Comment by breadwinner
5 months ago
I think it would be wise to listen to Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa of The Philippines, regarding unchecked social media.
"You and I, if we say a lie we are held responsible for it, so people can trust us. Well, Facebook made a system where the lies repeated so often that people can't tell."
"Both United Nations and Meta came to the same conclusion, which is that this platform Facebook actually enabled genocide that happened in Myanmar. Think about it as, when you say it a million times... it is not just the lie but also it is laced with fear, anger and hate. This is what was prioritized in the design and the distribution on Facebook. It keeps us scrolling, but in countries like Myanmar, in countries like Philippines, in countries where institutions are weak, you saw that online violence became real world violence."
"Fear, anger, hate, lies, salaciousness, this is the worst of human nature... and I think that's what Big Tech has been able to do through social media... the incentive structure is for the worst of who we are because you keep scrolling, and the longer you keep scrolling the more money the platform makes."
"Without a shared reality, without facts, how can you have a democracy that works?"
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/12/us/video/gps0112-meta-scraps-...
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information for in his heart he dreams himself your master." - Commissioner Pravin Lal, U.N. Declaration of Rights
Full quote: "As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
(Alpha Centauri, 1999, https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/The_Planetary_Datalinks... )
I sit here in my cubicle, here on the motherworld. When I die, they will put my body in a box and dispose of it in the cold ground. And in the million ages to come, I will never breathe, or laugh, or twitch again. So won't you run and play with me here among the teeming mass of humanity? The universe has spared us this moment."
~Anonymous, Datalinks.
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There is a difference between free flow of information and propaganda. Much like how monopolies can destroy free markets, unchecked propaganda can bury information by swamping it with a data monoculture.
I think you could make a reasonable argument that the algorithms that distort social media feeds actually impede the free flow of information.
> Much like how monopolies can destroy free markets, unchecked propaganda can bury information by swamping it with a data monoculture.
The fundamental problem here is exactly that.
We could have social media that no central entity controls, i.e. it works like the web and RSS instead of like Facebook. There are a billion feeds, every single account is a feed, but you subscribe to thousands of them at most. And then, most importantly, those feeds you subscribe to get sorted on the client.
Which means there are no ads, because nobody really wants ads, and so their user agent doesn't show them any. And that's the source of the existing incentive for the monopolist in control of the feed to fill it with rage bait, which means that goes away.
The cost is that you either need a P2P system that actually works or people who want to post a normal amount of stuff to social media need to pay $5 for hosting (compare this to what people currently pay for phone service). But maybe that's worth it.
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There is no generally accepted definition of propaganda. One person's propaganda is another person's accurate information. I don't trust politicians or social media employees to make that distinction.
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Propaganda wouldn't be such a problem if content wasn't dictated by a handful of corporations, and us people weren't so unbelievably gullible.
indeed, didn't YT ban a bunch of RT employees for undisclosed ties? I bet those will be coming back.
Oh, but can you make an argument that the government, pressuring megacorporations with information monopolies to ban things they deem misinformation, is a good thing and makes things better?
Because that's the argument you need to be making here.
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That sounds great in the context of a game, but in the years since its release, we have also learned that those who style themselves as champions of free speech also dream themselves our master.
They are usually even more brazen in their ambitions than the censors, but somehow get a free pass because, hey, he's just fighting for the oppressed.
I'd say free speech absolutism (read: early-pandemic Zuckerberg, not thumb-on-the-scales Musk) has always aged better than the alternatives.
The trick is there's a fine line between honest free speech absolutism and 'pro free speech I believe in and silence about the freedom of that I don't.' Usually when ego and power get involved (see: Trump, Musk).
To which, props to folks like Ted Cruz on vocally addressing the dissonance of and opposing FCC speech policing.
Anything that people uncritically good attracts the evil and the illegitimate because they cannot build power on their own so they must co-opt things people see as good.
Not in the original statement, but as it referenced here, the word 'information' is doing absolutely ludicrous amounts of lifting. Hopefully it bent at the knees, because it my book it broke.
You can't call the phrase "the sky is mint chocolate chip pink with pulsate alien clouds" information.
While this is true, It's also important to realize that during the great disinformation hysteria, perfectly reasonable statements like "This may have originated from a lab", "These vaccines are non-sterilizing", or "There were some anomalies of Benford's Law in this specific precinct and here's the data" were lumped into the exact same bucket as "The CCP built this virus to kill us all", "The vaccine will give you blood clots and myocarditis", or "The DNC rigged the election".
The "disinformation" bucket was overly large.
There was no nuance. No critical analysis of actual statements made. If it smelled even slightly off-script, it was branded and filed.
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You can call it data and have sufficient respect of others that they may process it into information. Too many have too little faith in others. If anything we need to be deluged in data and we will probably work it out ourselves eventually.
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This is a fear of an earlier time.
We are not controlling people by reducing information.
We are controlling people by overwhelming them in it.
And when we think of a solution, our natural inclination to “do the opposite” smacks straight into our instinct against controlling or reducing access to information.
The closest I have come to any form of light at the end of the tunnel is Taiwan’s efforts to create digital consultations for policy, and the idea that facts may not compete on short time horizon, but they surely win on longer time horizons.
The problem is that in our collective hurry to build and support social networks, we never stopped to think about what other functions might be needed with them to promote good, factual society.
People should be able to say whatever the hell they want, wherever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want. (Subject only to the imminent danger test)
But! We should also be funding robust journalism to exist in parallel with that.
Can you imagine how different today would look if the US had leveraged a 5% tax on social media platforms above a certain size, with the proceeds used to fund journalism?
That was a thing we could have done. We didn't. And now we're here.
Beware of those who quote videogames and yet attribute them to "U.N. Declaration of Rights".
They're not wrong; the attribution is part of the quote. In-game, the source of the quote is usually important, and is always read aloud (unlike in Civ).
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Beware he who would tell you that any effort at trying to clean up the post apocalyptic wasteland that is social media is automatically tyranny, for in his heart he is a pedophile murderer fraudster, and you can call him that without proof, and when the moderators say your unfounded claim shouldn't be on the platform you just say CENSORSHIP.
The thing is that burying information in a firehose of nonsense is just another way of denying access to it. A great way to hide a sharp needle is to dump a bunch of blunt ones on top of it.
Sure, great. Now suppose that a very effective campaign of social destabilisation propaganda exists that poses an existential risk to your society.
What do you do?
It's easy to rely on absolutes and pithy quotes that don't solve any actual problems. What would you, specifically, with all your wisdom do?
Let's not waste time on idle hypotheticals and fear mongering. No propaganda campaign has ever posed an existential threat to the USA. Let us know when one arrives.
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There are twin goals: total freedom of speech and holding society together (limit polarization). I would say you need non-anonymous speech, reputation systems, trace-able moderation (who did you upvote), etc. You can say whatever you want but be ready to stand by it.
One could say the problem with freedom of speech was that there weren't enough "consequences" for antisocial behavior. The malicious actors stirred the pot with lies, the gullible and angry encouraged the hyperbole, and the whole US became polarized and divided.
And yes, this system chills speech as one would be reluctant to voice extreme opinions. But you would still have the freedom to say it but the additional controls exert a pull back to the average.
Is your point that any message is information?
Without truth there is no information.
That seems to be exactly her point, no?
Imagine an interface that reveals the engagement mechanism by, say, having an additional iframe. In this iframe an LLM clicks through its own set of recommendations picked to minimize negative emotions at the expense of engagement.
After a few days you're clearly going to notice the LLM spending less time than you clicking on and consuming content. At the same time, you'll also notice its choices are part of what seems to you a more pleasurable experience than you're having in your own iframe.
Social media companies deny you the ability to inspect, understand, and remix how their recommendation algos work. They deny you the ability to remix an interface that does what I describe.
In short, your quote surely applies to social media companies, but I don't know if this is what you originally meant.
Raising the noise floor of disinformation to drown out information is a way of denying access to information too..
Facebook speaks through what it chooses to promote or suppress and they are not liable for that speech because of Section 230.
Not quite: prior to the communications Decency Act of 1996 (which contained section 230), companies were also not liable for the speech of their users, but lost that protection if they engaged in any moderation. The two important cases at hand are Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. And Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc.
The former moderated content and was thus held liable for posted content. The latter did not moderate content and was determined not to be liable for user generated content they hosted.
Part of the motivation of section 230 was to encourage sites to engage in more moderation. If section 230 were to be removed, web platforms would probably choose to go the route of not moderating content in order to avoid liability. Removing section 230 is a great move if one wants misinformation and hateful speech to run unchecked.
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We must dissent.
There's a special irony in this being the top comment on a site where everyone has a rightthink score and people routinely and flagrantly engage in "probably bad faith, but there's plausible deniability so you can't pin it on them" communication to crap on whatever the wrongthink on an issue is.
As bad as facebook and it's opaque algorithms that favor rage bait are, the kind of stuff you get by keeping score is worse.
>"You and I, if we say a lie we are held responsible for it, so people can trust us."
I don't know how it works in The Philippines, but in the USA the suggestion that media outlets are held responsible for the lies that they tell is one of the most absurd statements one could possibly make.
How about InfoWars?
I was referring more to established Media that people consider credible like the NBC, CBS, The Guardian, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, etc. The fact that the only person in "media" who has been severely punished for their lies is a roundly despised figure (without any credibility among established media or the ruling class) is not a ringing endorsement for the system. While the lies of Jones no doubt caused untold hardship for the families of the victims, they pale in comparison to the much more consequential lies told by major media outlets with far greater influence.
When corporate media figures tell lies that are useful to the establishment, they are promoted, not called to account.
In 2018 Luke Harding at the Guardian lied and published a story that "Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy" (headline later amended with "sources say" after the fake story was debunked) in order to bolster the Russiagate narrative. It was proven without a shadow of a doubt that Manafort never went to the Embassy or had any contact at all with Assange (who was under blanket surveillance), at any time. However, to this day this provably fake story remains on The Guardian website, without any sort of editor's note that is it false or that it was all a pack of lies!(1) No retraction was ever issued. Luke Harding remains an esteemed foreign correspondent for The Guardian.
In 2002, Jonah Golberg told numerous lies in a completely false article in The New Yorker that sought to establish a connection between the 9/11 attacks and Saddam Hussein called, "The Great Terror".(2) This article was cited repeatedly during the run up to the war as justification for the subsequent invasion and greatly helped contribute to an environment where a majority of Americans thought that Iraq was linked to Bin Laden and the 9/11 attackers. More than a million people were killed, in no small part because of his lies. And Goldberg? He was promoted to editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, perhaps the most prestigious and influential journal in the country. He remains in this position today.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of similar examples. The idea suggested in the original OP that corporate/established media is somehow more credible or held to a higher standard than independent media is simply not true. Unfortunately there are a ton of lies, falsehoods and propaganda out there, and it is up to all of us to be necessarily skeptical no matter where we get our information and do our due diligence.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-hel...
2. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/25/the-great-terr...
A sympathetic jury can be an enemy of justice.
I'm not an Alex Jones fan, but I don't understand how a conspiracy theory about the mass shooting could be construed as defamation against the parents of the victims. And the $1.3B judgement does seem excessive to me.
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Ever watched Fox News?
This is why China bans western social media.
Say what you will about the CCP, it's naive to let a foreign nation have this much impact on your subjects. The amount of poison and political manipulation that are imported from these platform is astronomical.
Well when the local media bends a knee and outright bribes the President (Paramount, Disney, Twitter, Facebook), why should we trust the domestic media?
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Instead of implementing government information control, why not invest those resources in educating and empowering ones citizenry to recognize disinformation?
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China reflexively bans anything that could potentially challenge Chairman Xi's unchecked authority and control over the information flow.
>unchecked social media
Passive voice. Who exactly is supposed to do the "checking" and why should we trust them?
Citizens. Through lawsuits. Currently we can't because of Section 230.
Nonsense. If social media users engage in fraud, slander, or libel then you can still hold them accountable through a civil lawsuit. Section 230 doesn't prevent this.
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The "editorializing" may possibly be applied i think (not a lawyer) when the platform's manipulation of what a user sees is based on content. And the Youtube's banning of specific Covid and election content may be such an "editorializing", and thus Youtube may not have Section 230 protection at least in those cases.
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The problem is not the content, the problem is people believing things blindly.
The idea that we need to protect people from “bad information” is a dark path to go down.
I don't see it so much as protecting people from bad information as protecting people from bad actors, among whom entities like Facebook are prominent. If people want to disseminate quackery they can do it like in the old days by standing on a street corner and ranting. The point is that the mechanisms of content delivery amplify the bad stuff.
It’s a terrible idea and creates more problems than it solves.
You eliminate the good and the bad ideas. You eliminate the good ideas that are simple “bad” because it upsets people with power. You eliminate the good ideas that are “bad” simply because they are deemed too far out the Overton window.
And worst of all, it requires some benevolent force to make the call between good and bad, which attracts all sorts of psychopaths hungry for power.
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Censorship works both ways. When i tried speaking against violence and genocide perpetrated by Russia in Ukraine i was shut down on Linkedin.
Even here on HN, i was almost banned when i said about children abduction by Russia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33005062 - the crime that half year later ICC wrote the order against Putin.
You know how this used to work in the old days? Instead of publishing allegations yourself, you would take your story to a newspaper reporter. The reporter will then do the investigations then, if there is solid evidence, the story will be published in the newspaper. At that point the newspaper company is standing behind the story, and citizens know the standing of the newspaper in their community, and how much credence to give to the story, based on that. Social media destroyed this process, now anyone can spread allegations at lightning speed on a massive scale without any evidence to back it up. This has to stop. We should return to the old way, it wasn't perfect, but it worked for 100s of years. Repealing Section 230 will accomplish this.
I remember a story that was investigated and then published...it was spread far and wide. The current president of the US stole the election and our biggest adversary has videos of him in compromising positions. Then debunked. (Steele dossier) https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-russiagate-...
I remember a story that was investigated and then published...for some reason it was blocked everywhere and we were not allowed to discuss the story or even link to the news article. It "has the hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation."(Hunter Biden Laptop) Only to come out that it was true: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fbi-spent-a-year-pre...
I would rather not outsource my thinking or my ability to get information to approved sources. I have had enough experience with gell-mann amnesia to realize they have little to no understanding of the situation as well. I may not be an expert in all domains but while I am still free at least I can do my best to learn.
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It never worked. Newspapers in the old days frequently printed lies and fake news. They usually got away with it because no one held them accountable.
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>At that point the newspaper company is standing behind the story
the newspaper company is the bottleneck that the censors can easily tighten like it was say in USSR. Or like even FCC today with the media companies like in the case of Kimmel.
Social media is our best tool so far against censorship. Even with all the censorship that we do have in social media, the information still finds a way due to the sheer scale of the Internet. That wasn't the case in the old days when for example each typewritter could be identified by unique micro-details of the shape of its characters.
>Social media destroyed this process, now anyone can spread allegations at lightning speed on a massive scale without any evidence to back it up.
Why to believe anything not accompanied by evidence? The problem here is with the news consumer. We teach children to not stick fingers into electricity wall socket. If a child would still stick the fingers there, are you going to hold the electric utility company responsible?
>This has to stop. We should return to the old way, it wasn't perfect, but it worked for 100s of years.
The same can be said about modern high density of human population, transport connections and infectious decease spreading. What you suggest is to decrease the population and confine the rest preventing any travel like in the "old days" (interesting that it took Black Death some years to spread instead of days it would have taken today, yet it still did spread around all the known world). We've just saw how it works in our times (and even if you say it worked then why aren't we still doing it today?). You can't put genie back into the bottle and stop the progress.
>Repealing Section 230 will accomplish this.
Yes, good thing people didn't decided back then to charge the actual printer houses with lies present in the newspapers they printed.
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What happens when the press refuses to publish anything which doesn't align with their financial or political interest?
There is no way to go back to this. It’s about as feasible as getting rid of vehicles.
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> We should return to the old way, it wasn't perfect, but it worked for 100s of years
At this stage you are clearly just trolling. Are you even aware of the last 100s of years? From Luther to Marx? You are not acting in good faith. I want nothing to do with your ahistorical worldview.
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I can think of another hot-potato country that will get posts nerfed from HN and many others
That's the evil genius behind the general movement in the world to discredit democratic institutions and deflate the government.
Who would hold Meta accountable for the lies it helps spread and capitalize upon them if not the government.
So by crippling democratic institutions and dwarfing the government to the point of virtual non-existence, all in the name of preserving freedom of speech and liberalism -- and in the process subverting both concepts -- elected leaders have managed to neutralize the only check in the way of big corps to ramp up this misinformation machine that the social networks have become.
I think it would be even wiser to start by holding to account the politicians, corporations, and government institutions regarding their unchecked lies corruption and fraud.
But no, yet again the blame is all piled on to the little people. Yes, it's us plebs lying on the internet who are the cause of all these problems and therefore we must be censored. For the greater good.
I have an alternative idea, let's first imprison or execute (with due process) politicians, CEOs, generals, heads of intelligence and other agencies and regulators, those found to have engaged in corrupt behavior, lied to the public, committed fraud, insider trading, fabricated evidence to support invading other countries, engage in undeclared wars, ordered extrajudicial executions, colluded with foreign governments to hack elections, tax evasion, etc. Then after we try that out for a while and if it has not improved things, then we could try ratcheting up the censorship of plebs. Now one might argue that would be a violation of the rights of those people to take such measures against them, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make. Since We Are All In This Together™, they would be willing to make that sacrifice too. And really, if they have nothing to hide then they have nothing to fear.
When you get people like Zuckerberg lying to congress, it's pretty difficult to swallow the propaganda claiming that it's Joe Smith the unemployed plumber from West Virginia sharing "dangerous memes" with his 12 friends on Facebook that is one of the most pressing concerns.
I don't think "breadwinner" is blaming the little people.
No, the ruling class is. breadwinner I guess has bought into the propaganda, but hasn't made the connection that it's basically putting all the blame on the little people and proposes to put all the burden of "fixing" things onto them, with measures that will absolutely not actually fix anything except handing more power to the ruling class.
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Exactly what are you trying to say about unbanning YouTubers here?
That it could be dangerous to readmit people who broadcast disinformation? The connection seemed pretty clear to me.
I certainly guessed that was what you wanted to say. Funny how polarization makes everything predictable.
But what I just realized is that you don't explicitly say it, and certainly make no real argument for it. Ressa laments algorithmic promotion of inflammatory material, but didn't say "keep out anti-government subversives who spread dangerous misinformation" - which is good, because
1. We can all see how well the deplatforming worked - Trump is president again, and Kennedy is health secretary.
2. In the eyes of her government, she was very much such a person herself, so it would have been pretty bizarre thing of her to say.
Ironically, your post is very much an online "go my team!" call, and a good one too (top of the thread!). We all understand what you want and most of us, it seems, agree. But you're not actually arguing for the deplatforming you want, just holding up Ressa as a symbol for it.
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