'Conservatives Will Cease to Exist Online' Speakers Fret About the Tech Bogeyman

https://reason.com/2020/02/28/at-cpac-anxieties-over-the-tech-bogeyman/

by haroldkicks • 6 years ago

12 16 6 years ago

reason.com

foolzcrow• 6 years ago

The censorship is going to result in civil war.

cultus• 6 years ago

Vague predictions of violence coming from your side only confirms what everyone thinks about you guys.

alphabettsy• 6 years ago

It’s almost like modern conservatism doesn’t actually believe in free markets and personal freedom considering this and their stance on things like gay marriage, cannabis legalization.

ykevinator• 6 years ago

Or science, don't forget science.

gerbal• 6 years ago

Maybe conservatism is about preserving existing power structures and not much else?

scarface742• 6 years ago

Of course they will believe in cannabis legalization the minute it is good for big corporations.

Also see how drugs became a “disease” and not a “moral failing of culture” the minute it start hitting “rural America”.

scarface742• 6 years ago

And this is the government that HN posters routinely want to “legislate big tech”.

But why is this the minority opinion at a conservative conference:

I can't believe I'm doing this, because I'm here to convince you at a conservative conference that government shouldn't regulate speech,"

AlchemistCamp2• 6 years ago

One doesn't have to be conservative to see an issue with world-straddling tech companies flexing their ability to shape public discourse.

People use Facebook/Whatsapp/Twitter/Reddit for many of the same things they used to use email and personal blogs to do in 2005. But with centralized control and the ability to shape what messages get broadcast to whom, it's far too great of a concentration of power.

Google is probably the most extreme. Consider the "Evil Larry" thought experiment. If Larry Page woke up one day in 2016 while he was still CEO and decided to use Google and YouTube purely to further his own goals, how many national elections could he tilt while maintaining plausible deniability from the outside?

My guess is, it would be quite a few. It wouldn't have to look that different. Counter-narrative results would still show up in search. They'd just be down-regulated. Links and videos supporting EL's preferred candidates and positions would be up-regulated and be shown up perhaps 10% more often than previously. With plausible deniability, election after election could be tipped by a few percentage points. That's often enough to change the outcome.

There are almost certainly some internal company safeguards that would have made this kind of crime a difficult, uncertain proposition and I do NOT think the real Larry Page would ever have done this. But being completely unconcerned would be a grave mistake. Giant tech companies already lobby extensively in nations all over the world and do not have goals perfectly aligned with each of those nations—e.g., Free Basics in India.

It's naive to dismiss concerns about such extreme concentrations of power being wielded to suppress speech along political lines simply because we're currently benefactors of the action.

defertoreptar• 6 years ago

Companies have always supported candidates and political parties of their liking with political contributions. What's different now is that these companies can now contribute not just with money, but by influencing the online discussion we see and the search results we get.

AlchemistCamp2• 6 years ago

Yes. I see the current tech giants as analogous to a Standard Oil that also owned the New York Times and one of the top two or three papers in every other city of the country.

bediger4000• 6 years ago

I'm old, so I remember the media consolidation of the 80s. FCC rules about ownership of newspapers and radio/TV stations, and number of stations in a given market went away. Soon after, the fairness doctrine did too. This lead directly to conservative radio. All objections got waved off and laughed away: the free market has spoken.

Now we have a situation where the same conservatives are getting cut out, and it's no longer the free market speaking, and the government is supposed to step in to protect and affirm a particular set of opinions.

I don't think this is a particularly consistent viewpoint, and it makes me wonder how much the free market had to do with ditching the fairness doctrine and the less conservative radio and TV voices.

rektide• 6 years ago

Yet they don't support network neutrality. Hahaha.

They don't seem to be interested in keeping 230 protections so companies can host content without having to be immediately responsible for every word they host.

They are either incompetent defenseless dolts. Or maliciously picking at platforms. They certainly aren't doing anything to safeguard & protect hosting speech online.

thu21112• 6 years ago

This looks like the paradox of tolerance, in the mirror form of how it's usually invoked.

A key tenet of conservatism is free speech. All together competing in the market of ideas. The first amendment came from this tradition and implicitly makes the assumption that only governments are big and powerful enough to control speech. It dates from a time when pamphlets and newsletters were the dominant form of political communication. That assumption is no longer valid.

What happens if your opponents systematically attack anyone who speaks ideas they don't like in an organised way, but they aren't the government? Then they win because they aren't forced backwards to pamphlets and paper newsletters. Being tolerant of this kind of intolerance means losing.

The simplest fix is probably to extend the first amendment to large, dominant providers of communication services. But that's unsatisfying because it's so unclear what a dominant service is, and anyway, can't fundamentally force providers to do things they don't want to do.

The core problem is the culture war itself, in which the extreme left see the right as an evil to be wiped out by whatever means necessary. Fixing that will require a much more complex set of legislative and cultural changes. These companies didn't used to be in the grip of leftist hated. Google and Twitter both used to have strong free speech cultures, which degraded over time.

krapp2• 6 years ago

The first amendment came from this tradition and implicitly makes the assumption that only governments are big and powerful enough to control speech.

On the contrary, the First Amendment makes the opposite assumption, that only the Federal government should be prohibited from controlling speech, implying that the power to do so organically devolves (as do all powers not explicitly granted to the Federal government by the Constitution) to the states, the people, and by extension any private enterprise created by the people.

What happens if your opponents systematically attack anyone who speaks ideas they don't like in an organised way, but they aren't the government?

That's what free speech is. If you don't like that, fair enough, but people being able to organize and oppose ideas they don't like, as well as exercising their freedom of association both to choose with whom they will and will not associate, is the way a marketplace of ideas in a democracy is supposed to work.

thu21112• 6 years ago

By "attack" here I didn't mean, respond with an argument agains their ideas. I meant retaliate in ways unrelated to the topic being discussed using free speech: banning people, trying to get them fired, etc. There's no legal, constitutional or philosophical tradition of this sort of thing that needs to be protected.

'Conservatives Will Cease to Exist Online' Speakers Fret About the Tech Bogeyman

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