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Comment by grenoire | Hacker News Reader

My thinking right now is that the status quo is the symptom and not the cause. Were we as the human race simply not ready for this?

Could we have been more diligent in educating people on ways of debating and understanding, could we have built a society that is not obsessed with perfection and winning?

If it wasn't Twitter, Facebook, Google etc. it would simply be something else in their place who had to perform the job of the gatekeeper. We were on course to enabling global communication at an unprecedented scale regardless of these companies establishing themselves, it wasn't news that we'd get here. Did we just discount the discourse on this that it's 'suddenly' a concern?

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I'd much rather we all man up and learn to live with the fact that people say things we disagree with on the internet, instead of assuming that we need gatekeeping.

Is inciting violence allowed?

Let the government regulate it, not a private company.

The government are the ones inciting violence though, seems like they have made the right decision to me, he’s done things that would get any other user banned for years!

Incidentally I absolutely love it when conservatives advocate for more government, whatever happened to the market is perfect let it decide the winners and losers.

As I see it, a company can either offer a public platform for everyone to voice their oppinion, not moderate and not be responsible for what is published on its platform but let the authorities handle illegal/harmful behaviour.

Or they can choose to moderate and/or editorialize the content they host and the conversations that happen on their platform AND be held responsible for it.

I'm not saying it is bad that a company moderates their platform, please do it! But don't pretend everyone can voice their view on their platform and be clear and forward about what you are doing.

The government is one small part of the State (as an organization). I should have probably said "Let the legislative and judiciary powers of the State handle it".

>whatever happened to the market is perfect let it decide the winners and losers

This is already happening: some people, disillusioned by the service Twitter provides, are moving to Parlor, for example.

You’re stating your opinions as if they are natural laws. It would be best for everyone if Twitter stopped policing things themselves and moved to a community driven model, nothing should be deleted but if the “incites violence” (or certain others) tag is added by enough people those tweets get broadcast to nobody and you’d have to look on Trump’s or whoever’s page to see it. Yes the gaming of this system would itself have to be policed, however I think on average it would be better than what we have now.

In the end Twitter have the power to ban Trump from their platform the same way a bar owner can ban people who they don’t like. Just because everyone thinks and feels Twitter is a public forum does not make it one; it is private property like virtually everything on the Internet.

If not, the proper measure punishment for a saying or writing should be determined by a court of law, not a company.

If only this was true in school when I was a child. :-/

Why Twitter posts if not punishment of children? Are children that unimportant to this society?

I would really like to know where the free speech activists think all of this will end if we just let the Qanon and Trump movement do whatever they want.

Or, man up and recognize that Twitter can ban whomever they want. They are not bound by the 1st amendment (at least in the American context).

Without weighing in on the actual alternatives... Your comment comes off a bit weird to me because that's what bondarchuck is saying he would rather not have. Yet you present it as a new (to the discussion) option. It makes the conversation kind of go like this:

Him: I would much rather we have A so that we didn't need B

You: Or, we could have this thing B

I think it’s pretty unlikely social media companies will continue to have total control over public discourse. There’s already some legal precedent that the Supreme Court views Twitter and Facebook as public squares. See Packingham v. North Carolina from 2017, for example. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see an escalation of this viewpoint soon.

You have to admit that that would be a lot easier if the people you are disagreeing with were making reasonable level-headed arguments, but somehow we are living in an era where large swaths of the population are convinced that there is no difference between what is true and what they feel is true and, consequently, they reject rationality and with it the concept of objective reality.

I know I'm on the record as saying that rationality, which is to say empirical philosophy, is incomplete. Let me clarify that by saying that it isn't the same thing as rejecting it outright anymore than rejecting Newtonian mechanics outright is the same thing as admitting it is incomplete.

Yes, large swaths of the population are wrong (from your viewpoint) and not open to rational argument and there's nothing you can do to change it, except totalitarian control of public discourse. My point is that it's vastly preferable to just let them be wrong on the internet and deal with it like an adult.

That has lead us to a point where people who, in spite of failed court cases, lack of evidence, expert opinion, and even disagreement among people who align with their political ideology, have insisted that a democratic election was stolen and believe it strongly enough to attempt to invade a government building with the expressed intent of executing politicians.

That anyone can believe that simply "letting them be wrong on the internet" is a viable course of action at this point is utterly baffling.

I sincerely hope there is an alternative to totalitarian control of public discourse, but I am becoming increasingly worried that there is not.

So when you see a political movement that wants to take your country into a dark alley you're supposed to man up and turn your cheek? No, people will push back.

> Could we have been more diligent in educating people on ways of debating and understanding, could we have built a society that is not obsessed with perfection and winning?

Humans are instinctively divisive. Our species relied heavily on small communities working together and excluding other communities throughout our entire human history. Tribalism is engrained in our nature as a direct effect of our evolution. It would take another thousand years to unlearn that. Social media is a global tool, and therefore social media has just brought out the worst in humans on a global level, but it hasn't created that intrinsic tribal instinct in us to begin with. Humans are just not meant to cooperate on such a large scale. We'd all be much better off (aka leaving more harmonious) if we'd live in smaller communities and would revert a lot of what globalisation has given us.

We could always go the cigarette route: Put a big sticker (legally required) in front of every twitter & facebook post/page just like cigarette boxes need a "smoking kills" sticker. Something like:

"Warning: This site contains highly speculative & offensive gossip and might cause anxiety, stress, unattainable standards and lowered self-esteem. Information on this site should not be considered credible, and might cause radicalization and extremism."

The problem is that cigarettes aren't vital to a functioning democracy, information is. When you impose limits on the spreading of information you give tools that can be abused to block valid information. Even if the 'block' is putting a label on everything, it'll still limit the spread of information.

Devil's advocate: democracy worked well (at least as well as the last ten years) before everyone could voice their oppinions in a worldwide public forum. We had journalists that spread the information through various channels.

Did it actually work well though? Because most democracies are rather young. Look at interwar Europe and how most of those democracies turned into autocracies. A longstanding democracy in history seems to be more of an exception rather than the rule. And most of those seem to come with some pretty big asterisks too. It rather seems to me that democracies today have performed better in terms of stability than in the past.

“Could we have more diligent in the educating...”

Jesus Christ man. You think you can educate the population to the point they don’t believe conspiracies and “fake news”?

I mean, how many anti-vaxers are postgraduates?

You’re absolutely nuts if you think you can “fix” the human condition through education.

I really don't understand why you're being so hostile; I genuinely believe that it will help. It's not an all-or-nothing, every bit of progress helps.

As for your very specific example, the arguments post-graduate anti-vaxxers will make are going to be different than people who're mislead and aggravated by 600-word articles or even shorter chain messages spreading bullshit. The vaccine to this bullshit is education, believe it or not.

The people got too much of a voice and the powers that be are now reigning that back.

Decentralization, encryption and anonymity is the only way to deal with this.

Aether is a good first draft: multi part app with a back end that can live on a single board computer in your closet and costs $4 to run for a year and a front end that you can use on your phone.

Link to Aether?

https://getaether.net/

Be prepared that it's a distributed system, it takes a while for posts to show up when you first run it.

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