I've written about freedom of speech extensively in all manner of forums, but the one thing that has become clear to me lately, is that people are genuinely uninterested in the philosophical underpinnings of freedom of speech. Today they would rather quote an XKCD comic, than John Stuart Mill's seminar work On Liberty.
Because of this, I've decided to try to reframe the original notion of freedom of speech, into a term I coined: Open Ideas.
Open Ideas is nothing more than what freedom of speech has always been historically: a philosophical declaration that the open contestation of ideas is the engine of progress that keeps moving society forward.
Today the tyranny of the majority believes freedom of speech is anything but that. They believe that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", despite the fact that such term came from nowhere, has no author, and in addition all great free speech thinkers argued precisely the opposite. The great thinkers argued that if people are afraid of expressing unpopular opinions, that is functionally the same as government censorship: ideas are suppressed, society stagnates, and progress is halted.
So far I have not yet heard any sound refutation of any of these ideas. All people do is repeat the aforementioned dogmatic slogan with zero philosophical foundation, or mention First Amendment details, which obviously is not equal to freedom of speech.
How is anything I've stated in any way an inaccurate assessment of what is happening?
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Notes -
Some people seem to equate “freedom of speech” with “freedom of reach”. You can say whatever you want. That doesn’t mean what whatever you say must be published by loudspeaker media institutions and promoted by social media algorithms.
Why put so much effort into pretending you're not exercising power?
Megaphone media has the excuse of limited resources, but SocMeds have no justification for manipulating the kind of content their users will see. Technologically it's perfectly possible to let every user write their own algorithm, but at the very least people should be given the option to switch to a basic "people who liked X also liked Y" algorithm.
I think the technical hurdles to this are a lot higher than you expect. I'd like to see someone make a shot at doing it anyway, but I'm confident it will come with some significant trade-offs. A basic algorithm is probably more likely.
The main problem is that you need to run this somewhere and neither of your choices are good.
Running this on company hardware brings large performance and safety risks. Safety because some guy is going to try to get you to run an infinite loop or virus. Performance because search algorithms over large datasets are computationally intensive at the best of times, and code written by random strangers is not the best of times. Solving both of these without severely limiting the ability to create an algorithm would be a miracle.
Running this on a user's computer instead raises challenges around getting the data into the user's computer to be searched. If you're looking at Twitter and want to get today's tweets from accounts you follow that could be thousands of records. Download speed limitations will ensure you will never be able to run your algorithm on more than a tiny fraction of the full site.
In the most general technical sense, sure, the Halting Problem is unsolvable: no matter how long you let some arbitrary algorithm run you can't always be sure of whether it's going to keep going forever or whether it's actually just about to finish.
In slightly less general technical sense, here, you don't need some arbitrary algorithm just to do a better version of an ordered search, so you can restrict your users to a non-Turing-Complete language on which the Halting Problem is solvable.
Practically speaking, you just do what any automated test suite does: you define "infinite" to be 5 minutes, or 5 seconds, or however much you expect you can spare per run at most, and if the algorithm isn't done by then it gets killed anyway.
This, on the other hand, has been solved even in the technical sense. Even if you're going Turing-Complete you don't have to let your users specify a program in C or binary or something, or run it unsandboxed in the same address space or with the same kernel privileges. Your browser has probably run a hundred little arbitrary Javascript programs so far today, and the worst they could have done would have been to churn your CPU until you closed a tab, because anything more serious is sufficiently restricted. Crooks sending you links to rnicrosoft.com still depend on you typing in your credentials or downloading and running something heinous afterward, even though the second you click a link like that they get to send your computer arbitrary programs that it will immediately run.
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