Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation.

If we are to avoid this dilemma we need systems that organically promote constructive, tolerant and inclusive communication, and original, nuanced, intelligent, non-ideological ideas, instead of the opposite.

This cannot be done by organizations whose profit incentive is aligned with user attention instead of user satisfaction.

Those organizations benefit from degraded communication until strong moderation is both continually demanded and decried.

---

On a side note, I am so disappointed in the constant framing of ideas as right or left. It dumbs society down incredibly to view so much through the filter of two (often arbitrarily correlated, historically shifting) clusters of supposedly disjoint options.

In the real world, communes work well sometimes, markets often work better at scale but not for everything, markets require "social solutions" like non-commercial criminal and civil justice systems, education and health could be explicitly tested and then managed as investments with a pay off of lower taxes (including for the rich) instead of as charities forced on the rich, etc.

The Right/Left and associated ideologies are all self-defeating when believed in isolation and the nuances of their ragged edges, their limitations, and constructive combinations ignored.

Surveys consistently show that most of us agree on far more than we disagree when questions are phrased in politically neutral terms. People quickly realize when they actually talk to other people that most are fairly reasonable and relatable, even if they have good faith disagreements on particular points, but social media being optimized for maximum engagement with shallow/short-form discussion just results in seeing the most extreme elements of society talk over each other and largely fail to come to a common understanding.

While bringing up a field service group, I had a period of high travel taking me all over the US. I enjoy politics, culture and people and am frequently frustrated with the left - right, very tribal political discourse myself.

So, what I did was find coffee shops and any other events where people might gather and enjoy conversation and had a bunch of chats avoiding labels while also conveying a strong, no judgement, just interested in perspective from different parts of the nation...

Those looked kind of like a two way interview.

Many of those ended up being long, gratifying conversations too.

Based on these, I would submit the following:

People fear judgement.

People fear "that other tribe"

An awful lot of discourse is fear, blame and shame.

eg: teaching "those other people" a lesson

How could anyone tolerate "that other tribe"

You get the idea.

Outside of those conversations, which all told me the US has poor class awareness and with that, equally poor ability to see others as just peers, instead it is all colored in various ways that amplify differences despite the reality being we are all people who run the same basic way, have the same basic needs, struggles.

You mention other events, so perhaps I'm totally wrong here. But I'm curious about the ways that the events you picked may have shaped the conclusions that you drew.

No, it was in line at the market, hanging in the park, the driver on a longer drive in a cab, Lyft, janitor, trades people...

What I did was just be opportunistic. Tried to fill some of the time I had learning more about how to just talk with people and have them feel they can do the same.

I had biases, mostly targeting normies and people who looked like they may have a story, rough or not.

What I can also tell you is I have done this sort of thing in my past. It is a simple pleasure of business travel.

What I did differently was avoid signaling "my camp", and tried to signal seeking more than anything else. If they were inclined to talk at all, I was frank and said I want perspective outside my familiar circles, so what is your take on... and go from there.

Sometimes I did not offer mine at all, content to let them share what they thought a curious person from somewhere else might want to know.

The primary thing I was interested in was arriving at a comfortable dialog state, like when you know it won't come back to bite, or be on the news, that sort of thing.

And the things I put above inhibit reaching that state.

This one surprised me the most, but people are just tired. Like fried.

Many put a brave face on it, but could use a break. If the chat advanced to where one could really relax and just talk, being tired always came up. And many did not express sadness, just fatigue, sometimes frustration.

"Does it all have to be this hard?"

In my past, I do not recall that expressed as much and from more diverse socioeconomic positions. This sentiment may be majority held now. Just a gut take on arguably small and unscientific samples.

"The Reset" The idea of it all not being sustainable. If it went here, people would roll through examples that concerned them. Some would make connections, but the general feeling of impending doom was far more common than I expected. I am sure more people than we know do not believe things will work out.

And one last disturbing one is along the lines of trading safety for liberty. Tons of people could give two shits about the increased surveillance. More people than I expected harbor and will express basic fear when comfortable enough to share it.

Either way, the point is not wether or not you can have a place with discourse with the all good qualities described, it is more so that because those qualities are not quantifiable, it is impossible to know for sure.

It is not impossible to measure quality, once you accept that quality has many definitions and therefore requires many contexts incentivizing different versions of it for different purposes and audiances.

And that diversity would be a very good thing.

We could almost imagine the author himself is vying for attention by pushing the hot buttons known to work. Either that or he is incapable of recognising his own foibles.

I mostly read r/NBA and find the quality very decent. I'm sure there are trolls and racist rants and so on, but unless I expand comment branches, I don't see any of them. I find that the branches being pruned/hidden helps manage how much time I spend on a discussion too. On HN, I often feel like I want to read or skim every comment in a discussion which is rarely a great use of time.

I disagree tying big tech censorship to this.

Yes what you describe is nice and what the audience here (including me) prefer, that's why we're here. Such places with such rules are paradises.

However, I for one accept the risk of freedom over "safety". I acknowledge we humans are "good" and "evil" at the same time, maybe we'll "actualize" at some point in the future as a whole (I doubt it) but we're not there yet. Even if that's a goal, I strongly believe allowing cancel-candidate speech is vital to the progress. Producing questionable speech has its cost already, I actually think the cost is too high already given the mob nature of social media.

Yeah there are "misinformed" people, but isn't that the value of democracy? We disagree but we compromise.

Even for the anti-vaxx case, when the ones who refuse to vaccinate can screw up the whole population, I still don't think you should ban the speech, the law or executive order should be based on action instead.

Even for the GAB case, I don't think the platform should be banned, nor private conversation being snooped on. So how do we protect ourselves against such attacks? I'd say these are just extra protections that I don't want given the tradeoff, the law is there to punish the actions. I'll take that safety risk that's been there since before tech is a thing any day.

Guess the nuance here is the right to speech versus the right to publish given the nature of social media moving the forth pillar of democracy to the public. My take is that the same applies even for publishing. If nonsense sounds more attractive than scientific facts, maybe we educated people should work on our PR skills, or fix the root of the problem, education. Now that's progress.

The problem isn't created simply by allowing people the freedom to express themselves. It's created by highly manipulative middlemen choosing what to promote and what to suppress (in a relative not absolute sense) via algorithms designed to maximize attention to ads.

That is nothing like a simple free speech situation.

I have no problem with free speech, and free speech forums, even if they do sometimes become cess pools.

I have a real problem with the most widely used glorified scrapbook sharing software (Facebook), biasing all our feeds toward content that is likely to pull us into comment flame wars or using provoked anger and tribal identity reinforcement as a user addiction strategies.

Note that Facebook didn't start behaving this way until after the network effect of their social graph had created tremendous lock-in/switching-costs for their users.

Effective policy isn't found using that false Rorschach compass.

Left v Right is about proletariat vs bourgeoise and it originates from French politic during the revolution where the left side of the assembly favored moving power towards the people and the right were Monarchists that wanted King Louis' continued reign.

To equate this to gender is unbelievably ignorant bordering on intellectual dishonesty.

But what's the concrete proposal here? How would things actually work? Will the services be forced to accept whatever unmoderated feed of filth the linked to service sends their way? If not, how is this supposed to fix the moderation problem?

How are you supposed to link together applications with totally different data, interaction, and identity models? Obviously you couldn't link e.g. say Discord to Instagram and have the interactions between the systems make any sense. Are we just going to have a predefined ontology of possible social networkign apps, populated with the currently existing models, and define an API for all of then? When and how does that ontology get redefined? Or define a single lowest common denominator covering everything? What happens with features that don't fit into the models? They're entirely forbidden? They need to go through a multi-year public review bureacracy?

Who exactly will be forced to interoperate, and who gets a free pass?

I was kinda wondering that. If a user gets banned, and moves off-platform to continue the behaviour there, but is somehow magically still linked to everyone they were linked with before... has anything really changed? Will facebook be forced to show its users the same nastiness it just booted off, because of the interop necessities?

Facebook should be forced to show me the feeds I choose to subscribe to. I'm perfectly capable of deciding for myself whether I find something nasty, and I find the idea of Zuckerberg as an arbiter of morality both absurd and dystopian.

This is a very common characterization that I find frustratingly absurd. Zuckeberg is not "an arbiter of morality" in any respect, the contents of Facebook is a corporate business decision, not a reflection on morality.

But that's in fact a moral judgement! It's saying "some people think $X is bad, and we agree with them (or at least choose to pretend to so as not to soil our image)".

While the actions of organizations like this have moral consequences, and the people that are part of it have their own morals, the machinery itself does not use morality to make decisions, except in hindsight as justification.

The moral consequences may be beneficial or harmful; it is all the same to a profit machine that acts in its own interests, which transcend the people who it is made of in the form of workers and users.

Well sort of. We can't legally, right? The constitution prevents that. If Facebook is simply censoring the things that consumers ask it to, it is absolutely serving itself (in a profit driven way), but it isn't asserting Facebook's morals. It's asserting something more like "American consumer morals".

Plus, the reason we can't legally is because we agree it shouldn't be done.

Are you suggesting business decisions are exempt from having moral consequences? Are the decision makers somehow less culpable as long as it is "just business"?

The answer is, he's not. He's just a greedy person with a powerful company. There are no real moral decisions to be found here, hyperbole notwithstanding.

Zuckerberg and other social media CEOs are the only ones using moral language to justify censorship, hence the irony of Zuckerberg as moral arbiter

Once that happens, Google and Facebook will never have to pay their share of taxes ever again!

How do you not end up with a censorship department of the government, that is tasked with writing moderation rules? It probably wouldn't be called a censorship office, but that's what it would be: a government office determining what can and can't be posted on social media. This seems entirely antithetical to the idea of the first amendment.

Do you have any other way to implement your idea of forcing Facebook to show you the feeds you subscribe to?

EDIT: Just saw in your profile that you might not be from the USA - feel free to substitute "the idea of free speech in modern liberal democracies" for "the idea of the first amendment" as needed. :)

That already exists: governments already have laws limiting some forms of speech e.g. copyright infringements or pornography. Obviously corporations that want to stay in business have to obey the laws.

> "the idea of free speech in modern liberal democracies"

As I've already pointed out, all states already have laws limiting speech. Maybe I think there should be more such laws; maybe I think there should be less; but either way it's orthogonal to whether I want FB to have power to control what I can say and hear.

If my government passes laws that I don't like, citizens can vote them out at the next election. I can't vote Zuckerberg out, he's an undemocratic locus of power.

> It probably wouldn't be called a censorship office, but that's what it would be: a government office determining what can and can't be posted on social media.

As I said, such laws already exist.

> Do you have any other way to implement your idea of forcing Facebook to show you the feeds you subscribe to?

Yes, require all social media apps to provide interoperability though ActivityPub and similar protocols. Make sure there are no legal or technical impediments to people running social media servers (Mastodon etc) on their own hardware though their home internet connections.

What I actually want is a world where people don't care whether FB censors things, because it doesn't matter as people can and do use other means to communicate. So FB censors stuff and no-one notices because it has no practical effect. That is, a world where FB is stripped of their power.

Fortunately, we already live in this world! We have the internet!

If it were me, I would have those regulated to be like utilities. Pre internet, business was done via phone. Deplatforming = not allowed to have a phone, and that basically did not happen.

And prior to the internet, deplatforming still existed: when would you ever hear anyone make neo-nazi arguments on any of the broadcast tv networks?

When do we see economic reporting from the labor point of view, for example? We don't on broadcast anymore. And after massive media consolidation, that reporting only happens via indie media, and it's largely via the Internet, discoverable through social media.

The answer to broadcast issues was public access broadcasting, and the likes of PBS. That sort of worked, except for underfunding and the need for big business to underwrite most of the programming.

In terms of social media, what is needed is process. Trying to do business today without it is similar to not having a phone. However, let's set that aside and just look at conflict of interest and speech issues.

The major players are the public square today. Whether that was intended isn't the point. That they are, is.

Back when Alex Jones was deplatformed, a lot of us, myself included, said we were headed down this increasingly difficult road today, and here we are. We were also frequently judged as being some supporter for Jones. (I am not, but see his case as being high value for this discussion)

Process needs to be there to manage expectations, provide opportunity for improvement, provide consistency and all the basics needed. In other words, some growing up needs to happen. Costs are higher, risks are higher, and the money is more than good enough.

Without it, what we've got is a very highly arbitrary, quite easily abused system that far too many people depend on for important discussions. Look at the folks advocating for direct democracy. They assume all this is here, working properly, and working for us, not against us.

The neo-nazis were on public access BTW. I seen 'em, along with quite a few others on the mandated access channels.

That department of censorship will exist no matter what. Internally, it is called the trust and safety department, at most big companies.

The only question is do you want to have the decisions of that department to be limited by judges and rights that are laid out in the constitution, or do you want it to be an unaccountable free for all, where they can do whatever they want?

> Do you have any other way to implement your idea of forcing Facebook to show you the feeds you subscribe to?

Well, phone companies are currently forced to allow most people on their network. We could do it the same way, that phone companies are required to do so.

Therein the problem lies. Users have no choice over which moderation policies their feeds are curated by at all. I should be able to choose moderation that I deem acceptable. To continue your analogy to telcos, this is akin to robocall blocking services which are a user decision and often tell you when blocking occurs.

Just to be clear, under US law, what you are describing (creating a government censorship department that determines how social media companies are allowed to moderate) would have NOTHING to do with the rights laid out in the constitution - it would in fact need to overcome the companies' constitutional rights to publish whatever they wish, just to exist.

You can argue that it's a good idea anyway, but claiming that government-mandated moderation is somehow enforcing constitutional rights is way, way off base.

Yes it could.

The point is that if the government is doing the "censorsing" or whatever you want to call it, then at the very least, whatever that "censoring" is, we have judges and rights and similar checks and balances that prevents the government from doing too much.

If something is so bad, that it needs to be censored, then our court system should handle it.

Unlike the big companies who are only beholden to their share holders - and sometimes only really that one shareholder called Mark - the legislatures are beholden at least in theory to the citizens (who vote) in our democracies and at least in theory are curtailed by things like the US Constitution and Bill of Rights and equivalent constitutional documents and human rights legislation in other places.

Is leaving it to legislatures to make the rules a perfect solution? Certainly far from perfect, in my humble opinion, at least in practice with all the lobbying, corruption and self-interest going on. But it still beats leaving such extremely significant decisions of what can and cannot be said to the rulers of some big corporations.

Facebook, instagram, twitter, youtube, etc will also never get tired to tell everybody that they are not publishers and do not "edit" or "curate" information on their "open" platforms and thus fall under 230 and are not liable. All the while they constantly curate and edit and purge.

There are plenty of ways to get information on the internet - just because Facebook says "no porn" doesn't mean you can't get porn on the internet, you know?

But there's only one government (per country, of course). If your government says no porn... What then?

No they can't. The legislature would. Do you trust Nancy pelosi and Ted Cruz to write censorship rules you agree with?

Yes the courts would. Lol. Any laws that infringe on our rights, can be struct down by the court system.

Thats literally the point of the court system. To strike down laws that infringe on our rights.

> Do you trust Nancy pelosi and Ted Cruz to write censorship rules you agree with?

Hey, at least if they write them, the courts can strike them down, if they infringe on our rights.

At least there is some check and balance there, where our court system, will strike down laws that infringe on our rights.

I'd rather have that then no court system being able to strike any of it down.

If you want to suggest that the court system should be able to strike down FB censorship rules, that would work as well though!

Currently, the courts have an opinion on censorship that is extreme enough that it protects what Facebook is doing. Today, the government cannot write censorship rules. They all, to use your words, "infringe on our rights". So if you want the government to be able to do that, and the courts to allow some censorship, you have to amend the constitution, and change the recognized legal framework of what our rights even are.

That (broadly) falls to lawmakers, not the courts. Do you trust Pelosi and Cruz (and other lawmakers) to change the very framework of what our right to free speech is, while simultaneously allowing the courts to protect it?

Well, are rights aren't particularly protected, from the censorship that happens right now.

There are zero checks on balances on the censorship that already happens. At the very least it would be better if we had more courts involved, so as to make sure that those courts have some say over what censorship can happen or not.

> Today, the government cannot write censorship rules

Sure they can. They are already doing so. Go look at the laws that cover phone companies. The government already has laws, that prevents phone companies from engaging in certain acts of censorship, or whatever we want to call that, on the telephone network.

Those laws don't apply to other things at the moment. But they could, if we changed them, and it would be no bigger of an issue than how those existing laws, already apply to phone companies.

> you have to amend the constitution

No we won't. All we have to do is take our existing common carrier laws, and expand them.

Common carrier laws, as they apply to phone companies, are already constitutional.

> to change the very framework

There is no massive change to the framework of free speech, when we already have similar laws, that already apply to a similar thing, which is the phone network.

Just whatever is happening there, already, and which already does not infringe upon our rights, could be expanded to apply to other things, and no massive constitutional change would be needed to apply these existing laws to new things.

Given that I don't believe that it is fundamentally possible for any private entity to infringe on my right to free speech, I'm going to have to disagree with you here.

> No we won't. All we have to do is take our existing common carrier laws, and expand them.

The Cato institute appears to disagree with you that it's that simple[0]. It's not clear that applying common carrier status to Facebook or Google could be constitutional, because they do not and have never claimed to be neutral, so using the force of law to make that so would be an infringement on the companies' rights to speech and association.

[0]: https://www.cato.org/blog/are-social-media-companies-common-...

You are not being creative enough, with how we could apply these laws.

One big reason why phone companies are claiming to be neutral in the first place, is to get certain protections, that those laws give them.

They claim to be neutral, to get certain benefits.

Phone companies are claiming to be neutral, for a reason. Its not because they simply want to. It is because they are doing that, on purpose, because the law is strongly incentivizing them to do so.

A similar strategy could be used against Facebook. What can be done, is we take away certain protections, that we currently give them, and only give them back, in exchange for them following something similar to common carrier laws.

The most common thing that people bring up, of a right to take away from them, is section 230 protections.

When the smart people talk about repealing section 230 protections, it is not to actually remove those protections.

Instead, the strategy, is to make it so, if companies want to keep those protections, they then have to follow other requirements, by making those protections contingent on acting a certain way, such as by following common carrier laws.

That is the way to get around being unable to force Facebook to follow common carrier laws. You don't actually force them to do it. Instead, you make the alternative, extremely difficult, by making previously necessary protections, contingent on following new neutrality laws.

The problem there, of course, is that both the average citizen and the average lawmaker want the companies to be able to do some forms of moderation. Which brings us back to the original question: Do you trust Pelosi and Cruz to define a reasonable framework for internet content moderation?

Yes they do. They would not be able to be sued, if they were a common carrier, and in return, they would be unable to engage in many forms of censorship.

If they did not have section 230 protections, then them existing in their current form, would be almost impossible, and therefore, they would have to make the choice to receive the alternative protections, which are common carrier protections.

Common carrier protections are different from section 230 protections. If they are put in a position, where their only real option is to go under common carrier laws, then that would be the point.

> the average lawmaker want the companies to be able to do some forms of moderation

Common carriers are already allowed to do some forms of moderation/censorship. It is simply much much more limited.

And additional forms of moderation, could simply be handled over to the user, to choose what they want.

For example, it would be completely allowed for a customer, to have some automated calling blocklist, where they choose to block all adult content phonelines, that call them.

> Which brings us back to the original question

No it does not bring us back to that. Because common carriers are already allowed to do very limited forms of moderation, and that is what it would be a good thing to incentive facebook into having to follow.

We don't have to have lawmakers do anything except for get us into a position where facebook is strongly incentivized to choose to be under common carrier protections, where they will then be extremely limited in the types of censorship that common carriers are allowed limited to.

If facebook doesn't moderate, they can't be sued anyway. Without section 230, moderation makes them liable, but if they choose not to moderate, they aren't liable.

You're suggesting that by opting into a common carrier status, they gain what?

> Common carriers are already allowed to do some forms of moderation/censorship. It is simply much more limited.

Such as? As far as I can tell, they're allowed to moderate forms of pornographic and harassing content which, to be clear, a non-common carrier would be legally required to remove anyway. The statues you're referencing basically say that a common carrier still has to do the moderation that everyone else is legally required to do.

> No it does not bring us back to that. Because common carriers are already allowed to do very limited forms of moderation, and that is what it would be a good thing to incentive facebook into having to follow.

Except, you're

1. Mistaken about the status of the moderation common carriers can do, as I explained just above and

2. Mistaken about the amount of moderation that people want. Both lawmakers and the average citizen want more moderation than a common carrier is allowed to engage in, which brings us once more back to my question: do you trust Cruz and Pelosi to develop a moderation framework?

I already know the answer. You don't. What you appear to want is a form of no-moderation absolutism that forces these companies to promote all speech that isn't harassment or pornography.

The problem with that is that, from a profit perspective, most users of those systems (and transitively, most advertisers) don't want to be associated with that kind of content.

The practical result would be a mass exodus from these platforms to other, different, new forms of social media that avoid being classified as common carriers (or do things to avoid the broad section 230 issues, perhaps by being even more highly moderated and small-group oriented or totally private, like discord). Maybe that's a win for some people, but if your goal is popular unmoderated platforms, that's not what you'll get, because that's not what consumers want.

It means that they can't be sued for content on their platform. If they do not have section 230 protections, every piece of content on the platform, they would be responsible for.

And if they then choose to be a common carrier, they also get that immunity from being sued. There are 2 different ways of recieving this immunity to lawsuits. And if you take away way 1, which is section 230, then their only option is to take way 2, which is by being a common carrier.

> but if they choose not to moderate, they aren't liable.

The point would be to strongly incentivize them to respect the user's choice of moderation, common carrier laws, are the way that people often talk about, but sure maybe there is a 3rd way that you have found to do this.

> Such as?

Such as moderation that is done at the request of the user, for that specific user only. The phone company, can blocks calls if that user wants it, and common carrier laws dont stop that.

If Facebook was only allowed to do moderation, at the request of that specific, individual user (or, of course, things that are already illegal.), then that solves most of these problems, where users want moderation for themselves.

If we want to get more detailed here, we could imagine allowing categories of moderation, that facebook can engage in, if and only if the user opts into it. Then we don't have to define moderation, and can simply have it be whatever that specific user wants.

> the average citizen want more moderation

That can be done through incentivizing facebook to allow user choice, of their own moderation. Problem solved. Then they can get that moderation, and we don't have facebook forcing this moderation on others.

> What you appear to want is a form of no-moderation absolutism

Nope. I want the moderation to be left in the hands of the specific user. Therefore, everyone gets what they wants, except facebook I guess.

> most users of those systems

And yet, the phone system works perfectly fine. I don't particularly care if the phone companies are mad about being forced to follow certain laws. We wouldn't have to make laws, if they wanted to follow them.

No! See Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe [0], which predates Section 230. If you do zero moderation, you are not liable for user generated content period. Section 230 creates a good-faith protection so that if you do choose to moderate some content, you don't become liable for failing to moderate the rest.

The legislative history of section 230 is literally that without it, companies were liable for user generated content only if they tried to moderate, and lawmakers wished to encourage companies to moderate content

> Such as moderation that is done at the request of the user, for that specific user only. The phone company, can blocks calls if that user wants it, and common carrier laws dont stop that.

This is not "moderation" in the common use. In the context of facebook, this would be that "I'm unable to block another user", which is silly (and perhaps should reveal to you why trying to shoehorn Facebook into a common carrier doesn't make sense).

> That can be done through incentivizing facebook to allow user choice, of their own moderation. Problem solved. Then they can get that moderation, and we don't have facebook forcing this moderation on others.

Facebook already allows users to block other users and pages. All of the options you want are already available. You're suggesting a strict reduction in moderation tools, and claiming that this will solve everything the way everyone wants.

So let me pose a simple question: how does your approach address coordinated misinformation campaigns? Say I come along tomorrow and start spreading lies about how and when voting works. I'm so effective at this that turnout next year is significantly lower because people are confused. I haven't done anything illegal. Can Facebook remove my content? It's actively and demonstrably harming the democratic process by preventing people from voting. What should we do?

> And yet, the phone system works perfectly fine.

I basically disagree here. Spam is a much larger problem on my phone than anywhere else. Plus, due to the implicit attributes of the phone system, things like spam and misinformation are handled by being crimes on the part of the caller. In other words, Ben Shapiro can post whatever he wants on Facebook, but if he were to call every American citizen and try to share the same information, he would be a crime. Not because of the information, but because sharing things widely via the phone system is essentially illegal.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.

Ok sure, whatever. But the point would be to put facebook in a position where they are only doing moderation that a user is requesting that they do. We can use common carrier laws, or we can use some different legal precedent. Thats that goal. The specific method, or process, isn't really the main point.

> you're suggesting a strict reduction in moderation tools, and claiming that this will solve everything the way everyone wants.

I am suggesting that users should be allowed to have voluntary choices about what moderation they want to have, as it relates to them, without facebook forcing those decisions on the user.

> All of the options you want are already available

No, users still are forced to accept facebooks choosen moderation preferences. That can't choose to opt out of Facebook's censorship or moderation, if they voluntarily choose to subscribe to certain content.

> solve everything the way everyone wants.

It will solve what a lot of people want. Sure, I am sure that there are people who are just explicitly pro-censorship, and want the 1st amendment to be removed, and want the government to ban all opposing political opinions.

But there are also a lot of people who don't want facebook to be forcing users to accept certain moderation, and instead want users to be in control of what they see.

> how does your approach address coordinated misinformation campaigns?

If something is so bad, that it needs to be censored, then that is what the government is for. Terrorist threats are already illegal, for example.

Backdoor censorship isn't the way to go. If you really believe that mis-information is so bad, that it needs to be stopped, by these types of methods, then the onus should be on you to gather enough support, to get around the protections of the 1st amendment.

Checks and balances are difficult to get around for a reason. And if you can't get around these checks and balances, well thats the point of those checks and balances.

> I haven't done anything illegal

Well thats life. You are trying to backdoor your way to try to get stuff censored, because you aren't able to convince the government to do it. We don't need this backdoor method of supporting censorship.

> Spam is a much larger problem on my phone than anywhere else

There is nothing illegal about phone companies offering additional, voluntary methods, of allowing users to choose more things to be moderated for themselves.

Such problems could be solved that way. By facebook, or whoever, offering voluntary programs, to block certain types or categories of things, if the user chooses to opt in to that form of moderation.

> Ben Shapiro can post whatever he wants on Facebook

You don't have to listen to Ben Sharpiro if you don't want to, in this situation. Instead, you could just voluntarily choose to subscribe to a "ban right wingers" block list, or whatever voluntary algorithm that the user opts in to.

I have gotten around the protections of the first amendment though! You're objecting how I did, and saying that it's not fair or not right, and that I should instead get around them in a different way. But why am I supposed to trust that you won't also object to that other way when, or if, I do gain that support?

> But there are also a lot of people who don't want facebook to be forcing users to accept certain moderation, and instead want users to be in control of what they see.

They are: they're free to use a different service. No one is forcing you to use facebook or to distribute your content via facebook. There are plenty of other ways to distribute your content, and you have no more right to require facebook distribute your content then they have a right to force you to use their website.

Yeah thats the point, lol.

If you are just pro censorship, and dont care about the principles that the 1st amendment protects, and just want to find a way around it, just say so.

If you would support the government, censoring all opposing political opinions, or jailing them, or worse, because of some legal technicality, just say so.

As long as you are honest about it, and you just want to do things that are basically equivalent to the government censoring anything for any reason, just say so, and say that you want to ignore all of this stuff, and want to find a way to censor all of your political opponents, in any way that you can find.

Yes, I completely agree that people such as yourself, don't care about any of these principles, and just want to figure out whatever ways that you can, to defacto censor anyone for any reason, regardless of the motivations in the first place, to stop censorship. Thats the point.

The whole point is that you don't care about any of this, and just want to engage in authoritarianism, in any way that you can get away with. Thats the problem.

Thats what everyone else is trying to fight against. Authoritarians who look for loopholes, to engage in authoritarianism, with whatever possible way that they can get away with.

Thats why we want laws to stop that!

> They are: they're free to use a different service.

But the alternative solution, that provides a lot of benefits, to most people, is to simply incentivize facebook to implement these policies.

That would allow people to get most of what they want, by preventing these work arounds, where the principles of anti-censorship, are backdoor ignored. While also simultaneously giving users the ability to moderate content that they see.

> have no more right to require facebook distribute

I agree that the law does not currently prevent facebook from doing certain things. Which is why the conversation, the entire time, was about making new laws, or changing laws, so that they cannot engage in what, in your own words, is a way to get around the 1st amendment, and engage in mass censorship, that is almost as bad as if the government did it.

Thats the problem!

That actually was my point: the governments do write the censorship rules already and define punishment that you get for violating them.

Child porn is censored, for example. Here in Germany there is censorship laws against promoting national socialism or antisemitism.

Our democracies are structured in a way that legally prevents the legislatures to write censorship rules as they please and without good reasoning, and that is usually achieved by constitutional law guaranteeing freedom of speech to the widest extent possible, of the press, of assembly and of religion, and a division of powers and the mandate for those divisions to check each other. The courts but also multi party democratic systems, the press, voters and activists and protestors play a significant role in this.

While this system is not perfect, and there were and will be mistakes and abuses along the way that need to be corrected - which usually takes a lot more time than anybody likes - it is still the best we ever had and will ever get I think. The only real "alternative" we tried, that of a "strong" leader or oligarchic group of "strong" leaders was and is always a lot worse.

But now we moved a very significant part, if not a major part, of public discussion forums onto the platforms of private companies, and are now surprised that the "strong" leaders on top of these companies do not necessarily share our values or even the minimal set of values our societies as a whole agreed on, and make up and change rules as they please, without any real repercussions so far.

And not just that, they sometimes actively try to use their immense powers of content distribution and "moderation" to nudge discussion into one way or another. We already see these companies getting bolder in restricting certain topics all by themselves, be it around certain Corona related topics, be it to "fight white supremacy" ideology or other "extremism". And of course the companies started by censoring topics where reasonable people would most likely say "oh, those are dangerous or vile ideas by dangerous or vile people" [and then somebody brings up the Paradox of Tolerance to justify letting the companies reign free in those areas]. I am pretty much convinced that a lot of these are test balloons by the companies to see how far they can push the envelope right now before the momentary backslash becomes too much. And if we let them, then over time they will slowly push the envelope further and further for more and more control.

We and our politicians even help those companies to gain more power and control, by writing laws delegating policing responsibilities to the companies and by demanding the companies start policing more against misinformation, extremism, racism or and other of those -isms more and more. Not only is that a transfer of power, it's at the same time regulatory capture making sure any future competitors to these companies have it almost impossible to enter the market at all.

The first step on your route to doom is signing a petition requiring people to "provide id before making a social media account" (as is happening right now e.g. in the UK because some racists said some vile things about English football players), and then before you know it you end up with a "social score" system like in China, except it's the big companies maintaining it and regulating it and not even the (repressive) government.

Good intentions and all that...

[/rant over]

But the alternative is that the government forces its own values onto the companies. I'm suspicious of "we're going to hide this information because its bad", but I'm also suspicious of "we're going to prevent companies from expressing values different from the ones the government allows".

I much prefer independent systems to a government that ultimately controls how and what corporations can say. The first is perhaps bad, the second is far worse.

What about constantly manipulating you to become aligned to the more extreme versions of your ideals, so you will subscribe to more extreme feeds?

I would consider this sentiment more absurd and dystopian than Facebook freely removing content from its own website.

The law should be applied to relevant details of a situation, not something arbitrary like incorporation unless the issue is specific to the details of incorporation.

No, that's partnerships or unincorporated associations (well, “people”, not necessarily “citizens”). Corporations are distinct legal entities created by the power of the state and im ued with state-issued charters whose investors are granted the immense legal privilege of limited liability.

> That shouldn't result in them losing rights simply because they are incorporated.

The exercise of state power involved in incorporation and the privileges at public expense it grants should absolutely be tied to restrictions and conditions that ensure that a sufficient public benefit to warrant the cost is served and that the exercise of state power involved in the creation, existence, and operation of the corporation is consistent with the restrictions otherwise applicable to state power.

No they're not. They come with an extraordinary privilege of limited liability, which is meant to be paired with a corresponding responsibility to create a social benefit.

On a different tack, if governments legislate some kinds of moderation for corporations, then the corporations would become an extension of the government and that would become government censorship in practice. Not good.

If governments legislate no moderation for corporations, then corporations would lose the ability to encourage different kinds of communication with moderation.

I don't see either case as healthy for freedom, capitalism, or individuals in the end.

Legislating that moderation rules must be made public, and moderation actions logged so the public could review a corporations compliance with its own chosen rules, seems reasonable to me. It would avoid deceptive moderation, which to me is a problem similar to other kinds of fraud that are outlawed.

I think Facebook is a terrible site, and I don't even know why anyone would want to keep using it tbh.

edit: typo

Does gmail block emails from your friends containing misinformation?

Why should facebook be allowed to do the same thing?

But if it's not happening, it seems pretty obviously like an explicit product decision rather than some kind of regulatory requirement.

I also think it's fair to carry this analogy over to the internet, and the difference between an email and a social media post.

No, but they actively block emails from many legit servers in order to enforce an email oligopoly. Note I'm not talking about servers who can't DKIM sign or are on well-known blocklists.

I think there definitely is a very blurry line between spam/fraud and spam/misinformation.

Large social networks already have API's with partners, but who and how they are allowed to be used is defined through legal agreements and access controls. The access act is intended to regulate how those legal agreements over the API should be defined.

The EFF wants to allow third-party to ask consent of those users in order to use those API's for interoperability. In theory this would not put any additional requirement on the social network, and the consent request could occur out-of-band. The only change would be the legal ramification and access control.

In theory there could be a dominating social network without any API for third-parties, in which this proposal might be defeated. In practice that is very unlikely given the need of large companies. The proposal could also require if needed that internal API, if they exist (which all of them have as a matter of practicality), get opened up in the lack of any external API that can be used to enable interoperability. I would however guess that such a broad brush would be problematic, and a bit unnecessary since again every large social network already has third-party API's.

Do Discord have an API that a selected group of partners has access to? Do Instagram have it too? Given the correct permission, interactions between those two networks would be a matter of a third-party using those API's.

This falls apart as soon as you examine it though. If the law only required a platform to give competitors access to whatever API they currently have without actually detailing what needs to be accessible then it would be trivially easy for platforms to change/restrict those APIs in ways that make them useless. And as soon as you try to address this you're back at the original problem of how you create a standard model that works for everyone.

You can't just ignore the fact that social networking has become the new town square because its inconvenient

That's not a good analogy. Facebook is most used as a semi-private space (akin to an open-house), or as just private (private party with friends). No one moderates that; you don't want to listen to it, you don't join the party (aka follow the person/page).

In a town square, if you scream profanities, harass people, etc, they have to listen because it's the only town square.

While free speech is not protected there by the first amendment (as far as I know), it is still important to value it broadly to create an open atmosphere. I think of the role they played in the run-up to the American Revolution and in organizing workers, and until the dawn of the internet and the plasticized commercialization of my town, the role it played in my social and artistic life.

But what you say is an excellent point about where we are now engaging in public discourse; it has changed drastically, very quickly, and there are significant concerns about free speech now that we all hang out on websites mostly owned by large corporations.

It feels gross to me. Like meeting up at the food court of Wal Mart because every other place in town has put out of business. And the town square is almost dead and gone, both online and in real life.

You don't have to map everything so the platform interactions are the same, simply make them equal-access via API call.

It seems flawless to me but I also only spent the time I took to type this thinking about it, so it may be 98% flawed.

Your solution creates the new problem that normal users don't understand what access they're granting to an API. Every API you expose is a tool for an unscrupulous app to exfiltrate data about you or your contacts. It's an avenue for sending spam. It's an avenue for monetizing your account's reputation by taking actions such as liking content, following/subscribing channels to boost their engagement numbers, scraping content that your contacts had not shared publicly.

It makes abuse-fighting much harder, since you can no longer trust the application to collect any kind of bot detection signals, and since huge tons of user interactions will be getting artifically concentrated at a few API gateways.

And finally, while nobody has a right to their business model, it's maybe useful to consider what the implications would be. It basically makes ad-supported services impossible, since somebody will inevitably implement an ad-free client for the service. (Or even worse, a client that just shows their own ads instead). Do you think we're really willing to go back to a world where the only free (as in money) services are ones that are being subsidized?

The marketplace of ideas itself has been show to be a bust in recent years, IMHO.

Better ideas, better models of truth and reality don't win out. People have not shown themselves interested in intellectual debate or argument. We do not see the 'best' ideas rise to the top. And before anyone asks who I am to judge the best ideas, I'll answer - nobody, but I can see that factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created. Often at the root of these is a profit motive.

Is censorship the best way to deal with it? Probably not. But we do need to recognise this as a problem as well as getting het up about giant internet platforms deplatforming people.

The strawman of the existence of factually incorrect content is irrelevant in my view. Everyone loves to jump on conspiracy theories or whatever other stuff is out there as proof that people (other people) are too dumb to be exposed to the world. First, I think the relevance and the number of serious adherents in the extreme version of these conspiracies etc are dramatically overstated because they reinforce a narrative. Second, I think most of it is an effect, not a cause, of people being told what to do and what to think. People uncomfortable with narratives that end in them giving something up will take shelter in alternative explanations. The problem is not the nutty theories being available, it's in the way that one group forces itself on another in the first place.

All this to say, we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice, or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us (and you hope it's you but it doesn't have to be) gets to decide. Frankly, the latter idea is ridiculous to me.

Not what I said. However the idea that everyone is equally able to parse out good information from bad is absurd, and I make no claims to be one of the group of enlightened ubermensch who should be able to decide for the rest. Neither do I argue that such people exist or are necessary.

> we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice, or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us (and you hope it's you but it doesn't have to be) gets to decide.

Or we can ditch bland cliches and false dichotomies and look at pragmatic steps that can be taken to, for instance, improve access to good information, improve education around critical thinking, and perhaps (as mentioned in other comments) re-examine things like automated algorithms that feed people ever more extreme content because it increases engagement levels, clicks and ad revenue.

But no, of course, you're right, taking any action at all is akin to fascism. Totally.

It's too hard, it's too impossible, we've decided big tech has already won, we've ceded decades of open progress in tech to moguls who don't give the fuck about us, or we're so ideological that any step to the "left" or "right" is perceived as abdicating principles of freedom.

My gp was a former-Jew (thanks anti-semites) that flew over nazi germany. My other grandfather served in Europe after that whole debacle. I feel I have as much right as anyone to say that it's bullshit going on Reddit and running into the same hateful misinformation on every thread, of "arguing" with holocaust deniers on conspiracy that think Sly Stallone kisses dolphins, use the same canards they've been suing for 2k years, and I can promise you were the first to notice my crypto-Jewishness. These same dummies love Q and have never found covid information that fit their narrative that they didn't love.

We really gonna relitigate (and lose) historical issues like the Holocaust for the next 10,000 years? We gonna sit by and whine about "principles" as people are murdered on a daily basis because of misinformation like that? That's not good enough.

What marketplace of ideas? How many serious challenges have there been to big tech by any company in the last decade? What freedom is there if you can't walk out your front door without being directly impacted by disinformation of various kinds on a daily basis?

I feel as though this may more reflect your fears than the state of the site, and I feel as though so reflexively writing off a population that already largely agree with you illumines the opposite argument--that reaction to speech is largely an overreaction, and we will, without careful consideration, largely consider any bloc to be constituted of what we fear.

Any platform harboring content will, as a matter of course, simply through the caprice of a moderator, let slip by insane opinions--but opining that these are some growing tide and, more dangerously, representative of their moderate counterparts (a la the r/Conservative subreddit, which seems constituted of largely by-the-numbers right of centers,) seems disrespectful to all parties involved and serves only to distract from your central assertion that communicating these ideas will in some way seed wanton chaos. (Comparing the ideas directly to those that precipitated the tragedy of the Holocaust.)

Edit, as I'd written my reply to a previous version of your own: I am sympathetic to the idea that seeing these more fringe ideals is unfortunate--but the argument which I believe bears greater importance is that acting in this manner against them, striking them from the whole of our public discourse and pre-empting any who could, in some way, divine inspiration from the muck is far more deleterious to discourse. It serves all too easily as a means to silence disquiet and cast a veneer of unanimity.

However, if allowing certain discussions means also allowing other discussions, I'm not broken up if sites like reddit were to ban a subreddit like conspiracy or at least try to reshape it to something much more objective.

If the owners a property decide certain views are abhorrent, that's their right, I can't think of a valid moral or legal complaint against that - it is their property. If we lack competition that is an issue of market competitiveness more than propaganda.

So we can't really treat these two as completely separate right now. Indeed, if those schemes are allowed to go forward, the next thing you'll hear is that we can't break Facebook etc up, because doing so will limit how effectively some information can be suppressed. The more power is concentrated, the more it seeks to sustain that state of affairs, and the better it is at that - so why would we hand those companies so much power when they already are a major problem?

Thanks a ton for providing the opportunity for some discussion on this!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Jersey_City_shooting

Every day? No. But when it's 2021 and you gotta worry about getting gunned down for being a Jew?

Putin loves to use anti-Semitic rhetoric when convenient. Which is the big part of this...the stand pat and do nothing approach doesn't work when the resources of nation states can (logically) and have been behind harnessing disinformation.

The Jewish issue isn't the only issue, better examples might be the Christchurch shooting where the gunman was livestreaming on and because of 4chan.

If you get a chance check out HBO's doc about Jim Watkins and Q.

And they did - to the point where a bunch of websites with forums were blocked outright because of their hands-off policy wrt comments (usually in some particular subforum; it's a fairly common way to keep it civil elsewhere) meant that there were a bunch of posts with links to the document.

The end result is that a bunch of completely unrelated stuff was blocked in Australia outright for a while, by private companies in charge of communications acting in unison - effectively, a censorship cartel - with no political or judicial recourse, since the government was not involved in it, and the ISPs were in their right, legally speaking.

That's another part of this...you can't just say whatever you want and expect there not to be consequences.

The option that is actually better than all the proposals on the table is what we have right now. I'm not claiming it's perfect, or even good - merely better.

Aye. This would improve so many things. Critical thinking is, in fact, not an instinctual ability. It's perfectly okay to talk mathematics illiteracy, but propaganda literacy? "No, no, we can't imply that people aren't capable of thinking for themselves." We have multiple historical instances of extremely successful disinformation campaigns, and people fell for it en-masse.

These "let people decide" trolls are effectively correlating critical thinking skills with intelligence, and it's patently absurd. Philosophers, some of the greatest thinkers there are/were, have spent years of their lives pondering the art of critical thinking.

Mandating data interoperability between platforms seems like a good middle ground that allows diversity of moderation while reducing the monopoloatic power of large platforms.

I would say you did:

> And before anyone asks who I am to judge the best ideas, I'll answer - nobody, but I can see that factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created. Often at the root of these is a profit motive.

You asked the right question (who are you to determine the truth?) but then you didn't answer it. You continued on to imply that, in fact, you are in a position to sort out what's true unlike those other, inferior people who fall for conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.

> Or we can ditch bland cliches and false dichotomies and look at pragmatic steps that can be taken to, for instance, improve access to good information, improve education around critical thinking, and perhaps (as mentioned in other comments) re-examine things like automated algorithms that feed people ever more extreme content because it increases engagement levels, clicks and ad revenue.

"Improving access to good information" is usually a euphemism for some kind of censorship. As far as I'm concerned, all of these "problems" are not problems, they're justifications for controlling other people and expressions of impotent rage at the failure to control those people. I'm vaccinated and I voted for Biden but I do not understand why peope care that others decide not to get vaccinated or voted for the other guy. Part of freedom is the freedom to be wrong.

I think these are not new problems. Democracy, pluralism, free speech, trial by jury, etc are our solutions to these problems. They aren't particularly satisfying solutions because, as you said in your first post, the truth doesn't always win. Rather they're tragic compromises. But I don't see any serious suggestions about how we should improve them.

The bizarre thing with this hoax, is that it looks like the mRNA vaccine increases swimmer motility.[1] Vaccinated folks should have no issues having babies if, for example, they need to improve their 5G reception at home.

[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2781360

The OP never claimed to have an appropriate solution so I don't know what you are talking about regarding them thinking censorship is easy.

Just because it's wrong, doesn't mean nobody should believe it or be exposed to it.

But I agree with the point you are trying to make, that many people have false beliefs crucial to a societal institutions that cannot realistically be suppressed by heavy-handed censorship without also destroying meaning and satisfaction for many people, and also the society itself. And of course, holy texts often contradict themselves, yet some consider all of it true.

However, you are arguing against a strawman, since OP never claimed to have a solution, nor even that censorship was the appropriate response, not do I claim that either.

OP strongly implied that it's easy to distinguish which claims should be censored and which claims should not be censored. This is complete fantasy.

Disagree. This is what OP said, among other things: "We absolutely can, as a society, say that (for example) misinformation about vaccines, where we are dealing with matters of fact, is not on a level with actual vaccine science. This is not really up for honest debate."

> Is censorship the best way to deal with it? Probably not. But we do need to recognise this as a problem as well as getting het up about giant internet platforms deplatforming people.

> make no claims to be one of the group of enlightened ubermensch who should be able to decide for the rest. Neither do I argue that such people exist or are necessary.

Gullible people exist. I mean, it's such a well-known phenomenon that the term "gullible" exists to describe people who fall for what should be obviously false information and lies. We all have our instances of gullibility, and we all have domains that we know nothing about, and there are countless people who prey on people with lack of knowledge in some area.

If people go around in real life deceiving people, someone might step in and tell them to watch out for the scam. There'll be signs in tourist areas where scammers frequent. Banks will send out notices on how to help their customers avoid financial traps. Schools teach kids to look out for bad information and misleading conclusions. Signs are posted in parks warning people not to venture out to certain areas because they're likely unprepared and could die (and people still die anyways).

This is all generally accepted as good.

But flag a post on some social networking site with a "This might be fake. Be careful", and people go wild saying the elite are trying to police us and they're destroying our freedoms.

This is a false dichotomy and a rather romantic notion. Independent adults rarely, if ever, make their minds from first principles. They do already cluster around people who think/convince others that they know better. So few of what we’re talking here is original thought, we are mostly riffing on what we’ve read elsewhere. And that’s OK. That how distributed cognition saves us a lot of time, when working correctly.

But distributed cognition of independent adults get to super irrational conclusions too, I don’t need to list past atrocities based on ridiculous ideas.

So while the failures and wins of distributed cognition is yet to be understood properly, it alone is not the culprit nor can be corrected via the virtues of atomized individualized cognition.

One thing is clear, ideas distributed over ad fueled companies’ screen estates conform to a particular topology and a particular objective function. The normativity of engagement is not that of reality. And the irrationality of those systems effect us even from afar, permeates into our culture and even into non-ad based forums like this.

I find this idea abhorrent as well, but I’m curious if you find it abhorrent because you think the claim is false and/or unsubstantiated, or if you find it abhorrent because even if it’s true it ought to be rejected due to some moral principle.

But even if it was shown to be beneficial, I would still be against it on moral grounds I suppose (but I'm not sure since that might depend on how "beneficial" it is).

Maybe a weird answer, I'm not a philosopher, I just don't think there is a scale of rights that people have, or in the idea of an elite that has special decision making power because it is enlightened.

This is the basic hierarchical nature of any complex society. In a well functioning society those people, called elites (today already considered a derogatory term), are being funneled to the top where they're put into positions of power.

I don't really know why that's in itself supposed to be abhorrent, because it's how any functional organisation is structured. The problems start when institutions break down and the quality of your elites is reduced, but the solution is not some sort of choose your own adventure story where you let the inmates run the asylum. There's no organisation on earth that survives like that.

The entire notion that the vast majority of adults 'make their own choices' is a complete fiction to begin with. Choices exist downstream from culture and culture itself is produced by elites and consumed by 'adults', and so the choice you have to ponder is which people you want to be in charge of producing your culture. Might be Harvard, Zuckerberg, Tucker, or the Pope, but the people have nothing to do with it.

So the idea that some people are better at some things than other people is indeed true, but the idea that we can reliably measure that without the metric being gamed and corrupted is false.

You have it backwards. People who produce or shape culture become elites, it's not that people who are already elites are the only ones producing culture (or rather, influencing it). That has very different implications from what you're describing.

In fact, elites who intentionally try to shape culture often get laughed at (cue the "Imagine" video).

In such an environment, the better ideas often do rise up to the top. Twitter and Facebook are not such environments.

"We" shield ourselves from bad ideas because this forum would be overrun if we didn't.

One of the problems is that we don't all get the same information.

> or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us (and you hope it's you but it doesn't have to be) gets to decide. Frankly, the latter idea is ridiculous to me.

You've bumped into the exact same problem that exists with our democracy. Do you want our future determined by a few well-informed, rational people? Or do you want it determined by an ignorant, short-sighted mass?

"I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

― Issac Asimov

It turns out that you can make that statement for any group of people. It takes all kinds of people to build prosperous nations.

It'a also particularly ironic that you're writing this because of a project that professors (and grad students) at some elite colleges started back in the 1970s, with some funding from the defense department. And their creation (the Internet) led to historic amounts of wealth creation in a stupendously short amount of time.

I also wonder where Britain would be without the numerous professors at elite colleges whose research in physics, mathematics, and chemistry made the Industrial Revolution possible.

The Ivy League wasn't the "Ivy League" back then - just a bunch of fledgling colleges without much of a reputation. America was a different country. Smart, ambitious people went into planting, trading, or soldiering. What things were like 200+ years ago has no bearing on how they should be today.

> Marx was a PhD and a professor and his political philosophy was the basis for several quite unsuccessful efforts at governance.

One academic's theories led to some failed governments, therefore academics are bad at country-building? Marx wasn't even in charge of any of those countries. Other people (such as Lenin, a lawyer, and Trotsky, born to a farmer) read his work, went "this shit sounds dope", and tragedy ensued.

I can point you to any number of countries run by "farmers, lawyers, businessmen, and military officers" that weren't as successful as the US. As I already mentioned, Lenin was a lawyer. So was Fidel Castro. I hope I don't need to go through a list various military dictators.

> But I want a farmer actually running the country.

I want smart people with good ideas, integrity, and communication skills running the country. You can find people like that in every field. I couldn't care less what their background is.

The US succeeded (in part) because the early leadership was of incredibly high caliber and integrity. George Washington stepped down voluntarily from the presidency after two terms. It seems normal to us but it was unthinkable back then. Everyone just assumed he'd stay in charge until he died.

No, that’s just the most egregious example. Circling back to my original point: I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes countries rich and how do you turn poor countries into rich ones. Academicians spend tons of time studying psychology, culture, politics can etc. But I can’t think of any of those theories that has ever been implemented in the real world to help a poor society develop into a rich one. When Lee Kuan Yew, who made Singapore rich in a generation, talks about development, he doesn’t talk about academic theories. He focuses on the culture of the ordinary people.

> I want smart people with good ideas, integrity, and communication skills running the country.

No. Ideas don’t make countries successful. Integrity, yes, but academics don’t have any special advantage in that regard. And the petty bureaucracies and box checking environment of academia selects against many of the other traits required for good leaders.

> I couldn't care less what their background is. The US succeeded because the early leadership was of incredibly high caliber and integrity.

The US succeeded because they were English by culture and departed little from the Anglo system of government and society, which was not created but evolved organically over centuries.

Revolutionary France is a good example of a society structured by “smart people” according to “good ideas.” It ended in disaster and bloodshed.

There is a difference between people with judgment governing with the advice of academics, and putting academic theories directly into action. A good example during pandemic were governors who listened to doctors but applied their own judgment after listening to other stakeholders, and those who outsourced decision making to credentialed experts.

We went from "academics can't build nations" to "academics can't lead nations". Then to "America became great because farmers, lawyers, and soldiers were in charge" (while ignoring failed nations that also had farmers, lawyers, and soldiers in charge). Finally landing upon Lee Kuan Yew and national character building (no idea how that's related).

There were no actual examples of an academic taking charge of a country and that country failing due to them being an academic (vs just being corrupt, despotic, insane, or plain incompetent). On the other hand, I provided lots of examples that showed academics have made modern society and the economy possible.

I'd argue that most academics don't have any interest in politics or leadership, which causes them to be relatively underrepresented in the arena. Regardless, I'm not biased against people due to their profession, as you appear to be.

You mean all by themselves? Well neither have plumbers, but I'm not about to disparage them over it, either.

Look where your governance-by-middle-finger got us. It got us an egomaniacal dotard, drunk on power, who shifted his politics when the opportunism suited him. His TV show got him just enough notoriety to move the needle among the masses. When he found that his toxic personality, based on name-calling and blustery bufoonery found a reception from Right-wing voters, there was nothing that could stop him from winning their side. But this was a man who could work with no one who wasn't willing to serve him without question, be they judges or legislators, and certainly a deal-breaker for our allies.

His world-view was an American centric one entirely, at a time when China had earned and demanded a role he couldn't conceive of or negotiate. Behind the scenes, he ruled a chaotic White House that was fortunately tested little. Still, the stories that escaped from this White House show that he was not to be contained by any legal constraints, and that he fostered an atmosphere where staff worked at cross-purposes to one another. Their singular focus was on the media, yet they couldn't even manage this successfully, despite the allegiance and sycophancy from Fox.

Finally, COVID-19 was the test they would not pass. Although Trump was due to receive some sympathy from his two impeachments, once America saw the reckless way he managed this pandemic and the huge toll it bore on us, there was little chance he could win the 2020 election. What we saw after the election was an unheard of nothing-to-lose strategy of trying to steal the election by any falsehood necessary, whether within the courts or in the streets. The books are coming out on the market now, but they show that our wildest dreams of what could have been happening in that White House paled when compared to horrid reality of what did.

We likely have to thank a mere few individuals such as Gen. Mark Milley, Mike Pence and such for holding together our country in the moments when it was the most vulnerable to those whose only concern was for power.

Your??

Second, what does it say about the desirability of what’s being sold by the technocratic elite that half the country voted for a second term for the egomaniacal dotard (for he surely was that), and most of the other half of the country got behind Joe Biden, a man from a working class background, a graduate of a second tier university known for his popular appeal rather than his intelligence?

You point to Trump, but I’d note that not even Democrats like the academic social engineers. On Super Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren (a Harvard professor) had an embarrassing performance. Even in NYC, home of the country’s technocratic elite, voters passed over the technocrat in favor of someone who promised to carry a gun to church as mayor.

Regardless, nobody is advocating having clergy run the country. (And no, listening to clergy as stakeholders in society and responding to voters’ whose beliefs might be rooted in religion is not the same thing as what the left seeks to do with academics. Putting a clerical “czar” in place to “nudge” people to desirable behaviors would be wild even for the Bush administration.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

Isn't this an argument for limiting the power we give to those in power? It's unrealistic to think that only people who are right will be in charge (I doubt I need to give examples). The realistic thing is strong controls on the power they wield, to that "short sighted masses" cannot take over. This idea underpins liberal democracy.

In a democracy, we have a way to limit the power of our government -- but what's the way to do that for those in power who are not in government? The traditional approach has been to use government power to check non-government power, but this seems to run counter to the whole "limiting the power we give to those in power." But if we don't use government power to check outsize private power, then we are again ceding too much power.

My own view is that the answer is less about how much power we grant than about how much accountability there is -- ie, broader and deeper democracy. But that seems to work mostly in theory; in practice this often gets circumvented by those with power and we get shallow democracy with limited accountability and thus unsatisfactory restrictions on both governmental and non-governmental power.

I agree that we need norms that limit any concentration of power. We've had anti-monopoly laws on the books for 130 years that serve a valid purpose. We may need to look at more laws to deal with recent constructs, I.e. platforms. I can see a superficial contradiction between not wanting government power, and giving government the power to break up monopolies or platforms. But if the overall goal is a restriction on how power can be concentrated, it's still in keeping with the idea of limiting what "those in power" can do.

I'm sure I've missed something. I definitely take your point.

(I mean those first two sentences non-ironically.)

An elite in practice means that we're stuck with irrational beliefs such as Lysenkoism. Democracy allows beliefs to compete and often correct ideas win. It's far from perfect but still has a better track record than self-styled rational elites.

The following quote is from Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line.

> But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.

I couldn't agree more. While no-one can deny that we are all born with different capacities (intellectual or otherwise), the argument that some people are essentially incapable of taking care of their own lives is a very slippery slope and a cynical one at that, viewing humans as incapable of learning or improving. I find it truly repulsive.

A central premise of Doctorow's argument is the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor. Proceeding from that framing, he proposes that the ACCESS Act as an important middle ground that could, among other things, help stave off the death of Section 230. OP points out that our better angels don't always win in that marketplace.

Let's get less abstract. The article envisions a market-based approach toward online censorship. The idea that a "marketplace of filters" would create a "live and let live" scenario seems extraordinarily naive to me. It seems much more likely that making it easier to choose filter bubbles -- and introducing a profit motive into the construction of such filters -- would just escalate the appetite to censor, on both sides.

> All this to say, we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice, or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us

You seem to be confusing critique with a proposal of some alternative. Just because OP believes that the "marketplace of ideas" thesis is a farce and that the ACCESS Act is probably a non-solution to the wrong problem, doesn't mean OP wants to censor people.

It's possible to both believe that Doctorow's argument is wrong and also not be a full-throated supporter of aggressive censorship.

In fact...

> The most abhorrent idea...

You take rather flagrant liberties when interpreting parent's post, constructing an unrecognizable strawman out of a post that contains phrases like "Is censorship the best way to deal with it? Probably not." and "And before anyone asks who I am to judge the best ideas, I'll answer - nobody".

> The strawman of...

Those in glass houses...

What you just described is called a representative democracy and was essentially created because a direct democracy didn't work, for exactly those reasons you mention (many people can't actually think for themselves - at the political level).

> All this to say, we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice

You're completely ignoring the crux here - it's about both access to information and algorithms that present signals vs noise. Pretending that my 95 year old grandma can reliably decide that a fox news segment isn't sensationalized drivel after being primed for 30+ years that its "news" and not entertainment, is just as silly as you thinking this whole suggestion is ridiculous.

The amount of bad information, random conjuncture and conspiratorial thinking is pretty shocking.

This is ridiculous.

What exactly is the end-game here? You're not going to beat (or educate) the populism and conspiracy theories out of Americans. We're talking about a country where a prominent tech billionaire died because he disregarded "the medical elite" and went on an all-fruit diet to treat his pancreatic cancer.[1] That river is wide and deep, my friend. Telling people that the elites are controlling information sharing online for their own good is unlikely to have the desired result.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

No, I’m specifically not telling you that! I’m not sure I have any good solutions but I specifically called out that censorship probably wasn’t the best plan!

I just wanted to say that the concept of a marketplace of ideas, as commonly envisaged in terms of ideas with merit rising to prominence, seems to be naive, and when we’re building systems to facilitate an uncensored or uncensorable marketplace of ideas, perhaps we should keep that in mind.

I would hesitate to say your prominent tech billionaire died because of diet choices.

The prognosis of these type of tumor is highly variable and he lived a pretty long time with it regardless.

He did not 'disregard "the medical elite" and went on an all-fruit diet', he had the tumor removed[0] nearly 20 years ago, and only after years of the most advanced medical treatments in private did he finally die. Steve Jobs lived for seven years after the tumor was removed, meaning he exceeded the 5-year survival rate.

Sadly, if somebody had stage 4 pancreatic cancer in the year 2011, the only cure for the disorder that will follow their untimely passing would be to soberly arrange ones affairs and express their humanity to everyone they have ever cared about.

[0] - https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Apple-s-Jobs-has-cancero...

Jobs delayed aggressive treatment for close to a year. He finally had the Whipple surgery, but it reoccurred likely due to spreading.

Well never know what might have been but suffice to say he only shortened his life.

While Jobs did undergo surgery, he waited 9 months and didn't get surgery until after the cancer had spread. I don't see amy credible medical claims that this dis not have an impact on his survival.

> But Jobs refused surgery after diagnosis and for nine months after, favoring instead dietary treatments and other alternative methods...By the time Jobs finally opted for surgery, the cancer had spread. [0]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

But even now that we have acknowledged "highly curable" to be relative to other types of cancer, pancreatic cancer being among the most sinister and deadly, I take great issue with the notion of highly curable pancreatic cancer.

  By the time Jobs finally opted for surgery, the cancer had spread. He had an under-the-radar liver transplant and began putting a lot of energy into researching the most sophisticated experimental methods, making a complete about-face from how he began his treatment years before.
  According to the New York Times, Jobs was one of the few people in the world to have his genome sequenced. Collaborating researchers at several institutions sequenced his DNA in order to develop a treatment that would target his specifically mutated cell pathways. He went for an experimental treatment in Switzerland in 2009, which involves using a radioactive isotope to attack the faulty hormone-producing cells of the body.[0]

A previous romantic partner of mine's father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and made startlingly similar choices against the behest of his entire family and everyone he knew. He was surely not an aloof billionaire who ate nothing but fruit, he was a very pragmatic union carpenter who took great pains to manage his health.

I know you did not make a claim like this, but I personally don't find it at all unthinkable for a somebody to make this sort of choice when faced with this diagnosis.

[0] Same, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

Nevertheless, there can be more factors at play than distrust of the medical community. Some people may want to live out the rest of their lives free from the harsh side effects of chemotherapy, for example. I wouldn't use his cancer treatment decisions to argue that tech elites make bad choices in the face of information, to bring us back to the broader discussion.

[1] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/pancreatic-neuroendocrine-tumo...

The question is only how. Is it going to be by dictate? Is a church or government or institution going to enforce which ideas spread, or is it going to be free, spreading at the level of the individual?

There is no moral alternative to the free exchange of ideas. The only alternative is a restricted exchange... censorship and punishment.

And what are the consequences of that?

When people talk about the marketplace of ideas they tend to think of good, beneficial, ideas winning out over foolishness, conspiracy and just plain inaccuracy.

This has been shown up as naive lately. And if we really are talking about the "marketplace of ideas" being raw, Darwinian, strongest wins, then are we prepared to deal with the fallout of the fact that loud, motivated, well funded bullshit merchants will continue to have a huge grip over the public dialogue?

Because something is posted on the internet doesn't mean large numbers of people actually believe it.

There will always be "wrong" people. That will never change. But there is a degree of wisdom in crowds.

Proper education and "good" cultural values are extremely important and we haven't done so well instilling those lately.

Furthermore there isn’t a better alternative. Right now censorship from platform owners is abusively used to skew political discussions, using the pretense of factuality. I regularly see fact checkers make mistakes or make misleading claims or they inconsistent apply scrutiny. I see trusted organizations like old newspapers and health organizations (like the WHO) regularly make mistakes or sell their own speculation as incontrovertible truth. Trust cannot be given to a few lone entities. The marketplace of ideas doesn’t have this problem since it is decentralized.

How does something that isn't a marketplace of ideas prove it's dumb? Or should this question be punished by your algorithm?

In the face of hyperstimuli, we can't talk about mere human propensities as a justification, else we would have already turned ourselves into junkies many times over.

How many years did it take for heroin go from a cough medicine to a schedule I drug? Amphetamines, cigarettes etc.

There is a reason you can't put simply everything on the marketplace, and that is OK. That doesn't mean the idea of a marketplace is broken.

Apparently I watched some alt-right-adjacent podcast or something, so for weeks youtube kept recommending seriously racist, fascist, white nationalist content. The algorithm was actively trying to lead me down the rabbit hole. Obviously it's learned that doing so increases engagement.