Web needs rethink to stop “nasty” ideas spreading, says Tim Berners-Lee
yahoo.com
yahoo.com
But apparently people are using it to do bad stuff
Better censor it, that can't go wrong /s
His idea's to make a social network where toxic content's has lower viral coefficients. Censorship is certainly one path to this goal -- simply kill any objectionable content before it has a chance to spread.
How else could you make a piece of content less likely to spread? Display it less prominently. Warn people that it spreads negativity and they shouldn't propagate it. Automatically identify filter bubbles and occasionally include content with an opposing viewpoint.
The real problem is some/all of these measures may cost you users. How do you lower the viral coefficient of toxic information in your social network without lowering the viral coefficient of your social network itself?
They seem to weight popularity heavily, which makes sense if you're trying to sell ads, but it means a lot of toxic content rises to the top (e.g. conspiracy theories, or tons of short videos denouncing the video of a well known figure, which becomes un-findable).
I'm banking on being able to improve this for my niche use case with more quality measures, although time will tell if this pans out. E.g. if a speaker has spoken at prestigious conferences, written a book, what Wikipedia says about that, or that they've invested in better production quality, including closed captions, better audio/video.
For the filter bubble problem, I think that being able to see lists of talks without the machine learning what you "want" is potentially a superior experience. I suspect that if you start by filtering to just the higher quality material, you can potentially get a good cross-section of different viewpoints, just by using text text analysis.
I think Reddit does something interesting with upvote / downvote ratios, I don't remember the specifics.
It might also be the case that toxic content spreads differently, or there's some other measurable way to separate it. Data and experiments to measure user behavior will probably be needed to develop an algorithm.
- you can react to hate speech by positive actions to counteract it;
- you can forbid hate that goes beyond speech.
At what point would you have been OK with suppressing fascist speech? (A lot of people answer "September 1st, 1939" to that question.)
At what point was it too late to stop? ("September 1st, 1939" was years too late.)
What makes you sure that it doesn't cross that point, before you have the moral consensus to suppress it?
We've been down this road once before. The last time around, it killed fifty million people. In politics, the line between speech and action is far murkier then these absolutes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performative_utterance
Was it after they seized power? They were so appreciative of free speech, that they immediately repressed it.
Alternatively maybe it could have been stopped by preventing the industrial revolution. Or by preventing Germany and Italy from uniting as countries at the end of the 1800's/early 1900's. Or by preventing banking interests from lending to industrialists. Or by preventing the Viking invasions. Or preventing the collapse of international papal authority. Or by preventing the rise of papal authority in the first place. Or giving the Chinese first dibs on East Asia. Or giving native Africans gunpowder. Or by any number of other means.
Point being, you seem to think 1)Fascism in Europe during the second world war is the worst event to happen to mankind ever and attempting to prevent it re-occurring justifies any means, even those with potentially worse outcomes. And 2)Fascism arose strictly because some guys popped in out of nowhere and started talking.
What about Pol Pot? What about Stalin? What about the church during the Middle Ages? What about the conquests of Islam? What about the massacres in Medieval China? Events very simply don't happen in a vacuum, (in spite of the popular culture/ public school view of history).
The dangers of those who want to prevent free speech because it offends someone far outweigh the dangers of letting the marketplace of ideas decide which ideas are worth considering. I don't find the rise of the alt-right (which I don't support btw) nearly as alarming as I find the number of young people who think offensive speech should be legislated against or banned. Which is truly an authoritarian and disturbing trend.
When nasty websites are outlawed only outlaws will have nasty websites.
And you can take my HTTP server when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.