Nicholas Carr on how to fix social media

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-to-fix-social-media

by conanxin • 5 years ago

50 95 5 years ago

dane-pgp• 5 years ago

As the dominant informational networks of the twenty-first century, they need to be accountable for the content they broadcast, whatever its source.

The article seems to be arguing that social media companies need to be judge, jury and censor over every message that is "broadcast", i.e. sent to more than a few close friends.

It admits that defining a "public interest" standard is basically impossible, but assumes that this ambiguity won't be exploited by whichever side is in control of whichever body gets to punish the social media companies for under- or over-censoring.

If someone tweets "Click here to read my 400 page manifesto about what is wrong with America", would Twitter need to assign lawyers the task of scouring that document for "problematic" passages like "defund the police" or "give more power to ICE"?

Perhaps if there were a workable system in place for silencing extreme and misinformed voices on the TV and radio, we could try applying it at scale to the internet too, but right now that's like trying to run before you can crawl.

sharpener• 5 years ago

I am not a lawyer, but... a public interest clause might not be the right tool, since public interest can be interpreted as restricted to information that would affect a person's voting preferences and nothing broader.

In the UK TV broadcasters get their licences and general charter terms from the government, based on standards previously contested in law and, I believe, broadly enshrined in statute and/or regulations. One of those terms is a crucial clause to the effect that broadcasters are not allowed to broadcast anything that would make ordinary people throw up over their TV dinner or grannies die of apoplexy, etc.

Various entities, people or single issue political parties for instance, have attempted to get broadcasters to show films containing grisly stuff, and when they meet refusal have attempted to sue broadcasters on free speech grounds. However, the right to free speech does not allow a legal entity or person to compel some other party to shout out noxious views on their behalf. So broadcasters in the UK can exercise their rights against such compulsion and filter out extremal horrors if they wish. The tests they use are designed to maintain the same two or three standard deviations of a normal distribution curve that maximises their customer base and matches the same standards civil law requires to maintain order on the civil scale anyway.

In that context, what are social media companies if they are not media intermediaries between legal entities? Thus they can not be compelled to relay anyone's content to anywhere else if they don't want to. Their T&Cs typically say so anyway.

Folks worried about censorship of their partisan or minority views on such platforms don't seem to get what rights those intermediary companies have. They play nice relaying messages because they like mass market incomes.

So really the issue might be purely about how many messages could MetaFB/Twitter afford to kill off and still be popular enough to survive?

bobobob4202• 5 years ago

My 2 cents on how to fix social media, maybe it is stupid but to ban any political discussion. People LOVE talking about politics especially in their personal community (echo chamber). I swear this is the most fun political people have had on the internet in 20 years. It’s too bad it just becomes an echo chamber. We had a community group for our town on Facebook, all it was was fake accounts and people talking shit about Democrats and the occasional left wing person talking shit back. Recently they banned political discussion and anything not directly related to our town. Thank the fucking lord. People will still slip in some political bullshit but it’s miles better.

mdp2021• 5 years ago

What about instead to "counter immaturity in discussion", like we are trying to do here?

zaphar• 5 years ago

Achieving any kind of success at that is very much an outlier and can't possibly scale to all the forums currently on the internet at the moment. You may get a handful of places that reach the level that HN currently maintains but the overall effect will be the same as now.

ksec• 5 years ago

I think every social media will grow until it reaches politics, stock / investment or pornography. And you would think having a special channel for those would fix it, but no, it always creeps back in. It is sort of strange to continue see the same pattern over and over again.

Personally I think we have a human nature problem, and not a technology problem looking for market fit.

vorpalhex• 5 years ago

In my social group, I ask that politics be contained to a specific channel.

Anyone is free to join the channel, no limitations or anything, just an opt-in. Rule is posted obviously and we remind people frequently.

I've lost 4 people because they were upset that this rule is enforced against everyone, out of a group of maybe 20. They wanted their politics to be everywhere and not constrained to one channel.

I never thought this tiny little policy was going to cause such a mess. It has dramatically improved the rest of discussions - you can actually just talk about stuff without people jumping in with their political takes - but it's been an upsetting policy in ways I did not anticipate.

anonuser123456• 5 years ago

You realize that under your proposal, your own proposal would be banned right? You are advocating policy. That’s politics.

cousin_it• 5 years ago

I think that kind of gotcha response is usually wrong. Yes, people need to be protected from politics, and that protection requires a certain nonzero minimum amount of politics. The same is true for guns, smallpox, etc.

bobobob4202• 5 years ago

lol! nice catch ...that definitely got me thinking

bena2• 5 years ago

Besides what others have brought up, I'll bring up the fact that what constitutes "politics" is almost a political question in and of itself.

And I live in an area affected by Hurricane Ida. I've started following my local government on social media because it is one of the best places to keep up to date on what's going on concerning cleanup and what not. And I would say a government run page concerning that government is about as political as you can get.

As is your community page. A lot of things related to your town is political. I mean, politics is the word we use to define how groups make decisions. So any time you're talking about making decisions in a group, you're talking politics.

But of course, that's not what you mean when you say "politics". It's not what anyone who complains about politics mean when they say politics. They either mean "things I don't agree with", "things I find uncomfortable to think about", or "evangelizing a viewpoint".

For instance, someone complained about Squid Game being "too political" because it had an underlying message of "rich people fuck with poor people for sport". But it isn't a political statement at all, it's a sociological one. But thinking about how a less exaggerated version of that is basically our day to day makes that guy uncomfortable. He wanted to tune in and drop out. But "this makes me uncomfortable" is a him problem. He's trying to make it an everyone problem.

pjerem• 5 years ago

Can't we just go back to the era where the "feed" or the "wall" was just the posts of our friends / the people we follow sorted by posting date and not this horrible algorithm made to show you infinite content ?

ghaff• 5 years ago

While very desirable that probably means that social media sites would have to be paid for at least in part by subscription fees.

prepend• 5 years ago

Or it means they reduce costs to what’s supportable by just inserting ads into RSS feeds every x items.

This isn’t very likely. But it’s more likely than someone charging to aggregate IM statuses and put them in chronological order.

d--b• 5 years ago

Unless someone regulates it, no! Of course FB has no interest in that…

One has to realize that FB is only optimizing for profit (and Zuck not going to jail). The only times they curbed was when bad PR was threatening their profits (and Mark’s freedom).

josefresco• 5 years ago

Twitter stays closer to this idea than Facebook. I basically see only posts from people I follow. I can even turn off retweets. Not perfect but it's not "endless".

kkjjkgjjgg2• 5 years ago

You only have to convince your friends to join you. Technically it is certainly still possible.

I would expect most Fediverse applications don't have much of a ranking algorithm yet, or at least it should be configurable.

samlevine2• 5 years ago

I do this in Twitter with lists. They don't make it obvious, but lists actually make it quite usable once you've set them up.

Facebook (or Instagram) don't seem to have good options for this so for the most part I don't use them.

Discord works chronologically, for now at least, and as long as it does I'll be happy to keep chatting with my friends there.

dicknuckle• 5 years ago

There is a chronological feed in FB but i haven't used it in years and they make it harder and harder to use. I've also heard of it not working for days on end.

PrinceRichard• 5 years ago

New laws mean forcing others to conform to our expectations of their behavior. This is only acceptable when there is a broad social consensus about the necessity of the law. There is no such consensus regarding how social media should operate.

mistermann• 5 years ago

As far as I know, there hasn't even been an attempt at having a serious, ~fact based discussion on the matter that involves the public. Where/how would such a discussion even take place?

The way the world operates in 2021 is a mess, unfortunately this is normal so few people seem to notice.

GodKronos• 5 years ago

Delete it?

kkjjkgjjgg2• 5 years ago

I don't think free speech was meant to only defend "private communication". What a weird article.

jimbob45• 5 years ago

I've yet to see compelling evidence that social media itself is a problem in and of itself (outside of teens but IIRC FB/Insta disallow kids until 13 to use their service per TOS).

I see a lot of stuff like, "Terrorists use the platform to organize and plan attacks!", which is true...but that seems like you should be solving that by solving the reasons people want to be terrorizing, not by attacking the mediums they use. If you want to attack mediums, then you'd be just as justified wiping away USPS as you would FB/Insta. It just seems like FB is being used as a scapegoat for lawmakers to avoid actually solving problems instead of pretending to solve them.

callmeal• 5 years ago

I've yet to see compelling evidence that social media itself is a problem in and of itself

You might be interested in this: https://www.wired.com/story/jargon-watch-rising-danger-stoch...

   stochastic terrorism: the use of mass media to incite attacks by random nut jobs—acts that are “statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.”

samlevine2• 5 years ago

I don't want social media to censor me, people I want to communicate with or people I don't ever want to communicate with.

I want tools that help me communicate with other people. Learn things, get exposed to new ideas. And we can't have that with a huge system designed to prevent people from saying the wrong things.

Our ability to communicate and learn freely is dependent on the ability for people we disagree with to also have this ability. You will be censored if you want other people censored.

bastardoperator4• 5 years ago

Funny, I'm not censored on any platform. Then again I don't make violent threats, spread misinformation, use racist language, or harass people. I feel free to have these discussions, and I do all the time. What's the problem?

You can communicate freely, but that doesn't mean there isn't consequences for things you speak and nobody has to host you while you're broadcasting it. I find this type of argument devolves into "I want to be a crappy person and not be judged for it or face consequences", which just isn't the reality we're living in.

jimkleiber• 5 years ago

I was thinking about this the other day: in public physical spaces, we often have police who step in when someone says something that breaks the law. In private physical spaces (e.g., a restaurant, store, bar, or house), we either have owners, managers, or private security who step in when someone starts breaking store policy or law. However, in public (or pseudo-public) digital spaces and private digital spaces, some of us seem to rebel strongly against any type of norm enforcement.

I mean, I can see how sometimes the internet seems to promise even more freedom of speech than in physical spaces and also that sometimes there are not very clear written laws or policies for those digital spaces, paired with unclear or unfair enforcement of those laws and policies.

Makes me wonder what the future of digital governance will look like. Do we have the digital equivalent of cops roaming semi-public spaces like Twitter and Facebook? If so, by whose consent are they governing? Do these orgs hire the equivalent of private security guards or bouncers? Have they already done so through moderators and such?

Anyway, just got me thinking about some of the challenges in the governance of digital spaces.

mellosouls• 5 years ago

I find this type of argument devolves into "I want to be a crappy person and not be judged for it or face consequences"

Whereas I find your counter-argument devolves into "Crappy people are those who disagree with my point of view and they should face consequences"...

The truth is there are extremes on both sides; but the censorship seems to be overwhelmingly driven by one.

mc324• 5 years ago

You may not have raised any questions about Covid provenance, spoken about Hunter Biden's cavorting the efficacy of Covid treatments, etc.

I'm sure there are tons more actual legal things you cannot freely talk about on FB.

jeffrogers4• 5 years ago

What do you call it when you make a post that you assume your friends can see and only some are presented your post?

tasogare• 5 years ago

Then again I don't make violent threats, spread misinformation, use racist language, or harass people.

You didn't did it yet. All of those are moving targets, and moving extremely fast especially in the US. I could say a dozen of totally non controversial statements in my country of residence (Japan), half of which being controversial or labeled some kind of -ist in my own country (France) and all of them warranting me cancellation in the US. At this rate what you are writing now will be categorized racist, threatening or harassing in a few years or so. Even your nickname could already be considered some kind of harassment as it single out kids born out of wedlock and is thus enforcing "the patriarchy". (Think it's far-fetched? Have a look at GitHub renaming the master branch)

olah_1• 5 years ago

Then again I don't spread misinformation

They cut the phone lines in Chernobyl for the same reason.

_3u103• 5 years ago

bastardoperator, would you also say that you don't denigrate people based on their parents marital status online?

On YouTube just saying your name would get your videos demonetized and I have a feeling your username banned.

karaterobot• 5 years ago

Then again I don't make violent threats, spread misinformation, use racist language, espouse unpopular political beliefs, mention atrocities committed by the government, attempt to peacefully organize against the government in power, or harass people. I feel free to have these discussions, and I do all the time. What's the problem?

You left a couple use cases for censorship off your list, so I added them back in. I totally agree with you, I don't do any of those things either, so no big deal for the two of us.

stolenmerch• 5 years ago

Funny, I'm not censored on any platform. Then again I don't make violent threats, spread misinformation, use racist language, or harass people.

There are a couple of problems with this line of reasoning. Cultural attitudes and mores and standards of decency shift constantly. Something you say today that seems within the bounds of good taste could be taken out of context or deemed racist/harassing later by different people. I trust you are a good citizen online and don't touch controversy, but you can't possibly know how language will evolve. I've seen simple and honest disagreements on Twitter turn into accusations of harassment in real time. The threat of misinformation is even more elusive and mercurial. I remember just a year ago when saying SARS-CoV-2 might have accidentally leaked from a lab was WIDELY considered dangerous information that should be scrubbed from the internet. Now it's at least acceptable to discuss in congress and on legacy media outlets. The "don't be a dick" model of speech regulation is full of traps and loopholes and problems that make it a bad guideline in many circumstances.

wowokay2• 5 years ago

If we want to go “there” then can I deem all nudity be censored? Your fixation on viewing things as either racist or not racist, as information or misinformation is opinionated. I think it is wrong that people can tweet pornography on the platform without any censorship. I doubt the Gay Comunity would be okay with that being censored, those are the posts I am subjected too. The point is any form of censorship will hamper someone’s freedom of speech. Why can’t everyone just block people that post what they don’t like? The way I do on twitter? Otherwise if we are going down the block what I don’t like road so will I!

MR4D• 5 years ago

I'm not censored on any platform

But your username is enough to get you kicked off of many.

anamax• 5 years ago

It doesn't matter whether you're offended by the word "bastardchild."

What matters is that I'm offended. Heck, "bastardchild" doesn't even have to offend me because it is clearly offensive to bastards and possibly children.

Your "justification" for such offensive behavior is no different than the offensive explanations by folks who wanted to have lawn jockeys.

How dare you. Your account should be deleted.

That's how cancel culture works.

FFRefresh• 5 years ago

Do you think you should face consequences for your username?

People of color are more likely to be called that slur, and you are their “operator”? I talked to my BIPOC friends and they think that’s incredibly racist. They say you are dehumanizing them and are clearly a white supremacist who celebrates operating POC. They are experiencing trauma right now given the outright violence of your name.

austincheney3• 5 years ago

The solution is simple. Exchange the client/server model for a peer-to-peer model. By peer-to-peer and I mean literally IP to IP and not something like instant messenger that bounces messages through a central server. Only then can you assure a fix to interference.

This requires:

* Routes - both parties to be on IPv6 or either party to have something like port address translation on a IPv6 interface.

* Identity - This will require a combination of CA and STUN. The certificate from the CA and corresponding key pair associated with that certificate ensures a user is who they say they are and their keys are respectable. The corresponding key exchange ensures the data is confined to the two parties. The STUN server correlates the unique user ID, such as that which is certified by the certificate, to an IP address.

Anything less is just another game for some media company to use you as a product.

nobody99994• 5 years ago

The solution is simple. Exchange the client/server model for a peer-to-peer model. By peer-to-peer and I mean literally IP to IP and not something like instant messenger that bounces messages through a central server. Only then can you assure a fix to interference.

This is my go to response as to "what to do about social media."

And I opine|rant|blather on about it whenever I see folks complaining about or claiming that some rules|regulation|policy will "fix" social media.

And such tracts are becoming more and more common (cf. this article[0][1], entitled OK, but What Should We Actually Do About Facebook? I Asked the Experts. from today). But, as in the article linked, no one ever suggests decentralized communications.

I'm not sure why, but there certainly are barriers to making decentralized "social media" work. Those same barriers are what make centralization of much of our digital universe necessary and hugely profitable.

Those barriers are primarily (there are other issues, but are mostly part of the result rather than the cause) related to the ways in which end-users are provided access to the Internet.

I'm specifically referring to asymmetric internet links. Most internet links are $X Mb/sec download and ($X / 25 or so) Mb/sec upload.

What's more, there are often policy restrictions on "consumer" internet links that block them from "running servers," whether that be port blocking or throttling.

This keeps decentralized communication from being viable. Other than these artificial barriers, there's nothing stopping folks from hosting their own cat/family/meme photos/videos and/or other content.

There are plenty of decentralized platforms that can do so with minimal set up and configuration.

However, if you can't serve more than a couple of concurrent connections at a reasonable speed, that breaks the whole decentralized/P2P paradigm. Because my upload bandwidth is the limiting factor in being able to host content.

If, on the other hand, you have a link with symmetric bandwidth without policy restrictions, serving your own content is a no-brainer.

As such, my "solution" for addressing the "censorship" of the centralized "social media" platforms is to make them irrelevant by eliminating the entire reason for their existence -- asymmetric bandwidth favoring download vs. upload on internet links.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/facebook-experts....

[1] (same as [0], just from archive.md): https://archive.md/qpNtV

Edit: Added title of linked article in the comment.

austincheney3• 5 years ago

YouTube was founded when most people had slow internet and they seemed to have done ok. I have fiber at my house and do about 920mb/s both up and down. It’s only a matter of time before that becomes almost universally common enough to rule out bandwidth from any consideration.

As a result I am writing a peer-to-peer application assuming universal fiber, 4K displays, and IPv6 are already common.

JoshCole3• 5 years ago

Calling the problems faced by social media simple is the sort of hubris that only comes about because of the Dunning–Kruger effect. You're underestimating the complexity of the problem because you're under-informed. Some aspects of your proposal have been tried before. They aren't new. History indicates that your proposal fails to achieve long term product-market fit. It also fails this entirely because of being decentralized and associating IP addresses with people and having high friction - not because of corporate dystopia.

Let's raise the level of discourse by reviewing our history. There are and have been in the past decentralized social applications. One of the most notable of them in terms of adoption was Skype. It was acquired by Microsoft. In the past it was normal to use Skype in gaming communities. It was a competitor to Ventrillo and TeamSpeak. Skype moved away from decentralization.

It's really common at this point for people who are simultaneously paranoid and outraged to start exclaiming with indignation that clearly corporations are evil. This failure to engage with reality is common online. Putting aside that social companies only discovered a few years ago that connecting people had disastrous consequence and have been devoting billions to try to address these so-called simple problems ever since it became clear these problems existed lets try to see if we can find a non-paranoid good-faith reason for Microsoft to have moved away from decentralization.

What do you know, but Discord displaced Skype for a reason within gaming communities!

Why did gaming communities move away from Skype? I've been in gaming communities. I've heard people express some of their problems with Skype. One of the issues that Skype had was that... it was decentralized and that could lead to the leaking of your IP address. Therefore if a streamer or even another person accidentally showed their Skype they could get DDoSed. At high levels in various competitive games this was a severe problem, because as you might guess... in social media you tend to be connected with people who are socially connected to you! So you leaked your IP address very often to just the sort of people with the incentive to capitalize on that by DDoSing you so they could beat you in a game.

Now Skype isn't decentralized, but it didn't matter. They didn't do a good enough job to serve some segment of the community. So Skype was doing just what you suggested. Being decentralized. And they had a higher friction process than a competitor, which is the case for your solution. And as a direct result of these things... (and others, mind, but we have to simplify reality at least a little to understand it)...

Discord found product-market fit in the gaming niche! And it grew increasingly popular. And now everyone in the gaming communities is on Discord, not Skype. Moreover, Skype has lost share even outside of gaming to Discord as Discord executes the standard niche to general playbook that so many social companies have found success executing.

Congratulations: your simple solution has already failed. You thought it was simple, but you were just ignorant of the actual challenges. But now we get to the real problem. The problem you completely missed. All of what I just said? It isn't the real problem. Those are details. They are suggestive of the real problem, but you need to step back and think about this from a level higher to see the true problem. It isn't technical. It is social. It's in the name. Not technical media, social media.

The true problem is so complex that it is almost certainly impossible to solve in a way which will please everyone. I'd go as far as to say it's probably fundamentally unsolvable.

Here is the real problem outlined using what we covered above:

1. Notice that decentralization is important to you.

2. Notice that it is outright against the desires of others.

3. Notice that social applications get more powerful as the number of participants increase.

Now lets generalize the above and make it more clear why those things matter:

1. Some people love X where X is something.

2. Some people hate X where X is something.

3. These people are incentivized to use the same application due to the utility of social tools growing with number of participants.

This problem is absolutely nutty in its complexity. It's also the actual reality of social applications. Almost all the issues with social applications boil down to the problem that people have different desires and those desires aren't in alignment with each other.

The technical aspects of the problem don't even matter. The problem isn't simple. As proof of this: mass murder and every other woe you try to lay at the feet of social media applications predates those applications. In actuality, the difference is that poor people have more power now relative to how much they had before.

austincheney3• 5 years ago

The problem is simple and two fold:

1) Social media has a profit motive to increase engagement

2) Social media has an expensive moderation problem

The solution is also simple, but certainly not easy. There are technology problems to solve.

When you remove access to the user content from the service provider they have nothing to moderate and cannot increase engagement through manipulation of the message (algorithms).

Most people (current developers) refuse to see this simplicity because alternatives are a world directly in conflict with their current livelihoods. This is a behavior called Cognitive Conservatism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_(belief_revision)

I will explain the alternative like this: content on demand directly at the source. Its like what Netflix did to cable and network television. Users take the content when they want it a la carte without waiting for a content provider to prescribe a fixed schedule. Instead of waiting for a media service to make features or content available, or even for their users to make user content available via upload, in a peer-to-peer reality the content is available the moment a user allows remote access. Facebook is like old cable television. You have to wait and hope the desired content appears when you want it to.

In a peer-to-peer world if you want family photos simply use your peer-to-peer application to connect to the remote family member's hard drive and browse or copy all those family photos you want without any web service in the middle. No uploads to Facebook. Just allow reading from a file system directory to authorized users across the internet. Now imagine that directness also applies to messaging, application access, video calls, and anything else digital. The best part of this model is that personal opinions will not dictate remote availability and simultaneously you have privacy in a way that isn't feasible on the current web.

nobody99994• 5 years ago

Extrapolating your experience in one online space to cover everyone's experience in every online space, as if everything, everywhere is your use case is either hubris or naivete of the highest order. Either way, I applaud your ability to climb to such heights!

There are so many other use cases and spaces that would benefit enormously from decentralization that I couldn't even begin to list even a small portion of them.

As for leaking IP addresses and DDOSing, that's only relevant if you are communicating with those who are potentially adversarial and definitely mean spirited. My use case doesn't include any of those sorts of people.

My privacy and PII are too valuable to me to allow others to monetize them.

And I don't care to share details of my private life with people I don't know or care about.

As such, decentralization (e.g., a Matrix server for my extended family -- which exists and works wonderfully -- except for the crappy upload speeds I get) is absolutely a valid and viable use case.

That you can't see past your own experiences and prejudices says much more about you than it does about centralization vs. decentralization.

As for your assertion that "decentralization has been tried and it failed" isn't anywhere close to being the truth.

It hasn't been tried at any real scale and hasn't gained a lot of traction because of the perverse incentives of asymmetrical bandwidth, user-hostile TOS and the willingness of companies to burn cash in order to stomp out/acquire any other group that attempts to compete with them.

tl;dr: You're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too. Yuck!

14• 5 years ago

My dad always talked about George Carlin the guy is a legend. My dad always told me a story about when Carlin was “not” allowed to say certain things on the air and made comment to that fact. I am now betting it was because of this case. Supposedly Carlin turned to the camera and said something along the lines of “f&@k all you stupid lip readers out there” except he only lipped it never actually said it. I’m not sure if it was live or they producers just didn’t understand what he did but they aired the show. It made a lot of deaf people mad apparently. I have not been able to find the clip or any reference to it but believe my dad’s account.

colinmhayes• 5 years ago

I like Carlin too. Here's my choice quote “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

I don't trust people to make good decisions. Admittedly incredibly paternalistic, but I've met a lot of people, and most of them are just making one bad decision after another.

djoldman• 5 years ago

...A few large companies, free to set their own rules, wield control over public and private communications.

This statement seems to have always been technically true. What does control mean?

Conversation and correspondence, far from being treated as confidential, are rifled through by marketers to extract sensitive personal data.

It seems that the public doesn't really care about this.

Propaganda, lies, and defamatory attacks get broadcast to the masses, often by sources that can’t be traced.

This statement also seems to have always been technically true.

Rather than promoting an informed public, social media has promoted polarization, extremism, and, all too often, ignorance.

I guess the questions is whether Americans want the government to tell them what they can and can't read or look at. Should that right be taken away? Shouldn't informed adults be able to make their own choices about whether or not they want to spend time on their Twitter or Facebook feeds?

Nasrudith• 5 years ago

Stop trying to fix or demolish it already. You don't own it and have no right to control everybody else. Think for a minute about how every proposal and precedent could be used against you. The pattern of "Lets do away with due process because I am angry! Wah my lack of due process!" has been repeated too damn many times.

kodah2• 5 years ago

While the government can’t police private conversations, it can regulate the content of broadcasts to protect the public interest.

I've never agreed with this idea and I don't think I'm alone in that. Possibly "public interest" is the wrong word.

It’s worth remembering that Congress’s decision to license radio operators after the Titanic disaster was about more than just allocating scarce spectrum. It was about bringing those who speak to the masses out of the shadows and into the daylight of the public square. It was about making broadcasters, whether individuals, businesses, or other organizations, visible and accountable. We may not need to establish a formal licensing program for social media, but we do need to bring the spirit of the common good back to broadcasting.

Except operating in the clear is a well-known danger as well. People using the words "accountability" and "consequences" almost never want to discuss the upper and lower limits of such ideas. If the concept of "punching up" is any indicator, it's at least partially a dog whistle for who it's okay to abuse these days.

Such a system would need to be private as well, instead of operating in full transparency to prohibit the litany of performative exercises people will undergo these days to make their point. The author seems to try to assuage that only "powerful private interests" would take issue with the proposed system.

An ambitious Digital Communications Act along the lines sketched out here would be complicated and controversial. It would be resisted by many powerful private interests. It would not be a panacea. But we can no longer pretend that social media will fix itself.

At the core of social media problems is bad human behavior of all persuasions. Some people just manage to learn or detach themselves.

Personally, I partially blame public API concepts for most of this mess. Whether you're talking about limitless graphs for sharing "information" (in its most general definition) or API's which can be enumerated. Their legitimate use is finite and at worst it's entirely extractive. Better regulation, to me, would be the government regulating what sort of information you allow to be open and possibly the use/limits of virality.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 5 years ago

I've never agreed with this idea and I don't think I'm alone in that. Possibly "public interest" is the wrong word.

Do you agree or disagree with the notion that since the electromagnetic spectrum is a limited resource, actual broadcast (using the spectrum) needs to be regulated?

kodah2• 5 years ago

Sure, regulating spectrum availability is one thing, but the action that the FCC was taking in that piece was related to what words are allowed on regulated channels.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 5 years ago

It's a long article with an admirable examination of history.

However, I feel Carr has made a mistake with his attempt to differentiate between private communication and broadcasting based on "number of followers".

I think the better distinctions looks something like:

  private communication is anything delivered ONLY to people to whom it is addressed or who have actively opted-in to receive communications from the sender. some authentication must be implied before they can read what I have delivered.

  any other communication, regardless of the medium, number of followers, etc. is considered to be public.

So, if I tweet about something, since anyone could read my tweets, they are all public. If I DM someone on twitter, that's private.

If I post something on my own private blog that requires a subscription to read, that's private communication. If I post the same thing on a medium where it can be read by anyone, that's public.

If I email my family about something, that's private; if I post a comment on a tiny open wordpress site with less readers than I have cousines, that's public.

This differentiation says nothing about what the difference in regulation between public and private should be. There are good arguments for many different schemes, some of which involve zero regulation for either form. But to discuss the merits of them, we need a clear distinction between private & public communication, and I think Carr's is wrong and mine is (roughly) right.

new_guy• 5 years ago

1, It's extraordinarily American-centric. Most everything the author wrote doesn't apply to the hundreds of other countries or non-American social sites in the world

2, before people criticise social media™ they should come from a position of experience having run their own site or even just a forum

That's the basic issue, an ignorant American jabbering on about something they have zero experience on.

Gepsens• 5 years ago

Seeing the comments in this thread makes me think about only one place in not so distant history : puritan England.

RNCTX• 5 years ago

For decades it was "common knowledge" that the War of the Worlds broadcast caused mass hysteria, when in fact if you look back on the newspaper articles at the time and compare them to criminal and hospital records you find no such thing. It would be more accurate to say that the newspaper industry was upset with the radio industry.

An article from a professor publishing via W.W. Norton about the internet is cut from the same cloth as newspaper vs radio, imo.

Nicholas Carr on how to fix social media

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