The model I apply to, basically, everything about the past twenty years, is to compare it to the Industrial Revolution. I believe we're in the midst of the Information Revolution now and while history doesn't map to the present 1-1, it comes pretty close.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, there was relatively little policing of the natural environment. Aside from property laws, once you were out in nature you could basically do what you wanted. That worked tolerably well, because the scale of what a single person could do to that shared environment was relatively limited.
But with industrialization came massive force multipliers. A single company could cause absolutely devastating pollution to the environment. They could reap all of the rewards while foisting all of the externalities onto everyone else.
I believe we're now in an era where we have to think of the information environment that we live in as a precious commons shared by us all. We still absolutely must have freedom of speech—everyone should have an inalienable right to visit and participate in that information environment. At the same time, no one should have an unbounded right to cause large-scale pollution that environment in ways that harm others, which is exactly what disinformation is.
Good laws are rarely all or nothing. We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.
There actually was another Information Revolution we can draw historical comparisons to - the printing press. The Lutheran Church is a direct outcome from that, as were some much more interesting and exciting events - check out Dan Carlin's Hardcore History for an entertaining overview.
Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses, but they were removed by the Roman Catholic Church because they determined it violated their community guidelines.
I listened to a discussion last winter about misinformation, rumors, and figuring out how to deal with them as a society. One of the people involved made a comment along the lines of "when he thinks about the internet he remembers that the invention of the printing press was followed by 200 years of religious upheaval and wars."
That made an impression on me, it seems like such a hard problem to think about well. I've seen that moderation is something that is very difficult to scale beyond a relatively small group of both consumers and moderators.
These are public, as was the fact that there were multiple "Disinformation" hires. However, the meetings between the Wikimedia Foundation and the DHS specifically (as opposed to government agencies generally) were not mentioned in public communications, to my knowledge.
> These are public, as was the fact that there were multiple "Disinformation" hires. However, the meetings between the Wikimedia Foundation and the DHS specifically (as opposed to government agencies generally) were not mentioned in public communications, to my knowledge.
Embezzling information is a form of disinformation too.
This is actually a great comparison, and we can look at the proliferation of anti-witchcraft propaganda leading to the brutal murders of thousands of women and queer people for a prototypical example of the very real damage caused by disinformation.
persecution of non-straight people is not new. are you wanting a source for linking queer and witchcraft specifically as one, as I'm not sure that's what the GP was intended even if the wording leans that way.
It's hard to see what else might have been intended, since this phrase seems to be linked to the "anti-witchcraft propaganda" phrase, with nothing else dangling there to apply it to.
> But with industrialization came massive force multipliers. A single company could cause absolutely devastating pollution to the environment. They could reap all of the rewards while foisting all of the externalities onto everyone else.
From past research into the history of the Industrial Revolution where it comes to pollution, I've seen that there were many court cases brought up to oppose industrial pollution from factories on farmers and others' land. What happened in these cases is that contrary to all past legal precedent of landowners' property rights, the rulings went in favor of industry because it was seen to be in the collective good to see progress and that superseded the individual rights of the landowners to not have their land damaged by pollution.
The lesson I see from the Industrial Revolution isn't one of dangerous force multipliers, but that ignoring individual rights always comes back to bite you.
> We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.
I think we all (or most of us) agree that individual rights exist.
But what is this collective rights you're mentioning? How are rights possessed by a group that aren't possessed by individuals? And if so, which rights and which groups?
And if collective rights exist and if they're ever in conflict with individual rights, why not just automatically side with the the smallest minority of all, the individual?
> why not just automatically side with the the smallest minority of all, the individual?
Do I have the right to kill all of the fish in a lake? Presumably not because there are other people who fish in that lake who would be harmed. If there happen to be no other people who want to fish in it right now do I then have the right? Why not? What individual right would I be stepping on?
One way to think of collective rights is that they are simply the rights of at least one individual we can reasonably assume does or will exist but cannot directly point to right now. Yes, the "reasonable assume" part requires judgement.
> Do I have the right to kill all of the fish in a lake? Presumably not because there are other people who fish in that lake who would be harmed. If there happen to be no other people who want to fish in it right now do I then have the right? Why not? What individual right would I be stepping on?
A simple answer about legality might be: "You can kill all of the fish in a lake that you own just as you can kill all of the fish in your fish tank, but not your neighbor's fish tank".
The legal cases in the Industrial Revolution that cropped up were the equivalent of a factory owner dumping poison in a farmer's lake and a judge merely saying to the farmer, "That's progress, sucks to be you". A strict adherence to property rights could have prevented many environmental problems.
PS: I'm obviously not familiar with your life experience and background, but for some reason it doesn't seem like you've encountered much in the way of libertarian style arguments on this before. I'm not here to do the proselytization thing (and I don't even think I'm a libertarian), but for the sake of enhancing your own arguments, I'd highly recommend looking into some libertarian-style environmentalist discussions on Reddit, looking into searches like "free-market environmentalism", or looking into libertarian-esque environmental think tanks like https://www.perc.org/ to gain a better understanding of what you're arguing against.
> One way to think of collective rights is that they are simply the rights of at least one individual we can reasonably assume does or will exist but cannot directly point to right now. Yes, the "reasonable assume" part requires judgement.
If you can come up with a better definition, I'd be open to hear it and noodle it over, but it sounds like there's no objective standard.
I'm sure your intentions are good here, but a hypothetical imaginary person's rights could always end up trumping an actual person's rights. Think about what happened in much of history. There was no objective code of laws and if there was some judge like a king or tribe leader or high priest or something, he just based his decisions on whatever he felt might have been reasonable. It was always seen as a great civilizational progress for humanity to try and codify all laws into a legal system that could be objectively understood. Not sure that what you're arguing for, based on how you described it, is anything but a step backwards.
> We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.
We already have laws which provide penalties for 8+ categories of illegal speech: {Obscenity, Fighting words, Defamation, Child pornography, Perjury, Blackmail, Incitement to imminent lawless action, True threats, fraud, conspiracy to commit a felony, etc}.
My assessment is the tools of the law (police departments, prosecutors, courts, and tort litigation) don't move at the scale of internet posters/commenters.
How long did it take for Alex Jones to build a theory about the Newtown School Shooting kids' parents/families/investigators? He probably just remixed some 4Chan theory in a few minutes then went onto his show unscripted.
How long (and how many resources) did it take the plaintiffs and their lawyers to gather evidence, do discovery, fight AJones's legal motions to delay the case? Literally years. The first case was finally settled 10 years after the shooting.
The law doesn't move fast enough because of the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle[1]. New laws are unlikely to solve that problem. IMHO only very consistent prosecution of people that do violate the law would dissuade law breakers.
If Brandolini's law is true and if there is gonna be a ministry of truth, then that ministry probably needs to grow exponentially and suck up all other ministries until all BS is eliminated.
[The Ministry of Truth] was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The law moves reasonably fast on criminal cases. The lawsuit against Alex Jones was a civil case, which are inherently less urgent. Many cases were also delayed due to the recent pandemic.
What's your point? 18 months to resolve a criminal case seems reasonable. There's no particular need to move faster. Delays in criminal cases usually happen with the consent of the defendant since they consider it advantageous to have more time, especially if they're not being held in jail. Defendants can usually accelerate the process if they insist on maximally exercising their 6th Amendment rights but most don't.
I wish HN had a way to bubble up or highlight comments from particular people on an opt-in basis. Your comments are always insightful and high quality.
I bookmark some of the outstanding contributors on this forum, usually because of regular insights or domain expertise. It’s quite amazing to read comments from deeply knowledgeable people, who in some cases have even been witnesses to history or inventors.
There is nothing new about this. Mobs, riots, and mass unrest have occurred as a result of rumors, conspiracies, and "disinformation" since the beginning of human civilization.
It was a major concern during the Constitutional Convention that:
> In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men.
What's different is we're coming out of a time when a very small class of people had near-total functional control (or so they thought) over mainstream media, so there were huge swaths of people they really had no experience of. Now these people are @ing them on Twitter. And seeing these people out there makes them very, very uncomfortable.
The arguments you're making are not new arguments. They're the exact same arguments made by authoritarian regimes for millenia. From the article:
> In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government.
The problem is dissent. Much of the government is run and controlled by a class of people whose beliefs and values are becoming increasingly divorced from other segments of the population. And rather than re-adjusting their policies and goals in line with a democratic consensus, they want to stay their course and tighten control of speech and even thought in the name of social order and harmony. None of this is new at all.
200 years ago, everyone had about the same power to reach people. Oh, sure, it was easier the richer you were, but the difference was not dramatic and wealth inequality was not as dramatic a factor. Then in the 20th to early 21st centuries, broadcast television and media consolidation put a lot of one-way power into the hands of a very small set of hands. Now everyone is on the same playing field once again.
The issue is not the strawman you put up, where you mention it is scary to the leaders that people are getting access to information and making choices. The issue is that people are riling up large groups of people based on lies and making deadly threats (like Trump's "beat up the people in the crowd who are protesting"), leading to threats, attacks on govt - these attacks are based on absolute lies, and deadly threats of violence and some of them end up happening. Also your broad arguments about "authoritarian regimes did things, so they are bad". It's the specifics that matter. Dictators who controlled everything in say Russia also controlled the production of milk, that doesn't mean milk deliveries are authoritarian and bad.
Everyone is not on the same level now. Some are willing to make incredibly outlandish claims about stolen elections, and make personal threats to others, they are fine with that and they have enough power to make it hard to stop them or counter their reach.
> so there were huge swaths of people they really had no experience of. Now these people are @ing them on Twitter. And seeing these people out there makes them very, very uncomfortable.
"These people" have brought us a mass convergence of social panics (some recent, others remixed):
- Anti-government zealotry (a la sovereign citizens, accelerationists, Ruby Ridge, Timothy McVeigh, Turner Diaries readers, Amon Bundy militia, 3 Percenters, Boogaloo Boys, neo-nazis)
- traditional family advocates / anti LGBTQ+
- sexual slavery/trafficking
- anti police-violence (both the pro-police and anti-police movements)
- local community book burning
- "abortion is genocide"
- "white genocide"
- 2020 election fraud
- anti "Jews control the [elite organization]" (millennias old)
- Pizzagate / adrenachrome / HollyWeird / "cabal of [elite people] who [some secret sex or slavery acts]" / QAnon
- Obama birtherism
- numerous things with the Clintons including "the Clinton Kill Count", "HER EMAILS!!!", and Benghazi
- numerous things with Donald Trump (too many to name)
- George Soros (theories about uses of dark money)
- The Koch brothers (theories about uses of dark money)
> We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.
What about a private sector solution?
We consider Michelin stars to be indicative of exceptional food. You can still get amazing food outside of their reviewed restaurants, but to be included in their list you need to pass a pretty thorough anonymous inspection over time.
It could be at an individual reporter level or a publication level and reviewed using a set of public, transparent criteria.
It would be far from perfect, but a bottom up review is definitely better than any top down censorship.
The private sector has over and again shown that it is not the right lever to use when trying to solve public commons / ecological problems. The private sector is what gave us Dickensian hellholes full of child coal miners, the North Atlantic cod collapse, the Bhopal disaster, etc.
Private enterprises are structurally incentivized to externalize their costs in order to compete with other private enterprises. They are about as good at preserving a shared public space (physical, ecological, or informational) as any of the hippos are in Hungry Hungry Hippos.
I'm not anti-market in general. I think within the bounds of a well-structured regulated market, they have shown an incredible ability to increase efficiency and allow goods and labor to flow around and organize.
But that only works when the market participants are playing a game with rules and enforcement. If you just get a bunch of people together all trying to win without regulation, you get a quarterback carrying an assault rifle onto the field.
> We consider Michelin stars to be indicative of exceptional food.
Yes, but we do not rely on Michelin to make sure we don't each roaches or get food poisoning. We rely on regulation for that. Michelin ratings don't scale to the level needed for food safety. It's a niche, luxury product.
> It could be at an individual reporter level or a publication level and reviewed using a set of public, transparent criteria.
Reporting without enforcement is pointless. There were many many reports showing clearly that the North Atlantic cod population was going to collapse. The fisherman didn't care. They just wanted to get what they could out of the water for as long as they could.
This is a prime example of the private sector working, while Republicans crying fowl without knowing or caring that they are destroying the private sector solution.
Reminder that Google's response to the Republican claims is to RTFM when sending email marketing:
> Google denied the allegations, saying the spam filtering is based on actions taken by users. "As we have repeatedly said, we simply don't filter emails based on political affiliation," Google said in a statement provided to Ars. "Gmail's spam filters reflect users' actions. We provide training and guidelines to campaigns, we recently launched an FEC-approved pilot for political senders, and we continue to work to maximize email deliverability while minimizing unwanted spam." [1]
GMail isn't biased towards/away from Republicans. The users receiving those messages are training the spam filter to dislike their messages.
Getting regulators involved in this case is increasing nanny-state actions from the party that claims to hate the nanny-state.
> GMail isn't biased towards/away from Republicans. The users receiving those messages are training the spam filter to dislike their messages.
i think this highlights an interesting dynamic we’re seeing pretty often lately, groups are trying to force their beliefs and the recipients are saying “i’m not at all interested.”
it really seems reminiscent to what i’ve read about the 60s-90s religious groups where these groups were trying to force their personal religious beliefs onto society.
these groups are now suing to use government force to force companies to force their views onto all of us.
again:
> GMail isn't biased towards/away from Republicans. The users receiving those messages are training the spam filter to dislike their messages.
The capture and revolving door definitely goes both ways.
Although my comment may not be sufficient to prove anything, there's a lot to explore with this topic. For instance, here's an example in the other direction:
>more than 80 former Schumer staffers have gone on to subsequently work at the Big Tech firms. And Schumer's two daughters have also both worked directly for Big Tech—one for Amazon, and one for Facebook subsidiary Instagram.
This article is only about the one direction, but you can be sure the revolving door goes both ways in big-tech. Just look at all the ex-NATO officers currently wor
If Google (specifically GMail) is rent-seeking, the Republican lawsuit isn't an example of it.
The study Republicans cite only displayed a bias in the default training of a new email account that had never trained the spam filter:
> "Shahzad said while the spam filters demonstrated political biases in their 'default behavior' with newly created accounts, the trend shifted dramatically once they simulated having users put in their preferences by marking some messages as spam and others as not," the Post article said. [1]
In other words, Republican email messages are more likely to use spammy phrases. Once a user starts marking any messages as "mark as spam" or "move to inbox", the bias dissipates.
This is not anywhere close to a good example of rent seeking.
Reciving thousands of spam emails per user per day is ... not normal. If they weren't exxagerating then there must have some factors that saw them targeted specifically. I encoruage you to run your own mail server and publish your address on the web and see that the reality is pretty manageable without any filter.
Everything that has transpired over the past ~30 years with the big tech companies should have shown you that the private sector does not give a shit about our individual rights.
> We still absolutely must have freedom of speech—everyone should have an inalienable right to visit and participate in that information environment. At the same time, no one should have an unbounded right to cause large-scale pollution that environment in ways that harm others, which is exactly what disinformation is.
This is contradictory.
> We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.
Maybe something like, you can't force someone to stop and pay attention to you if they don't want to? Or maybe letting people sue anyone who spreads damaging lies about them?
It isn't in the parallel they are drawing - right now you have free permission to visit public property and forests and national parks but you still can't cause harm to others or the property (set fires). So while there is personal freedom, it is not at the cost of other people's freedom.
As to your second point, what about social networks not showing content that they believe to be objectionable. Does that count as “not forcing someone to stop and pay attention to you if they don’t want to?”
"Contradictory" presumes that a given property is Boolean and thus if it isn't one value, it must be the other.
Very few useful properties outside of the artificial worlds of logic and computing are Boolean. Most properties we are trying to design systems for out in the real world continuously varying and often multi-dimensional.
That's why optimizing them requires difficult trade-offs.
I think disinformation is not as a significant problem as it is often made out to be. It would not need immediate attention. It is the individual decision of some people to listen to it. Many of them know better, but they have a conflict with those that want to set themselves up to discern truth and wrong.
Especially with topics like the pandemic I see no authority that could help here and maybe that isn't so bad in the grand scheme of things.
"Information" and "misinformation" is not. The problem of "truth" is a philosophical one - how do you know that a particular claim is, indeed, true? Very few things in the world are directly provable. Even judges and juries get it wrong a lot, even when human lives - apparently the most valued things in society - are at stake.
Your model has a fatal flaw in its assumption that "the truth" is something obvious that we all agree upon. It's not - it's subjective and complicated.
The entire history of the ecological movement is about conservationists working incredibly hard to create the notion of "pollution" as a concept, persuade people to believe it, build technology to detect it, generate data based on that, prove that it actually causes harm, and get people to care.
Really, please do learn more about the history of ecology and conservation and you will realize that the truth is anything but what you just said.
> The entire history of the ecological movement is about conservationists working incredibly hard to create the notion of "pollution" as a concept, persuade people to believe it, build technology to detect it, generate data based on that, prove that it actually causes harm, and get people to care.
This seems more like a problem of convincing people of truth than problem of the contept of pollution. We have built technology to detect it - we have no such technology to detect truth. So pollution is measurable, truth is not.
> Really, please do learn more about the history of ecology and conservation and you will realize that the truth is anything but what you just said.
No, I don't think me having an epiphany of "Gasp! That person on the internet was RIGHT, I was completely WRONG! Pollution is a harder problem than truth!" is going to happen, no matter how much history of ecology I learn. It's a cute sentiment, though.
Pollution is well defined and easy to detect precisely because we have centuries of experience studying the effects of pollution on the environment. And even then we learn new things and have to revise opinions on what we define as "pollution" and what not. See the history of Asbestos, or of CFCs for examples of things we didn't think of as "polluting" initially or assumed the tradeoffs were worth it, only to later realize that they aren't.
> Pollution is well defined and easy to detect precisely because we have centuries of experience studying the effects of pollution on the environment
We also have centuries (even millennia) of experience studying the truth. Yet the problem of truth is still as hard as always. I don't see how could any amount of experience solve such fundamental problems.
I don't think the issue at hand is truths and lies, it's the ability to both communicate with hundreds of millions of people easily while at the same time also being able to create smaller silos of group think with no restriction on geography.
The initial comment's argument is comparing "misinformation" with "pollution", since misinformation can now be massively broadcast to many people through the internet, causing ill effects.
The problem is differentiating between "information" and "misinformation" - which is exactly the issue of truth and lies, isn't it?
Otherwise, if you ignore the truthfulness of information, and judge only by the effects, you're walking a slippery slope towards censoring truth because "it's harmful".
We've been trying to find ways to discover truth for much much longer than we've been looking for pollution. I think consensus is that there are some things that are unprovable - e.g., the existence of a god. We know with a high degree of certainty, thanks to Kurt Godel and others, that there are things that cannot be proven.
You're using bad analogy to promote a bullshit idea of speech control for the sake of the "common good". The problem with your idea is that unlike environmental pollution in which real, physical spaces are damaged or destroyed by measurable physical contaminants, intellectual "pollution" is extremely subjective.
It's subject to the biases of those who decide what is and isn't disinformation and its subject to changes in these biases over time. The damage it does is also hard to measure, especially when weighed against the damage caused by giving anyone or group of people the authority to decide what others can say and believe. It's easy to apply such ideas to obviously stupid conspiracy theories and fringe claims, but it's also very easy to start spreading the scope of what gets claimed as disinformation over time.
We could look at the entire pandemic as just one very evident example of these tendencies happening. We can also look at a number of authoritarian countries that have taken advantage of the western media obsession with "misinformation/disinformation" of the last few years and used it as a cover for passing their own clearly authoritarian speech-repressing laws in the name of "fighting misinformation". Freer countries are also never immune to going down the same road, their governments DO NOT need more tools for making it easier.
Truly bad information and grossly ignorant opinions are not only not anything new in all of human history, they are if anything today less extreme and less common than they've ever been. The proliferation of better thinking has moved best in exactly those countries where free speech has been best protected. It's in places where it has been repressed that the opposite tends to happen more easily.
It's sad to me that educated, intelligent people can use sophistry to try building moats around their personal biases in defense of speech controls and then claim that they're working towards the protection of people's minds, or any sort of common good. History has shown that such attempts at controlling speech almost invariably produce the opposite and that giving power over speech to any authority does so especially. Grotesque.
No we don't need any more legislation to restrict or suppress freedom of expression. Our current laws are working fine. Today's "disinformation" occasionally becomes tomorrow's historical fact or accepted scientific theory. If, as a consequence, some people suffer incidental harm or take offense then that is a completely acceptable outcome.
Drivers find it quite uncomfortable to be without a car. If they don't use internet from birth, they shouldn't miss it. Or it can be an internet cafe or ATM/kiosk (for a public transport system).
Too many institutions now presume internet access for that to be true, even here in Germany, despite many of the people around me with the meme that German bureaucracy is pre-digital.
And I have a driving licence, but have had no need to drive since moving to Berlin.
I'm not talking about ATMs. I'm taking about government functions, banking (can't invest shares on an ATM), taxation, how to find out which services can be accessed where and when, what schedule changes are planned for public transport, collecting parcels that have been redirected and finding out where they were redirected to, doctor appointments, and so on.
Sometimes these things can be done without internet, but not always, and the current trend is moving more things online-only.
Flaming hot take: the Internet was better in the past because only developed nations had access to it. As soon as mobile phones lowered the barrier to entry and BRIC countries and the like had easy access to it, the quality of everything plummeted. The amount of bad actors that flooded into the system was astronomical.
Hot countertake: No nation has a monopoly on jackasses and the majority of problems in my life caused by misinformation on the Internet came from my fellow Americans.
Just charge for tweets and posts, & like everything else the rich will do as they please and the rest of us will obey the law. I'm pretty sure that arrangement will quickly put an end to fears of "disinformation!"
> to cause large-scale pollution
Be Exxon and have expensive lawyers and you'll be fine.
Looked at from another angle, I guess I'm proposing a thought experiment:
Imagine if only billionaires, celebrities, or "papers of record" were permitted to opine. Would we be discussing the problem of disinformation and how to institutionally address it using police powers?
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, there was relatively little policing of the natural environment. Aside from property laws, once you were out in nature you could basically do what you wanted. That worked tolerably well, because the scale of what a single person could do to that shared environment was relatively limited.
But with industrialization came massive force multipliers. A single company could cause absolutely devastating pollution to the environment. They could reap all of the rewards while foisting all of the externalities onto everyone else.
I believe we're now in an era where we have to think of the information environment that we live in as a precious commons shared by us all. We still absolutely must have freedom of speech—everyone should have an inalienable right to visit and participate in that information environment. At the same time, no one should have an unbounded right to cause large-scale pollution that environment in ways that harm others, which is exactly what disinformation is.
Good laws are rarely all or nothing. We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.