It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech

https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-new-censorship/

by jgraham • 9 years ago

33 22 9 years ago

"Why? When the human condition was marked by hunger and famine, it made perfect sense to crave condensed calories and salt. Now we live in a food glut environment, and we have few genetic, cultural, or psychological defenses against this novel threat to our health. Similarly, we have few defenses against these novel and potent threats to the ideals of democratic speech, even as we drown in more speech than ever."

In the past, mass speech was difficult, expensive, and centralized. Now it is cheap, universal, and everyone can partake -- so the limiting factor becomes the attention of the audience.

Memes that grab people's minds spread through the population, and oftentimes the most extreme and unreasonable ideas spread the most quickly, just like weeds can grow quickest first.

Overtonwindow• 9 years ago

A provocative title for what is more an opinion piece, lauding the value of Twitter, and other methods of speech communication.

whatshisface3• 9 years ago

John Stuart Mill’s notion that a “marketplace of ideas” will elevate the truth is flatly belied by the virality of fake news.

Wow. I think this sentence is a great example. The author makes no attempt to convince us that fake news is actually winning out over real news - they just assert it along with their primary claim in the hope that we will be carried along into both by the momentum of their article.

Yellow journalism goes back to the beginning of press freedom and lying goes back to the beginning of speech. We've had ways of combating these things for generations - ways that can't be used to make false statements - but people have always wanted to reach over and silence their opponent through (sometimes abstract) force. The problem with that? Your opponents can sometimes do it to you, too.

mcguire2• 9 years ago

What "can't be used to make false statements?"

GCU-Empiricist2• 9 years ago

There is a communication mode that can't be used to make false statements, really?

whatshisface3• 9 years ago

It's a bit off-topic, but there are indeed many! The simplest that I can think of is the grammar that produces all statements of the form (N not gates) <-> (N+2 not gates). Although, the search for a real answer to your question is an active subject in philosophy.

What I was really talking about was how there are a huge number of "methods of convincing" that work better for the truth than for lies - sometimes so much better that they essentially don't work for lies at all. An example of that kind would be pointing at an object everyone can see and saying, "that thing, there."

Bartweiss2• 9 years ago

The handwringing in this article over how a few publishers now control almost all distribution is also odd to me. Certainly I'm not thrilled by that situation, but why the pretense that it's a novel situation?

People like Hearst and Murdoch have had massively outsize control over news distribution in the past. And before that, when the supposedly-outdated First Amendment was being written, control of publication largely accrued to whoever could get distribution into a given spot.

These are not unprecedented challenges, and seeing an article like this casually discard their historical context makes me worry that it is in fact criticizing free speech for all the usual reasons.

woahdudebro• 9 years ago

You'd think someone so opposed to "fake news" as it's called would also be a fan of centralization. The mainstream news coverage of the 2016 election was objectively in favor of Clinton with perhaps the exception of Fox News and a few other small outlets, if you were to presuppose that her election was the "correct" outcome for democracy wouldn't that be exactly the direction you would follow?

optimuspaul2• 9 years ago

I think the article spells out the problem very well. Entities can craft fake news that appeal to very specific audiences and target them so directly that the majority doesn't even know about the fake news. The message can be tweaked slightly for different audiences to push or pull them from one view to another. This is a huge problem. There is no mechanism that can verify the messages are true. It was widely reported that this is exactly what the Kushner organization did during the Trump campaign. I'm not saying Kushner created fake news, but his organization did in fact push highly targeted messages that influenced people in ways that one might consider dishonest.

It is a problem, the article lays it out. It could do better (as could I) to convince, but I find it hard to believe that someone like yourself can't convince yourself with the data available. Fake news is real, but it's not what Trump says it is.

(Fake news is real, lol)

Goladus• 9 years ago

Fake news is real, but it's not what Trump says it is.

It's also not what this Wired author says it is.

===

Originally, the term "Fake News" was created by mainstream news organizations (aka old media) to denigrate all competition (legitimate or not) from social media. It was a branding campaign meant to poison the well against outside sources. Trump just turned the language against them, since he benefited from new media.

The reality is that the only thing that will work is for individuals to apply critical reading skills and evaluate the content for what it is. Big news brands don't want that, though. They want people to think "real news is us, fake news is them"

whatshisface3• 9 years ago

The best I can do is convince you that the difference is one of quantity, not kind. All liars tweak their lies for the weaknesses of their perceived audiences. Governments all across the political spectrum have sat in back rooms, carefully considering what the people should be made to think. That's been going on for a very long time.

You can't create a pannel of lie-destroyers because the liars would just see them as another audience to capture. The only solution, as uncomfortable as it might be, is to mix people so well that there's no way to lie to a target without a nearby non-targeted friend finding out. What does that look like in practice? A marketplace of ideas. If people are captured in filter bubbles, you have a thousand local monopolies of ideas.

mcguire2• 9 years ago

"Here’s how this golden age of speech actually works: In the 21st century, the capacity to spread ideas and reach an audience is no longer limited by access to expensive, centralized broadcasting infrastructure. It’s limited instead by one’s ability to garner and distribute attention."

That is probably the best description of the changes in culture since the Internet revolution began that I have read. There are no gatekeepers; instead limited attention from the audience is the bottleneck.

But on top of that, there is the next sentence:

"And right now, the flow of the world’s attention is structured, to a vast and overwhelming degree, by just a few digital platforms: Facebook, Google (which owns YouTube), and, to a lesser extent, Twitter."

These companies, the ones who control modern culture, do so by selling attention, and do so knowingly, self-consciously. They know attention is their product and whatever that attention is currently focused on can be damned.

lemagedurage• 9 years ago

Digital surveillance: encryption,

Attention-channeling: skepticism,

Harassment: thicker skin,

Data collection: not sharing private data,

Algorithmic decisionmaking: what's the problem?

GCU-Empiricist2• 9 years ago

It's always relevant to look at what the root cause of the failure state is. In a phrase it seems to be "outrage culture" relevant video: CGP Grey "This video will make you angry" www.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DrE3j_RHkqJc&usg=AOvVaw19LNbXnWxQ6ChEZfLZ5kGn

iamcasen2• 9 years ago

Honestly, I think the only hope for the future is open source AI that can read and digest the vast landscape of "truth" on the internet, and help the average citizen be more informed by corroborating facts.

It's very true: no one has the time or attention span to deeply analyze everything we see/read/hear. We used to trust what was given to us, but now that's impossible.

DanAndersen2• 9 years ago

It's hard to see how placing trust in a giant AI would solve the issue. Just offering "fact-checks" that don't deal in context leaves so much open to interpretation. The major leftist/rightist media networks do what they do not as much through blatant lying (though that happens) as with technically-defensible interpretations of factual events, selective coverage/reporting, and twists of terminology (democracy vs populism, government vs regime, article vs screed, etc). When people call upon services like fact-checkers or find individual studies to wield in argument, the goal ends up being to find mental stopsigns to be able to dismiss the opponent's argument and totem-like symbols of legitimacy to prop your own arguments up.

I don't know what the way out is, but I can't imagine externalizing our thinking/reasoning even more would be the way.

iamcasen2• 9 years ago

Note that I said "open source AI" with the implication that how it works is transparent, and how it is trained is transparent and verifiable.

There is simply no skirting around the fact that our brains are not equipped to deal with the astounding volumes of information being jammed through our every sense every minute of the day.

DanAndersen2• 9 years ago

There's a bit of amusing irony in the article due to how a lot of the article's reasoning could be enlisted against the concept of democracy itself rather than the "democracy-poisoning" free speech. Analogous to the article's concerns about how everything is "optimized for engagement," one could say that the democratic values promoted by the author "optimize for votes/reelection/contributions." The dismissal of Mill's "notion that a 'marketplace of ideas' will elevate the truth" could similarly dismiss the idea that the masses voting would elevate the best leaders or reasonable long-term policy.

The common refrain might be that it's the worst form of government except for all else that's been tried. I'd invite the author to explore similar critiques for democracy, or else to consider the idea that societal taboos against restricting free speech exist out of concern of the alternative.

leepowers• 9 years ago

Today, even the most powerful elites often cannot effectively convene the right swath of the public to counter viral messages.

Let's imagine this was implemented. For every post on Facebook, Twitter, et al, a counter-point from the other side was included. Would this change anything?

Maybe not. The narrative right now is that the social giants are forcing people into media bubbles because this drives engagement. Including counter-points would burst the bubbles and we should expect a drop in engagement on the major social media sites. But would it lead to a drop in engagement overall? Wouldn't people still seek out the news that reinforces their pre-existing views?

The narrative should be inverted: the reason Facebook is massively popular is because it allows the masses to construct personalized bubbles. If Facebook loses it's "bubbleness" users will simply construct their bubbles on different platforms or in different ways. The space will fracture. You'll have a conservative Facebook clone, a leftist clone, a libertarian one, etc.

It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech

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