Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

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No.

What the best interest of us all is to realize that all not hate speech, especially politically related, needs to not be burdened by restrictions on such by any government.

the only entities too big are the Chinese and American governments and both for the same reason, they are very willing to suppress speech which does not further their goals as countries or that of their politicians.

In the US that means they have to resort to scare tactics because our freedom of speech and assembly are protected if not heralded at times. so they have to scare you into believing the democratic process is threatened, that elections are threatened, that your very way of life is threatened, unless you of course give them power to suppress speech they claim meets those requirements. Fortunately courts would stop most attempts but politicians truly think the court of public opinion can be used to influence the courts too.

So yeah I get it, the fad is to hate of Facebook but I would take multiple companies the size of facebook before I let any politician tell me what speech is acceptable when it comes to politics or the like. putting a muzzle on facebook opens the door to muzzling all blogs and sites and that is something the press and politicians would love to have, control over the message again.

edit: just blundered into this story [0] - while more dire than what we are discussing one must understand that China isn't far from what Venezuela is now but for the people there this is what they gave up when they allowed the politicians to control the message and what is and what is not acceptable

[0] https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2019/10/20/my-so...

With respect to the current US political situation, a good deal of it can be traced back to the last major upheavals of the late 1960's to early 1970's. The preordained approach to and discourse around economics, race/ethnicity, and feminism(and likewise many sacred cows of the computing culture) all have some birthing around these dates, and their post-hoc developments have tended towards intensification rather than realignment, a thing which has become more jarring and explosive over time and is likely to precipitate our next political era(or perhaps the current one depending on how you see it).

And this goes for how we talk about and express "free speech" as well, since the era prior had just seen the Red Scare, various forms of media censorship, military drafts, and a "government man" approach to solving all sorts of problems. Everything moved in the direction of libertarian, market-driven ideology, and Facebook is an ultimate result of that.

My suspicion is that the "compete with China" narrative is actually the most powerful thing shaping this discourse. The authoritarian end of US politics will seize upon it as a way to take power, but will always suffer the handicap of their solutions being "too much like China". When combined with the free speech principle it animates arguments for allowing free speech on Facebook and throughout the Internet, while simultaneously also fueling arguments for breaking up the company and decentralizing its functionality in the "users have a right to privacy and should own their data" sense. In that sense it's like the motives that produced the Apollo missions, and a politican who approached it that way, as a "defense of our digital property rights requires the investment of our brightest minds" kind of issue would probably be very successful.

>When combined with the free speech principle it animates arguments for allowing free speech on Facebook and throughout the Internet, while simultaneously also fueling arguments for breaking up the company and decentralizing its functionality in the "users have a right to privacy and should own their data" sense. In that sense it's like the motives that produced the Apollo missions, and a politican who approached it that way, as a "defense of our digital property rights requires the investment of our brightest minds" kind of issue would probably be very successful.

People have a tendency to conflate Facebook's privacy lapses with the calls for antitrust action.

GDPR isn't meant to punish big tech companies like Google or Facebook, it's literally meant to protect individuals' privacy. That's it. It's not a Rube Goldberg machine to punish Facebook or address competition concerns. GDPR isn't even limited to the tech industry, it applies to every industry.

Governments already have antitrust laws to deal with monopoly power. The reason the calls for antitrust action are heating up is because of actual anti-competitive behavior. Antitrust also has nothing to do with free speech no matter what opportunistic politicians say to conflate them. The First Amendment protects private corporations to make any moderation decision they want. Section 230 lets them do it while also immunizing them from any liability.

I agree with you, but that won’t stop Zuck from trying to sell Facebook-the-big-corp as an anti-China counterweight.

This is very naive.

In addition to suppressing speech, there are foreign intelligence operations posing as domestic actors influencing political campaigns. This is illegal under US law, for good reason. It distorts the entire process if no one can tell who the speech is coming from. Foreign lobbyists must be publicly identified for this reason, and its interesting that multiple Trump administration persons have been found guilty of "not registering as a foreign agent".

Many fake US organizations and persons were created by Russians to influence the 2016 campaign, in clear violation of US laws. It seems the Chinese are not far behind. And because they are foreign actors, this falls squarely under the purview of counter intelligence and foreign policy towards hostile actors.

I do not think the US Founders vision of free speech included massive foreign propaganda campaigns.

> It distorts the entire process if no one can tell who the speech is coming from.

Not if voters are rational. Rational voters will weigh everything they see and hear in terms of the track record of the source: how well has this source done at telling me the truth in the past? Obviously an unknown source--still more a source that refuses to identify itself and has no track record at all--will simply be ignored. In an environment like that, hiding the true origin of speech is self-defeating.

Humans are not rational, and it's naive to believe that they ever possibly could be.

Governments need to be at least as big as the corporations and the other governments they seek to regulate and defend against, otherwise things get squirrelly and dangerous.

> Humans are not rational, and it's naive to believe that they ever possibly could be.

If this is true, we're screwed, because governments are run by humans.

Governments have a couple of safeguards in place to deal with irrational humans running the show. Some of them are division of power and checks and balances.

These safeguards are the reason why governance is sometimes slow and sometimes bulky but also why, by and large, governance doesn't fail entirely when it happens to be unjust: it can recover from most injustices (one argument against capital punishment is that there's no recovery from that).

And all that is rooted in a distrust that humans do the right thing all the time - without that assumption you wouldn't need these mechanisms with all their overhead, you'd just appoint a philosopher king.

[edit to add: One problem is when some of these powers aren't doing their job. Checks and balances break down when (for example) the legislature devolves into playing the executive's yes-men instead of directing its activities.]

All of these safeguards depend on people being rational--at least rational enough to watch whether the safeguards are working. If people aren't willing to do that, the safeguards break down. For example: the US Congress has something like a 98% re-election rate for incumbents and an approval rating in the single digits. That means important safeguards are not working.

Does that mean democracy is unsafe?

It means a democracy in which voters are unwilling or unable to hold elected representatives accountable for maintaining the safeguards is unsafe.

Fair enough - we need to limit the vote to the responsible voters only - for the safety of the people.

No. We need an educated populous, and not just educated in rationality but in spirituality as well.

Not religious dogmatic mechanistic ritualism corrupted for selfish motives, but open one-with-all selfless spirituality that seeks to promote future generations instead of stealing from them for the goals of the ego.

I don't really think it's all that useful to think of even individual humans as rational or irrational, but in any case:

Governments (much like cities, markets, neighborhoods, societies, companies, social networks, "the media", political parties, academia, unions, religions, etc.) are "run by humans" somewhat like flocks are run by birds.

Yes, studying the nature of individual birds can teach you a little bit about flocks, but you've zoomed out to a level where it's more useful to talk about systems and dynamics. Can't see the forest for the trees, as they say.

This amounts to saying: we humans can't really predict the behavior of entities like governments. That just makes the problem I was pointing at worse.

No, it doesn't.

It amounts to saying that different rules and dynamics govern higher-order systems. It's not that the ir-/rationality of individual participants isn't a factor--but multiple interacting systems and feedback loops are creating the weather that those actors have to make decisions within.

This doesn't scale.

Even investors and economic agents can't be said to behave this way, and their incentives to put in the effort are much more immediate and explicit.

Few people have the time, resources, patience, persistence, and expertise even figure out whether any single thing a single source said is true. (Imagine someone makes a single claim backed by a mountain of "true" data, but ignores some problematic data. Time, a little domain knowledge, and patience might suffice to validate the ground-level truth of what they did cite, but I'm not sure anything short of domain expertise will be able to view it in light of everything it didn't cite.)

> Few people have the time, resources, patience, persistence, and expertise even figure out whether any single thing a single source said is true.

First, the amount of effort you invest should be proportional to the extent to which you care about whether the thing is true. If you care a lot, you should invest a lot of resources. If you don't care much, you shouldn't invest much. If you don't care at all, you should not invest any resources and you shouldn't have an opinion at all.

Second, for most things where you actually need to know what's true in order to live your everyday life, you can test things by direct experience. And for most things that you can't test by direct experience, you don't actually care about what's true; expressions of opinion one way or the other are signaling, not actual commitments to the truth of the opinion expressed. This is easy to see because most people don't actually govern their actions according to, for example, the political opinions they express.

And third, the only alternative solution to figuring it out for yourself is finding some third party that you can trust to do the work for you and truthfully convey to you the results. But then you have to decide which third parties to trust, and that just puts you right back at the same problem: few people have the time, patience, persistence, and expertise to actually evaluate the track record of truthfulness and accuracy of third parties. And every shortcut to that process can be, will be, and has been gamed.

Sure. But voters aren't rational. We've just gone through that with economics - the homo economicus is bull - and I suppose we need to repeat that for the ultrarational libertarian crowd.

This is not how this works. This is not how any of it works. Humans are vulnerable to emotions. To lies they want to believe. To subtle influence just outside their daily cognition. To cheap dopamine hits from cheesy entertainment.

Believing that rational voters and some sort of speech attribution system will help solve all ills is beyond naive.

> voters aren't rational

And if that's the case, we're screwed, because no system of government can produce good government if the people don't know it when they see it and aren't willing to vote for it or against the lack of it.

Education is a semi-decent counter. So is complete deplatforming of people attempting to radicalize other people.

But yes, unrestrained capitalism + unrestrained privatization + unrestrained speech + democracy is not a combination that sustainably works, the way it looks.

More importantly, voters need to have skin in the game. If they can vote themselves unlimited benefits without themselves being personally liable for the costs, then republic will fall.

My solution: you only get to vote if you paid net tax for the year, less wealth transfer payments.

We should protect voters from all this confusion by eliminating democracy!

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