> They are closer to states than they are to algorithms
This seems like nonsense. All the tech industry does is convince people. It doesn't force anyone to do anything. States have a monopoly on violence. No one holds a gun to anyone's head forcing them to consume <insert content you disagree with>. In a country of equals, everyone's opinion, including <position you disagree with>, should hold equal sway, and be resolved via democratic due process.
Just because many people hold <position you disagree with> and vote for <politician you find repugnant> doesn't give you any sort of reasonable justification to limit the freedom of others to advocate (including on social media) for it.
I agree with everything you've said with regard to the justice of the matter, but I don't think that there is a free market at work in social media.
* So-called "intellectual property" laws dramatically skew what can and cannot be shared
* Censorship at the behest of world governments is rampant, and completely overran anything representing a nonviolent scientific dialogue during the recent COVID19 pandemic
* States, with their monopoly on the legitimate initiation of force, pick winners and losers at every level of the experience, from chip makers to the duopolistic mobile OS vendors to their app stores to the social media offerings. Sure, network effect may describe the reason people join and stay, but the availability of places to join and stay is in no sense a market phenomenon
Consider: the major social media barons meet with POTUS all the freakin' time. Do you suppose that's just because they enjoy his company?
> So-called "intellectual property" laws dramatically skew what can and cannot be shared
Agree! let's get rid of these :)
> Censorship at the behest of world governments is rampant
Agree! States have always pursued censorship to maintain power. That doesn't contradict the point that social media companies themselves are not state actors, and are not the problem.
> States ... pick winners and losers
I'm not sure I'm 100% on board here. States may thumb the scales, but the fact of the existence of FAANG/MANGO seems much more like a market phenomenon than an interventionist project.
> social media barons meet with POTUS all the freakin' time
There is almost no clearer display of corporate self-preservation than social media vendors kowtowing to the president.
Much of what you're outlining is standard run of the mill corruption. The US Government (and others) is acting in contradiction to its stated principles. This is not a new phenomenon, and seems in the category of core human governance challenges.
I think you may have misunderstood my comment - or perhaps misunderstood the consequences of the censorship regime.
If anything, it seemed like the denialism was amplified by the censorship. What fell by the wayside were the serious, rigorous dialogue that had previously been the best thinking on epidemiology and public health.
I was a moderator and frequent contributor to /r/ebola during the 2014 outbreak; during that time I reached out and began to form relationships with (and respect spectrums for) various epidemiologists and academic departments. And it was really hard during the COVID19 pandemic to watch people like John Ioannidis, David Katz, Sunetra Gupta, Michael Levitt, etc. be totally cut out of the conversation while a group of second-stringers who were willing to toe the corporate line took their place.
Was it your experience that the censorship worked to _stem_ denialism? It seemed to me that it made it much louder and much worse, muddying the water of genuine discussion and research.
The idea that real, serious scientific debate was stymied by social media platform policies doesn't pass the smell test for me. Facebook/twitter/et al were making good faith efforts to stop the flood of downright harmful misinformation, and government didn't force them to do it. None of even the most questionable scientists were ever silenced. Those folks had the right wing press broadcasting their worst ideas to the world, the didn't even need social media when they could get on Fox News every day of the week.
It was the final attempt of social media even trying to be something more than a cancer. Now? Every social media platform (especially Facebook and twitter) would have zero problems being the driver of modern day pogroms, complete with running betting markets on the outcomes, if it would keep their share prices up.
> None of even the most questionable scientists were ever silenced.
...a literal nobel laureate, a literal Einstein scholar, and literally the author of the most cited paper in the history of open publishing were all censored.
Multiple scholars of the Hoover Institution. The director of Oxford Center for EBM. An author of the most widely-assigned textbook in preventative epidemiology. Two editors-in-chief of BMJ publications. Literally the BMJ itself had articles removed from Facebook! The British Journal of Medicine was censored from Facebook dude!
Tenured professors form Yale, Johns Hopkins, Oxford, Harvard, and Standard (several from Stanford in particular) had their work either totally removed or subject to shadowban-style censorship.
What can you possibly be talking about? I'm broadly anti-credentialist, but I can't fathom not noticing what happened: The world's foremost experts were silenced; we all watched it happen.
Let's not mince words here: there was a _thunderous_ chorus of the world's top experts opining against lockdowns. And social media depicted something entirely different, and entirely false. It wasn't like... close. Lockdowns never gained anything resembling mainstream support in the actual real world of epidemiology.
David Katz, Michael Levitt, Carl Henegan, Monica Ghandi, Scott Atlas, Vinay Prasad, Eran Bendavid, Sunetra Gupta, John fucking Ioannidis (my personal favorite author of medical science for over a decade prior to COVID19, and arguably the most accomplished medical scientist of our generation)... I can go on and on and on. How on earth are you conducting your "smell test"?!
All the most impressive minds of our age were cast aside so some second-stringers from suburban Virginia, who had been collecting a paycheck from NIH and CDC but not doing anything resembling continuing education at their alma maters, could babble nonsense about interdiction and hold aloft the Imperial study which they obviously didn't understand (and which all of us who read it knew it was destined to retracted from the word go).
There were a tiny few serious academics who endorsed lockdowns. And some were genuine experts who simply got it wrong. I respect Carl Bergstrom and Marc Lipsitch enormously, and I give them credit for sticking their head above the parapet - I think they genuinely believed in horizontal interdiction and, although they were absolutely wrong, I don't think they were intentional being propagandistic.
And I don't think they went out intending to be amplified as they were. I only wish their other work were amplified as much as when it was convenient for the lockdown narrative.
...but it's simply, totally false that accomplished academics and experts weren't censored. I can't even approach that with a straight face.
A lot of people with credentials join the grift train, yes. Apparently it's quite profitable. Listing many of them isn't really an argument that the grift is true.
What a bizarre and reckless take. I thought this 'no true scotsman' nonsense was put to bed in 2022.
By this metric, who is _not_ a grifter? You have to be Scott Gottleib or Peter Daszak - shilling pseudoscience while sitting on the boards of corporations making billions from the pandemic - to _not_ be a grifter? Is that it?
> Literally the BMJ itself had articles removed from Facebook!
These people got their stuff published in the British Medical Journal, so nobody in the scientific community had the slightest problem seeing it.
Facebook posted a fact check where the story was shared pointing out some problems with it. They didn’t “censor” anything. It was frankly entirely reasonable and the BMJ should have done better in the first place. Facebook did “combat bad speech with more speech”, the thing you’re supposed to do, and the cranks absolutely lost their minds.
In any case, the danger is over now and we can rest easy knowing that Facebook won’t lift a finger to prevent millions from being misled about vaccines causing autism. They’ll sell ads alongside the posts! phew
...let's get our facts straight here. I hope we can agree on this nutshell:
* During phase III of the Pfizer trial, there was an unblinding event which was not initially disclosed. At first, it appeared that it might only have been a few dozen participants, but later disclosures showed that it was more serious.
* The BMJ learned of this - again, only knowing about a few dozen patients - from the regional director of the contractor carrying out one of the arms of the trial, who was fired the same day she reported the unblinding to the FDA (as required by law). This disclosure included photographs of documents, in the study area, with unblinding information on them.
* The BMJ published what was, in retrospect, an extremely cautious report, even though by that time it was becoming clear that the problem went even beyond mass unblinding and into falsified data, so much so that the contractor's quality control check team were overwhelmed trying to catch up in the days between Jackson's termination and the publication of the report.
* In response, Facebook added an inane "fact check", calling the BMJ a "news blog", and which got several of the above facts wrong. In fact, the "fact check" didn't actually make any coherent assertions about the actual content of the article at all. It seemed its primary function was to add an insinuation of doubt, via scary red boxes, about the BMJ report, without any critique of the substance or merits.
* Three days later, Facebook went further - preventing the story from being shared at all, and adding warnings to users commenting on the article (in places where it had already been shared) that they risked having their accounts degraded or terminated for spreading misinformation.
* All the while, board members of Pfizer (one of who was a former FDA commissioner) were permitted to deny these assertions and smear the whistleblowers (in what, in retrospect, turns out to have been actual misinformation) with no "fact checks" or prohibitions on sharing.
* Months later, Facebook acknowledged that they took these actions at the urging of the White House.
...I don't think it's the least bit far-fetched to call this "censorship".
Facebook 'reduced distribution,' they didn't block. And again, your original claim was that social media somehow blocked scientific debate, which is categorically false. All these claims are hand-waving away the fact that this was published in the BMJ from the outset.
Facebook could throw all their servers in a wood chipper today and it would have zero effect on scientific debate in the world.
All that a state does is convince people. States don't really exist. They're fictional constructs that sometimes convince a police officer to break into a murderer's home and kidnap him. And most of us agree that's a good thing. However sometimes they convince a police officer to break into a protestor's home and kidnap him. And some of us agree that's a bad thing. Other times they convince bomb makers to make bombs and convince aircraft mechanics to attach them to airplanes and convince pilots to fly over hospitals and press the release button. That's bad too - sadly not everyone agrees on that.
You've written this with a certain sardonic tone, seemingly in efforts to show the person to whom you're responding that their view necessarily leads to the particular brand of anarchism you're espousing.
And I must say, I find your argument and phraseology very convincing. I agree with everything you've said here; states are not imbued with any particular magic. They simply convince people to do things that, if people weren't filled with the mindset of exceptions that seem to come when engaging in public services, they'd never ever do.
I have a degree in political science, and I wish that the reading material required to get that degree displayed more of the technique you've used here.
I mean, it's good prose but it's just sort of hand-waving away all the history of how we ended up with modern states. States solve a lot of problems, they're not perfect but I'm pretty passionate about not living in walled cities because there are hordes of raiders who go around enslaving everyone.
I think you both may have misunderstood my comment. It's not about history. It's simply a rebuttal to the idea that something which "only convinces" is less influential than a state. States themselves also fall into that category, and therefore we can see that things in that category can be so influential they need forceful restraint.
This could be amended to "States have a monopoly legitimate on violence". Your comment seems to deny the existence of "legitimacy" as a concept. How do you distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate use of force?
No, states can't do violence because they don't have hands, so they can't hold guns or bats. The violence is done on behalf of the state by some of the people it convinces, mostly police officers and soldiers.
No, sorry. It's eminently reasonable to ask or demand that a business to reduce its (fantastic) margins/profits in order to remain a prosocial citizen in the marketplace. In fact we do this all the time with things like "regulations".
It may be unreasonable to demand that a small business tackle a global problem at the expense of its survival. But we are not talking about small or unprofitable business. We are talking about Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon. Companies with more money than they know what to do with. These global companies need to funnel some % of their massive profits into tackling the global problems that their products have to some degree created.
This is called "consensual exchange" and it is by far the most ethical way to run society. You don't have to agree to these terms. You can go start your own company. It's a free country. The alternative always seems to boil down to various bureaucrats dictating terms to people. What gives them the right to do so?
You're no more entitled to be paid a salary than you are to get laid. Both satisfy needs that you undeniably have, but must be negotiated with other people on a strictly consensual basis.
I’m not sure I agree that consent should be a requirement for photographing people in public. You have a right to observe people in public. You have a right to take notes about these people and publish them. You have a right to hire a person to sit in a public place and record their observations, and to publish these to your heart’s content.
Technologically augmenting these rights does not change them. A pen and paper to record observations is a technological augmentation to memory and recall. A newspaper is an augmentation to a gossip corner. A camera is just the same. A person should be able to record and retransmit any information they come across in public, regardless of technology, since ownership of an observation is fundamentally the observer’s.
> You have a right to observe people in public. You have a right to take notes about these people and publish them.
Not completely. If you keep staring at me, following me around and taking notes I am going to call the police even if you keep to public spaces.
While it is not illegal to stare at people I would strongly advice you to not do so. You will find that some people will react quite badly to it.
> You have a right to hire a person to sit in a public place and record their observations, and to publish these to your heart’s content.
No, you can't. They can write about the people they saw in general terms but once you publish information that directly identifies me and contains personal information about me, I am gonna sue you. Might vary depending on country though.
People are making such high level philosophical argument about why they should be allowed to photograph strangers but no one answers why. It is hard for me to come up with any non malicious reason. Sure, maybe you just like photography but then again photograph people that consent to it.
Not to mention even if you legally can, I doubt that running around photographing strangers will gain you any positive reputation. In practice you are well advised to ask for consent anyway.
> You will find that some people will react quite badly to it
It’s a good thing we have laws, courts, and prisons for people who can’t control themselves.
> once you publish information that directly identifies me and contains personal information about me, I am gonna sue you
For what? What right of yours have I violated by retransmitting publicly available information about you? Presumably this right of yours would also be infringed if I gossiped about you? I agree it’s not a polite thing to do, but rights only count when they protect contentious actions.
> It is hard for me to come up with any non malicious reason
Free people don’t need to justify their actions. Your country may infringe on your rights, but that doesn’t invalidate the assertion they exist. Freedom of speech and the consequential freedom of the press are fundamental to a free society. Having to justify yourself when you’re not harming anyone is tyrannical.
> For what? What right of yours have I violated by retransmitting publicly available information about you? Presumably this right of yours would also be infringed if I gossiped about you? I agree it’s not a polite thing to do, but rights only count when they protect contentious actions.
Information that you gained from observing me is not necessarily publicly available information. You can't camp in front of an abortion clinic and write down everyone who went in and publish that on the internet, at least not in Germany.
Generally, if there is not a legitimate public interest, you can not publish information that would direct identify me, like my name, in a newspaper.
> Free people don’t need to justify their actions.
Well if you answered that questions, we could have an actual discussion.
Currently everyone that responded to me here said a variation of "everyone should have the right to photograph strangers without their consent because everyone should have the right to photograph strangers without their consent" with a bit of fancy works.
Like yeah this might be true and self evident because of some axioms that you have but that I don't necessary share and that you don't make explicit so this looks completely pointless to me.
I genuinely don't even understand the passion for photographing strangers without their consent and why it needs to be defended with such a lofty rhetoric.
My best attempt to steelman this is that you think restricting your god given right to photograph strangers without their consent is some slippery slop towards having more rights taken away which is... a very weak point.
> Your country may infringe on your rights, but that doesn’t invalidate the assertion they exist.
This makes no sense to me. There is not right to photograph strangers without their consent in the declaration of human right and never has such right existed in my country so how can that be my right?
What the hell has photographing strangers without their consent to do with free speech?
Observing and publishing a list of who goes into the abortion clinic is a perfect example of the exercise of free speech. You don’t need a public interest to do so. Restricting what I can publish is a violation of that exact idea. Free speech means you can say very nearly anything without criminal penalty (libel is a civil matter).
My point is that the free people can do whatever they want, as long as they are not directly harming someone else. My right to waive my fists around ends where your nose begins. I don’t need to justify why I’m waiving my arms around. I don’t need to justify why I’m camped outside the abortion clinic. Maybe I hate abortions and am engaged in civil protest. These are all protected activities in a free country.
My assertion is that as a consequence of German policy with regards to speech, Germany is a fundamentally less free place. Who gets to decide whether something is in the public interest? Why is shaming abortion seekers not in that category?
Germany has historical experienced how fascists can weaponize free speech to gain power. One of the core tenants of modern Germany is to let this happen again.
Now, we might not be doing well but certainly the US is currently doing much worse. You are already at the building camps stage and it is unclear whether you will have free elections for long.
What is the point of theoretically having free speech for a migrant worker that might deported without any trial by the ICE, for a women that might die during pregnancy because abortion was banned? Those that allow fascists to speak freely will end up with no one but fascists speaking.
People that want to murder me should not be allowed to speak.
> My point is that the free people can do whatever they want, as long as they are not directly harming someone else.
And yes, someone writing that I visited an abortion clinic can do me harm. Same as someone making lists of practicing Jews by camping outside a synagogue can get those people hurt. Your free speech ends where it can hurt me and certain information about me being public can and will hurt me.
Making the lists is not the problem. It’s the rounding people up and sending them to camps that crosses the line. We already have laws about the circumstances required for citizens to be detained. Illegal aliens can be summarily deported, such were the risks they took when the broke the law to get here.
> for a women that might die during pregnancy because abortion was banned
To discuss abortion we would have to agree about things like "what is a person?". Many would reasonably argue that unborn children are humans too and therefore deserve their own freedom.
Allowing fascists to speak freely is the hallmark of a free society. Otherwise who gets to decide who the fascists are or are not? Free societies are free as a matter of principle, not as a matter of consequence.
”I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”
When Nazis marched through Skokie, Illinois in the 70s, it was Jewish lawyers who defended them. Being obsessed with liberty is a much better defence against tyranny than hoping the enormous government apparatus that determines who gets to speak and who does not will never be turned against you.
> someone writing that I visited an abortion clinic can do me harm
No they do not. Any person who reads what they wrote and decides to visit violence against you is doing you harm. Don’t shift blame away from violent actors, they make their own decisions. We already have laws about violence. You are not harmed by people simply knowing you had an abortion. It is a true fact about you.
> for the greater good of all or advancement of society
I'm not sure we agree enough on the definitions of these things to justify a democratic redistribution of resources towards them. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny after all. The nice part about private enterprise is that it's hard to argue they didn't earn their money. Google, Apple, et al provided some value to some folks who volunteered to pay for it in a free exchange. Their claim to use their earned wealth as they see fit is much easier to substantiate than a government intervention which is neither voluntary nor obviously providing value to the people who pay for it.
> The purpose of the state is to be the most powerful organization in the room - to constrain other actors
I'm not sure this is a universal definition. Some of us just want a state that maintains a monopoly on violence, and otherwise does not constrain peaceful actors. An administration of peaceful coexistence rather than a mandate for cooperation. While administrating the peace does require some absolute power, it is required narrowly, to prosecute true crime, defend from outside threats, and resolve disputes.
How is an entity with a monopoly on violence not the most powerful actor in the room? And in what way is administering the peace not constraining other actors?
I'm perfectly happy for some folks to have trillion dollar net worth. I'm glad to negotiate with these folks and their organizations to provide value in exchange for a comfortable living.
> just buy the government they want
The idea of a constitution and separation of powers is to constrain the types of government that can legitimately exist. This does work to some degree. No matter how wealthy you are, you can't kill people in public. Money is to buy goods and services in a free exchange. When government agents acting in their official capacity accept money or the promise thereof in exchange for official action, this is called corruption. All human systems are corrupt, and no solution to corruption is perfect, but ours is pretty good compared to others.
> The idea of a constitution and separation of powers is to constrain the types of government that can legitimately exist.
It's ironic to read this in the context of what's been happening in the US recently. When the trillionaires and grifters (but I repeat myself) have fully captured the US government, you'll be able to complain that that government is no longer "legitimate", but that's not much consolation.
Best only to worry about what you can control, no? If there are external and internal factors to your success then you should spend 100% of your time focusing on the internal ones, since these are the only ones where productive gains can be made.
Also, the research is in. Grit is the single biggest predictor of economic success. Anyone who is lacking in economic success can be reasonably assumed to lack grit. Whether you label that “lazy” or not is semantics.
You're asserting that Meta a set of responsibilities towards their users, beyond simply providing a service that users can choose to use or not use.
Are these responsibilities enumerated or written anywhere? Honest question, because it's quite hard for a large group of people to agree on what these responsibilities might be unless they are written down including reasonable tests of whether they are being met or not.
A fair number of people probably agree that it's bad to pretend to research the harm of your product to kids while suppressing data that shows such harm,
We're not in the esotherics of subtle moral philosophy here.
Why can't reasonable people disagree here? Surely if the utility of some features might outweigh the security concerns for some people. Making features opt-in instead of opt-out significantly changes their discoverability and usage metrics. On the whole, a translation system that has a feature to translate selected text seems hardly surprising. Similarly, using an online service to improve translation quality and reduce local resource usage also seems reasonable.
Fundamentally, always-online, home-phoning features are the norm, and it should be up to OS distributions to manage security postures such as allowlists for network access. Think something along the lines of "StarDict wants to connect to dict.cn. Allow/Deny?".
They can, but framing this as a mere disagreement is disingenuous: One approach might slightly inconvenience someone, while the other (as was taken here) inflicts irreparable damage.
> Fundamentally, always-online, home-phoning features are the norm,
No. Although common on certain platforms, they are not a fundamental norm in software, nor should they be.
Plotting the highest observable assembly index over time will yield an exponential curve starting from the beginning of the universe. This is the closest I’m aware of to a mathematical model quantifying the distinct impression that local complexity has been increasing exponentially.
This seems like nonsense. All the tech industry does is convince people. It doesn't force anyone to do anything. States have a monopoly on violence. No one holds a gun to anyone's head forcing them to consume <insert content you disagree with>. In a country of equals, everyone's opinion, including <position you disagree with>, should hold equal sway, and be resolved via democratic due process.
Just because many people hold <position you disagree with> and vote for <politician you find repugnant> doesn't give you any sort of reasonable justification to limit the freedom of others to advocate (including on social media) for it.