that the payoff for manipulation has become huge. The incentives at play today are totally different than they were, and very often of the lowest common denominator or tragedy of the commons variety.
Not exclusively, no. There's nothing in the definitions of the words 'censor' or 'censorship' that imply it is an act exclusive to governments.
Effectively, something can be censorship even if the government is not involved.
When the government is involved, then it's government censorship.
Pot, meet kettle.
I think back when the internet was new, people just weren't used to anonymity and still behaved like they were in a room with other people. Also the types of people who engaged in those early internet forums may have just been less likely to be showy edgelord trolls - these types took longer to get into the internet.
God forbid anybody show any intellectual curiosity if it went against the doomer dogma.
And the worst part is the people with the “wrong think” were right. Covid didn’t have a “4% kill rate”. It almost certainly came from a lab. The vaccine was not always safe and definitely wasn’t effective. Lockdowns didn’t work and neither did masks. Closing school for two years and keeping kids locked inside on iPads will fuck them up for the rest of their lives.
And saying any of that resulted in being banned, accused of “dangerous thought”, and being yelled at by society.
The trouble with labeling something "misinformation" is that you also need to be one hundred percent right, forever or you need to be ready to make prominent retractions and groveling mea culpas. With this is mind, one ought to tread lightly on topics such as fast-moving science (especially the softer ones) and matters of policy recommendations. COVID was both of these. Yes, masks! No, don't use masks! Yes, masks. Yes, masks, haha you caught us we just didn't want you to buy up all of the masks. Yes, masks, but they really only prevent you from giving the virus to others.
My undergraduate was in the harder sciences, so it is not like I am some anti-science loon. I just think that acting with Total Certainty and If You Don't Agree You Are Killing People, on certain classes of topic, is a recipe for eventually being as believable as the numerous food pyramids which, once taken as gospel, now are simply shrugged aside.
Also, community norms massively included censorship. BBSes booted people who annoyed the sysops, Usenet had moderation even if it wasn’t very secure and some servers aggressively filtered the feeds they carried for reasons in addition to space consumption.
That’s nostalgia - the BBS world, Usenet, IRC, etc. absolutely had norms and people who violated them were routinely blocked. Where I grew up there were some BBSes run by e.g. evangelical Christians who aggressively restricted the FidoNet channels they carried and the files allowed to be uploaded, and later some of the business-focused ISPs sharply limited things like Usenet (which had its own moderation system). When I ran a FidoNet node, I had to agree to community standards with the boards I peered with because the operators didn’t want to deal with certain types of hassle.
What was different is federation: back in the early online era, someone who was booted off of one system would go somewhere else. The problem with services like Twitter is that they’re centralized and so when people break their terms of service don’t want to go somewhere else, so they complain about censorship when they really mean “free hosting and promotion”.
Also you are still wrong about most of that. The vaccine is certainly safe and effective, masks definitely help, lockdowns definitely helped the overrun hospitals. Yes there were adverse effects in some of these policies unfortunately.
It is, at worst, "popularity makes right." Which, to be clear: there are philosophies that take significant umbrage with that (there's a reason the US government isn't a strict popular vote for every position).
But the complaint seems to boil down to "I want people to go do something else because... I know they should." Not exactly compelling. People know themselves better than strangers do.
This isn't a claim that might makes right. It's a challenge to replace theory of how people want to engage with the world with practice. I suspect (because we keep seeing the same patterns over and over) that a replacement for Facebook is going to either not catch on like Facebook did or is going to find the need for heavy-handed moderation at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Even for HN, this is an ideologues bridge too far.
You desperately need to remove yourself from communities of perpetual victimhood.
All I said was that they are not legitimately questioning the science, because they are not.
The one thing that is extremely interesting is that even the people who loudly shout for free speech do not themselves believe in it, as they constantly try to cancel all sorts of free speech and expression essentially constantly.
Very very few people believe in absolute free speech.
You’re not being taken down for the legitimate take. You are being taken down for the other wild assertions, conspiracy theories and lies that you cook up with them.
You people will write like “some stupid n*** shot up a grocery store”
Then you get taken down and whine that “I just made a comment about news that really happened”. And then the real reason it was taken down was the n-bomb you dropped.
The posts you claim are censored are not being censored for the reasons you are claiming.
Wow. Well, I can tell how your mind works. Go ahead and keep all that to yourself, yea?
I’m still waiting for the media to tell me what “I want to fold clothes with you in the bathroom at Whole Foods” meant.
It turns out they were mostly right (at least the decisions were the best possible with the knowledge of the time). Vaccines were effective against infection at the time and became less so with new variants (still a very good idea to reduce illness severity and likelyhood of hospitalization), lockdowns had some side effects but all in all saved lives before we got the vaccine, and the like.
Now that misinformation is less harmful than before thanks to most people having some immunity, it's less controlled and more people start believing the misinformation to be the truth.
It is possible to distinguish between censorship and spam filtering. In the case of censorship, the speaker wants to say something and the listener wants to hear it and the censor prevents this. In the case of spam filtering, the spammer wants to say something and the listener doesn't want to hear it and voluntarily requests that a third party filter it out, with the option to individually disable this filtering.
Now, someone could implement censorship and call it a spam filter, e.g. it filters spam and also disfavored facts and people leave it on because there is only a single on/off toggle and they don't want to be deluged with spam. But what this implies is that a "spam filter" with uncorrectable "false positives" is equivalent to censorship.
He is making sworn statements to the house judiciary committee.
Are you saying he is lying and the BidenHarris admin is telling the truth?
Why would he do that? And why does all the evidence of censored accounts on Facebook match up with the Twitter Files and what everyone saw happening?
Let's distinguish two things here.
One is, you have ten thousand groups and they each have local moderators. If you're a gigantic tool, you get banned from 90% of groups you join and the other 10% are a trash fire. But this primarily happens on the basis of temperament rather than ideology. Most groups don't ban you for expressing a minority viewpoint, they ban you for being a jerk or a spammer, and the ones that do ban you for expressing a minority viewpoint are the ones that become a radicalized trash fire with a reputation for abusive moderation and decline in popularity. Also, you don't have to care much about them because there are plenty of other groups that don't ban you for engaging in civil debate, most people are members of many independent groups, and there are consequently plenty of well-trafficked places for civil debate to take place.
The other is, the platform itself does the moderation and there is nowhere to go to escape their errors without losing the massive network effect of the consolidated platform. The platform at large becomes a radicalized trash fire but the network effect keeps people from abandoning it, so the platform not only loses the incentive to stop that from happening, it becomes a target for capture by authoritarians who want to censor their opponents.
One of these things is not like the other.
This just how effective the censorship was; the actual peer-reviewed science shows that lockdowns did not in fact save lives: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737?ut...
All of the incumbents were established with network effects long before then, they are very sticky and unaccountable. Not Ma Bell level of natural monopoly but the network effects are pretty strong.
Look at Twitter under Musk, your standard beltway liberal type still uses it even though they hate him.
The discourse as I interpreted it, was that there was a need to censor those who are expressing opinions that are not "legitimate".
The public at large however is not informed enough to have a legitimate opinion.
I'm saying he might have found the circumstances distasteful but he didn't find them a violation of his rights worthy of a lawsuit.
I don't personally have a lot of respect for the people still using Twitter. I deleted my account before Musk bought them when they responded to a notorious TOS violator being elected President by changing their TOS.
All we have to do to hold the incumbents accountable is log off their service and log on to another one. Nearly 100% of the power in this situation is in the hands of the users.
Plus - nothing was at the scale of Facebook or social media during those halcyon days.
Do you think platforms WANTED to invest in manpower dependent labor?
Platforms started moderating because things got bad.
Between engagement driven metrics and the sheer ludicrousness of moderation, any sense of order is swiftly smashed.
There are more policy updates and clarifications in a year than there are days.
Why assume intelligence where randomness would achieve the same.
On top of all of this, bans were frequently appealed and overturned.
That the crank can actually change things just by thinking about it, like some kind of half-assed troll telekinesis. Wow. You've apparently got a few fans for your idiocy, they're downvoting away.
People question science all the time. Heck we all have people who tell us about this herb or diet that will fix things, or how plastic is deadly.
In addition the platforms removed this content, not the govt. And the platforms would 100% do it again, since we are discussing this topic with the benefit of hindsight.
Misinfo evidence shows that once misinfo is absorbed and accepted, people defend it. If the data shows that those scientists and doctors were wrong - people would ignore the data and reiterate their talking points.
For practical purposes though, the kind of censorship that we're concerned with in this conversation can't be done by anyone other than a government or a lunatic with a gun. Companies just don't have any authority over anyone except themselves. They can't deprive you of your ability to speak, only your ability to use their property to do so.
There were plenty of things besides a myopic fixation on one single problem to the exclusion of literally everything else.
It takes an extreme amount of privilege to look back and say we should have done any of that.
… it was unethical, immoral, authoritarian and plain evil. I don’t care if any of it “worked” because even if it did the costs vastly outweigh any of the “working” bit. The fact it requires a lot of contortion to show any effect at all should give a reasonable person a concerned pause. Any idiot off the street should be able to clearly see the effects of masks and lockdowns without reading a bunch of statistics first. This is clearly not the case at all….
And again, doesn’t matter if “it worked” because “it worked” only holds true in the most myopic, sheltered, privileged world view possible. For any view that sees the world through a lens besides Covid, what we did was clearly insane.
What Facebook does though, is horrific. They are not just letting illegitimate science have a platform, they are actively and intentionally propping that shit up because it creates victimhood communities.
1. Why would a repair shop accept a repair job without the return information?
2. Why would a repair shop start snooping on their own client's machines even if they were unable to contact their client?
3. Why are there multiple disk images, some "raw" and some pre-organized released to different press organizations and Trump sympathizers?
4. Why did the FBI warn Facebook in 2020 about the laptop story to "cover it up" when the FBI at the time was lead by a man appointed by Trump himself?
Not to mention the cranks that did exist were more likely to be amusingly erudite windbags than moronic spammers pasting unfunny conspiracy "jokes".
> Every message board and chatroom (bbs, forums, irc, icq, aol, et all) on the young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all
But if your definition of "virtually uncensored" is that there are uncensored instances, then IRC, forums, etc. are just as "uncensored" as ever. There's just a lot more internet users on moderated platforms now.
Also Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, et all all started off pretty uncensored and unmoderated to build the moats. Then they started cracking down once the feds and political influences kicked in.