I Shouldn’t Have to Publish This in The New York Times
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The article seems to make contradictory arguments that (1) censorship is good, (2) big tech is the only way censorship can be enforced, (3) big tech must be broken up to enable smaller companies.
The article also only focuses on examples of obvious right-leaning types of inflammatory content and excuses itself and its equal weight in dividing us.
NYT also presents itself as the last beacon of hope, the only place such an article could be published in the future. Which is the biggest joke in the world for free speech; just read the paper daily and you will observe that it has one of the biggest self-applied filters anywhere.
Big media doesn't like that people don't need it anymore, and it sees breaking up competing large institutions as part of what will save it.
It is trying to use its weight and influence to squelch competition, which is what it accuses others of doing. But goes one step further by asking for it to be enforced politically.
Maybe the papers should be broken up.
I mean, definitely [1], but that doesn't invalidate his argument. Both tech and media consolidation is a problem.
[1] http://cgi.rumormillnews.com/pix0/Screen-shot-2012-07-19-at-...
I'm skeptical that "breaking them up" would really do anything. People would continue to use the thousands of other platforms that are out there, but there would still be a desire for a sufficiently abstract social network that another one would grow. Then there would be calls to break that one up...
To fight against large social networks is to fight against natural human organization and interaction. Attempting to is pointless and probably even harmful, since the velocity of good ideas would be reduced along with the bad.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Many markets naturally tend towards monopolies - that is no reason not to break them up.
As for the thousands of other platforms - those can't sway elections like Facebook can.
What I hear when you say "smaller platforms can't influence elections like facebook" is "citizens vote differently when they are disconnected from their peers - in a way that I like".
[citation needed]
But it's more than just the way people interact - it's also a company controlling it. E.g. no-one is calling for breaking up IRC or XMPP - because you couldn't.
I'm just not comfortable giving a handful of companies so much soft power over national/global discussion.
The point being made in the article is not so much about the companies themselves, it's about how people communicate with each other on such platforms (even if the author intended otherwise).
However I agree that breaking them up may not be the solution - mandated interoperability may be. At least then there would be the benefits of having freedom of choice with plenty of options without the downsides of losing access to your data and your social network (which I think constitute the majority of the switching barrier). Similar mandates in healthcare and education would also be beneficial. This would of course not immediately solve the problem, but I would rather have to deal with getting developers to be mindful of the needs of their users than face the impossibility of getting users in the first place.
An entity should be allowed to be as successful as they can manage, so long as the practical barriers to competition are not affected (ie, network effects)
If they fell, whatever platform is next in line would start receiving the criticism.
But further, I think we've seen many times in tech that about the time something gets so large that people start wanting to regulate it is about when tides are shifting anyway. The thing to reduce the influence of these networks won't be regulation, it will be some combination of boredom, disillusionment, a better alternative, the next generation wanting something different from their parents, etc. To force split before that happens just ensures the market-provided solution is weaker and less revolutionary than it could be, since the competition it is overcoming has artificial handicaps. That makes progress slower overall.
New York Times as society's moral arbiter will never happen again. I'm not sad either. For all this high minded talk about protecting people from extremism I'll never forget how much blood they have on their hands from back when they reported fake news that helped sell the Iraq war. That has killed way more people than the rise of extremism has. Their FUD about how we have to break up the NYTs competition doesn't sway me.
The NYT also loves extremism so long as it's the kind they approve of. Neo-victorian social media lynching of men accused of sexual indiscretions? Well they're on board with that because it advances women's rights and the collateral damage is exaggerated anyways.
I think if the author were calling for censorship to be lifted, his first and loudest argument would be for it to be removed from existing networks. But his ultimate judgment is that the existing networks are bad because they can't properly apply censorship, and that the answer is smaller networks. What criteria would a large, abstract social network be broken up by? The only answer is content, meaning ideas would be relegated to certain spaces so that they cannot propagate as easily. That's an argument for censorship while trying to sell it as something else.
It's certainly possible to build services to limit the damage of e.g. harassment, without censorship. Look at Mastodon. If you run your own instance, you can publish whatever you'd like. By default, any two instances can communicate. If one instance doesn't like what another publishes, they can block it.
Also, with regard to your allegations around NYT's opinion of itself: the article was written by Cory Doctorow. I doubt he's particularly rooting for NYT to be an even more powerful gatekeeper.
> I think if the author were calling for censorship to be lifted, his first and loudest argument would be for it to be removed from existing networks. But his ultimate judgment is that the existing networks are bad because they can't properly apply censorship, and that the answer is smaller networks. What criteria would a large, abstract social network be broken up by? The only answer is content, meaning ideas would be relegated to certain spaces so that they cannot propagate as easily. That's an argument for censorship while trying to sell it as something else.
Re #2, From the article:
> Only the largest companies can afford the kinds of filters we’ve demanded of them, and that means that any would-be trustbuster who wants to break up the companies and bring them to heel first must unwind the mesh of obligations we’ve ensnared the platforms in and build new, state-based mechanisms to perform those duties.
I don't know a whole lot about Mastodon yet, but the reason it "solves the problem" (according to you and the author) isn't because of how it changes network dynamics, but because it is federated and technically limited. Meaning it is not meant for any single instance to handle the load of e.g. Twitter. Its design basically prevents people from interacting as they would like to, which means we're deferring the power of our speech to an inferior technology designed for a different use case. If that was all we had, then someone would invent a large centralized network because that is what people want because that is how information travels quickly. Mandating federated networks would be an attack on the rights to free speech and property.
As for who the author is, I don't think it matters, it still supports NYT's whole viewpoint of itself and the world.
Mostly, we're talking about social norms that cover behavior and speech. These get called "censorship" to form a negative connotation, but literally zero people are consistently against them.
For example, there's a norm against child pornography (this one actually is government censorship). NDAs are a form of government censorship too, but people are generally okay with it because you opt into it explicitly. What if you continually insult your boss? There's no law against it, but you'll probably get fired. If you divulge all your family secrets, are you being "censored" if you no longer get invited to the holidays?
Behavior that violates norms gets pushed to the margins. That's how society works. Centralized networks are making people uncomfortable because it's centering behavior that people want marginalized; that's a bug, not a feature.
And when we do force them to marginalize it, they'll do it badly. Because we're placing a lot of power and responsibility in a few giant corporations, accountable to their shareholders and clumsily coerced by voters. Which is why the article supports breaking up the networks: the best way to ensure everyone has a voice is to distribute power to them.
Re: Federated networks, people don't care whether their networks are centralized. Email has existed federated for decades! People care that they can easily talk to the people they want; the ability to do this is orthogonal to how centralized the network is.
I wonder if speech could be treated similarly, with a distinction made between passive hosting and promotion:
"Tech companies should not be liable for the content that users upload to their platforms, but they should be liable when their algorithms choose to show it." [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_... [2] https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/955594859154259968
It's also interesting that he published it on the NYTimes.com, which has an even higher barrier to entry, and thus is not an option for most people to express their freedom of speech.
I know article titles are usually an editor's choice, but doesn't it seem like he could have easily published that article on his blog? (Fully admit I have have missed his larger point; I have difficulty grokking Mr. Doctorow's writings, which is a pity because I think he's an interesting thinker.)
> Editors’ note: This is part of a series, “Op-Eds From the Future,” in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write Op-Eds that they imagine we might read 10, 20 or even 100 years from now. The challenges they predict are imaginary — for now — but their arguments illuminate the urgent questions of today and prepare us for tomorrow. The opinion piece below is a work of fiction.
You have have a right of speech (with very limited curtailments) in the USA... However given high density of people on limited technologies, if you're on the out, you have no effective right to speech.
And since political candidates are on there, you even lose the forum to talk with them. (AOC, Trump, other national politicians, local city councils, county councils). When the soapbox IS twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat - just how much power should the corps yield to decide who talks and who doesn't?
(I'm making an argument for a review on user density relating to a monopoly and thus significant oversight and access, esp when relating to politicians and their constituents.)
Honestly, breaking up the companies will come with the added blessing that public discourse can take place on platforms that are not, structurally speaking, race-to-the-bottom garbage.
And exactly what rubric could we split them? I can set up my own instance of Mastodon, which is a FB/Twitter like clone. I can set up federated Jabber chat. Is the monopoly FB sales? Or is it FB groups? Well, it's obviously the sheer number of people that's pulling the oxygen out of the room - but that's not a monopolistic attribute... yet.
Monopoly isn't the right word here. I don't think we have a right term yet, to describe being deplatformed from society by private entities on a massive scale. But, it feels gravely wrong without due process. And it feels wrong as well to be deprived from access to my political representatives, even if it is a proprietary and private platform.
I think most courts would conclude that freedom of speech is the right for you to speak in a public place or to publish using your own means. It is not necessarily the right to be heard by the particular audience you desire to reach, nor the right to publish using someone else's equipment. The internet is still an open place, and there are plenty of venues other than Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube where you can express your thoughts and opinions. You can also build your own website or blog and seek attention to it by reaching out to others for links.
I was thinking more akin to the lawsuit that happened against Trump 1.5 years ago, when he was blocking citizens on Twitter. And he was overruled in court. I think the legal confusion was "what is a private social media site when politicians are making political speech?"
I know we also had a snafu here in Bloomington, IN over the same. A politician was using a local FB group for campaigning. They were also a mod as well of the group, and were restricting speech on said group. It was resolved in an unrelated way when they were caught in some questionably illegal things, and they stepped down. But left the 'private social media, with politicians and political speech' unanswered.
You are absolutely right that putting all the eggs in one basket is a textbook mistake, and one should diversify communication channels & sources of income.
>nor the right to publish using someone else's equipment
Two legal cases come to mind:
the recent decision that POTUS twitter feed is a public space (https://theconversation.com/federal-judge-rules-trumps-twitt...)
and the 1980 decision in Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins where, based on Californian law, private property of the shoping mall was deemed open to political speech (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...).
It's perfectly fine for FB, Twitter, Google & friends to declare themselves editorial organizations rather than open platforms. However it's worth noting Section 230 protections hinge on being a platform.
Interestingly, the opinion did _not_ conclude that Twitter itself is a public forum and therefore must allow all speakers to use it and viewpoints to be presented. Instead, it concluded that the _President's Twitter account_ is a public forum for the purpose of answering the question whether the President can block others' accounts from responding to it.
As for _Pruneyard_, that case is about freedom of speech under the California Constitution, and has narrowed by subsequent law, but it remains an open question as to whether "open to the public means all content must be permitted" under CA law in the social media context.