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I don’t know why these people find it tough. It just isn’t. Don’t censor. But someone said something I consider naughty? Who the fuck cares.
That was the old attitude of those fighting censorship. Aw, you don't like sex/naughty words/other things, you prude? Well then just don't read or look at that stuff. Anyone has the right to say anything they want.
Of course, that couldn't last long in the pure state, because (1) okay so are you saying it's really okay to spew lies about people and call for their murder? and (2) some of the people who were fighting censorship were only doing it because it was their views or wishes that were being censored; when they got the right to say/write what they wanted, they soon moved on to "no, you can't say/write that because it's hate speech or violence". In other words, they were not committed to fighting censorship, they wanted the power and authority to censor what they didn't like.
EDIT: My natural instincts are pro-censorship. There are things I think are harmful or stupid or wrong and should not be publicised. I've had to consciously make myself more 'tolerant' on this, and then when I finally get to the point of "okay, I may not agree with it, I may not like it, but they have the right to say it", then the liberal side goes for "now we have the upper hand, censorship is okay!"
I’m fine with libel laws and the incitement standards. They are robust narrowly defined set of rules (I would overturn NYT v Sullivan).
And yes, there is a problem that some people only like free speech when it’s their speech that is being censored. I am honestly okay with allowing progressives, commies, Nazis, or even the Amish to have free speech rights.
Honestly I don’t think you are being intellectually honest saying your fine with those people having free speech.
If the commies were in position to actually win and their numbers just went from 20 to 30% and you knew in 5 years they would succeed taking over every institution and you would suddenly being living in Mao China then you would not say you support free speech for them.
Let’s say you are Musks. You own twitter. You can hit a red button let’s call it the deplatform button. If you hit it the commies lose momentum and disappear. If you don’t hit it then you live in communists china in 5 years.
I would not believe you if you told me you won’t hit the red button. You are fine with them having free speech provided they are small and not in charge of real power. But that changes quickly if their free speech leads to winning the ideology battle.
The point of free speech is
Speech = win battle of ideology = win power = enforce their ideology on you
Maybe you are right. Communist China sucks. But at the same time, I know the allure of wanting to ban disfavored speech is to turn everything I don’t like into commies. Don’t stare into the void.
Censorship is merely a tool that can be used to further a goal. If you only want to ban commies, and not go any further, then just do exactly that and no more.
It's not some kind of addictive substance or dark magic that will warp your mind into something unrecognisable. It's a simple, non-violent press of a button - the victims will be frustrated and angry, but unharmed physically.
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In the last few years I think I’ve just lost faith that the better argument will win and society will be better off. And historically a lot of bad things seemed to have happened.
I grew up in America being mostly good but it seems like path directionality sometimes matter.
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"Imagine you are richest man in Russia who (among other things) owns largest network of newspaper kiosks in St. Petersburg in April 1917. Would you stop selling Pravda if it is the only way to stop the dastardly commies?"
This is hypothetical scenario unconnected to real life.
1/Nowhere in history communists won due to "free speech" , nowhere communists won by convincing majority on free marketplace of ideas that communism is the best thing since sliced bread. Countries where communists prevailed were countries that practiced heavy censorship (at the time), it did not helped.
Closest example is possibly Czechoslovakia after WW2, but it was heavily managed "democracy" with only four political parties(and their newspapers) alloved and all criticism of Soviet Union treated as fascist treason.
2/ In situation where communists are in such ascendancy and ready to take power, they now have their political party, trade unions, organizations of all kind (including well armed militias) and their own newspapers, radio, TV stations and, in modern conditions, their equivalent of Twitter.
Does Elon have any comprehensible "ideology"? He is against long list of things (that changes every week), but what exactly is he for? What he wants the world look like?
I think his core is what I’ve heard to as Victorian ideology. Striving to still do great things. I think he probably has a great deal of HBD realism probably even magnified by his experience in S Africa and it now being a failing state.
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The Amish are run like a society-wide cancel mob.
I don't think that's true. They use shunning as punishment, but as far as I know the mob element is absent; the punishments are deliberated by the leaders of the communities, right?
It is somewhat of a matter of definition, but I'd say that it's close enough. You can disobey the leader, but then you'd get shunned too. I admit I have no idea how common this is compared to the leader actually using force against people who refuse to participate in the shunning.
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and?
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I'm more a fan of the Solomon-type "cut the baby in half" approach (as in, only those that would otherwise allow their world view to be censored for common-good reasons will never be censored; those that would do that will be judged by their own standard and silenced), which is the only way you will ever preserve a free-speech paradigm in a socioeconomic environment otherwise unfavorable to it.
Censorship cannot co-exist with a mutually assured heckler's veto or among equals; it arises when the former stops being a natural consequence of economic prosperity and, for the latter, when the (later to be oppressed) group on the downswing fails to guard that balance of power sufficiently jealously.
What does a heckler’s veto have to do with economic prosperity?
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Can you expand a bit on what exactly this means? It's a bit confusing to me.
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I understand the position. My concern with the paradox of tolerance paradigm is that it is an easy cudgel to stifle dissidents.
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I wish it was that simple. I really do.
I've been a moderator on /r/slatestarcodex and then /r/themotte. I also semi-moderate a few different real life non-profit thingies.
I'm also an anarcho-capitalist by philosophy, and a libertarian via practicality.
At the end of the day, censorship is a consumer demand, not a platform demand. After all, if you are a platform the easiest move is not to censor anything. But there are many things that will absolutely turn off users. Maybe those users suck, and they shouldn't be so picky. But I can guarantee that you, as a user, want at least one, and more likely all three of these things censored on the platforms you use:
Spam is really the trickiest though. One man's trash is another man's treasure. And one man's spam is another man's news. It is subjectivity all the way down on "spam". Because spam is ultimately just content you don't want, sent by people that want you to have the content.
What I find by far to be the most sensible proposal would be user-chosen blocklists/filters. People should be able to pick and choose what they want to see, so the no-gore and no 7000-yo-lolis crowd can give their eyes a break.
In terms of spam, let multiple filters, some community run, exist, so that people can pick their poison. I suspect a middling AI like Llama can do this on the cheap, for "good enough" results.
Outright CP is well, illegal, so I don't suppose platforms that exist on the open web have much choice in removing it.
It may be the most sensible if you are sufficiently (classical) liberal, but there are many topics for which most people are no less bothered (or even more bothered, in the "I can handle this/don't get off on this, but what if this gets seen by someone more gullible/degenerate than me?" way) by the prospect of a consenting third party receiving the content as they are by being exposed to it themselves. Pick your poison: CP, loli, gore, racism, porn, pro-homosexual or -transgender content, "misinformation"/worldview reinforcement for the outgroup...
It's like the old "Is there someone you forgot to ask?" meme.
Well, sure, in a vacuum most people gravitate towards censoring speech they don't like. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. We shouldn't structure society around people's natural destructive impulses; we should structure society around what allows humans to flourish. And we've known for centuries that that is a free and open exchange of ideas. Not because there are no ideas which are genuinely harmful! But because humans and human organizations are too fickle, ignorant, and self-interested to be trusted as arbiters of which ideas meet that standard.
To be clear, I agree with your stated position here - it's just that I have grown cynical about the willingness of people, even those who are vocal free speech maximalists, to stick to the principle when faced with speech they find particularly disgusting or threatening to their tribe. Would you be okay with removing obstacles to consenting parties sharing all entries in my list above?
Me personally? Yes, for all the things you listed. But is that really all that surprising? We're on The Motte. The only one you listed that people here would really find controversial is CP, and while I (of course) agree that creating real CP should be illegal, sharing virtual/generated CP harms nobody and should be allowed. (This is basically the situation we're already in with hentai, which is full of hand-drawn underage porn.)
But if you want issues that do challenge my stance, I'd suggest revenge porn, doxxing or the Right To Be Forgotten. So, you're right that my "free speech maximalism" only goes so far; there's always something in this complex world that doesn't have an easy answer.
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And then there is the "right side of history" crowd, where even the mildest disagreement is met with "you are literally genociding me!" and calls for "this should not be allowed" action by social media, mainstream media, schools, governments, libraries (I get a kick out of the 'banned books' weeks in libraries because dang sure something not on the approved thought list is going to be banned by the cat's eye glasses wearing ladies), advertising, billboards, placards, and you just walking down the street thinking your own thoughts in your own head.
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That's a good start, but use any but the very most clearly-defined labels and you start getting into fights over what should or should not be labelled. I for one would prefer not to see normal pornography on my feed; must I specify each action and bit of anatomy I consider pornographic, or hope the arbiters of the label share my views on the matter? If they do, they present an enormous target to anyone who wants to stir up trouble. Labels could be crowdsourced, and I think a good solution in that area is possible, but would require quite a lot more innovation than the centralized tyranny we currently enjoy.
In general, given the world's recent pattern of institutional capture by people who hate me, I'd prefer my filters to be more concrete and more resistant to change. The current tactic of flagging questionable material and reducing its reach is certainly imperfect, but it at least mostly sidesteps the debate and the power games.
I generally agree, but the issue is a bit more complex than just allowing more customizable filters.
Sure, this would be easy - just provide a clear, concise and accurate definition of pornography and the filter will be produced in short order. Good luck!
That's pretty much my point--I can't tell if you're trying to agree or disagree with me.
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You would presumably subscribe to a blacklist source who shares your notion of what counts as pornography.
Many years back this problem came up in an Actual Adversarial Environment. The Freenet distributed anonymous network, though various cryptographic contrivances, supports the semi-persistent storage and retrieval of files associated with a key. Furthermore, there is a mechanism publish updated versions of a file, which can be discovered by someone in possession of the old key. This was first intended to be used to publish blogs and the like, but at some point in Freenet's history (way before my time) someone figured out how to build something like Usenet on top of it (but without binaries because there's no point when you can just upload a file and include the key in your message).
The first such usenet-alike was called Frost. From what I've read about the motivation for the second one, Frost was quickly filled with people discussing and sharing CP, and almost as quickly, by enormous volumes of automated spam created by people who didn't like CP. More importantly than filling up the UI, the automated spam made Frost effectively unusable, taking message latency and reliability from, "something like metro area snail mail in 19th century London", to "something like sending a letter to Jamestown from 17th century London".
The replacement was FMS (Freenet Message System, iirc). In order to combat the spam problem, it used some kind of web-of-trust thing where you could mark messages as spam/ham, and also mark other nodes as honest sources of spam/ham labels and labels about other nodes. Or maybe the trust was automatic based on agreement with your own labels or something. I don't recall exactly. In any case, messages that were too spammy would not be propagated, protecting the network from overload.
FMS's WoT censorship system was just a single axis spam probability, because this was 2011 and everyone involved was a cipherpunk free speech partisan solving a technical problem. Anyone who didn't want to see pedos talking about pedoshit was offered the simple expedient of not subscribing to alt.erotica.redacted. But I don't think there's anything inherent to the web-of-crowdsoruced-moderators idea that says you can't have a whole smorgasbord of labels.
Trust webs do sound like a good way to crowdsource the whole thing.
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There are plenty of people who aren’t interested in a place that tolerates anti-semitism. Somebody on /r/TheMotte or /r/slatestarcodex once made the interesting point that maximizing speech is completely different from refusing to censor anything — at a certain point you’re driving out as many viewpoints as you’re enabling by tolerating certain people.
Also advertisers – advertisers care.
That idea is itself a central and noxious example of what it describes.
"I use the [speech act] leverage at my disposal to make you censor my enemies."
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That’s a fig leaf for a forum like Twitter to block views that are abhorrent to the people who run Twitter. Oh — this post criticizing Soros prosecutors is just anti-semitism so we are banning it.
Well, Soros choose to give a lot of money to elect prosecutors who seem to only like prosecuting people who defend themselves. He should be criticized regardless of whether it may or may not be a dog whistle.
That’s what it always devolves to so the only way to really run a program at scale that isn’t going to devolve into censorship of ideas I dislike is the free speech paradigm.
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Might be true, but trying to carefully micro-manage which views need to be pruned to what extend in order to give room to which other views, and deciding which views bring how much value, and having an apparatus in place to enforce all of that...well, it might work on small internet forums where small teams of savvy mods who know their userbase well and actually care to maximize viewpoint diversity (though still - by what metric?), but I don't think it scales at all without devolving into conformity enforcement machinery.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record that goes "AI will fix it", that sounds like a job for AI.
I suspect a model finetuned on the moderation decisions of The Motte will beat the brakes off the typical internet or reddit mod.
I think you underestimate how many humans want censorship. To me reddit is a boring sterile place in most areas where any political sub becomes parroting of the same agreed ideas. But humans seem to want that because we converge on it repeatedly.
Even here if someone parrots a few ideas like more communists leaning they probably get enough disagreement that they end up just deciding to go to the place where everyone will call them geniuses.
AI might be able to maximize for users by never showing that posts they don’t like. Effectively letting everyone live in their self-reinforcing bubble. But it does seem many on the left don’t like the idea of supposedly something they think is a Nazi being on the same platform whose thoughts they never see.
I think people are confused about what they want. They don't understand that in order to get lively, creative, intellectually stimulating conversation, they have to be willing to tolerate people with beliefs that are far different from their own.
The modern progressive movement has sold the idea that you can have all the vitality, ingenuity, and fun that we've always had without the dissidents and the ghouls and the witches. Hell, they push the line that without those bad people, there will be even more of the good stuff!
Unfortunately this message is, likely unintentionally, a classic example of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Who's they? How big exactly do you reckon the audience for these things is?
'They' are the 'average person' that @sliders1234 is referencing above. The standard, everyday, stereotypical person or I guess 'NPC' (although I find that term demeaning). People who for whatever reason don't have the ability or time or inclination to think deeply about their beliefs and struggle towards improving them. Who tend to latch onto mainstream messages and not question them too deeply.
In terms of the audience for these things, well, I'd say everyone? If you ask a person on the street if they prefer interesting conversation over boring conversation, what do you think they'd say?
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In this particular case they could be both the establishment and the normie audiences.
It's ginormous. Why else were they (the establishment) raiding all the lively, creative, intellectually stimulating cultures for popculture entertainment?
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Completely true. I’m not saying Twitter is trying to (or even can) cultivate a garden if ideological diversity, which was (roughly) the goal of /r/slatestarcodex
Twitter is probably more interested in maximizing users (which, as you say, isn’t the same as diverse viewpoints), but a similar principle still holds: if you want to maximize the number of people using your services, a policy of allowing entry to all often isn’t optimal (as users here often point out for public transportation).
What AI? The commercial versions which are being carefully monitored, pruned, and edited to make sure no No-No Words or Thoughts get through the sieve?
I think you replied to the wrong comment
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Finetuning is the process by which such goody-two-shoes AI can be coaxed into almost anything you like. You could remove the guardrails, turn it into a member of the gestapo, or in this case, teach it the tenets of Motte moderation.
Of course, this is for open source models like Llama where we can tinker with their brains, not GPT-4, which is locked down and if you get naughty, OpenAI will spank you.
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To be clear: they care about not being attacked by establishment NGO's, not about "being associated" with something objectionable in the eyes of the consumer.
I’ve heard this claimed before but admit to knowing nothing about it. What is the evidence for it?
Examples of companies losing business due to reaction from consumers are few and far between. Bud Light is probably the only one in recent memory, and they didn't really change course all that much as a result of it. Also advertisers were constantly being associated with offensive content on Twitter, Youtube, etc. It's not until the establishment media do a "it's bad to advertise on $platform" report that they actually bother to pull out.
All in all, there's very little evidence they care about being associated with something offensive, and a much simpler explanation is that it's the media coverage that bothers them.
In part, probably because the only people who saw those ads were “bad people” anyhow so there was no taint to their brand. But then the media blew their spot up.
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