Free speech can’t flourish online — Social media is an outrage machine, not a forum for sharing ideas and getting at the truth
ft.com
Free speech can’t flourish online — Social media is an outrage machine, not a forum for sharing ideas and getting at the truth::Social media is an outrage machine, not a forum for sharing ideas and getting at the truth
It's amazing how much casually nicer lemmy and the greater fediverse is. You still see some bad habits leaking over from the rest of the web, but then people actually apologizing! and asking others to be nice! And it actually works!
Well outside of some thorny political issues, but that's just human nature.
it's more like the old internet or like old reddit.
As an old Reddit user, that’s why I came here. Just gotta get up the wherewithal to start/ recruit some of the niche subs I enjoyed most now.
Fewer people, more tightly connected communities... In old Reddit there was a point over which the sub was getting mainstream and then you would get gallowboob and other assorted jerks ruining everything
Totally disagree. If there was a way to disable comments about Elon Musk, Windows and Trump that would be great. I mean yeah I get it. Lemmy users don't like those topics but it seems like it's just constantly force fed to you on this platform. At least on Reddit you could filter certain subreddits out but here it seems to be everywhere.
From my perspective, most of the things I am seeing related to those topics seem to be what can pass for news. Many of them are being linked from reputable sources and it is genuinely important to keep up on details regarding the world. Especially when it is shit and going to hell. How else are the patient men going to run out of it? (yes, John Dryden had it right. Beware the fury of the patient man.)
I can say that I am abidingly patient, but I am running out very quickly knowing what the shitlords are doing.
That's not been my experience. I keep getting baited by ml power users and then banned for daring to question their orthodoxy. It seems intentional.
The downvote button is still abused as a "I don't agree with your opinion" button though...
"I don't agree" -> "the content of this comment is false, because it doesn't agree with what I believe to be true" -> "this comment provides no value, because its content is lies". There's no way you can prevent that chain of reasoning, especially since it's largely unconscious for most people.
That's unfortunately true 😕
I suppose it'd probably be pretty hard to sell people on lies being good, on the basis of lies being good ground for refutation of those lies, huh?
But then I dunno, I'd take like 30 comments of people all disagreeing with some premise in some similar way, compared to like, a 10 comment long reference getting 30 gorillion upvotes, because everyone has to be god's gift to comedy.
yeah I don't really know how we can improve on that
A "I don't agree with that" button?
What would it do? If it didn't do anything, people would just use the downvote button
I think lesswrong has an "agree/disagree" vote as well as a "this comment is/is not high quality and relevant button"
You remove the downvote button. Or maybe instead of points you only allow stickers/emoticon reactions.
You should only get so many downvotes to use per day. Maybe 3.
Ironically gets downvoted by people who disagree
Yup, perfect example of the problem. An on-topic comment adding to the discussion. Sure maybe not the ultimate solution but a valid point to consider.
This is a nice idea that I've seen before, but also one that sort of needs a centralized platform to work well
That's a good point.
That's similar to how slashdot modpoints worked, although both upvotes and downvotes were limited. IMO it was one of the better self moderation systems I've seen.
I do personally wish people were a bit more thoughtful before downvoting, and making them a limited resource could help with that. It could also encourage sock-puppeting if not implemented very carefully, though.
I was thinking about slashdot modpoints too - it did seem to result in better discussion, but maybe everything was better in those days/in my rose-tinted spectacles. (And at this point I cba going back to check...)
There were some oddnesses - I remember someone's signature was "The difference between 'Interesting' and 'Insightful' is whether you agree" which always rang very true to me. Separating upvotes for "funny", "I agree" and "I find this interesting" is already pretty handy though.
I think there's no way to prevent people from downvoting what they disagree with - but maybe if you provided downvotes for "this is wrong" and "this is trolling" people could have an option to ignore the "this is wrong" downvotes and get more diverse opinions.
Have you been to slashdot lately? I'd hardly hold it up as a standard for effective moderation. It has long since become the domain of trolls and edgelords.
That's what people not on reddit say about people on reddit, and probably so on for all sorts of social media.
Less flippantly, bits of reddit definitely are domains of trolls and edgelords, and when slashdot was at its height, being edgy was way more popular across the entire internet. In addition there is a fundamental tension between preventing groupthink and preventing trolls: in a diverse community there will be people who so vehemently disagree with others that they interpret their good-faith comments as trolling and so will use whatever tools are available to suppress it, leading to groupthink. (I mention groupthink in this context because of the point of "sharing ideas and getting at the truth" if that wasn't obvious.)
So I don't remember much about the comments the last time I checked in there but I am a bit skeptical.
In addition there is a fundamental tension between preventing groupthink and preventing trolls: in a diverse community there will be people who so vehemently disagree with others that they interpret their good-faith comments as trolling and so will use whatever tools are available to suppress itThere is only a fundamental tension between preventing groupthink and preventing trolls when communities and moderation are defined by large monolithic entities that have to square the circle of trying to cater to everyone. That isn’t the case on the fediverse. A summation of communities with differing moderation policies, demographics, sizes, governing styles and cultural norms is fundamentally different than a monolithic single community administered by one group of people in power with one vision that makes decisions to exclude people from 99% of the online sphere of that social medium/platform. Even if the average of all the moderation policies of many small communities averages out to roughly the same moderation policy of one massive social network, the fundamental mechanics of how that play out are way different.
With a single community the edge cases become flashpoints of exploitation and trolling but with many communities the different definitions of what is unacceptable behavior and how edge cases are dealt with tends to filter out the trolls more naturally because trying to find a controversial line to tiptoe justtttt behind is useless when every community draws their red lines slightly differently (even if in spirit they are similar) and every community has different stakeholders actually enforcing and enacting the moderation. Instead of finding a line to tip toe safe just on the other side while dog whistling, trolls experience a progressive, smooth ramp up of rejection from more and more communities the more toxically they behave.
The groupthink on reddit is not imposed by the monolithic entity in charge of reddit; it's imposed by the average of redditors and by subreddit moderators. The fediverse may support a better diversity of participation such that the average is less representative, but I think if Lemmy (say) got larger - let's say at least as large as reddit was 10 years ago when there was plenty of groupthink and toxicity - you would see major Lemmy communities take on similar characteristics to major subreddits. I think what you're saying is that you'd get various communities with overlapping areas of interest and different moderation policies and groupthinks, allowing for more diversity. But I think that network effects provide a strong opposing pressure to that kind of diversity, and even where more than one community can survive, I think you're more likely to see the equivalent of
/r/politicsand/r/conservativeemerge than/r/leftofcentreand/r/rightofcentreor something. So you still have groupthink, people are still liable to get downvoted into oblivion or banned for expressing the wrong opinion.I'm not really sure what you're getting at with the trolling aspect though: I don't really see why diverse moderation policies would discourage genuine trolls as I don't see how that "smooth ramp" would be any discouragement. Maybe you reckon it would be too much admin to keep track of where the line lies in each different community?
I'm new to Lemmy (I am assuming it will be better than reddit for a long time due to being smaller and the userbase having a different average, and federation meaning other influence from a monolithic controlling entity won't affect it) and very interested in this though so do share what you think.
I’m not really sure what you’re getting at with the trolling aspect though: I don’t really see why diverse moderation policies would discourage genuine trolls as I don’t see how that “smooth ramp” would be any discouragement. Maybe you reckon it would be too much admin to keep track of where the line lies in each different community?That could be one impact, there are many differences that have significant impacts in my opinion. One of the biggest is that trolling and more importantly the identity of trolling relies on standing justttt behind specific lines within specific communities and projecting toxicity through thinly veiled language/behavior that just barely keeps a troll from crossing the line (or just crossing it to see if anyone is going to do anything). Trolls form huge chunks of their identity around those lines, with shitty memes and dog whistling as basic forms of creating said identity. The worst trolls basically form their entire identity around this and try to spread it to others by making memes/jokes about transgressing those lines (looking for the other edgey-boy losers who will validate them).
If every community has different lines and enforcement that doesn’t meant there won’t be trolls but it does mean that they aren’t given an easy place to gather and forge identities around like they are with monolithic communities with one moderation policy. You end up with a lot of losers getting kicked out of many different communities instead of a group of trolls who have come together based on the identity of pushing the lines of a specific large community.
Obviously I am generalizing, and I am not saying I am 100% confident I am right but in my experience this hypothesis fits my experiences on and off the fediverse.
There's a lot more bad content than 3 per day, though. Also, downvotes have essentially no effect, so the whole mechanism is a bit pointless. Better than nothing, still.
Lemmy already has a huge alt/brigade problem. That would just make it worse.
What the hell is "alt/brigade"?? I mean, as a German I know I'm getting old, you don't have to rub it in...but I don't think that's the meaning of this
That reminds me, I once made my first political post on reddit and that got downvoted to oblivion. I would like to see how that exact same post would perform here on Lemmy.
"Free speech can't flourish online"
Subscribe to unlock this article
LOL. Truth!
With the truth there is a price to pay?
Used to be slowly changing
What happens on social media has nothing to do with free speech. If I can kick Nazis out of my bar , I can kick them off my website.
And either way, a public square where violent fascists are attacking people and screaming over everyone with megaphones isn't a place where anything important is being discussed anyway.
Screaming over everyone with megaphones about how they're not allowed to scream over everyone with megaphones, to a crowd that's 50% mannequins that have been wired up to play pre-recorded cheering.
Unfortunately, the discussion is important. Everybody hangs out in that public square which means everybody is forced to hear the megaphone Mein Kamph. It's how the far-right procreate now
The right wants to make it so that if you ban Nazis from a website, armed men from the government will come and arrest you. At the same time, they rant about being compelled to use transgender pronouns.
Free speech online doesn't even seem to be a particularly well-defined concept. Those who extol it the loudest are often looking to have the millionth "good faith discussion" about The Bell Curve, or use slurs as "just a joke", or promote a "dating and lifestyle coaching" business to teenage boys. If all they want is carte-blanche to say absolutely anything without being censored, I guess they only need to spin up a web server of their own, or run a lemmy instance. But what they actually want is to bypass the moderation rules on widely-used platforms and shit on the social contract. It's the same reason they don't show pornography, snuff footage, or other damaging content on television.
What they seem to want is a right to an audience.
No paywall: https://archive.ph/2023.11.12-212740/https://www.ft.com/content/8fde56b7-2515-441a-9472-30c8aedcc200
Tbh, the article doesn’t really talk about the headline. Just some history and talk about Elon musk and Twitter. Not a convincing argument about social media in general.
If you want a proper civilized discussion, head to pornhub. You're welcum.
Nothing makes my day more than clicking on a vid, then seeing some really intelligent shit in the comments.
The comments are always 🔥. They're better than the videos most of the time...
Pornhub comments is where I learned about the existence of and how to make chicken adobo. Shit's delicious.
This is the most _________ comment I've ever read on the Internet.
*Can't think of the proper word to use for this comment, it's totally blown my mind. Esoteric? Nope. Non-sequitur? Nope. Has the word actually been invented that describes this comment? It's power is over 9000!
** I have further questions. Where can one get the recipe for chicken adobo? Also, why when you use voice-to-text does the word "internet" always show up in lower case, when it's a pronoun that is supposed to be in uppercase?
I was gonna type it all out but then I got lazy. Here’s a pretty close approximation from a quick googling.
The recipe I have uses cane sugar vinegar instead of white vinegar, and brown sugar. And since you’re using vinegar, make sure you don’t stir anything with a metal spoon. It gives it a bitter taste.
Free speech cant flourish under corporate rule
Free speech has nothing to do with corporations? As long as the government doesn't start a social media platform, the First Amendment has 0 to do with any of them.
True. I think i mean something different that probably doesn't even have a term for it.
Not in this Cyberpunk world
Free speech can't flourish online, says the paywalled article
Well, "social media" and "online" ain't the same thing, now are they?
Well, mostly they are nowadays. Sure, there’s still old school forums and personal websites around but most people online interact via social media.
The old forums I used to go to don't exist anymore. One is now a separate entity from the sponsor company because they pivoted from renting game servers ( the old times when you could host your own private server) to telco and it lost all the value to have gamers attached to the image of the company. Also gamers in the meantime assumed another meaning entirely...
Is this an issue with.. social media, or corporate social media? Mastodon technically is social media and it can potentially have the problems of Facebook or Twitter, or not. Depends on the instance owners control. Even then, however they can't control every little detail when it's federated but, that's a good thing for the freedom of ideas.
If you want my actual opinion, places like Lemy and even Reddit are better for independent voices, because you can go into a dedicated community and get what you want specifically. While places like Mastodon, is more like a timeline of, hey I did this thing, or hey Elon musk did a thing today. Lemy is less like that, but it can also be like that.
Lemy or reddit seems to encourage discusion and Lemy seems to do great at it. The best interaction i've seen on an opensource social platform even compared to mastodon, dispite mastodon having more users.
I would have agreed with reddit before but the moderators are killing it the other way. Too much power, zero oversight, and quick to delete or even ban without having knowledge of what they're supposed to be moderating.
It's one of the reasons I'm here now, hoping for less of that. And I don't mean "the vaccines are making my 5G reception weak" type of posts. I mean factual information just getting removed of it doesn't align with the random moderator of the day when someone inevitably reports it. So much information there is scrubbed that's accurate and what remains is just an echo chamber of outdated or false information. I don't know how anyone can solve it other than relinquish control to our robot content moderator overlords.
The writer here seems confused. Free speech thrives online. There is no freer a place to speak than the Internet.
What they seem to take issue with is that free speech isn't always the path to truth. This was never a condition of free speech, and the lack of truth online doesn't make the speech there any less free.
In fact, free speech is the very force that allows people to lie with impunity. Maybe there would be more truth if speech were less free.
God I could kiss you. It's so weird. People have been just saying what's on their minds in chatrooms, forums, etc since the beginning of the internet, which was never scrutinized this much over being "factual". They were just expressing themselves. But now all of sudden we need a PSA to stop it lol
I think we've always thrived on outrage.
Before social media we had newspapers. Sure, we had real serious newspapers where the headlines where printed in a serif font, and mostly contained news about share prices and the political ramifications of abandoning the gold standard, but that wasn't what the masses bought.
We had tabloids. Look at what the BARMY EU want to ban now. Check out what BOFFINS are doing to dogs. Here's a 16 year old with her tits out. Look at this man on BENEFITS with 10 kids.
The only objective actual reporting in them was the sports pages at the back, and the TV guide in the middle.
We've always been like this. I have no answers how to make things better. We'd have to want to be better, and I don't believe most people do.
There's also no algorithm taking the most controversial answer and making it the top most comment ala Facebook.
I couldn't even get to the article. My screen was immediately blurred on the top half, and the bottom half with a full width pop-up talking about "managing cookies".
(And yes, I know, but I not using my desktop, I'm using my phone.)
That's not true. People are just talking about what interests them.
It's a paywall. "Subscribe to unlock this article".
People tend to reflect and post the outrage media they subscribe to, then look for echo chambers to reinforce those views. Reasonable opponents get exhausted and leave - and yes, IMO that’s what makes them reasonable, the ability to understand what they’re up against and quit a battle that cannot be won.
Also IMO the “gentleman’s agreement” we had, in the US at least, that free speech was somewhat honored most places including your job or online decades ago is dead. It’s quite clear that even the government isn’t too keen on the 1st amendment depending on who is in charge, much less corporations who will terminate people for speech conflicting with corporate agendas, and absolutely not petty or controlling forum moderators.
People that yell “muh freedum of speech!1!1!” the loudest are often the ones doing their best to force some hateful subjects or outright lies into other’s faces, then they get upset and claim they’re being attacked or bring up some other victim complex when they get “cancelled.”
I feel you are pointing in the right direction, but you did miss some stuff that is commonly missed. (I am going to preface that all I am doing is presenting facts, corps can burn in hell for my personal opinion)
I’m thinking that maybe you missed my point, which is exactly what you said.
First point: Free speech only applies to government retaliation, but that’s on thin ice. Like I said. Not sure what needed clarification, maybe my more sarcastic take on it made it less clear.
Second point: The point is that people aren’t really falling into echo chambers and having the lack of awareness to remove themselves from it, the point is they don’t want to leave the safety of their rage-bait fed herd and face criticisms of their narrative and/or worldview. Sure, someone who views a controversial or fringe subject will probably be fed more by algorithms, and the fault not only lies in that algorithm that wants to profit off clicks but the person that actively excludes any factual evidence to the contrary. Nobody thinks they’re the bad guy, and they don’t want to be told so.
You also should not assume that everyone is the bad guy, either.
And I get you might to push back against what I just said, but take a look at the tone of your comments, they tend to come from a critical point of view that already sees Humanity in a negative light. (No insult is meant.)
Are we not, though? I’m pretty cynical, but even from a pragmatic standpoint we are incredibly destructive despite us telling ourselves how great we are with our technological advancements.
We're both, actually. And I would push back on your assertion that you're holding a pragmatic standpoint.
The fact that you focus on the negatives and do not mention any of the positives bolsters my point...
There is no requirement to mention “both sides”. I did not agree to such a condition, that’s your own criteria to make yourself correct. Have at it.
There is in America. It's one of the founding parts of the framework of the social fabric of the country.
Sometimes though, it's not about winning or losing the battle, but just pushing back against the messages that's trying to shape a harmful narrative. To leave both sides of the argument available for third parties to read and consider.
And for that, every reasonable person should be doing some of that, instead of just bailing. Consider it a civic duty.
Up- and Downvotes should be removed entirely.
I have mixed feelings about this. Self moderation is better then needing to get mods involved with everything. Lemmy does it pretty well where voting only impacts each post and there's no total karma count.
I'd like the system if it at all resulted in self-moderation. but it really doesn't
I disagree in the sense that I think voting is useful but just up/down is not. A consensus engine that can judge each aspect of a statement alone and in a group can be used to find what is misleading, dishonest, and the like as well as what is simply untrue or lies.
I've kind of been of the opinion for a while that there are maybe a couple different ideas of "free speech". If you have total "free speech", right, everyone is allowed to talk and say whatever they want, much like the public square yadda yadda. You won't get nazis, you'll get spam, something which is obviously bad to anyone with half a brain (increasingly a smaller and smaller amount of the population). Spam is "free speech", technically, as, someone is making the most of their ability to scream at the top of their lungs, maximum volume, they're taking up all of the airwaves as much as is possible, and since these are usually the people with the most resources, it generally falls into the same kind of capitalist maximum usage of a resource in the most efficient way possible, with the minor caveat that nobody sane ever wanted that resource to be used in that way. Everyone needed a little bit of inefficiency in order to grease the wheels of conversation.
Of course, over time, we realize spam becomes less effective than subtly prodding at the collective consciousness, and running a twitter account with snarky remarks. We basically just have to understand here that it's still spam, it's just that the distinction has been moved from maximum volume, to bad faith. Which, is something that isn't necessarily the role of a corporation, just like spam doesn't necessarily have to be a corporation. Spam can also be people that are just scammers. Instead of selling products, these sorts of spammers and scammers try to win you over, drive the discourse in a different direction, engage in a bad faith manner. It fills the same role as spam being the maximum volume in the amphitheater, drowning out any other communications, but this is more insidious, harder to catch, and doesn't necessarily come from a place of malice or like, actual bad faith. If you were an alien listening to the airwaves, you might just hear something resembling a regular discussion, with the distinction that maybe you'd be getting a larger percentage of people getting mad and storming off as they talk to what are basically ideological zombies, or maybe robots.
I can get a bad faith discussion out of taking two people that are temporarily mad, or passionate, invested, about the same thing in different ways, and then controlling the debate in a certain kind of way, say, over a text medium where neither side can communicate effectively. And those are people that should've been able to relate over a shared passion, ideally. I can get a bad faith discussion out of two people that do not speak the same language, out of two people that can communicate just well enough that what's being said sounds sensible, but doesn't actually translate to either side. And of course, I can get a bad faith discussion out of just simple trolling. I mean, that's what trolling is, at a basic level, just taking a devil's advocate nonsense stance super seriously, until other people also do that, basically on the premise that you're someone to talk to. We sort of approach an event horizon with communication, where the closer two people are to actual communication, the more potential for frustration and misunderstanding there is, sort of like the hedgehog's dilemma. So of course you get bad actors who lean into that, and who propagate that behavior and their own sorts of separate language and thought terminating cliches, in order to basically be spam, without being spam. They create bad faith conversations.
And then, of course, I kind of fear the role that AI might take in the coming years, with all of this. Especially if analog computing hardware starts taking off again and people have easy access to building their own actually sensible chatbots resembling some mid-level internet discourse, instead of stuff that resembles what are really smart toddler might write. Then we're gonna see this all play out all over again, with the spam, except in a way that's much harder to detect, and in a way where you don't have to recruit human labor to do any of it. Dead internet theory, but real, basically. I dunno of a real way to counteract any of this, en masse.
I think the biggest thing is that people, generally, just have to put more thought into why specifically they want to leave a comment. Who are you doing this for? It can't really be for the person on the other side of the screen, you know, because the miscommunication is going to be inevitable given enough time, there's nothing you can do to counteract it. I think, inevitably, we all must realize, that the only reason to post online is, because you wanted to.
And so we all become trolls, in a way. But then, as is the ancient wisdom of the trolls, it becomes boring to just inhabit a shallow perspective, to spout nonsense. It's like playing a game with all the cheats enabled. It's fun for a while, probably too long actually, if you're insecure and have a chip on your shoulder, but it's not fulfilling long term. You can get plenty of people to do this regularly, clock in and clock out, be passionless, play the game with cheats for 3-4 hours with no real investment and then walk away. But if you're serious, you have to disable the cheats, to start inhabiting perspectives with real depth, you have to start inhabiting worldviews that aren't your own, but are still fully internally consistent. Ones that just stem from maybe other starting values. Or maybe they are all the same perspective, just given different easily malleable information landscapes. And if that's the case, then you're not really trolling anymore. You're just doing the socrates shit, where socrates invents a fake guy to challenge himself and others. Was that socrates? I dunno, who gives a fuck.
Tl;dr We are/all must become trolls! Memes are the DNA of the soul!
> ChatGPT crits you for 1,000! <
Seriously, you have to be more concise than that. We didn't purchase one of your novels to read over an afternoon, we're browsing a comments section of an online form.
Apologies for the implied rudeness, none is meant.
"We" who, bro? If you're not reading the post, don't read the post, maybe it wasn't meant for you, if you don't wanna read it, I dunno. But also, in the words of blaise pascal: if I had more time, I would've written a shorter letter. I'm not gonna waste like an extra hour, on top of the thirty minutes I already spent, to try to compress my thoughts as much as possible. If people are interested, they can read it, if they're not, then they can go read some other dude's comments.