The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/free-speech.html

by pseudolus • 6 years ago

208 394 6 years ago

Given how much the issue of free speech comes up here on HN -- especially regarding Twitter, Facebook, and politics -- I think this is a really important article for people to read.

It's long, but is extremely nuanced and shows that the issue is far more complex than just "the solution to offensive speech is more speech".

One key takeaway is in the middle:

[Free speech is] a fundamentally optimistic vision: Good ideas win. The better argument will prove persuasive. There’s a countertradition, however. It’s alert to the ways in which demagogic leaders or movements can use propaganda, an older term that can be synonymous with disinformation. A crude authoritarian censors free speech. A clever one invokes it to play a trick, twisting facts to turn a mob on a subordinated group and, in the end, silence as well as endanger its members. Looking back at the rise of fascism and the Holocaust in her 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt focused on the use of propaganda to “make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism.”
In other words, good ideas do not necessarily triumph in the marketplace of ideas. “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing,” the philosopher Jason Stanley and the linguist David Beaver argue in their forthcoming book, “The Politics of Language.”

But most of all the article shows that the history of free speech in the US is not simple at all -- and that our current view of it is very different from the period of 1949-1987 when broadcasters were subject to the "fairness doctrine", which I think most people today aren't even aware of.

ColanR• 6 years ago

I wonder if the argument you've highlighted is a good idea, or a particularly dangerous one. Maybe we should discuss it and find out. Or maybe we should call what you're saying 'propaganda' and ban it outright, since it might call for 'radical' and 'potentially destabilizing' 'changes to our democracy'.

It would be too bad if you could only present it as an opinion, in limited arenas far away from anyone who might disagree. I wonder who the next 'protected minority' will be, and what, exactly, they will need to be 'protected' from.

Aren't you glad we have freedom of speech, so that you can make this thought of yours known?

dagmx9• 6 years ago

Nothing in their post or the article says that things shouldn't be up for discussion. That's not even the point of it.

The point has been about whether more powerful figures can use their platform to drown out the free speech of others and the lack of accountability.

The article is in fact calling for more accountability, which is precisely what your comment about discussion would be.

You're in effect reinforcing both the articles point and the points shared by the person you're replying to

taxicab3• 6 years ago

Since the point clearly went over your head or you just decided to give that snotty reply to a strawman you came up with: parent was saying good ideas don't win if demagogues can hold a monopoly on the marketplace of ideas in the same way that, say, the ISP industry can hold broadly anti-consumer policies that customers don't do anything about because it is locally not a free market.

To expand it further, I would argue stuff like Twitter and Facebook that optimize for engagement are already not free speech since they are designed for only the most outrageous (and likely false) content to flourish.

bitdizzy• 6 years ago

I had to read your post and the GP post multiple times and I'm still confused. It doesn't seem like you're talking at all to what they said but are stating a very well worn argument for free speech, that is, if some speech is to be curtailed, then all speech is under threat of being curtailed.

But the GP was precisely talking about how even though many would say "we have freedom of speech", what that actually means in practice falls far short of the mark. We "have freedom of speech" in the sense that many people hold the ideology. But holding an ideology is very different from having that ideology realized.

polishdude20• 6 years ago

In practice, free speech is easy to lose. Say we start with equal free speech for both sides of some spectrum. As some ideas from one spectrum take hold, they are selected for. After a while, the ideas of one spectrum slightly overtake the ideas of another, then it's easy for that side to now try and silence the other side and lose that freedom of speech.

It's kind of like that common saying that pure evil is the belief that there is nothing left to know. That's what losing free speech does. It's society thinking "our system right now is the best" and not bothering to try and improve things.

greenduck2• 6 years ago

Not only is our view of free speech different today, but the US has a long history of censoring minority groups. Take the Hays code for instance which made it de facto against the law for movies to portray gay men in a positive way or "race mixing" at all. That was around until nearly the 70s. That's still within living memory [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Co...

krapp7• 6 years ago

What does "de facto against the law" even mean?

The Hays code was an industry-imposed form of censorship, there were no actual consequences, legal or otherwise, to ignoring it.

rayiner7• 6 years ago

Liberals fought against the Hays Code. And now they condone Twitter and Facebook on the same premise as those who defended the Hays Code: that its private actors voluntarily policing speech that’s harmful to society.

mistermann2• 6 years ago

Perhaps I'm misinterpreting this, but I wonder if the author is suggesting ("dog whistling") that in our (US) current two party system, that only one side is guilty of it? (I guess my question is actually: I wonder how paragraphs like this are unpacked in the minds of readers, depending on their particular worldviews. Written English is so brutally flawed as a communication medium).

Or maybe this is the nuance but I'm not picking it up:

It’s alert to the ways in which demagogic leaders or movements can use propaganda, an older term that can be synonymous with disinformation.

Trump (primarily, but certainly not solely).

A crude authoritarian censors free speech.

"Crude authoritarian" typically unpacks to Trump in most people's minds, but it's mostly "the left" doing the censorship these days.

A clever one invokes it to play a trick, twisting facts to turn a mob on a subordinated group and, in the end, silence as well as endanger its members.

I interpret this as "the left" again, but I wonder if that's what was intended?

Looking back at the rise of fascism and the Holocaust in her 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt focused on the use of propaganda to “make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism.”

This feels like it is pointed at Trump ("the rise of fascism", "the most fantastic statements"), and fair enough, but what many people don't realize is that both sides do this, regularly. What most people don't realize though, is that "if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood" doesn't happen with mainstream falsehoods, because the disproofs aren't published in the mainstream. Why would they be? To find disproofs of many mainstream facts, one must read "alternative media" - but, due to a decade of skilful propaganda, these sources now intuitively evaluate in most people's minds as False by Definition.

Or perhaps the author is saying this only with respect to history, and I'm getting all worked up about nothing.

The biggest issue right now (other than the widespread lack of appreciation for the importance of truly free speech, and how biased and simplistic mainstream speech is) in my opinion is the lack of realization of the degree to which the ability to restrict free speech now lies in the hands of a very small set of elite companies, who are arguably not entirely politically unbiased. The number of people on HN who seem unable to distinguish between the broad general principle of free speech versus the first amendment is very concerning.

EDIT: Wow, the silent majority is fast on the gun today! But alas, the reasons shall forever remain a mystery...

kthejoker22• 6 years ago

Because you interpreted the neutral words of the article as left and right? It doesn't say what political views the crude authoritarian has.

You injected that in, and then claim it's the author dog whistling. (By the way, this is actually, literally "begging the question" - "It must be a dog whistle because I read it this way even though it doesn't use those words or make that claim at all!")

That's why you're being downvoted. There's a strong reason the author didn't use the words "Trump" or "left".

zozbot2342• 6 years ago

[Free speech is] a fundamentally optimistic vision: Good ideas win. The better argument will prove persuasive.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! Free speech is pessimistic as heck. It's saying that good ideas don't necessarily win, but if you allow authoritarians to engage in arbitrary censorship then bad ideas will always win. Censoring free speech is not just a "crude authoritarian's" move; it's what all authoritarians do whenever they feel they can get away with it. And censorship won't save you from propaganda either: there's a lot of crude propaganda in every totalitarian regime, happily coexisting with censorship of every other point of view!

Free speech is NOT a problem: it's a very real safeguard against critical threats. If you treat it like one, you haven't seriously engaged with the issue.

wisty• 6 years ago

Free speech is a Monte Carlo method - it certainly delivers a probably good solution.

crazygringo3• 6 years ago

Well, traditionally according to political philosophy, free speech is most associated with John Stuart Mill who did praise it out of optimism. That is the common understanding of it.

I'm not sure what philosophical viewpoint you're referring to when you describe it as "pessimistic as heck".

If you want to seriously engage with the issue, the article explores a lot of aspects of it, and why 100% unfettered free speech is potentially a problem to democracy.

noxer• 6 years ago

Exactly, in fact it doesn't even matter what comes out of it there is simply no alternative to Free Speech that could work. Free Speech at least can work that's more than any other concept has to offer.

gonational2• 6 years ago

Everything you said is 100% true.

Anyone who tries to take this right, or any other right, away from you is planning to, in the long run, kill you. History tells us this very clearly.

eblanshey• 6 years ago

[Free speech is] a fundamentally optimistic vision: Good ideas win.

I disagree with this statement. Free speech has no say on who "wins". Free speech is based on the principle that everyone has a right to be vocal about what they believe, even if you disagree with it. The alternative is giving up the power to others to decide who can speak and for what reason, whether you agree with it or not.

Many people don't want to hear this, but if hypothetically the majority of a population believes in and talks nonsense, then that's what the population wants and that population should live with those consequences. What we have here is not a political problem, but a human problem, and involving politics as a bandaid has shown time and time again that those doing the censoring don't do it for the "common good". Corruption and self-interest is attractive to people in those positions, again, because they are humans and what we have is a human problem, not a political problem.

The difference between the former and latter manifestation of human problems is that in one a small group of imperfect humans make the rules for the rest, whereas in the other no one decides who can say what and people get the consequences they bequeath upon themselves.

paganel• 6 years ago

Good ideas win. The better argument will prove persuasive

We don't value free speech because "good ideas win", there's nothing "optimistic" about it, we do know that bad ideas also win, sometimes on the back of/with the help with said free speech (history has showed us that), so tying the idea of free speech with its perceived usefulness/effectiveness is a fallacy, that's not the reason why we should value it. We should value free speech for its sake only.

rriepe• 6 years ago

Where have bad ideas won under free speech?

jturpin• 6 years ago

I agree. You can extend this idea to the idea of freedom of religion - the goal isn't to have some Free Market of religion where the "good ones" win and the bad ones die off, it's just a fundamental human right. Same as speech.

roenxi2• 6 years ago

Looking back at the rise of fascism and the Holocaust in her 1951 book...

She learned the wrong lessons from her study of the rise of fascism. The correct lesson is 'if you botch the economy badly enough, voters will explore every option to try and get some relief'. Including voting in Nazis. The Nazis (with a parallel to Trump) are a sign of some large group feeling profound economic distress and being rather unhappy with politics as usual.

And there is a basic premise in the middle of that article that you quote: that the author is morally pure enough to determine what is good and bad in the marketplace of ideas. That possibility was tested extensively in the 20th century. There isn't anyone who can do that. They tried lots of people, none of them worked out. If we create a method for anointing some truths reliable and some 'twisted' then it is going to become controlled by corrupt people and then do more harm than good. Free speech is by far the most reliable way of identifying bad ideas as bad.

krapp7• 6 years ago

Free speech is by far the most reliable way of identifying bad ideas as bad.

... but you just spent an entire paragraph arguing that it's impossible for any person to distinguish between good and bad in the marketplace of ideas, and that all attempts inevitably do more harm than good.

How then would it be possible to identify bad ideas given freedom of speech? Surely any attempt to do so would suffer the same bad consequences.

dagmx9• 6 years ago

This is a pretty good read and fairly nuanced.

IMHO free speech needs accountability and massive increases in education resources to be effective.

Without accountability, the loudest voices can set what is true to many. This congregates power into the already powerful, until new means of information dissemination are created to allow new voices. However those too will need the same accountability or will fall to the same issues. You can see this with the rise of every new medium for information. From newspapers to books to movies and music to each new major social media platform.

Without education resources, there is a much lowered threshold for people accepting information provided to them as truth. We need to globally, but especially in America, increase education of the sciences and critical thinking. Maybe it's too late for entire generations today but the future can be very bright.

Unfortunately the premise of the title will most likely provoke an emotional response from many, to which the concept of unfettered free speech is inalienable, even the discussion of the problematic side effects it can create.

zepto3• 6 years ago

Can you say more about what ‘accountability’ means in this case?

dagmx9• 6 years ago

Accountability could take many forms:

* Having to delineate between news and opinion more clearly. Fox news is a high profile example, but many news sources do this. The inter mixing of news and opinion without clearly defining what is opinion, leads to the spread of opinion as truth.

* encouraging social media sites to require political ads be transparent of who funds them and make it clear to a viewer.

* require political ads to provide sources for their claims.

* Bring back some form of the fairness doctrine to prevent hyper partisan news.

Accountability to me means, there should be transparency to the consumer of news of where the content is coming from, differentiating news and opinion ,and providing them with the direct means to learn more.

A large part of the article is about how there's no easy paper trail for the lay person to verify their source.

I would like to take the emotion and deceit out of politics and news. Free speech is great, but it hasn't scaled well with the unfettered ability for deceit to be part of it. There should be solutions to provide more free speech while allowing people to curtail the inherent deceit that it also allows, by arming them with the mental tools to do so.

orangecat3• 6 years ago

This congregates power into the already powerful

As opposed to throwing people in prison for expressing incorrect views? Who do you think will be in charge of that process? Hint: not the powerless.

SpicyLemonZest3• 6 years ago

The article doesn't seem to propose any ideas that would result in people being thrown in prison for incorrect views.

dagmx9• 6 years ago

That's a bit of a reactionary straw man there.

Nobody said anything about prosecution for incorrect views. Neither I, nor the article, advocate for jail. Accountability can take many forms , none of them need to be dire. Many can just be tantamount to better transparency so we know who to hold accountable in the first place, and the requirement for posting sources in political ads for further reading.

ilaksh2• 6 years ago

massive increases in education resources

This is why China is the most advanced country in the world. They have entire camps set up for immersive education for people who talk about religious nonsense! How progressive!

dagmx9• 6 years ago

That's a straw man in bad faith.

Increasing education resources doesn't have to have an end goal of reeducation camps.

Education is woefully underfunded in America, especially rural America.

Starting with giving people access to the same level of education across the board is a good first step in increasing critical thinking.

Not everything has to be torn down into authoritarian versus a free for all. There are lots of shades of grey in between.

betwixthewires11• 6 years ago

"Free speech" cannot be held to account for anything, only people can be held to account for speaking. Accountability to whom?

Every "whom" has an interest. Any way for any entity to hold any other to any artificial consequence for saying anything at all will assuredly be perverted. This is why free speech is held as an absolutist value. Any compromise will inevitably lead to abuse. There can be no legitimate mechanism to enforce this. There can be no criteria required to say whatever you want or learn whatever you want. Anything less than everyone having the right to say anything for any reason is an unacceptable compromise. You as a free individual cannot allow the normalization of speech policing to occur. If you do so you will inevitably be victimized.

mrfusion• 6 years ago

Free speech is always a problem. But the problems of not having free speech are worse.

3gg• 6 years ago

Have you read the article? It's a lot more subtle than what can be captured by general statements like that.

defen5• 6 years ago

Somewhere along the way, the conservative majority has lost sight of an essential point: The purpose of free speech is to further democratic participation.

Is that actually true? It seems critical to her argument, but this statement was presented without much evidence (just a quote from a law professor) - but is that actually the purpose of the first amendment?

aeternum• 6 years ago

I disagree. I read it, and the article brings up the usual 'platforming' and fake-news arguments which are unconvincing. Benjamin Franklin himself published plenty of fake news, but the benefits have always and likely will always outweigh the risks.

rayiner7• 6 years ago

In the 2010 Citizens United decision, the court’s conservative majority opened the door to allowing corporations (and unions) to spend unlimited amounts on political advocacy, as long as they donated to interest groups and political-action committees rather than to campaigns.

Unsurprising to see Emily Bazelon deeply distort Citizens United. That case wasn’t about “unlimited money.” The entity that was prosecuted was a small 501(c)(4) non-profit (the same category as the NAACP or ACLU), who made a movie critical of Hilary Clinton too close to the election. The government’s lawyer admitted, that under the government’s theory of the first amendment, nothing would preclude the government from prosecuting a corporation that spent corporate treasury money to publish a book: https://www.ifs.org/blog/citizens-united-its-all-about-the-b....

In fact, had Citizens United gone the other way, the Trump administration would be able to tell Google and Twitter they can’t use corporate funds to moderate political content. There is a reason the ACLU was in the conservative side in that case.

That the media has for a decade created a Twilight-Zone reality to make the public believe that Citizens United was about money and not a political movie should call into question the article’s whole premise. Do you really trust these gatekeepers of “the Truth” to yield the government’s power to police speech?

tux1968• 6 years ago

That's the thing. The people railing against disinformation are responsible for as much of it as anyone else. They have no moral authority to put themselves in charge of the speech of everyone else. Their illiberal desire to be in control of others speech should be terrifying to anyone who cares about the future of western civilization. Many people are cheering for such control because they think it will only be applied to the "bad people", it's breathtakingly shortsighted.

kombucha111• 6 years ago

What was the outcome of Citizens United?

defen5• 6 years ago

The wikipedia summary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC) is pretty good. The government can't prohibit anyone (people, corporations, unions, etc) from making political speech, so long as it's not directed by the candidate. So I can't donate a billion dollars to a candidate's campaign, but I can run a billion dollars of ads supporting him (or against his opponent), so long as I don't receive direction/instruction from the candidate. Or, in this case, make and advertise a movie. The question you have to ask yourself is whether the alternative would be worse.

srean2• 6 years ago

A problem is the inherent asymmetry in the ease with which one can create a believable lie and the difficulty of ensuring that its refutation reaches everywhere the lie has reached.

You can easily tie up the fact checkers and refuters with what amounts to a denial of service attack.

Should one curtail free speech ? My opinion is no, but one needs to realize what we sign up for when we do that.

betwixthewires11• 6 years ago

What we sign up for is the burden and responsibility to educate ourselves and thoroughly, skeptically vet information ourselves. Interestingly, we have this burden anyway regardless, and censoring information only increases that burden and makes it more difficult to verify information.

srean2• 6 years ago

The 'educate myself' is not that hard, the much harder problem is to get the truth out to those who have already been sold on propaganda. Facts rarely make people change their mind. As they say, one can only lead a horse to the water.

acituan6• 6 years ago

Facts and transparency are the intended pillars of the modern First Amendment

I don’t think we can ascribe intentions that easily. Speech is also the way people process their emotions, clarify their thoughts, get into dialogue with other people and form a dialectic to discover the truth. If people can’t fight their with words, they will fight with their swords, because they will lose hope of integrating their world-view with others.

I am also bothered the word facts getting thrown out that easily. We are all exploring an infinite problem space with limited knowledge and processing power we have. This has 2 consequences a) no one can have the epistemological monopoly on truth and b) one could definitely deceive themselves and others with factual information that otherwise doesn’t give the complete picture.

Which means, there is no terminal place for reality, and we always need to be in the process of integrating new data, including the perspective of others.

Author bends over backwards to ultimately manufacture consent for censorship, but the problem has never been about misinformation. It is not even about the volume of content to sift true with new media. It is the new platforms themselves with their perverse incentinves.

When we read twitter, we think we are interacting with people. But just like fish not seeing the water, we don’t see the medium, and the fact that the largest entity we are interacting with is the AI that keeps curating the content we see for one and only goal: engagement.

Behind the curtains, the biggest applied psychology experiment is being run by the best paid PhDs of the world; your every interaction is processed through the lens of every single heuristic you have and their failure modes (fallacies, biases) are exploited in the name of engagement.

The result is of course we going crazy, because no one, not even the most self-disciplined stoic, can defend against prolonged exposure to this machine and preserve their rationality.

So to assume the answer to this madness is to restrict speech is not only futile but also harmful. It is empowering the filtering role these platforms play, and will definitely drive us crazier.

Instead I propose this solution; marketplace of ideas now has to incorporate the marketplace for AIs that curate those ideas to be complete. Make it mandatory for any sufficiently large content curator to have alternative recommendation engines users can pick from. Then watch people chosing ones that doesn’t make them enraged at the expense of engagement, that rewards curious, honest intellectual discourse, that doesn’t reward impulsivity etc.

Those recommendation engines are the hidden parties in our speech, constantly whispering “have you heard so and so said this” and carrying around the most enraging but engaging stuff, because it can make a few cents showing you ads everytime you let it speak. We need to make and pick ones that has the best interest of people in mind, not just shareholders’.

betwixthewires11• 6 years ago

Instead I propose this solution; marketplace of ideas now has to incorporate the marketplace for AIs that curate those ideas to be complete.

I don't know about this. Interesting proposal. I don't normally take a cynical view, but humans are emotional creatures, otherwise these dishonest mechanisms of generating engagement wouldn't work. In such a system it is likely that the most emotionally motivating algorithms would win.

Beyond that, why does one company need to make multiple algorithms? Why do we need a law to enforce this? Why don't we just have any company able to make any product they like and let people decide?

We have that now of course. And the problem I laid out with this is plainly obvious on the internet today. People are picking the algorithm that generates in them the most emotional reaction. But I suggest that these algorithms fail in the marketplace by a different mechanism: they inevitably lead to the state we are in now, where people become disillusioned with the control of information flow (and other problems associated with the curation algorithms), and people move to other websites with other algorithms.

In the past couple of years we have seen an explosion of alternatives, some echo chambers, some failed but genuine attempts, some sizeable competitors, some in the pipe. There is a large and fast growing diaspora from the big websites. Essentially what I'm saying is, what you want is happening now without any intervention, and everything is as it should be.

acituan6• 6 years ago

Beyond that, why does one company need to make multiple algorithms? Why do we need a law to enforce this?

I meant they are enforced to open their content for licensing.

The market we have today is for services that are actually a bundle of things; youtube is both a video infrastructure and a recommendation engine. Twitter is both an infrastructure for textual content, for a network of people and a recommendation engine based on both.

It is hard to say if they are chosen for their recommendation engines or their content/network. The latter is very prone for monopolistic dynamics, the former is being victims of that power law distribution in my opinion.

I don't want to be as engaged as possible with twitter, but twitter does. If the new "virtuous-recommendation-engine" promised they are not there for maximum money but maximum wellbeing and sensemaking of their users, I might switch to that, ask my relatives to switch to that, force my kids to switch to that.

015UUZn8aEvW• 6 years ago

It's ironic that Emily Bazelon, the author of this essay, is the granddaughter of the late influential federal judge David Bazelon. Judge Bazelon was a well-known progressive and a well-known free speech proponent. Although his granddaughter shares his broadly progressive worldview, her position on this issue is different.

The evolution from David to Emily reflects that of the US left as a whole. Most people like to praise free speech as a theory. In practice, it is a tool for those who don't occupy the commanding heights of a culture to push back against those who do. When the New Left was ascendant in the 1960s and 1970s, promotion of free speech was an important component of its rise to cultural power. Now that its intellectual descendants occupy the commanding heights, they view it as a threat rather than an asset.

zozbot2342• 6 years ago

In practice, it is a tool for those who don't occupy the commanding heights of a culture to push back against those who do.

And this is a good thing. The commanding heights of culture should be as contestable as possible; this is what makes for an open society.

montagg• 6 years ago

This quote from the article describes the dynamic in the US pretty accurately, in my opinion.

The conspiracy theories, the lies, the distortions, the overwhelming amount of information, the anger encoded in it — these all serve to create chaos and confusion and make people, even nonpartisans, exhausted, skeptical and cynical about politics. The spewing of falsehoods isn’t meant to win any battle of ideas. Its goal is to prevent the actual battle from being fought, by causing us to simply give up.

If that’s what awaits the future “heights of culture,” if that’s how you think people will ultimately get influence in the future, I don’t think there will be much of a culture left to have lofty opinions about freedom or speech.

lilsoso• 6 years ago

The commenter you are quoting is praising free speech. Yes, it is a good thing.

To belabor the point, what's ironic is that in the 1990s it was the right, 'the religious right', that wanted to censor free speech -- such as the speech of rap artists. Now it is the left that attacks free speech and wants to censor rap artists.

Previously it was the church that wanted to censor free speech. Now it is progressives, who 'f------ love science', who want to censor uncomfortable scientific results.

Somehow the teams, and costumes, changed.

jbirer• 6 years ago

This is very similar to Mao imprisoning people for "threatening the revolution". The revolution is good when it serves them but not when it threatens their hold on power. They now want to ban free speech because it is against their power interests.

crazygringo3• 6 years ago

In practice, it is a tool for those who don't occupy the commanding heights of a culture to push back against those who do.

But isn't the article arguing the exact opposite?

It warns that those in power now use the shield of "free speech" to push propaganda and lies in order to undermine truth and democracy and thereby attempt to preserve power. Which is not something anyone saw coming, and which deserves to be treated as a serious danger.

This is completely and utterly different from using free speech to promote civil rights, transparency, etc. The New Left wasn't weaponizing free speech to spread disinformation, so the two situations would appear to be completely distinct.

acituan6• 6 years ago

It warns that those in power now use the shield of "free speech" to push propaganda and lies in order to undermine truth and democracy and thereby attempt to preserve power.

Except with new media no one can really push information, it is mostly up to the recommendation algorithms to propagate the messages, which is optimized for creating more engagement and ad dollars. This, singlehandedly damages more of democratic processes, which depend on healthy discourse, than any questionable content put into it.

now use the shield of "free speech" to push propaganda and lies in order to undermine truth

Is there a form of free speech, contents of which you disagree that doesn’t push propaganda or undermine some definition of your truth? In other words, in this version of narrative warfare, every opponent narrative is already “propaganda”, every disagreement is “destroying democracy”.

Except truth is hardly an out there objectivity to which propgandic words magically render our eyes blind. It is a process of dialectic; disagreements that can be integrated together and form a more comprehensive picture of our musings in an infinite problem space.

It is the false sense of certainty, including utopian ideas of its attainability with likes of “fact checks” and judicious restriction of speech that destroy this process, and with it any hope of integrating opposing worldviews without wanting to hurt those who hold them.

amadeuspagel2• 6 years ago

I don't know what to make of the idea of the powerless censoring the powerful to protect truth and democracy. If you can censor your opponents, you are per definition powerful. If you are worried about your opponents use of the "shield of free speech" to protect themselves from you, you are worried about limits on your power.

Wowfunhappy10• 6 years ago

One thing that occurred to me while I listening to this article last night: I would not mind laws which restrict obvious and provable lies, in circumstances where the individual knew they were lying. You would need to adopt an extremely high standard for prosecution, similar to libel—no suing someone for being wrong, or having a strange belief, or saying something that's misleading but has a shred of truth.

But, I don't think it's good for society that I can create a fake website purporting to be a way to vote online, and send it to members of an opposing political party to suppress their vote. If I know that I'm lying, there should be laws against that.

If we don't do anything, our problems are going to get so much worse as deep fakes improve and doctored footage becomes indistinguishable from reality.

SamReidHughes2• 6 years ago

The fact is, people reading only the New York Times, HuffPo, CNN, etcetera, are completely engulfed in a disinformation environment. They're basically abuse victims.

pdonis8• 6 years ago

The New Left wasn't weaponizing free speech to spread disinformation

Yes, they were. They were advocating a way of organizing society that had already killed tens of millions of people and would go on to kill tens of millions more. And they were relying on their audience not being aware of the death toll.

refurb4• 6 years ago

The only way that argument makes sense is if one views their own political in-group as being the arbiters of true - never wrong, never taking the wrong side, never abusing power. If history has shown us anything it's that humans with power are really bad at those things.

What comes across as so hypocritical is that the people calling for restrictions on free speech were the same ones who benefitted from free speech in the past as they sought to push back against the establishment.

pessimizer• 6 years ago

No part of the 60s New Left occupies the commanding heights outside of a few Ramparts Magazine born-again Catholic neocons. This is a fantasy of right-wingers who try to roll the US black civil rights struggle and working-class socialism into a big ball of University Judeo-Bolshevism.

edit: That gay people, black people, and women have to be considered now is not left-wing politics, which are about class. That people other than white men have a voice is a rational, liberal outgrowth of the civil rights movement. Other than that, mainstream politics moved aggressively to the right until the bottom fell out of the capitalist utopian theory in 2008.

refurb4• 6 years ago

Matt Taibbi writes about this a lot. Free speech used to be a cornerstone of liberal/progressive values. In only 50 short years that's been abandoned to prevent the "fomenting of discord".

DenisM• 6 years ago

I came here to express the same sentiment, but you did it first and you did it better. Thank you.

defen5• 6 years ago

I kinda disagree with her characterization of the whole "coup attempt" thing, which she presents as "totally fabricated", "without evidence", etc. Which is true - some people sitting in a room wargaming isn't a coup or a plot to take over the country in and of itself. It's not a crime to do that. But the steelman "extremist" (her word) argument is that the publication of the WaPo essay (and Hillary Clinton saying Biden "should not concede under any circumstances", and this essay itself, etc) represents the elite using free speech to establish a Schelling point, or common knowledge, of how to dispute the election. By now anyone with any political awareness knows, and knows that anyone-with-any-political-awareness knows, that the election results won't be known for weeks or months after the election. And that mail-in ballots are going to decide the election. And that Trump is suppressing votes. It's a kind of manufacturing of consent for the intellectual elite who hate Trump. But to them this sort of thing is totally invisible - that kind of speech is good and important for democracy, because it establishes a collective template for coordination-free cooperation to ensure Trump is not reelected. It's the other kind of speech that is bad.

gnicholas• 6 years ago

I can see why a writer for the NYT would find it palatable to call for limitations on free speech, since her speech would not end up being censored.

throwaway573925• 6 years ago

The legal concept of "free speech" originally meant "speak truth to power".

Highlight on truth and power.

Now it's being co-opted to allow for propaganda, disinformation and even far-right apologists.

betwixthewires11• 6 years ago

No. Not even a little. You cannot highlight your baseless premise and make it more true.

Free speech means and has always meant "to say whatever you want and for whatever reason."

mythrwy2• 6 years ago

And far left apologists too!

(this is a pretty clear example of exactly why we need free speech)

Tycho2• 6 years ago

Why do we need the term “disinformation?” Deeply suspicious of this word. Seems to let politicians ignore allegations without having to declare them as false.

kthejoker22• 6 years ago

It also includes things which are technically true but lack context, or aren't relevant to the policies or decisions we want.

"George Floyd was a drug using criminal" is true, and therefore becomes a talking point in conservative circles to justify the police brutality he suffered, even though it's irrelevant to why others are upset at his treatment.

I think it's a more useful framework because half truths are way more dangerous than outright lies.

Tycho2• 6 years ago

I don’t agree with your perspective about relevance. Details are an important part of journalism. You might not find some detail salient along some particular line of argument, but I still want to know.

leftyted• 6 years ago

This is another "we have to kill free speech to save it" spiel. I don't find these arguments convincing and the use of Hannah Arendt is particularly egregious. Hannah Arendt was not (and never claimed to be) a philosopher. She was a political theorist who tried, in her own words, to "look at politics with eyes unclouded by philosophy".

Looking back at the rise of fascism and the Holocaust in her 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt focused on the use of propaganda to “make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism.”

The author uses this quote to stand for "in other words, good ideas do not necessarily triumph in the marketplace of ideas". But that's not at all what Arendt was saying. She believed that, in the end, the truth will come out:

Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle. This is one of the lessons that could be learned from the totalitarian experiments and the totalitarian rulers' frightening confidence in the power of lying--in their ability, for instance, to rewrite history again and again to adapt the past to the "political line" of the present moment or to eliminate data that did not fit their ideology. Thus, in a socialist economy, they would deny that unemployment existed, the unemployed person simply becoming a non-person
The result of such experiments when undertaken by those in possession of the means of violence are terrible enough, but lasting deception is not among them.

The power required to eradicate the truth, she writes, "would amount to omnipotence". Hitler, Stalin, and other totalitarian leaders undermined their own governments in their attempt to destroy the truth and rule through terror. For Arendt, all political power flows from consensus. She believed, contrary to Mao's quip about "political power growing from the barrel of a gun," that violence and coercion cannot create political power but can only undermine it.

That sounds optimistic to me. By encouraging the citizenry to simultaneously believe everything and nothing, these regimes undermined themselves.

The article sees strong defense of free speech as naivete:

It’s a fundamentally optimistic vision: Good ideas win. The better argument will prove persuasive.

I don't agree with this interpretation of modern liberalism. The modern liberal position on free speech is not optimistic, it's resigned. The argument is not "everything that rises must converge" but, rather, we are stupid, limited beings, so what right have we to interfere with other stupid, limited beings? This position amounts to a recognition of the limitations of human rationality, not a celebration of it.

It has been personally sad to me to witness the left turning on free speech. When I was a kid, it was the lefties who defended free speech. It was Chomsky who said "with regard to freedom of speech there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it and prefer Stalinist/fascist standards". Now that I'm a little older, I realize that, mostly, people just defend free speech when they stand to benefit from it (i.e. when they aren't in the position to censor).

These days the left has a lot of cultural power and many on the left are bowing to the temptation to use that power to censor the opposition.

abecedarius6• 6 years ago

Sad to see this excellent comment so far down in the list. It's making me want to read some Arendt.

ironman14783• 6 years ago

I really hope people take this article seriously and not just knee jerk react to the idea that unobstructed free speech is totally perfect. The idea that there should be no consequences for spewing vitriol and using lies to back it up is insane. It's been demonstrated time and time again that people can't fact check every single statement and this fact is used by malicious actors to manipulate people to their ends.

Its also really strange because for every other system we have, we accept legislatively enforced boundaries. There are constraints around the manufacturing of drugs, food products, vehicles, etc. We have regulations around pollution.

Even for abstract ideas, we socially agree on norms. Nobody would think it's acceptable to just called somebody the n word (or some other derogatory word) in the work place. Healthy companies tend to get rid of 'brilliant jerks' who yell or bully other employees, despite their technical competence. Why? Because we understand that this attitude creates a corrosive environment that is fundamentally not beneficial for the good of the group. We even understand this in personal relationships. We break up with people who lie to us and manipulate us.

humanrebar2• 6 years ago

The idea that there should be no consequences for spewing vitriol and using lies to back it up is insane.

Is that what we have? Michael Richards seems to have seen consequences for vitriol. Tom Brokaw literally lost money due to broadcasting gross speculation.

Maybe those sorts of things should be more common?

ironman14783• 6 years ago

Sure, those are examples, however what about people like rush limbaugh? Michael richards should be in trouble for what he did and he suffered the consequences, but somebody like rush limbaugh has an active listener base where he essentially lies about every group under the sun and there are no consequences. Here is his Wikipedia page which lists all his views, many of which are just abhorrent and factually incorrect (he doesn't belief that we damaged the ozone layer, this is a non political example) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh

We also elected a president who spread birtherism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_con...

And there was the pedophile ring pizzeria conspiracy theories floating around a few years ago that had real consequences not just for the politicians implicated but the pizzeria owner themselves https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory

It doesn't seem like there were consequences for any of these the people who spread lies (in pizzagate people were arrested, but not the spreaders of the rumors).

Imo, we should be intolerant of the intolerant as they say. I have nothing against obscene language, pornographic ideas, dark humor, etc. But speech has influence and the second speech is used to infringe on the rights of people, it should really be stamped out.

slothtrop• 6 years ago

There are already consequences to vitriol and lies which are not contingent on revoking free speech.

umvi• 6 years ago

How do you arbitrate truth? What if someone starts spreading the idea that gravity does not exist and that the reason you are stuck to the earth is that the ground is accelerating upward towards you at 9.8 m/s^2?

Who gets to decide whether lies or truth is being spread here? I don't think anyone is qualified to make that call.

Andrew_nenakhov8• 6 years ago

I come from a country where a free speech was never really a thing, and I tell you, americans, this: you don't value it enough.

Restrictions on free speech inevitably lead to some form of censorship, and any form of censorship inevitably leads to the population being subjected to some 'official' version of 'truth'. This 'truth', however, is carefully curated to coerce the population to act in a certain way.

So when Twitter or Facebook start 'fact checking' posts, you shouldn't say 'Twitter is a private company, 1st amendment doesn't apply to it', you should grab pitchforks and put their censorship efforts to rest.

remarkEon2• 6 years ago

I find it very interesting (but understandable) that tech people, obsessed with data and informed decision-making, are essentially stating that "this time will be different" when arguing for speech restrictions. Despite all the decades of history of these sorts of things going sideways, somehow we're still optimistic that this time we'll get it right.

cycloptic2• 6 years ago

I find all the pearl-clutching on HN about "free speech" to be rather boring when these have always been heavily moderated platforms run by for-profit businesses that have always given special treatment to whatever advertisers were willing to pay the most. Nobody bats an eye when they're the ones profiting off of it.

I'm sorry if that's dismissive but it's extremely frustrating hearing these kinds of things in the context of social media companies, who have never had a problem with advertisers milking FOMO and gaslighting their entire audience with this stuff for years now. (you are inadequate if you don't buy this product, you are a loser if you don't share this article right now, you are an enemy of the state if you don't vote for this candidate, etc) And actually they love all that because it drives clicks!

The uncomfortable situation they find themselves in now is: At what point is the line drawn, where companies and special interests with millions to spend on ads can no longer lie and gaslight the public? It seems to have been easier for these companies to be the ones to dismiss this when the stakes weren't as high.

jariel4• 6 years ago

There are speech controls everywhere except on your own private website.

The MSM press, despite being narrative driven has tons of controls, they hold each other accountable in ways, they generally stay in the domain of facts.

Social Media has always been censored, if you try to attack people or incite violence on Twitter, you'd get banned 10 years ago, nothing new about that.

YouTube has been dropping channels for a long time now, mostly anything that upsets advertisers etc..

The issue isn't so much 'Free Speech' or 'Censorship' in the classical sense - it would be if web sites were being taken down, or, if the White House for example forbade MSM to talk about certain issues, or worse, took control over MSM outlets.

It's more subtle than that.

Aunche• 6 years ago

Well too much free speech on Facebook allegedly caused the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. Either that free speech sensationalized the role of Facebook in the genocide to the point where Facebook doesn't have free speech.

Wowfunhappy10• 6 years ago

I came into the article expecting to hate it, but the author eventually kind of won me over. She doesn't think Americans should abandon free speech, but she does think we should approach it more like Germany and France.

Germany and France have laws that are designed to prevent the widespread dissemination of hate speech and election-related disinformation. “Much of the recent authoritarian experience in Europe arose out of democracy itself,” explains Miguel Poiares Maduro [...] “The Nazis and others were originally elected. In Europe, there is historically an understanding that democracy needs to protect itself from anti-democratic ideas.”

Andrew_nenakhov8• 6 years ago

Guess what are two most frequent reason for site blocking and prosecution of dissidents in Russia? Articles 280 (Calls to extremism), 282 (actions aimed at inciting hatred or enmity, humiliation of human dignity).

So you say on VK (one of russian social networks), "Corrupt mayor from the ruling party is a crook and must be prosecuted"... well, you are inciting hatred to the ruling party. With luck you'll get 2 years of suspended sentence.

dkdk8283• 6 years ago

I support so called hate speech. This narrative is abused to censor and support extreme views which are just as damaging as their so called mission to quell so called extremists.

easterncalculus• 6 years ago

Germany and France don't have free speech. If there's speech that you receive legal action for then it isn't free.

Zpalmtree2• 6 years ago

We promise, we're only going to ban """"hate speech""""!

Oh wait, who decides what "hate speech" is?

MeinBlutIstBlau3• 6 years ago

Is a thought a crime though?

sershe2• 6 years ago

Well, as long as we recognize marxism as morally equivalent to nazism and, while suppressing the openly far-right movements/publications/elected politicians, suppress the openly far-left ones.

...just kidding, I am a free speech absolutist. I feel like the leftist sudden dislike on free speech is similar to that of trumpist dislike of the media in 2015. They know that they are extremist, and they know they are wrong.

l33tbro• 6 years ago

Artists in the soviet era had to employ all kinds of allegories and humor to communicate their experience without being reprimanded by KGB censors. I'll take free speech over assigning any group the power to arbitrate what is considered "disinformation".

Andrew_nenakhov8• 6 years ago

Exactly. So every time I see news of twitter/fb 'fact-checking', it reeks to me with a far too familiar KGB / STASI odor.

Going down this path will not end well.

Animats4• 6 years ago

It's worth listening to the people from censorship-heavy countries. The US is better off for not having censorship. Free speech is messy. But it beats the alternative.

It's useful to read what the extremists have to say, if you read the extremists from both sides. You can still read Dabiq, ISIL's magazine, online. (That may have backfired. Their position was, it's a war to the death between our Islam and everybody else. The opposition agreed and crushed them.) It's worth reading what the gun rights people have to say. (Do not carry with a round in the chamber is good advice.) What the "defund the cops" people have to say. What the cop-rights people have to say. What QAnon has to say. What the "FEMA Death Train" people have to say. (Those big windowless railroad cars are car carriers. One believer followed one and put a video on Youtube, and was dismayed when it reached an unloading point and new cars came out.) What the "FEMA coffins" people were excited about. (That was a private storage yard for grave liners. Turned out FEMA doesn't stock coffins, just body bags, and not enough of them for the peak of the coronavirus epidemic.)

Within those extreme points you find the BLM people (who have had it with being shot and harassed), the white supremacists (who are mostly working-class guys who saw their way of life evaporate), the evangelicals (who right now are rudderless, having latched onto Trump, who represents their fears but not their values), and the Universal Basic Income people (that used to be called the "dole" in the UK). All have legitimate grievances. Within that perimeter lies reality. Those people are exploitable by politicians who don't have good solutions but can direct their anger.

That goes back a very long way. Read Shakespeare's version of Caesar's funeral oration.

monoideism• 6 years ago

Universal Basic Income people (that used to be called the "dole" in the UK)

I'm much more ambivalent than I used to be about UBI, after seeing what large groups of sequestered, out-of-work, bored, and angry people are capable of doing, but just to clarify, UBI is not the same as the dole. The dole is only given to people who are unemployed, whereas UBI is given to everyone.

0x6862• 6 years ago

I think the downvotes are about your assessments on some of these issues.

But you’re absolutely right in that only by reading these varied sources can you approximately discern what’s really going on. Reading bs trains your bs detector. Only read bs and you won’t be able to distinguish it from reality

burlesona• 6 years ago

I agree with you that it’s worthwhile to read what everyone has to say.

One problem is that Facebook and Twitter, not to mention the NYT and the rest of the media, are not that.

Social media places you in a filter bubble, and whatever you click on first shapes everything you’ll see forever, such that your entire worldview is shifted.

The media does essentially the same thing, tailoring it’s articles to match a particular target audience and then feeding them more and more of what they want to hear.

I don’t really know how we break out of this, but I think some level of decentralization - breaking up the social media networks so none of them have more reach than say, CNN, would be a good start.

jariel4• 6 years ago

The comparison is difficult.

Putin, Xi etc. have heavy-handed controls over state media and Xi of course total control over social media. The US is not 'headed in this direction'.

'Free Speech' is the wrong banner for this discussion, as no-one's speech is threatened here - everyone is essentially free to say as they please publicly, and on their own web sites.

The Press is 'free' to say what they want, which includes a ton of bias, but that is what it is.

'Social Media' is a very new thing - it turns out it can be extensively influential and 'memes' from out of nowhere can grab narratives like dogs chasing each other through a crowd.

FB and Twitter are private platforms, concerned with content unlike AT&T, Amazon, email or network providers who are fully neutral - and Social Media has always been censoring content: if you attack individuals or threaten violence etc. you would have been banned 10 years ago.

The algorithms have always been favouring one thing or another using any variety of criteria, so the very nuanced question boils down to the nature of 'truthiness', the degree to which it can be assessed, and how much it can be used for algorithmic purpose - and especially, how could it be done 'fairly'.

I wonder if there are truly objective methods whereby people only ever see posts if they are shared directly by friends, thereby implying a more 'direct' model, like email, whereby if one party wants to chose with a specific, other party, well there's nary anything anyone should censor there.

Alternatively, one could contemplate anything with any political content whatsoever, to be in fact, political, and to be managed in accordance with the same rules for political spending etc. - but that might be altogether too much.

I honestly don't think that this is an existential question to the point wherein industries need to be disrupted or transformed, we are probably 'somewhere near' reasonable at this point, with some modifications we may have a system we can live with.

Finally - it should be noted that 'free expression' doesn't in any way imply 'fair expression' - like a free market, it can be leveraged and dominated by a few small voices who want to 'take control'. There's no reason that a few smart minds couldn't establish control over the narrative whereupon we'd have to ask ourselves if that's what is remotely good for society. As much as we sometimes loathe the press today, there are a lot of checks and balances, along with 'narrative driven news' the MSM are beholden to mostly facts, there's quite a lot of integrity in that system. A 'free for all' wouldn't have any such controls and any kind of real truth could be lost.

Perhaps the best solution would be to just stop using social media as we do. I did, and don't miss it at all.

datschmo• 6 years ago

Coming from a country where free speech "was never really a thing" implies that your government either stops you from conveying X, retaliates, or is unwilling to protect you from another entity doing the same.

I find it strange that anyone in that situation would equate it with social media sites removing or flagging content published on their platform.

nradov4• 6 years ago

It was particularly bizarre when Facebook anointed Snopes as an official fact checker, and then Snopes proceeded to "fact check" posts by the Babylon Bee as "fake news". (The Babylon Bee is a humor web site and clearly labeled as such.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Babylon_Bee

shadowgovt3• 6 years ago

Not clearly enough. Multiple people (including the President) have been tripped up by Bee "news."

chipotle_coyote• 6 years ago

News stories from satire sites routinely get shared across social media with little context and, very importantly, without anyone clicking on them to check out the source. It may seem absurd to "fact check" them, but it really isn't, particularly ones that aren't very well-known to a wide audience -- which essentially means "anything but the Onion and even they get quoted straight-faced on occasion".

toast03• 6 years ago

Babylon Bee and The Onion are exactly fake news. It's humor and satire and looks like news but isn't. What else would you call it?

Somehow fake news started also being applied to news that was sourced and thought to be true when reported, but turned out to be wrong when new informatiom became available. And also, for some people, any news that disagrees with your opinions.

cortesoft3• 6 years ago

Can't I believe both things? I believe that Free Speech is one of the most important rights we have, but I also believe that people utilize their free speech to mislead and do harm.

While it would be nice to believe that "the solution is simple more free speech", and that the truth will win out in the end, is not fully backed up by the evidence. Lies can be carefully crafted to exploit the way human brains work, to mislead people into believing them... the truth is limited, because it has to be true.

So what do we do? I am not able to read the article, but it sounds like they are arguing for some limits on free speech. I share the concerns that people on here, like yourself, have about that. So what techniques can we use to stop misinformation that don't rely on limiting free speech? We can't just sit back and hope the truth will come through, we have too many examples in history to know that doesn't always happen.

If we just sit back and wait for the truth to win out, we might end up in a world where the people using free speech to mislead grab enough power to stop people from using the truth to fight their misinformation.

mdale• 6 years ago

I think this sums up our predicament: "Lies can be carefully crafted to exploit the way human brains work, to mislead people into believing them... the truth is limited, because it has to be true."

dcolkitt• 6 years ago

Lies can be carefully crafted to exploit the way human brains work,

Well, sure. But the problem is the censors are also human. If crafty lies can deceive the average person, why do we believe that the authorities are any less immune?

I feel like so many times anti-libertarian arguments follow this formula. "Regular people keep making this mistake. So let's just have the government, helpfully stop them from making the mistake. Except of wait... the government is also made up of people who make mistakes." In other words, who watches the watchmen?

Even in a world filled with crafty lies, open speech is the obvious solution. It's much harder to deceive 300 million people than it is to deceive a small agency responsible for "arbitrating truth". Yeah, a lot of people will still screw up and get the wrong answer.

But when millions have access to open information, it's virtually guaranteed that at least some non-neglible subset will figure out the truth. A world with centrally managed opinion is not very robust, and likely to see truths die out completely.

erichocean• 6 years ago

people utilize their free speech to mislead and do harm

Trust the government, comrades, and fear the people! It's the people that mislead and do harm.

Seems legit.

hilife89• 6 years ago

Or just stop using their services? I like that we've just sort of accepted that Facebook and Twitter are trans-government institution level monopolies and that there's nothing we can do about it, or have better alternatives. There's no mandatory reason to have a twitter or facebook, there's plenty of ways you can connect with someone. And I'd happily trade online messaging for personal communication especially if I'm concerned about censorship and privacy rights from that institution.

juniper_strong• 6 years ago

Right on.

afurculita2• 6 years ago

This is like saying: I come from a country where free market was never a real thing and you should oppose even the slightest regulation, anti-trust laws etc.

dkobia• 6 years ago

I too grew up without free speech in a dictatorship and believe fervently in free speech. However I believe too that dictating to a company what speech they can have or can't have on their platform is a violation of free speech in itself. It is their right to disagree with someone's opinion and to deny them access to their platform. If we disagree with that action we punish with our eyeballs, or our wallets or we build our own.

That these platforms are so huge is a problem for sure but doesn't automatically classify them as institutions owned by the public. There are other ways to deal with companies that get too big.

sleepysysadmin• 6 years ago

We used to have free speech in the 1960s in Canada but we removed this. We created an opening to start policing speech.

Why are Canadian's so polite? Because you can go to prison for up to 2 years though more often than not it's just compensation. AKA "including compensation for injury to dignity, feelings and self-respect"

Hurting someone's feelings will send you to a non-judicial court where you do not have innocent until proven guilty. You must prove you didn't do it. Though it seems literally the only way to not be charged is to threaten taking it to the supreme court.

Worse yet, it has also created the 'you're a racist' thing. In order to silence your political opponents out of fear of being brought up on these charges. You get called a racist.

In BC they even teach kids in school to be right-wing is to be a racist: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/racism-a-right-wing-value-b-c-...

Then you can see why no right-wing parties are represented in their elections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_British_Columbia_general_...

throwaway133372• 6 years ago

Society is misdiagnosing the issue here.

It's not unchecked free speech. Instead, it's unchecked curation by media and social media companies with the goal of engagement.

As long as media companies get the most benefit from people engaging with content, they will continue to promote information that is damaging to society. It may even be true information but when the goal is engagement, it's purpose will be to enrage and divide because that's what's engaging.

Limiting speech will not cause this issue to go away. It's bigger than just misinformation. The core issue is the underlying system that values engagement over all things. That is, the advertising system.

Companies that make their money selling ads while providing content to engage have a perverse incentive to make society worse. This is the bad seed that needs removal.

This business model should be illegal. It's already trivially unethical.

gatvol• 6 years ago

I think you have the core of the issue here.

kurthr• 6 years ago

I take your meaning as, what we see on social media is not Free Speech, it is advertising subsidized Commercially Promoted Speech. That also means that preventing the promoted distribution is not limiting Free Speech (although as a private business they could do that with some liability as well).

Basically, the people complaining that their speech is being blocked were allowed to select the terms for debate based on their chosen meanings. Maybe the meaning of Free Speech as standing on a box in the town square needs to be taken back... but the Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech so it seems like that boat has sailed (for commercial and political reasons).

Wowfunhappy10• 6 years ago

Netflix doesn't sell ads (and doesn't rely on user-generated content, so they can't really threaten democracy), but if you read interviews with executives, they also seem to be optimizing for maximum time spent on the service.

Apple, too, reportedly told developers it's increasingly looking for Apple Arcade games that will "keep users hooked" over a long period. [1]

Consequently, I'm not convinced removing ad-supported media will fix the problem of companies optimizing for engagement at all costs. Humans are stupid, and so we're more willing to pay for services where we spend lots of time, irrespective of the quality of that time.

---

1: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/30/apple-arcade-game-strat...

zapita3• 6 years ago

The difference is that TV shows and video games are clearly entertainment, so you know what to expect. It’s possible for a fictional TV show or video game to manipulate you, but it’s harder because you know what you’re experiencing isn’t real.

Social media is more dangerous because it can warp your perception of reality: what is happening in the world, what people think and care about in your neighborhood and your country; what is a scientific fact and what is up for debate; which politician is trustworthy and which isn’t. There is no boundary to what aspect of your life Facebook or Google can manipulate. With an ad business model, they are incentivized to expand the scope of manipulation further and further, since their ability to influence you is literally what they sell.

jimkleiber• 6 years ago

I think the underlying challenge here might be that the most "successful" businesses often make us the most addicted. I'm curious how many of the very large companies, if any, don't rely on a business model of (borderline) addiction to their products.

arvinsim• 6 years ago

The quote "If you do not pay, you are the product" implied that if you pay, you are not the product. That is, a profile won't be built around you to be tracked and manipulated.

Today it's more like "You are the product, whether you pay or not".

Nasrudith3• 6 years ago

A coup is a threat to democracy, election rigging, or coercing others to vote or barring them from doing so.

Ads and propaganda aren't - it is absurd that this hyperbole is so blindly accepted.

tshaddox• 6 years ago

I agree with your diagnosis, but perhaps not your treatment plan. You seem to think that making the social networks’ business model illegal would not be a violation of free speech, but that the social networks limiting distribution of misinformation would be a violation of free speech. Am I interpreting you correctly?

strawberrypuree2• 6 years ago

No lucid assessment of “free speech” entertains a definition that includes “the use of machine learning to target messages to individuals in order to make money.” In the same way me sitting outside your house watching when you come and go to determine the best time to place a political flier on your door so you’ll see it when I want you to, surveillance capitalism it not free speech.

desipis• 6 years ago

The core issue is the underlying system that values engagement over all things ... the advertising system.

I don't think you're digging deep enough here. It's not the business model. It's the technology.

We've invented technology that can, to a significant degree, control people. It is as addictive as hard drugs and people will just keep coming back to their dealer for more and more digital crack.

But it's worse than simply heroin or crack cocaine. It gives the dealers not just the power to keep people coming back for more, but also gives them far, far more control over not just what those people do, but what those people think.

The large companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc) aren't in the business of search or social media. Nor are they in the business of advertisement. Their business model is selling complete control over people at the population level. At some point it will stop being a business model and start being a self sustaining model of raw power that strips us of our humanity.

We need to take a hard stance to all attempts at psychological manipulation via technology. A/B testing to see how changes affect behaviour should be seen as morally repugnant as selling crack cocaine to children.

pdonis8• 6 years ago

I don't think you're digging deep enough here. It's not the business model. It's the technology.

I don't think you're digging deep enough here. It's not the technology. It's the people. Meaning not just the people running companies, but all of us.

Technology is a tool. Any tool can be used for nefarious purposes, or for beneficial purposes. Which kind it gets used for depends on the people who use it, and on the people who are creating the environment in which the people using the tools operate.

I don't dispute that most of the people who are running large companies (not even limited to social media companies) are amoral and will do anything to make more money, including manipulating other people's thoughts and opinions. But such people can only thrive in an environment where there are lots of other people who are susceptible to their manipulation. There will always be nefarious people in the world. But there is no rule that says there have to be enough other people who are susceptible to them to enable them to thrive.

I don't disagree that people who make money through lies and manipulation should be punished. But I think we all need to take a step back and ask why such people are able to thrive in our society to this extent. At some point the rest of society needs to take some responsibility for not being susceptible to liars and crooks.

Nasrudith3• 6 years ago

Their business model is selling complete control over people at the population level. At some point it will stop being a business model and start being a self sustaining model of raw power that strips us of our humanity.

Calling it "complete control" is absurd hyperbole ans ignores that psychological manipulation isn't even remotely new. In fact the goddamned politicians implicitly called upon to ban this are psychological manipulators already. So were televangalists, every theocrat and strongman who suppressed dissent enough that his victims were stockholmed.

It cannot strip us of humanity - although it would be a good thing if it could because "humanity" in that context is a collection of bugs exploited for evil.

pdonis8• 6 years ago

Companies that make their money selling ads

Which includes...the New York Times. And all other media companies.

This business model should be illegal. It's already trivially unethical.

By this criterion, pretty much all newspapers that have ever existed should be illegal. Also pretty much all TV channels. If this is a problem, it's been a problem since long before Facebook and Twitter.

thesagan• 6 years ago

It's a problem. Been one since the Spanish-American war.

Some of the biggest source of advertising revenues for news media organizations comes from defense companies. The New York Times pushed for the Iraq war, for example. They fired journalists who reported dovish news, too. Many others left to report as freelancers so they could paint more accurate pictures in smaller publications.

Similarly, MSNBC will bring on ex-Pentagon officials to "analyze" current events, but they don't bring in ex-State Department officials. There are likely patterns and incentives here. "Follow the money" as they like to say.

glial• 6 years ago

Yeah, there’s a terrible conflict of interest between informing the public and selling advertising. There has been for a long time. It’s just worse now. We should figure out how to fix it rather than throw up our hands.

josquindesprez3• 6 years ago

I'd honestly have a hard time making a case that Fox News is less net bad for society than Facebook as of today. But Fox News feels like the "end-stage" version of whatever you'd call that particular flavor of classic corruption and human-brain-hijacking, whereas Facebook has been visibly improving its algorithmic behavior control abilities, has already invented new flavors of human-brain-hijacking, and seems to be getting better and better at making us worse every day.

We've learned how to handle the old style of human-brain-hijacking. Those lessons were written in blood and war. Facebook has few parallels, only distant rumblings of far worse lessons to be learned.

throwaway133372• 6 years ago

Absolutely.

Media - especially news media - wherein the product is advertising has always had a perverse incentive structure to stir up society to get more eyeballs. Key in this is the insight that what keeps humans engaged most is angry righteousness and tribalism.

The difference is that media never had the tools that are now available to track, optimize for engagement, and also amplify that engagement with immediate social sharing.

With this toolbox, we've created something that can cause society to destroy itself - the stakes are really that high. It's not the intention of the media companies but it is the result.

Nothing in this world scares me more than particularly our tools created by first social media companies in their compacity to destroy civilization.

mths• 6 years ago

Not to speak for GP, but I think what he's getting at is that the application of AI in this business model in order to drive engagement (for the purpose of selling ads) should be illegal. Or more generally, we need regulation around AI.

kgwxd• 6 years ago

Newspapers and TV channels are curated and the means to being a publisher or advertiser on those platforms is extremely limited compared to what the internet allows. When everyone on the planet is an unchecked publisher and/or advertiser, the problem is clearly much worse.

hnaa• 6 years ago

The problem is that moderation doesn't scale. Newspapers, TV, radio, film all evolved to have or to conform to some kind of standards and practices department, which played well with advertiser needs. The issue with contemporary media companies is that it's not practical to do that at Internet scale -- see all of the routine stories about moderation teams at Facebook, for instance.

echelon• 6 years ago

> Companies that make their money selling ads
Which includes...the New York Times. And all other media companies.

Netflix?

It doesn't have to be so. But you have to pay for the product.

CinchWrench• 6 years ago

You nailed this.

What all of these pearl-clutching arguments amount to is former gatekeepers kvetching about there no longer being a gate for them to keep.

The information dissemination landscape is evolving, and we are only being held back by those too cowardly to let go of their control and let us grow and ascend.

jseliger• 6 years ago

It's not unchecked free speech. Instead, it's unchecked curation by media and social media companies with the goal of engagement.

Try teaching non-elite undergrads sometime, and particularly assignments that require some sense of epistemology, and you'll discover that the vast majority of people have pretty poor personal epistemic hygiene—it's not much required in most people, most of the time, in most jobs.

We evolved to form tribes, not to be "right." Jonathan's Haidt's The Righteous Mind deals with this topic well. https://jakeseliger.com/2012/03/25/jonathan-haidts-the-right...

trophycase• 6 years ago

This, I keep saying this. It's not a question of truth, it was never really a question of truth. It's about who is saying what.

Hammershaft• 6 years ago

Are undergrads from elite universities any different from your experience?

petermcneeley• 6 years ago

I think some concrete examples would be nice.

webmaven• 6 years ago

Try teaching non-elite undergrads sometime, and particularly assignments that require some sense of epistemology, and you'll discover that the vast majority of people have pretty poor personal epistemic hygiene—it's not much required in most people, most of the time, in most jobs.

I'm not sure what you mean by "non-elite undergrads" here.

Is it "undergrads from non-elite universities", or "undergrads from non-elite backgrounds", "B-student undergrads", or perhaps something else?

specialist2• 6 years ago

I'm onboard with Haidt's description of the problem.

I was much less impressed with his prescription for mitigating it. Apparently if we all just clap louder, Tinkerbell will fly.

specialist2• 6 years ago

"... unchecked curation by media and social media companies with the goal of engagement."

Correct.

The Freedom Speeches™ food fight is just a useful distraction, to head off any structural reforms.

Similarly, all the pearl clutching over fact checking and truthiness and bias is completely misguided, serving to crowd out useful technical reforms.

Actual journalism (reporting) is very simple:

  - Share your data.
  - Cite your sources.
  - Sign your work.

Any medium claiming to be "news" must have built-in support.

kofejnik• 6 years ago

highly relevant fiction (fiction?): https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

ABCLAW3• 6 years ago

It's not unchecked free speech. Instead, it's unchecked curation by media and social media companies with the goal of engagement.

Unchecked free speech has always been an issue, which is why even in America, where free speech occupies one of the highest rankings of competing social virtues by dint of history, there are still a litany of narrow carve outs.

Do you lie to your business parters in the context of a transaction? We hit you with fraud, misrepresentation, or any number of torts. Do you threaten someone with bodily harm? Oh boy. Cyberbullying? Depending on your state, that might be a problem. Lying while under oath or to a federal agent? That's potentially a few years behind bars.

So yes, unrestricted 'say anything lmao' free speech does not exist. It has never existed. It will never exist.

Everyone who does us the disservice of trotting it out as if it does exist is creating a strawman which distracts us from a more honest conversation.

Which isn't 'should there be a line at all?' It's 'where should that line be drawn?'

armatav• 6 years ago

No - it's "there should be no line at all". Even a minor concession is the beginning of a total defeat.

In all of those instances you listed there are circumstances above and beyond the contextual meaning of free-speech in the above posters reply.

unishark2• 6 years ago

Speech in freedom of speech refers to the communication of ideas and opinions, not all communication. The term "freedom of expression" is commonly used to clarify this. Lying to your partner is not a crime. Taking their money under those circumstances is the crime.

crispyambulance• 6 years ago

  > Do you lie to your business parters in the context of a transaction? We hit you with fraud, misrepresentation, or any number of torts. Do you threaten someone with bodily harm? Oh boy. Cyberbullying? Depending on your state, that might be a problem. Lying while under oath or to a federal agent? That's potentially a few years behind bars.

...and yet, ALL of those things happen routinely and without consequence on a COLOSSAL SCALE.

Folks on HN like to pretend that laws and courts function like clockwork or computer programs, executing flawlessly and automatically. They don't. People get away with stuff ALL THE TIME. And if it does ever end up in a court, "winning" is an iffy proposition even in the best possible circumstances.

In the case of political disinformation, the problem is even more intractable. Talking heads can lie their heads off to audiences of millions of people on incredibly powerful platforms. I don't just mean "lie", I mean deliberately say a demonstrable untruth with the intention of misleading others on serious matters and be completely unaccountable for it.

There's the recent example of Trump retweeting a completely fabricated story suggesting that Biden had members of Seal Team 6 who were involved in the OBL assassination "executed". Turns out the story was "launched" from Miami Florida at the "American Priority Conference" the week before. In a few short days, a disinformation campaign was able to fabricate a completely fake story, gain 3M youtube views, and "induce" the President to retweet it to 85 Million followers. The source story was then quickly pulled from Youtube, but everyone involved (Gary Franchi, Anna Khait, Nick Noe, and others) is totally free to do it all over again. They still got their twitter, facebook and youtube platforms, RIGHT NOW, during a super tense time right before the election.

These platforms are very much "owned" platforms. They're not like newspapers but they have the same responsibility to act with some level good human judgement. Laws aren't ever going to be able to keep up with this crap.

briantakita• 6 years ago

The issue with restricting speech is selective enforcement, often based on political ideology.

taxicab3• 6 years ago

unrestricted 'say anything lmao' free speech does not exist

I am baffled by everyone here talking about algorithmic platforms like Facebook and Twitter as if they are a bastion of free speech. They are designed to promote only the most engaging content (IE most outrageous and in some cases literal misinformation meant to feed on your biases).

These services are not a free marketplace of ideas, they are companies which are designed to make money. The more eyeballs on screens, the more money they make, and it is not well reasoned discussion with a diverse representation of viewpoints that keeps people glued to their devices.

Consider how you respond to someone making an incorrect statement on Twitter. You reply to them, and by replying to them you amplify the audience of the incorrect tweet. The fact that your correction causes misinformation to spread isn't a bug, it is exactly how the platform was intended to work, because it causes "engagement."

"The solution is more free speech" doesn't work here because the platforms don't have free speech and never did to begin with. All people are asking is for those platforms which currently promote outrage above organic content to sort themselves out. Not any of these strawmen about creating a "bureau of truth" or "state censorship boards" and certainly not notions of making an American KGB which I think I saw mentioned somewhere.

I have no idea of the best way to do this. Treat the negative effects of algorithmic platforms as some sort of externality? Develop strict regulation on what types of methods to keep people hooked on social media are considered ethical? Similar to how drugs or gambling are already regulated? Just straight up ban this type of business model?

It's going to be one of the big questions of the next decade. Even something like a user generated flag where if enough people press it, a tweet has a big warning over it saying "this is a contested matter" or something would be better than the current situation.

simonh• 6 years ago

I think one significant difference in these cases is access to alternative channels of information. Fir example when buying a property you are very highly reliant on the information you get from the vendor in making your judgement, you can hire a surveyor etc, but the owner occupier is in a uniquely privileged position. The same often goes for a party too a business transaction, especially with respect to their future intentions. In political discourse there are generally plenty of alternative sources of information and opinion though.

Also contracts and personal relationships are between two specific parties with defined responsibilities, but voting is not as direct and specific as that.

blitz_skull• 6 years ago

Literally no one is making the argument that it’s actual unchecked free speech.

The person you replied to was making the case that the problem is the system, which it is.

Anyone over the age of 13 understands that “say anything lmao” doesn’t exist.

thayne• 6 years ago

I'm curious what kind of business model would incentivize providing accurate, balanced information over spectacle and divisiveness.

BuyMyBitcoins• 6 years ago

It would depend on recommendation algorithms actively promoting that balanced content.

dimator• 6 years ago

None. That's the problem. We've reached a point where the very engine of humanity's growth, capitalism, has revealed a huge vulnerability in its design.

hechang19972• 6 years ago

Yes, currently the 2nd amendment only guarentees that no censorship comes from government. We need a stronger guarantee: no censorship on any public discourse from any party. Not any kind, because even well intentioned censorship causes problems! Using reddit as an example: suppose there is a subreddit A that discuss news and politics, and the mods ban racist comments. If you are a racist, will you change your racist way if you found your post banned? No, of course not. You would just be indignant and find/make another subreddit B that is more tolerant of racism. The subreddit B is provided the same tools subreddit A uses for censoring racist posts, and abuse these tools to censor any voices that argue against racism. You can no longer be convinced to abandon racism because you are stuck in your comfort zone and anyone who argue against racism are just SJW or special snowflakes in your eyes and their opinions are automatically dismissed by your brain.

taxicab3• 6 years ago

Unless you are planning to gun down some state censors, then I'm guessing you mean the first amendment.

goBackwards00• 6 years ago

You want this to be illegal? Get to work on it.

The subtle underlying problem is all the people out there curating cogent arguments about the problem on social media, meaning countless hours spent avoiding the legwork.

Hi HN. Hi Reddit. Hi Facebook. Hi tech workers who have to constantly re-invent the wheel.

I’m sick of “both sides” and every one in between projecting and deflecting.

You all want to look at the problem in society, look in the mirror, cause you’re a part of it too. Say and do other things rather than demand other people do and say other things.

American people and politicians are on the same page: nothing is my fault, and it’s only my problem if I get paid for fixing it.

clusterfish• 6 years ago

You think billionaire magnates and state actors who fund a lot of this divisive content care about advertising profits? No, in fact they have the deepest pockets and will be the last ones standing regardless on what you do with twitter and such. They don't need twitter, its focus on engagement just makes their efforts more cost effective. Cut that off and they'll refocus on buying national and local TV networks or whatever else gets eyeballs and attention.

blockmeifyoucan• 6 years ago

Advertising needs to go away. All moral arguments aside, humanity can no longer afford to spend so much energy on something with so little benefit.

non-cotton• 6 years ago

I think this has a lot to do with the platforms vs. publishers issue, and the Section 230 dustup we're about to see.

IMO any platform whose owners have enough editorial control for these engagment-hacking techniques to be useful (the ability to decide what gets seen, what doesn't, and who sees what) should be treated as a publisher, not a platform.

This doesn't have to kill online communities generally. As long as we can distinguish between editorial control and freedom of association (i.e. the ability to ban rule-breakers and people we don't like) I don't see why effective moderation wouldn't be possible.

disown2• 6 years ago

Society is misdiagnosing the issue here.

I think you are being a bit generous here. It isn't society doing the diagnosing. It's just a group of highly privileged individuals. It's one disinformation entity demanding privileged position in the disinformation space.

All state propagandists complain about disinformation. Whether it is the bbc or chinese propaganda organizations or russian or whatever. They all claim to be worried about and fight against disinformation just like the nytimes. After all, if you are fighting disinformation, then you must not be party to disinformation. But we all know that's a lie.

That is, the advertising system.

Nope. Disinformation/propaganda/yellow journalism/etc predates the modern age of advertisement. In the past, newspapers were funded by wealthy business people, politicians or government. And they were all created to further the aims of their creator via propaganda. Ask yourself who created the nytimes and why?

This business model should be illegal.

Nope. You are being misled by disinformation. It's not the business model or the profit generating mechanism. It's the nature of the business itself. News/media/etc exist to manipulate people. It was created to tell people how they should think or feel about events. To guide the herd.

Also, engagement was important long before social media.

amelius• 6 years ago

It's not just the "right to free speech" anymore. It's now also the "right to have your speech broadcasted to a selection of people in a way that depends on what they might think is relevant to them." So complicated stuff.

Animats4• 6 years ago

We have a few issues here:

1. What should be the role, if any, of governments in censorship? The US supposedly has a rule of "none". But there are exceptions. Some kinds of porno. Threats against individuals. Incitement to riot. All of which can be over-used to chill speech.

2. What should be the role of private companies? This is tied in with the role of monopolies. If there were 50 Facebook or Twitter like services, none with more than 20% market share, this would not be a problem. Maybe this is an antitrust problem.

3. Should anonymous speech be as protected as thoroughly as non-anonymous speech? The US has a tradition of protecting anonymous speech. This is partly because the Federalist Papers, and "Common Sense", were published under pseudonyms. Much of the problems with "fake news", from whatever direction, come from concealed sources. Spam, in all media, comes from anonymous sources. Of course, if you publish under your own name, you may face harassment and reprisals.

Those are questions worth thinking about.

betwixthewires11• 6 years ago

"The age of disinformation" is the crucial fulcrum on which the entire premise rests. There is not more disinformation today than there was in days past. In fact, it is easier to check and see if something is true (not using self professed fact checkers and the priesthood of truth and fact, but by looking around and using your mental faculties) than it was when I was a teenager.

How many of you are old enough to remember bullshit like "if you ask a cop if they're a cop they have to tell you" or "you heard about the kid who's intestines got sucked out of his butthole in a swimming pool"? I remember people telling you things and you just went with it. It used to be very easy to lie. People made stuff up all the time, and said things that someone else made up that they believed.

To use the European context and Nazi Germany example, there is a big difference between then and now. That time was very much like my adolescence was with regard to access to information. Disinformation can spread wildly in an environment where people cannot verify it.

Currently, I could probably unilaterally get the equivalent of a university education in any field for free if I were so inclined, just by searching around on the internet. We do not live in an age of disinformation, we live in an age of unbelievable information availability, power structures and hierarchies once existed to enable the dissemination of information, and the ones that currently exist are beginning to show their cracks, simply because information can be effortlessly obtained at miniscule cost. I honestly believe we are living through social upheaval as a direct result of this revolution, and we haven't even seen the beginning. Making the majority literate was very, very hard. Making the next few generations well educated is something so easy it is probably best to just let people do it for themselves. I truly believe we will not need formal education within 100 years, people will just want to learn things and learn them at a whim.

I don't usually like to attribute motive, but I find it suspicious that it is the very institutions and organizations hammering away at this premise that stand to lose the most from this information revolution we are beginning to undergo. It is very convenient when the old entities with a grip on what people know and don't know happen to be the ones telling you not to trust your own judgment and defer to their own.

mynameishere• 6 years ago

How many of you are old enough to remember bullshit like ... "you heard about the kid who's intestines got sucked out of his butthole in a swimming pool"?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/girl-injured-in-gruesome-pool-a...

You're right about it being easy to verify stuff on the internet nowadays, though. Some of the Nazis blamed Henry Ford for their beliefs. They would.

asimpletune• 6 years ago

The core issue is actually by allowing companies to harvest hyper individualized information about you, so then they can then design algorithms to maximize engagement by exploiting our psychology, and thus harvest our attention and clicks...

Literally if we just started to pay for stuff we’d see this problem improved. The consequences of the current model is that the internet has become the modern equivalent of a welfare state, in the sense that our experiences are sponsored by our wealthy corporate benefactors. Clearly not a good recipe for civic engagement.

So, as consumers we should pay for things if we want to have nice stuff, and also businesses simply shouldn’t be able to follow literally every person in the world around, as they stroll around the internet, and write down and share what they’re looking at. That could be done by creating liability around data collection/protection, as in the case if HIPPA, or outright banning the technology that enables ad tech at scale. I’m sure people here have much better ideas than this, I’m just offering an ethos.

Also the internet itself should be treated as a public utility. The sad thing is by not paying, we’re still paying, just in less direct ways, since the ad tech that sponsors our internet lives still has to get money from somewhere...

Edited for clarity

belorn2• 6 years ago

If we look at the issue from the other side, the problem with censorship is the central idea of a civilizing mission on the belief that government and only government can really artfully determine who ought to speak to the masses in the interest of the expansion of knowledge.

The misguided belief in the superiority of government wisdom about who should speak to many has happened before. With radio it was unlicensed radio stations that corrupted youths with rebellious thoughts and strange music. With TV and movies it was commercial publisher corrupting youths with violence and nudity. Now with the Internet it is bubbles that corrupt youths with disinformation and falsehoods.

The enthusiasm for radio censorship is dead. TV censorship died relative recently. Internet censorship however is starting to gain popularity, but I strongly suspect it will crash in a few decades just like radio and TV did. Future people will look back on the misguided belief in the superiority of a handful companies and wonder how it ever could gain popularity.

WalterBright• 6 years ago

That's ironic coming from the nyt, with their heavily biased front page. Even people who agree 100% with the nyt's point of view should be offended by it. I'm more interested in facts than confirmation bias of what I believe. I don't consider them a reliable source of news.

Note that an article can be disinformation even if all the information in the article is correct - by simply cherry-picking which facts to present. An example from several years ago: "Half of All Corporations Paid No Income Tax" which was factually correct. Another fact omitted from the many articles on this was "half of all corporations lost money". Income tax is not owed when losing money.

easytiger• 6 years ago

Prescient reminder of someone being murdered because of their application of free speech from today: https://www.ft.com/content/51fdc6f1-15ef-4dfb-949c-1b1d18601...

https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2020/10/17/attentat-d...

"In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most merciful, (...) to Macron, the leader of the infidels, I ' executed one of your hellhounds who dared to belittle Muhammad, calm his fellow human beings before a harsh punishment is inflicted on you.

RyanShook• 6 years ago

When the press asks for curbs on free speech we’re in trouble as a society.

hannofcart• 6 years ago

It seems like the author is bending over backwards to advocate _some_ censorship over unfettered free speech.

Yet, I don't see free speech as being the issue here at all. The truth is that when a significant percentage of the population holds regressive views, they'll seek out and amplify people who pander to those views to the exclusion of all others.

This has gotten more irritating for the moderate mainstream with the advent of internet, but the root of the problem always is the presence of a core critical mass of the electorate that espouses those views.

csours• 6 years ago

The promise of the internet and social media was that it would broaden people's horizons. That has certainly failed so far, but I wonder if it is at all possible to create a social media platform that drives genuine, deep interaction.

I think it would have to be based on curated, pseudo-anonymous conversations with some strong ground rules.

Information is cheap. As recently as 20 years ago, the best source of general knowledge was a set of encyclopedias, at home if you could afford it, or at a library if you could not. Wikipedia is far from perfect, but it is generally as good as encyclopedias were, and far more broad. You could tell a similar story about the news, and many other things.

What does it mean when information is cheap? I'm not an expert, but I think it means that propaganda is cheap too. I wish people were better able to recognize propaganda and brain washing.

The truth does not battle falsehoods with facts, but with emotions. Hate, anger, fear, and distrust are used to prepare the soil for the seeds of propaganda.

It seems like the brain is hardwired to find 'interesting' things, like counterfactuals. Conspiracy theories are the ultimate counterfactual. I admit that I find conspiracy theories to be interesting as well; but I use them to inform my opinion about motivation, not facts.

chroem-• 6 years ago

There are not a lot of causes that I'm willing to die for, but freedom of speech is one of them. It is the most fundamental human right from which all other human rights are derived. The moment you lose your absolute right to question authority is the moment you lose the ability to protect your other rights.

babesh• 6 years ago

One bright spot is the rise of some independents on YouTube and other social media. I find some far more reasoned and informed than most journalists. I think they are on the positive end of the smeared bell curve created by technology. They gain wider reach and viewers benefit from better voices.

gonational2• 6 years ago

If you don’t like free speech or any of the other protected rights in the US Constitution, you can always go to a country that doesn’t have such things.

Why wouldn’t you want to? It seems getting rid of our rights is to make things better, right? So, why not go and see how awesome it is in such places?

France is doing great, I hear.

TedShiller• 6 years ago

Funny how social media went from being the "great democratizer" when Obama won, to "disinformation" when Trump won.

amanaplanacanal7• 6 years ago

I know this isn’t what you meant, but social media changed quite a bit between 2008 and 2016. In 2008 both twitter and Facebook were in their infancy. If anybody called them “great democratizers” it was probably more about their promise than their results.

riverlong2• 6 years ago

I'm worried that this situation is going to get a great deal worse. A flurry of disinformation and online noise is somewhat manageable so long as it is coming from humans, who may be paid by a state or an enterprise to drive engagement with controversial topics.

It's going to get a million times worse when this gets automated.

Right now the quantity of disinformation is practically limited by the human capacity to post stuff online, but GPT-3 style automation will remove this limitation, and we will live in a world of all noise, no signal. Our knee-jerk adherence to "free speech" is opening up a dangerous scenario where we are more vulnerable than anyone else to what is effectively a DDOS on our minds.

I explored this topic in more detail in an essay of mine, where I lay out that a world of Anonymity + GPT-3 can undermine free speech by drowning out real human views and opinions with machine-generated, human-looking propaganda. https://jayriverlong.github.io/2020/07/24/gpt3.html

mcadenhe• 6 years ago

Interesting essay Jay. The top comment in this thread is by throwaway13337. You see this when people have a hot take they want to post but aren't ready to own it in front of their peers. I'd bet on average comments from accounts with identifiable personal info are much more tame and civil. But if everyone is too scared to talk about something for fear of getting cancelled then anonymity is the natural answer.

---

Maybe in the future if something is written by a bot it will need to be disclosed that a real human did not %100 write it. I mean I just looked at your blog and your twitter and I feel like a devious enough actor could use AI to help them create just as genuine of an online presence as you have, even down to the profile pic.

I actually wanted to raise this discussion on HN and created a thread [1] but it didn't get any traction. Maybe it could be a future topic for you.

If things continue the way they are we'll all be paranoid about everything being fake, like an internet Truman show. The sad part is you know it's fake and there's nothing you can do about it. So basically we have to go back to meatspace for genuine human interaction which is not the absolute worst I guess as long as there's not a deadly pandemic going on.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24807090

riverlong2• 6 years ago

I think there's a solution in pseudonymity: it has the liberating effects of anonymity, while providing some accountability that there's a real human behind the digital face.

For example, suppose there's some repository of hashes of Personal IDs. If you want to sign up somewhere, you have to submit a Personal ID that corresponds to such a hash -- the Personal ID doesn't get stored anywhere, but it authenticates that you're a real human. (Obviously this is a naive solution and something more clever would be necessary, but it's just an example.)

nec4b• 6 years ago

Free speech only a problem for those who want to control the spread of information.

mensetmanusman3• 6 years ago

I think we know now that people that want to be disinformed tend to consume media.

Why do we keep seeing studies that show people who engage more with the main stream media have a far more skewed view of reality. That includes places like the NYT.

Why: because to make money you have to focus on the long tail of events, which always describe outliers. It’s how Trump got elected: he was good money.

ghoward• 6 years ago

I wrote my thoughts on this sort of thing in a blog post: https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/recommendations-and-radicali... .

lazyjones• 6 years ago

Free speech was never about the truth. But its enemies always used their “truths” as an argument against it.

pippy• 6 years ago

Traditional media companies have a motive for social media to implement prohibitive self policing measures. Youtube recently caved and gave media companies an extra boost in their trending algorithm and exceptions to expletive language, which made vloggers upset: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44279189

Traditional media tends to stick to big three excuses to implement these measures; 'think of the children', terrorism, and cyber bulling.

account42• 6 years ago

Is it really necessary to make users scroll ten ticks before they get to see the article text?

The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation

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