Comment by anyonecancode
4 years ago
A nuance I see missing from the censorship/free speech dichotomy is around what's essentially DDOSing of speech. I think that the free-est speech has something equivalent to the voting idea of "one person, one vote." No one should be silenced, but also everyone should have equal representation.
In the same way that being very rich generally gives you effectively much more power than having a single vote, and so is a corruption of democracy, I think we see a similar thing with online discourse, where those with extra resources are able to essentially "flood the zone" and dominate the discourse.
So the question is what should be the effective response? Those pushing the censorship/free speech framing argue that removing voices is wrong -- banning, deplatforming, etc. That may be right, but it's also incomplete as it doesn't address the dynamic of the well-resourced voices overwhelming everyone else.
I don't know what an effective solution _is_ here, but I know what it _looks_ like -- all voices with equal access. I don't think the censorship/freedom framing gets us there.
This is basically one of the oldest problems on the Net, spam, back to haunt us. We got complacent, sitting back while Google filtered the junk out of our search results and inboxes. But who watches the watchmen? Now, v1agra ads and Serdar Argic[0] have evolved under our noses into camouflaged and effective predators glutted on endless Eternal September fodder.
Now that the Net has devolved into a political battlefield, how do you draw the line between a censorship regime and a spam filter? Was there ever a difference?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic
That's really interesting! When I first saw your comment I thought to myself "well sure, spam is kind of like this, but that's more about commercial/marketing," and on clicking the link and learning about Serdar Argic, I see that, actually, the first big spam incident was actually political trolling. Did not know that history.
> So the question is what should be the effective response? Those pushing the censorship/free speech framing argue that removing voices is wrong -- banning, deplatforming, etc. That may be right, but it's also incomplete as it doesn't address the dynamic of the well-resourced voices overwhelming everyone else.
It's a good point, but the loud voices that have been driving this "anti-free speech" shift are also a loud minority. The people who got Alex Jones banned everywhere, got YouTube to start demonetising videos, got Trump banned from Twitter, were essentially a small group of influential Twitter users (some of whom also had jobs in the media, giving them huge platforms to put pressure on these companies). It's a "natural law" of human societies that the 1% are disproportionately loud, on any issue, and drive what the other 99% hear and think; not just a feature of online spaces. When you think of a liberal, or a conservative, or a college student, for example, whatever you picture in your head is just the loudest, most visible portion of that group, but is likely a tiny minority of that group. Whatever opinion you have on science, or nutrition, is driven by a very tiny loud minority, whether that's lobbyists, or a few influential individuals (maybe Neil deGrasse Tyson, maybe Al Gore, maybe a prominent scientist, or maybe the Coca Cola company). Without them, the popular mind might think quite differently.
Ergo; the "censorship shift" isn't about giving the minority their voice, it's two warring minorities struggling for control of the Overton window.
> the loud voices that have been driving this "anti-free speech" shift are also a loud minority. The people who got Alex Jones banned everywhere, got YouTube to start demonetising videos, got Trump banned from Twitter, were essentially a small group of influential Twitter users
I had to laugh - this could easily describe Alex Jones and Trump as the proximate cause of their own bans.
Now you're getting the idea!
This is the key ingredient missing from most online fora that is not missing in most face-to-face fora and the actual halls of government (well, most of them): equal time.
In a public physical venue, it's much easier to allocate one person, one time slice to present their views. There are exceptions (lobbying is a huge hack on this, and indeed, there's a reason many see lobbying as anti-democratic). But in contrast: online speech is dominated by whoever has either the most leisure time to toss at an online forum or the willingness and resources to sock-puppet up and turn their one voice into an echoing hydra. Factor in state spending on those hydras and the situation turns pretty un-democratic pretty fast.
Differrnt people repeating the same thing over and over without addressing or acknowledging arguments from the other side still results in a ddos.