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
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.
> 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.
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
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 !
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.
You are so full of yourself. HN is great proof that there is zero association between "self identifies as technical" and "intelligence"
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.