My brother, a retired financial advisor, and I have been discussing this topic and his most recent comment is worth sharing:
Both parties have allowed companies to get too big in virtually every industry. No company in any industry should ever have more than a 20% market share TOPS. It’s only in the last 2 years that I have seen the Justice Anti-trust division diligently scrutinizing any of these big mergers. I hope this is because it’s common sense, but I suspect this scrutiny is being reserved for the Trump detractors (Att buying Time Warner which own CNN). There has been virtually no obstacles to big mergers since the late 70’s
1
Wait a minute. How is breaking up tech giants on antitrust grounds mutually exclusive with forcing them to regulate content? Why can't you do both?
I give it a B for content, C for execution. Sci-fi should be entertaining as well as thought-provoking, or else you should just write an essay.
1
For those interested in this topic, you may also want to read "The Splinters Of Our Discontent" by Mike Godwin of Godwin's Law fame:
https://amzn.to/2Xv9dWN
Dear Cory
Please stop propounding Twentieth Century theories that have been proven wrong by reality. Your rap is by now a wheeze. You have done a tremendous amount of damage. We need help. Please wake up.
All good wishes to you
T Bone
@T Bone Burnett Are you saying "Please stop having an opinion" ?
@T Bone Burnett You must listen to good old T Bone. He's the dinner-plate umpire.
1
As a discarded newspaperman, I was critical of the professional journalist class (mainly the C-minus minds that run these organizations, as Matt Taibbi describes them) that decided what was and what wasn't fit to print. The access journalism dominant in DC is a particularly destructive aspect of this.
However, I'm even more disturbed by social media. True, they've opened many doors on much malfeasance that would otherwise go unexamined. But, on balance, the record of their effects across society is horrible.
A better alternative, I believe, is what Doctorow abhors: Holding these outfits to the same laws and standards that govern all other media. These platform would, I believe, be sued out of existence (contrary to Doctorow's conclusion).
Then what we would need is a much more vibrant national press with a much wider range of political and regional flavors -- quite the opposite of the lockstep blob mentality that now dominates the mainstream media. And to deliver this, we need a new technology that cheaply prints out any newspaper-style publication desired in the home.
There, problem solved.
@Pelham Oh.
Cory is in the top rank of contemporary sci-fi writers.
Some years ago I had the pleasure of designing the book cover for his fine early anthology "A Place So Foreign."
I'm glad to see him speaking out against arbitrary censorship.
It does often seem that one has to play a semantics game with euphemisms in order to discuss something controversial on social media.
@Jerry Engelbach That's nice. We're delighted to learn that you briefly had a tenuous connection to the writer.
And now back to the social-media platforms story.
Not the future but the on coming train!
The failure of government to police the growth of supper powerful monopolies in digital communication and product provision and delivery is making the US a country without opportunities or creativity. Soon the government will be a subsidiary of one of the mega corporations that tell us what to read, what to say, what to eat and where we can live while their owners live above us in a cloud city with views and clean air. METROPOLIS wasn’t just a movie it was a prediction!
A lot of commentators here seem to be missing the myriad of questions within Mr. Doctorow's futuristic scenario of government regulated algorithms put in place to edit the massive amount of user content online. And in doing so, stifling the kind of content responsible writers may want to post.
Why can't readers of online content be more discerning and critical, not only what they read, but of where it comes from and who has written it?
1
I see Facebook, Twitter, et. al. as common carriers. We wouldn't allow Verizon to censor our phone conversations, we shouldn't allow FB to censor our likes.
No doubt these new media companies think Nazism, pornography, etc., are bad for their corporate image. That's why the government must lead here in making it clear that corporations have neither the duty nor the right to censor messages.
That phone conversations are private and the others are public is immaterial: new media are more like EM frequency bands than like TV networks. The NBC might have a right to censor their content, but the FCC shouldn't be able to.
If we really think that censorship is now necessary, because now ordinary people get a public voice, then we should do the honest thing repeal the bill of rights (they're mostly a fiction anyway).
In 2005 the FDA gave 80% of the responsibility for safety certification (Remember MAX 9 737?) to the industry. This is no different. This is what America does now in our Corporate dominated society. Foxes in the henhouses (CEO's, Wall Street, to 1%) are doing great. The hens (you and me) not so much. And it is spiraling downwards when a Tax Reform bill borrows on the debt to the tune of 2 trillion to provide an enormous and unneeded tax cut for those same individuals. Any end in sight? I can't see it, can you?
1
I remember when people thought beliefs were good, if not necessary. That was before we programmed the human mind in the computer and learned from this model the true effect of beliefs on the mind.
In the near future, we will program the human mind in the computer based on a linguistic "survival" algorithm, which will provide irrefutable proof as to how we trick the mind with our ridiculous beliefs about what is supposed to survive - producing minds programmed de facto for destruction. These minds see the survival of a particular belief as more important than the survival of all. When we understand this, we will begin the long trek back to reason and sanity.
See RevolutionOfReason.com
1
Lol. Seriously? Cory Doctorow writes: "Our first mistake was giving the platforms the right to decide who could speak and what they could say." Nope. Our first mistake was allowing these social media advertising creatures to get way with saying,"We're just the platform. We're not responsible for anything that's posted." Which is an odd tactic for bringing the world closer together, as Mr. Zuckerberg piously declaims. Right. It brings people closer together, just like a boxing ring.
272
@Hugh MacDonald
"Which is an odd tactic for bringing the world closer together..."
Which implies a need to "bring the world closer together."
Why? Have you entertained a possibility that the world is "close" enough as it is and may use some 'spacing out', to make space for free thought and controversies coming with it?
Note, how 'controversy' has become a dirty word in our close-minded 'democracy', scared ...less of anything unconventional that crosses the boundaries of PC, where a t-shirt or our very flag can be construed as 'hate speech.'
14
I agree with you. I meant simply that while piously claiming to be bringing the world together, the Facebook platform blindly posts all sorts of shameful content that turns strangers into adversaries. I don't believe in social media anyway. I prefer to meet people in person and then decide whether or not to be friends.
15
@Hugh MacDonald~
Yes, it appears that a rapidly growing number of people here and around the world want to destroy these "open platform microphones" that give people the opportunity to amplify their voices to an extent that was previously impossible—indeed, not so long ago, only governments and powerful multinational corporations enjoyed their monopoly over the speaking platform and the mic that they themselves created and controlled.
Facebook is in fact a communication platform, but quite notably, one that has given the mic to you and me to say whatever we want to say to the world. (Thank you, Facebook.)
By contrast, The New York Times certainly isn't a communication platform that gives an open mic to you and me; rather, as a powerful multination private corporation in the service of other more powerful multinational private corporations, it must carefully control who it allows to use its mic on its platform—as the NYT certainly recognizes that its mic is one of the most powerful (i.e., loudest) mics in the world. So people who want to speak via the NYT must go through rigorous training in journalism schools, so that they can thereafter be fully trusted to think (and speak) in a way that never threatens the power of these powerful multinational private corporations—because if they did that, the NYT would no longer be of service to the clients that ensure its existence.
There's a reason you are railing against Facebook but not railing against the NYT.
5
Democracies aren’t strengthened when a professional class gets to tell us what our opinions are allowed to be.
Actually this is the only way democracies work. Otherwise it becomes a vote buying bonanza as low information voters forgo long term gains to vote for candidates that have bought them off in the short term.
See 21st century American politics, from student loan forgiveness, unconstitutional abortion laws, to both parties complete lack of effort on fixing immigration.
28
But doesn't such arrangement give the 'professional' class disproportional share of influence in democracy? How will we make sure that this class uses this influence for good of society not only for good of themselves and their sponsors?
5
@Emily
Power always corrupts. Doesn’t matter who holds it although the more ethical the holder, the longer it takes for the corruption to take hold. We need to take money and religion out of politics and legally call corporations what they -not people but enemies of the people.
4
The Internet lives outside of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple. You don't have to consume garbage from these companies, if you don't want to. Saying that these companies are the "only" way to communicate is like standing in the candy aisle of a grocery store, bemoaning the lack of good food in grocery stores. If you choose to eat garbage, that's your choice.
I've been using the Net since before the Web was invented, I use it now, and I'll probably use it for the rest of my life. I don't interact with any of these companies, and I live a happy, complete, successful life.
36
@Frank...Thanks for mentioning it. I also consider the companies you mentioned to be unnecessary evils. I utilize them. However, their goals and/or missions as corporations will always be antithetical to the notion of freedom and individualism. Conservatives, progressives and everything in between must learn to vote with their clicks. If you hate it, don't click on it. If it censors you, don't support it. But it is easier said than done when we are being neurologically rewarded by each 'like'.
7
I took Facebook out of my life 6 months ago! Fabulous relief! And then I removed every bit of google and replaced it with Firefox- only problem, I still have to check gmail, and worry, that perhaps- that every other day action, undoes my other efforts?
Not too long ago I visited the grave of Philip K. Dick in Fort Morgan, Colorado on my drive home from Omaha.
Similar to the Black Mirror series on Netflix and BBC's Years after Years which premieres this evening on HBO, Dick opened up an endless array of possibilities during my restless youth and gave me a sense of agency in choosing which ones I hoped would materialize. Dick's novels gave me nightmares.
The Supreme Court's openness to upend the administrative state last Thursday in a split decision that augurs coming earthquakes in constitutional law. Think executive agencies have too much power to interpret and enforce the law? Want courts to dismantle landmark statutes protecting the environment, consumers, civil rights, and employees? You may be in luck because this may be the first chapter of a recently discovered Dick novel: The conservative justices are eager to take a hatchet to the federal bureaucracy that governs much of modern America.
We should listen to these science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists. They are our canary in the proverbial coalmine and we all know how eager Mr. Trump and his oligarchs are to get Americans back into the mines.
38
@Really, Thanks for the shout-out to PKD, one of the 20th century's true literary greats. While other science fiction writers were imagining futures that were like the present only more of so, PKD imagined, e.g., household appliances that spied on their owners. Or drones that stalked "deadbeats" to shame them publicly about not paying their bills on time (can those be far off, now?). And SO much more. PKD was a creative genius with a razor-sharp understanding of human nature.
9
@Really "proverbial canary in the coal mine." the coal mine is real.
1
"If you’re thinking, 'Well, all that stuff belongs in the newspaper,' then you’ve fallen into a trap: Democracies aren’t strengthened when a professional class gets to tell us what our opinions are allowed to be."
Whoa. Stop right there.
I thought that what distinguishes this newspaper, and other responsible print and electronic news outlets, WAS their professionalism, and their editorial judgment. Professional journalists do not tell us what to think. They do, however, gather and analyze news responsibly, do their best to distinguish fact from fiction from propaganda, and provide editorial commentary that allows US to make our OWN decisions as to what to think and believe.
Neither unregulated, nor imperfectly regulated, nor even well regulated, social media can replace independent but professional journalism. Our mistake is thinking they could. This stuff DOES belong in the newspaper.
52
@FJP
Remember, this is an opinion from the future, how an author imagines the state of the world in 25 years. In that time, this newspaper may be shaped by world events to how Cory imagines it could be.
Right, well science fiction is written by science fiction authors after all. So nobody should be responsible for content now or in the hypothetical future because the monopolistic internet will be ascendant as a consequence of accountability? No, really? The argument that we should break them up is not in conflict with holding platforms accountable for content. We are talking about sites that aggregate content not produce it. You are already liable for what you produce under the rule of law (which can be abused and often is, but that is a separate conundrum). The issue is the reach of these "platforms" who want the profitability but not the accountability of what flows through their hands. In other words their hands are dirty but they want us to pretend otherwise. Nope!
30
Whether you’re Zaphod Beeblerox or a citizen of the Klingon empire doesn’t change the fact that Facebook etc. is not about free speech, giving voice to the voiceless, or enhancing public discourse.
These companies are amoral profit making entities that take the inputs of each user and package them up for the purpose of selling data to advertisers who use it to sell stuff.
All of this needs to be regulated and the logical place to start is with the same laws that govern newspaper publishing.
45
@Michael Trobe
They are not newspapers and regulating them as if they are is a bad idea. We don't regulate cars like buses, even though they both use the roads.
Legislating morality almost always ends badly.
That's not to say we should do nothing. I just think we should be smarter about the kind of regulation put in place.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
4
The current situation, in which discourse is drowning in propaganda from both state actors and vicious individuals, will likely lead to the end of democratic civilization. The only cure is to make all platforms liable (joint and severable) for any slander purveyed.
This will destroy their business models, and return us to a world where people get news from curated platforms (i.e. paper or online newspapers and magazines). Replacement of Google by a transparent Atavista will be a small loss.
38
@rick shapiro
"The only cure is to make all platforms liable (joint and severable) for any slander purveyed"
Hummmm...
And who will decide that, Mr Shapiro? You??? Your friend? Just because you don't like what ya'll read in Michigan???
6
@rick shapiro
"and return us to a world where people get news from curated platforms (i.e. paper or online newspapers and magazines)."
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” - Noam Chomsky
6
@al
There is no limitation on the topics that are addressed by magazines and newspapers. The historical limitations caused by the cost of publication will still be mitigated by the ease of on-line publishing.
2
Quote: "Democracies aren’t strengthened when a professional class gets to tell us what our opinions are allowed to be."
The current debate this piece obviously refers to isn't nearly as Orwellian or restrictive as this author wants to suggest. But it's indeed about a professional ethics standard that was once called journalism and that is currently being thrown under the bus.
In times of escalating shout matches, blatant propaganda and irresponsibe conspiracy mongering, there is nothing wrong with asking for a minimum standard to be upheld by all active participants. It's mostly about form and dilligence anyway and I don't see how this would impede freedom of speech in anyway (at least it didn't so for many decades, if not centuries).
If a return to a minimum journalistic responsibility is the price of saving democracy, I'm all for it. Everybody should be able to understand and follow a few basic rules without sacrificing an iota of freedom.
40
@Andre
"Saving Democracy?"
You'll have to forgive me for thinking that our American form of politics isn't quite "Democracy." But it could be, if we let it.
6
@Andre
"there is nothing wrong with asking for a minimum standard to be upheld by all active participants."
Depends on who gets to determine the boundaries of the "standard." The loud majority mob? The gov? The academia? The church? Andre? Joe Schmoe?
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” - Noam Chomsky
2
@al The standards of journalism are already defined and time tested. As said, it's not about content, it's about form and dilligence.
1
"...following the algorithmically enforced rules or disappearing from the public discourse"
We don't need to imagine this future -- we live in a world of algorithmically enforced rules right now.
What Mr. Doctorow misses is that those calling for regulation are asking for those rules to be removed from the backrooms of private Silicon Valley companies and into the light of day where they can be made to act in the public interest.
57
Ha what? Ten years in the future and this is what you're worried about? Ten years in the past nascent websites were just barely crawling past kids as celebrities started to use twitter to tell people about when they used the toilet. The notion that a serious thinkpiece about online regulation would have been published there would have been hilarious. Moreover, today that's still hilarious. No one seriously interested in news gets it from Facebook, Twitter or any other social media site and individual blogs are far, far worse. They're literally the reason 'fake news' exists (actual falsified or misleading 'news' not Trump's version, anything so labelled by him is probably 100% accurate). If it hasn't been reported by professional journalists working to the high standards of a newspaper like the NYT you should ignore it. Unverified reports from hysterical bloggers or rumors passed through the twitterverse are nonsense virtually every time. When there's real news, actual news organisations pick it up, clarify what's actually going on and report it.
Worse, the proliferation of deliberate false information on social media, the rise of extremism - literal nazis and all the other horrifying things to be found on social media are crying out for strong regulation. Platforms are responsible for what get's published on them, it's no different from hosting a concert and giving a megaphone to everyone who wants to scream at the crowd.
You shouldn't have to publish this in the NYT? At least you get to publish it. The NYT limits what readers may comment about and censors comments even when accepting comments on particular articles. This is especially frustrating when a reader wants to comment on a NYT article that is not objective and accurate. American political discourse is being stifled. How can an ordinary citizen be heard? On another aspect of this problem, news information that was once available through internet searches is now blocked, requiring a searcher to subscribe to this or that publication to read one article. And these problems exist in the context of students being intensely indoctrinated day in and day out by far-out or even hysterical leftist instructors in our colleges and universities without being presented with the other side.
1
Common sense states: get fact based news from major publications like NYTimes, Washington Post, and most local newspapers. Save FB for your cat videos and other nonsense.
1
In general, it's a terribly bad idea to restrict speech or put companies in the business of being responsible for doing so.
On the other hand, it's probably a good idea to moderate speech for known falsehoods, hate, divisiveness and statements presented as facts that are still scientifically in dispute in a material way (i.e. 1% of the scientific community disagreeing is not "in dispute").
Such content can be labeled, especially for repreat offenders, in a,manner not entirely dissimilar to what Wikipedia or the Times may do, or some variation of it. For example, if a neo Nazi wants to post on You Tube, let it be known "90% of this user's/groups posts have been flagged as hate speech by over 75% of viewers in the past" or "this group has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center" or "an investigation by Facebook after complaints has found the statements in this poste is false based on X, Y and Z sources. Or, "the assertions in this post are in dispute and can neither be proven or disproven at this time".
It can't be that hard to label the worst offenders. Nor should it be hard for non government organizations to ban those they deem the worst repeat offenders.
Newspapers such as the Times moderate for content.
When done in a responsibile way, this could work, at least to some extent, at lot of the time.
Excellent article and outstanding last two sentences.
Well done.
Around 1470 bookprinting was invented. It took a long time before the authorities got used to it. The most famous "incident" published his ninety-five theses in 1517 and it became by far the most printed publication of its time. In the meantime the Catholic Church has changed: nowadays it would find better ways to deal with such crisis.
You see something similar with newspapers. The first newspapers were often sensationalist and not very truthful. You can see similar things still today in countries were until recently most people couldn't read. But somehow newspapers got tamed. You still have a yellow press but compared to the past it is quite decent. And this has happened equally in countries with strict libel laws and countries without.
Our society will get used to internet too. Even without any additional laws it is unlikely that we ever will see something similar to Russiagate.
This is my comment to a previous article -
Russia Sought to Use Social Media to Influence E.U. Vote, Report Finds - June 24, 2019
and a response.
I think it is pertinent to this opinion piece
ahenryr | BG
Is it unrealistic to ask why governments can't legislate to shut down the major players in social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) for the month preceding national elections. This would impose suffering on private advertising income rather than democracy.
Albert Edmud
EarthJune 15
@ahenryr...If your idea of democrazy would be furthered by a month long muzzling of social media, why not strengthen democrazy even further by shutting down TV, newspapers, snail mail or any other form of human interaction that could be conceived of as disinformation dissemination by the hegemonic State. For that matter, give democrazy a real boost by extending the ONE month moratorium to an EVERY month moratorium. The resultant loss of private advertising $$$ is a small price to pay for democrazy.
Corey—you fail utterly to address the Russian bots and intelligence agents who manipulate the online media platforms. This does not happen when journalists and editors work to provide the public with information.
You fail also to address the hateful provocateurs who spread hateful ideology meant to appeal to the weak-minded (Nazi sympathizers in the U.S. & Europe; religious & ethnic extremists elsewhere in the world).
I would much rather return to a media that served our nation well for 200 years—newspapers.
1
For those against moderation, wake up. Go look at yahoo. It's like Russian Troll central - I swear 80% of the comments are from the GRU. You'd think Trump had 90% approval ratings if you followed it daily. The only reason why the NYT comments section is civil, mostly respectful, with educated, well thought out comments, is because (1) the moderators are sifting and filtering out all the garbage and trolls and (2) there isn't complete anonymity (NYT knows your personal billing details). Obviously, it's very subjective, and it's going to be biased to some degree - but, we would not have some of the best, most insightful comments on the web without it.
2
This is probably the worst dystopia ever written.
The author pretends in a horrible future he actually had his rights violated. Social media platforms have not just deliberately allowed, they've actually encouraged, the most illegal and irresponsible content to be published free of any legal responsibility for such content.
A primary function of the social media platforms is to distort all public discourse because the dissemination of disinformation is highly profitable for the phenomenally wealthy private individuals and private companies which own these entirely for-profit and privately owned platforms and dress them up to appear to be public spaces.
The author acts as if these private platforms are digital analogs to public spaces or the traditional press. Nothing could be farther from the truth. These are privately owned for-profit spaces.
For this reason if a state attempts to regulate a social media platform it is the constitutional property rights of the company owning the platform which are abridged, meaning it involves the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause, not any supposed First Amendment rights of any people actually using the platform as they're on private property so any "users" never had any Free Speech or First Amendment rights in the first place.
All that matters is whatever the social media platform owner's reasonable business expectations are, meaning he and his company may possibly need to be compensated under the Fifth Amendment Takings clause.
1
Social media filtering algorithms might be the least of our worries in the not too distant future. We already have individual and state sponsored cyber attacks. We are now becoming completely reliant on AI for many vital processes. Can this play out without some unintended consequences? What type of singularity will occur? There is no first law of robotics programmed in to protect us.
The platforms legitimise our opinions as "truths", giving us more power than we deserve. We all fall into this trap. You start an online discussion by sharing your thoughts and you end up in a completely out of control situation where nothing is true except what you type yourself.
People's intentions may be right, but the reality is that free speech turns ugly really fast due to the scale of the platforms and our nature.
The best solution is to stop using these platforms. I did, and surprisingly life goes on and I have a lot of free time now.
The next best solution I can think off is to restrict anonymous accounts to a bare minimum on public platforms. There is no social control nor any repercussion when I want to hurt anonymously. I do realise this also creates problems in countries where free speech is not a given. But I can honestly not think of a single online platform that is not dealing with hate speech and other abhorrent content.
I honestly wish people would just stop making Facebook and Google relevant. Don't legitimise them by making it an important part of your life. You are their product and the moment you realise that stepping out makes life a lot easier.
Mankind relives the story of Pandora's box ad infinitum....
1
Tomorrow's internet will belong to today's suburban commuters. The best and brightest will live and work in small communities and will seem more 18th century London salon society keeping as far away as possible from the worldwide web. That is if survive the Kakistocracy.
4
We do not hesitate to hold widely followed internet platforms accountable if they permit to be published material promoting racism, sex trafficking, etc.
Why should we not insist that outright lies be prohibited?
Especially the lies intended to distort our perceptions of our society and our state of governance. False broad statements about groups of our citizens, e.g., minorities and political parties, pose a clear and present danger to our nation.
We form our opinions based on facts. Facts influence and guide our choices when voting and choosing how to allocate our resources.
False facts, lies, can do real harm to all of us. Deceptions on popular platforms informing millions distorts our collective opinion-forming. Lies about facts can and do cause us to incorrectly evaluate the state of our nation.
Such incorrect assessments lead to dreadful attitudes and alarming choices. When based on lies, these responses will seem reasonable to people.
There is no social benefit, only great risk, in permitting internet platforms followed by millions to knowingly publish obvious falsehoods about our people and our institutions. Particularly falsehoods devised by those with a sinister intent to mislead us, divide us and harm our nation.
5
Media have their bias and publish what they agree with - Trump may be complaining about bias and it is probably somewhat true. He is of course like the flu and makes every one sick. And the media may have almost nothing positive to say about him.
1
Ten years from now, if we're lucky, it will have been years since anyone believed a word they read/heard/viewed online - and so no one will be going there anymore.
2
I'm getting a little weary with the argument that if we expect internet platforms to meet the same standards of responsibility for their content as media companies, then we'll lose free speech. Really? The internet as we know it today has existed for what, 20 years tops? Did we not have free speech before then?
First amendment fundamentalists are starting to sound a lot like 2nd amendment fundamentalists. You're weaponizing our freedoms against the very people they were meant to protect. And no one old enough to remember life more than 20 years ago is going to buy this hysterical nonsense about how our freedom as Americans is suddenly dependent on Facebooking.
5
As AJ Liebling said, Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.
The time was, because nearly all news was local, printing your own newspaper was an option for some fairly small groups, though it was exceedingly unlikely that they would garner a readership in the millions (let alone billions of users, like Facebook claims).
Doctorow makes a good point about the kind of filtering various societies might impose -- are now imposing (think Great Firewall of China) and the ham-handedness of Big Tech in responding to regulations. As a science fiction writer, he is expert at exploring the Law of Unanticipated Consequences -- and this one isn't even a stretch.
4
I have stopped interacting with social media and tech giants. In less than two decades they have built the largest individual and collective surveillance industry.
Concerning Google's parent company Alphabet, they have the most advanced critical thinking predatory systems known to mankind with many relays to the intel/military/security community.
Tech Giants and all social media represents a far more sinister threat on open societies than radical ideologies. They are not to be trusted.
7
The last thing the author writes is the best -- the tech world moves so fast, we may well be complaining about companies that don't even exist or have much power in the near future.
Too bad the author does not realize the full implications of his other arguments. He laments that only big companies can live up to the censorship obligations that the government now puts on Internet companies. He has realized something that so many opponents of the extent of government regulation have pointed out for years -- regulation, rather than be a way to help the consumer, is often pushed for by the big players in an industry to keep out newcomers.
So the author maybe shouldn't lament the lack of antitrust action so far, because maybe that too would have ended up benefiting industry insiders. We have little idea what the future of tech is, so maybe we should stay away from government action trying to anticipate and control that future.
1
The government regulates speech? After seeing what humanity does with free speech, that sounds like a utopia to me.
4
@Cassandra So don't listen.
1
One reader argued that the problem isn't opinions that need filtering but false information, and therein lies the problem. Who decides what counts as facts?
It should be self evident and unquestionable, but everything is disputed these days. Consider a recent court case reported by the NYT - it parroted the claims of the defence, claims the jury rejected, and then added an additional defence argument of its own. The defendant has now used the NYT's defence as a rallying cry and the case is all but guaranteed to be appealed until either the 'right ruling' is given, or SCOTUS decides the case. Those who followed the case know that the defendant's claims are bunkum, that they're guilty of grievous misconduct and yet that wasn't what the NYT reported.
Or consider a story about a crowdfunding platform that shut down a free speech campaign arguing it was against their terms of service, yet which permitted a teen to raise thousands for legal defence against assault charges. The latter campaign was against the terms of service but permitted, the former permissible but not tolerated. Again this is not what the NYT actually reported.
How can filtering work when even basic facts are in dispute, or are we headed for an Orwellian world where the powers that be dictate what counts as Truth or Fact, and punish dissent?
3
One her observation. Natural selection gifted more complex organisms, like mammals, with compartmentalized body layouts. This is thought to be an adaptation to infection, that is, to prevent minor local infections from spreading to the body as a whole, thus killing it.
It's worth considering the analogy to a society that was more localized -- in which time and space effectively slowed or prevented information from traveling between compartments. The internet has effectively poked holes right through the compartments of society. There have been many benefits of doing so, but the infections that we are seeing will ultimately kill a variety of social arrangements we've had previously.
4
@Eben you left out the part about the spread of chicken pox and measles.
2
Cory, You don't address the platform's surveillance business models as a prime driver of the behavior on these systems. You also don't address the tricky issues of personal accountability and anonymity. Finally, you don't address some of the basic rules of the communication road: like the regulation of virality that could dampen many of the undesirable aspects of the platforms.
The most basic issue is that the platforms are incented to propagate any "information" that generates engagement.
5
The future of the internet, social media, the argument of whether or not to regulate with respect to harassment, extremism, disinformation, etc.?
I pretty much believe regulation will exist in the future and it will not be pleasant at all. Take the history of literature in the U.S. over the 20th century. No one was particularly pleased by Joyce or Fitzgerald or Hemingway. Not to mention Henry Miller. The story of great American writers over the 20th century was one of fleeing to Paris, and Joyce who was an Irishman was not welcome in the U.S. As for great SF writers, few people read them. And then when the sixties arrived there was a gradual assault on the entire corpus of Western Civilization literature to the point that now everyone has heard of the Dead White Male.
In short both the left and right wings have no great record when it comes to art, science, literature. Especially literature. WORDS. The left and right disagree on much, but what they do seem to agree on is a truly petty investigation into words which serves their ponderous and simple interests. They're just two dirty crowds, the both, rock bottom mass politicking, stinking up everything they touch. Anybody who's read some actual decent literature can't help but conclude that the both are cowardly, in fact blatantly so, with behavior and talk which would shock and embarrass a Rochefoucauld or a Wilde or any other astute psychologist (you really have no idea of what you're saying, how stinking low you are?).
3
@Daniel12 " No one was particularly pleased by Joyce or Fitzgerald or Hemingway."
Three of the best-selling and most widely read authors of the 20th century.
But people didn't really like their stories (or the movies based on them).
They just bought those books to annoy Daniel.
5
And the intellectual capital lost. And the jobs that have fallen by the wayside.
Think of that.
That's the real tragedy.
Once Upon a Time we were each unique. We could travel and the world and sample that uniqueness. Now there is an iPhone in every pot and a Starbucks on every corner.
What we've lost is incalculable.
2
I just read on NPR.org that some knitting website I had never heard of, no surprises there as I don't knit, has banned talking about Trump and Trump-related patterns: ""We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy," Ravelry said in a statement."
I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. I also believe in the freedom of speech. But that freedom is the freedom from the government enacting any laws against it, not from a private company to exercise their own freedom of speech, which in this case their expression is to ban all expressions supporting Trump. Fine by me. It's their prerogative. They also have banned members from "[a]ntagonizing conservative members for their unstated positions..." Fine by me. It's their prerogative.
I encounter similar expressions of speech in the popular online game Call of Duty. And while I would like to see it banned there as well, I do so enjoy 'antagonizing conservative members for their [stated] positions.' In fact I've accrued a following of Trump supporters who cannot stand the fact that I'm better at their favorite video game.
Still, wouldn't it be nice if you could go to a knitting website and just talk about knitting? Or play a game where you shoot each other over and over again and just shoot each other over and over again?
11
The site is called Ravelry.com and, curiously enough, bans all Republican oriented writing/knitting projects.
Checking Reddit to see attitudes on this shows that anyone who thinks the Ravelry ban should include Democrat content - or all political content - is immediately overwhelmed with anti-Republican rants (sorry but there's no better word and it does justify the idea that all political content should be banned, because, you know, knitting).
It's knitting and the mean girls are in charge! Appalling!
1
@OnABicycleBuiltForTwo wouldn't it be nice if you could ... play a game where you shoot each other over and over again? Not especially.
"Democracies aren’t strengthened when a professional class gets to tell us what our opinions are allowed to be."
I assume this means newspaper editors and TV-cable news editors. Given a competitive environment, are we sure that this is true?
Are we better off in an Internet wild west where the gatekeepers are not editors but big business, nations states, and non-state ideological actors using big data micro-targeting facilitated by a few mega Social Media companies?
4
@Chris As things stand, most of us will read both the Citizen-Times and Internet entries and believe the one that agrees with what we thought in the first place.
2
The fact that actor James Woods had to give up on the broken speech rules on Twitter tells us everything we needed to know about social media.
Progressive-socialists run all the media-internet-social media giants and outright pro-American or pro-Israel speech is usually going to get people ''de-platformed.''
The supposedly professional class abandoned journalistic independence because it just wasn't cool anymore.
Our proof: Zero news reporters have come out admitting their two years of lying that Trump had colluded with wascally wussians.
5
"If you’re thinking, “Well, all that stuff belongs in the newspaper,” then you’ve fallen into a trap: Democracies aren’t strengthened when a professional class gets to tell us what our opinions are allowed to be."
We ARE strengthened by professional journalists abiding by rules of fairness and balance and accuracy.
All those opinions from world class morons masquerading as "Truth" will not be missed IF we survive that long?
I'll take the professional class any day over the idiotic rabble babble.
Free speech needs and has limits - AND posting false info -for example -say about climate change IS worse than crying "Fire" in a theatre.
6
@dave " strengthened by professional journalists abiding by rules of fairness and balance and accuracy."
Absolutely. If they're going to print stories about a murder in LA, why can't they also print stories about all those people who stayed alive last night? That's what folks really want to read about. Right?
Imagine it...all the handwringing because people get angry about words that they read on a screen. "It's only one man's opinion," my father used to say. If only people had more self-control when they read things they disagree with.
2
It used to be one person could not broadcast it to the entire world. So that is a big difference from a couple decades. All rights require accountability, we have to add some.
5
This op-ed reinforces the rationale behind the Sherman Anti-Trust Act from what seems ancient history.
Really, though, fundamentals, or principles, endure.
2
A true libertarian espousing libertarian thoughts that anything goes. Yes the "mommy state" has gone too far, really too far, but given that society is comprised of the intelligent and the dumb, the rational and the irrational, the thoughtful and the gullible, we have chosen to protect those on the "lesser side of the ledger" as opposed to giving free reign to those who would take advantage. This is the better choice.
1
@Richard Frauenglass
By protecting them, we give no incentive for them to improve their discernment and education. Experience may be a painful teacher, but it is the only one some will listen to.
Bullying has been around since the formation of our society. Our capitalistic and competitive natures feed some of the problems, but there is little doubt that modern technological advances have--from their inception--made matters worse. Would that we could moderate the problem, but we appear hard-wired to go after people in any way we can.
Can we change the dynamics? Maybe by attacking the technologies themselves something can be done. For now, they have been used to make the problems worse.
2
My goodness! If there are about 350,000,000 people in our population, that guarantees that there are at least 350,000,000 opinions on just about everything. If you wanted to hear everyone's voice, it would take a long time just to get through the weather report. Fortunately, technology has allowed us to limit our information to the voices that pretty much agree with our opinions. Even then, we would quickly approach information overload.
Ah, for the good old days when there were three TV networks, maybe a half-dozen good newspapers, and a smattering of talk radio shows moderated by both left and right wing hosts, when media evangelists pretty much limited themselves to demanding pay-to-pray congregations.
In the early internet days, its promise of freedom was always accompanied by the question: "how will it make money?" Well, we now know the answer to that. We have elected to accept that access to information will be driven by commerce, giving the cyber overlords the Hobson's choice of regulating their content or protecting their income streams. And we know the answer to that, also.
Perhaps we need to admit to ourselves that all input is propaganda, including The New York Times and History classes.
I certainly enjoy posting comments here, but I also question their value as anything more than an examination of my own ideas.
How do we get smarter?
Is anything real?
I'm waiting for the fifth remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
1
@michaeltide
"In the early internet days, its promise of freedom was always accompanied by the question: "how will it make money?"
No, it was not. In the early internet days, no one thought there was any way to make money off it; I know because I was one of them.
"How do we get smarter?"
By reading and evaluating a variety of ideas and opinions. Some we can dismiss at once, some we do not have to bother with because they are in agreement with our own, and some few are opposed to our beliefs but make points we need to consider.
Censoring the opinion of anyone prevents learning; it does not encourage it.
4
@michaeltide "...I also question their value as anything more than an examination of my own ideas."
An examination or an expression?
I hope you didn't express them before you had examined them.
2
@mikecody, Thanks for taking the time to reply. I hope I did not give the impression that I was advocating for any censorship other than self-censorship.
Yes, and there are still many invaluable resources on the internet that depend on contributions (like mine) for their continued existence, Though it has mainly been occupied by entrepreneurs who are mainly motivated by self-enrichment.
As far as getting smarter, I think that starts by, as you say, absorbing oneself in ideas, and contemplating them in relation to our belief systems before engaging in debate. I remember when there were still bookstores, I would sometimes spend hours just deciding what to read next – a wholly productive use of time. Familiarizing oneself with opposing ideas, intelligently presented, is essential to having a firm grasp on one's opinions.
FIRST AND FOREMOST, It is essential at all times to be mindful of the limits of the First Amendment to free expression. Incitement to violence is NOT a protected form of speech. Donald Trump himself has been found guilty of incitement to violence at a campaign rally by Judged David Hale. The case is being appealed. So that effectively vitiate the power of the the limits on incitement to violence in that case at least. Another problem is with recognizing the scale of communications it ever was the Internet. The speed of communication is many orders of magnitude faster than it ever was before in human history. We have virtually immeasurable amounts of information traveling over fiberoptic cables at the speed of light, rendering everything invisible in plain sight. The speed of flicker fusion in the human eye is 24 images per second. So cartoons must be at least 24 images or more per second to look like movies. We will never be able to go back to a time when things were slower. Hacks on computer systems can occur hundreds of millions of times per hour. So hacking is like solar wind that's full of charged ions which will eventually break down matter in its path. We must continue in our efforts to limit damage and to protect ourselves--most of all to protect our children, on the Internet. When children of 10 and 12 years of age commit suicide because of cyber bullying, we must act. But how? Is the answer blowing in the wind, my friend? Where are simpler times?
1
From ten years in the future? Homer Simpson summed it up fifteen years in the past. "Instead of one big media voice controlling everything, now there's a hundred idiots each screaming his worthless opinions."
We either have gatekeepers or we have flat-eathers and white-nationalists, and that's just that. There is no sidestepping this problem. Doctorow appears to inherently misunderstand that if the mob is given free reign, then all that will do is perpetuate the hierarchies and prejudices within that mob.
A much more insightful piece would focus on an aspect of the issue that does make this inherent problem worse: algorithms. It turns out, ignorance is more profitable to show to show to people than the alternative, and when the machine learns that, it only spirals.
6
There is no truth. There are only words and critical thinking, and the worst of all is someone big--the government, big business or big technology--determining what is true.
4
Is this the same clairvoyant science fiction seeing that had us all with jetpacks and flying cars by the1970s?
Colonies on Venus?
More leisure time and a 10 hour work week?
2
It doesn't take much poison to foul the information stream; to so pollute the truth as to make it unknowable.
That was the foundational mistake; to believe that with complete, irresponsible free speech, the truth would win. Rather, the truth is so fouled that it takes experts to unravel it. And those experts don't live on social media.
It is asymmetric warfare between the truth and lies.
5
I'm in the anything goes camp. Free speech is the bedrock of this country.
6
I just wish I could push it off to the side and turn down the volume some times!
1
We use antitrust laws to regulate companies whose collective effect on the economy is coordinated, abusive, and exploitative.
If Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other advertising companies will not as a whole regulate harassment, extremism, and disinformation for fear of losing ad revenue, then those companies must be forcibly dismantled, by law.
3
As long as we have a few dominant oligopolies with extreme market power, no healthy competition is possible, giving rise to a deeper and deeper inequality. As to how to control the content in Social Media, and avoid disinformation, even fake news, is anybody's guess. The suggestion that the state shouldn't have allowed the big one's to swallow (or kill) the small competitors with great ideas, is beyond repair now.
Please. TV and newspapers are regulated all over the world. Big tech shouldn't be an exception.
9
The internet and social media is responsible for the rise of the amateur in almost every aspect of our lives and we are suffering because of it. There is so much recycled garbage crowding out the real talent that the cream can't rise to the top anymore. Loudmouth hatemongers and advertisers dominate the internet. Everyone is going nuts trying to discern truth from fiction. On line conspiracy theories are running amok. Maybe we need AI and the robots to save us from ourselves. There's got to be a better way to live.
2
I remember when "Democracies [WERE] strengthened [by] a professional class get[ting] to tell us what our opinions [were] allowed to be."
We called it education, and the professionals were teachers or people with expertise. Then climate change could be debated without flat-earthers claiming equal time and vaccines and antibiotics could be regulated by scientists and not misinformed autodidacts. Alas, the resentment of the uneducated and the libertarian meddling of the rich ended the possibilities of true democracy -- which involves a choice among plausible real possibilities.
156
@Jeoffrey
I really resonate with this comment. However, on "the resentment of the uneducated," I wonder if how good education has been restricted to a limited class of people who then use it to manipulate and oppress the poor is part of the push back. Minorities and women have been historically kept from quality education, and for the poor, even more so today. The legal profession is the biggest practitioner of this use of knowledge. Elite schools serve as private clubs to perpetuate the privileged class who make social connections poor people will never have a chance to make. The professional class seems to be focused on gain and money and not protecting the public interest, much less helping the most disadvantaged.
13
@Jeoffrey
You went full circle here... first presenting the benefit of skewed learning and norms through education .... followed by ridicule of the under educated and wealthy for wanting to dictate skewed learning and norms.
You cannot have it both ways, here.. and you came across as a liberal elitest university voice. Note: I am a liberal.. but I know nonsense when I see it... even when played out from a liberal bias.
8
@Jeoffrey, Wow, VERY nicely said.
3
Anarchy?
We lived without these platforms before we could live without them again where publication was a scarce resource that was valued and to use it required something of value to publish that was vetted.
Get ride them and people won't feel ill treated by them.
At least, and if, we can be the civil evolved society we thought we were.
1
@Marie
exactly who decides something is of "value" and hence who controls what is allowed to be published? People who went to the "right" schools, have the "right" connections, work at the "right" companies??
I will take the wild west of the internet over some self appointed media elite deciding what the rest of us can read or see.
2
In most cases, it's not opinions that need to be filtered, but false information. If, for instance, a politician who had a small crowd at his inauguration tried to claim it was the largest crowd ever, then a good algorithm could detect this common falsehood, and block the post. End of problem.
The politician can still promote his views, no matter how undemocratic, but he has to provide factual information while doing so.
100
@Charlie Calvert
How is misrepresenting the number of people at a rally threatening to anyone? Subjective truths are the ones that are contentious but algorithms cannot navigate nuance well enough to discriminate.
3
@Charlie Calvert
But doesn't the public have an interest in evaluating that politician's false statement? Doesn't that contain relevant information to the voters? Haven't many campaigns stood or fallen based on perceptions of that candidate's honesty and character?
Put another way, do we really want to live in a world in which one candidate accuses the other of lying about a matter of serious national importance, and the other's dismissive response is "hey, don't blame me, blame Google"?
13
@Charlie Calvert
It's simply the case that sifting through posts to differentiate FACTS vs OPINIONS is extremely difficult, if not impossible. Just let the anarchy stay.
2
"Democracies aren’t strengthened when a professional class gets to tell us what our opinions are allowed to be."
No. But democracies are strengthened when people hear the truth, or even something close to it. If the internet has demonstrated anything, it's demonstrated that propagating truth is much harder than peddling lies. I'm so weary from figuring out which is which. All I ask is a source that has earned most everyone's trust. We can figure out our opinions from there.
105
@Steve
What's true?
The Iraq war was not criminal.
The war on terror is good.
Agents of mass incarceration deserve a higher level of respect.
The economy is fair.
Technology cannot navigate truth it can only judge the order of words as something that passes or fails.
4
@Steve And we're only going to see the likes of Reddit, Wikipedia, and Quora (opinions on them vary, I know) succeed if the idea of a regulatory glass ceiling is forgotten. I can't abide the idea of a government we can't trust cutting down all the tall flowers.
5
@Milo
"Technology cannot navigate truth it can only judge the order of words as something that passes or fails."
This is where you get it all wrong. Technology can and does measure, which is by definition the truth.
"The Iraq war was not criminal." Technology can answer how many and which laws it broke.
"The war on terror is good." Good or bad has nothing to do with truth, those are just judgments.
"Agents of mass incarceration deserve a higher level of respect." Technology can tell you how efficient they are and what pay grade the efficiency deserves. This is the truth.
"The economy is fair." Technology will measure its parameters: GDP, net worth, and distribution, and that will be true.
Easy enough?
4
Nice attempt at cake-having-and-eating-too.
As usual, it doesn’t work that way.
Social media is intoxicating and addictive in large part because the platforms are few: the (mostly false) promise that if you post today’s viral moment that you too can be a famous influencer making bank by just being you!
This imaginary “vibrant” internet Doctorow imagines would be the result of a plethora of platforms wouldn’t attract the same fevered following because the viral vectors would also be weakened, and as goes the incentive, so goes the “need” to participate.
To put it another way: they’re only “public” spaces because everyone is listening. A billion small prayer groups — or even say a thousand mini-Facebooks — misses the “public” part.
Everyone has a megaphone means no-one does.
Not to mention that democracies somehow managed quite nicely for hundreds of years with *exactly* the filtration system of professional opinion makers Doctorow decries.
The problem will “solve” itself when the bots get reasonably good at creating plausible fake content. The platforms will then collapse under the sheer uselessness of trying to find any signal amid the torrent of noise.
No intervention required. The platforms have lived by empowering the anonymous ranters, and they’ll die by that same method.
114
I guess depends of definition of 'quite' nicely. How nicely was the existence of Democracy when people were denied vote, freedom and equality for more than hundred years? We lived 'quite nicely' without computers, should we ban them too?
4
All those things are bad. All of them were threats to democracy.
All of them were the subject of sustained criticism by the “opinion makers” of the day, which is largely why they changed.
They’re also not what we’re talking about here.
9
@John Killian wow and YIKES.
2
There is nothing dystopian about this future. It is just the way things were in the past before the internet. And most people don't think that the pre-1990s era was lacking on freedom of speech.
So I am frankly unmoved by this editorial from the future.
2
@Observer people don't think that the pre-1990s era was lacking on freedom of speech. MAYBE NOT IN LONDON. BUT I GREW UP IN THE RURAL SOUTH OF AMERICA. WE WERE VERY CAREFUL TO SAY ONLY THE "RIGHT" THINGS. AND THE BLACKS WERE VERY CAREFUL TO SAY NOTHING AT ALL.
2
There is an encroachment on 1st amendment rights digitally and Doctorow has it right.
It's not popular to say this, but with trigger words, rigidity in correct, inclusive speech; concerns about cultural appropriation; arguments about whether a writer can be allowed to write outside her ethnicity/worldview and does what she write include the right balance and right words ... I am worried. What now we allow the collective to correct may soon be designated as right speech and wrong speech and delegated to algorithms.
If you hear/read words that you are uncomfortable with, rejoice! It means that intellectual freedom and free speech still exists.
The mergers I fear are Facebook/Wells Fargo or Google/Chase Bank.
Once "Too Big to Fail" finance is merged with we own all of your data, that's game over for state sovereignty and individual citizenship as we know it.
That could never happen you say?
Say hi to Libra, the new cryptocurrency coming to you from Facebook.
Break up the tech monopolies now, before it's too late.
188
@Ken
I share your fear and could definitely see this happening at some point in the future.
6
@Ken "Break up the tech monopolies" is a very convenient, simplistic take on the problem that you posit.
The problem is that breaking up tech monopolies accomplishes nothing. Even when Warren gives her take on how they should be broken up, she conveniently leaves out the part where she explains how that accomplishes her (and your) goal. Imagine how useful breaking up the massively dominant social network MySpace would have been in 2007; that's exactly how useful breaking up Facebook today would be. The concept is laughable.
To people who actually work in tech (like myself), the idea of breaking up these companies is pointless. The ACTUALLY USEFUL solution is to *open* these platforms, so that all data on each is easily shared between them, and with any other platform that you'd like to invent. In other words, forcing open APIs and protocols that allow interaction between any and all social networks online.
4
@Michael-in-Vegas the fact that one person - mark zuckerberg - has the ability to control what ~3 billion people see, is proof in itself that big tech needs to be broken up.
2
"Once upon a time, the internet teemed with experimental, personal publications."
And once upon a time before the internet, if you wanted to get something published you had to convince a publisher, whether it be a newspaper, magazine or book publisher, that what you had to say was worth publishing. Sure it limited how many personal publications or opinions would be published but the publishing marketplace served as a built-in filter which did a pretty good job of weeding out factually false or patently offensive or hateful material.
When given a choice between having an internet where anyone with an internet connection can publish whatever he or she wants without being restrained by the facts, ethics or common decency, or a system where there are built in marketplace limits on what is or is not published, I choose the latter.
240
@Jay Orch
And once upon a time before the internet, if you wanted to get something published you had to convince a publisher, whether it be a newspaper, magazine or book publisher, that what you had to say was worth publishing. ard
Actually, during when America has been at its politically intellectual best, namely in the lead up to and around the turn of the 18th century, there were thousands of independent pamphlets and publications and it took nothing for someone to spin up a newspaper in their basement.
You have confused the modern corporate nationalized media landscape with the way things used to work. What you describe is the anomaly, not the internet.
20
@Jay Orchard
Actually, virtually all creators (print, film, arts, etc.) back when have had the ability if not the finances to "publish" privately.
And many did, and in fact some succeeded commercially.
5
@Jay Orchard
Maybe so. But you're using the exact same arguments the church used against the printing presses that launched the very publishing businesses that you're defending now.
11
As someone versed in AI and Tech, a technology solution will not solve the problem - its an arms race between the platform and posters. Most people who battle misinformation and propaganda recommend understanding who is speaking. I try to google an issue to find the speaker's agenda and verify the truth. Not everyone has the desire to do this but censorship is not the cure.
I think the content should always reference the original publishers with authenticated identities otherwise referenced as a risk. Exceptions for when identities need to be protected.
Speech is not free if you do not know who is speaking.
We need truth, disinformation, and hate-speech rating systems - third parties could do this (again, these would be biased by the source. do you trust Fox News or CNN?).
News is now entertainment, so we need to go back to when News was delivered without profit.
Last, there should be consequences for posting lies, bullying or slander. Free speech is fine, but you also need to take personal responsibility for the problems your speech might cause. For example, there need to be consequences for adults whos children bully. (i.e. adult must have oversight of their children)
As I watched the Internet grow up, I wrongly thought that easier access to information would make us a more informed society.
I think back to the New Yorker cartoon "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog". I think right now, we are all being punked by the 'dogs'
1
@Scott
" As I watched the Internet grow up, I wrongly thought that easier access to information would make us a more informed society "
Unfortunately your error was twofold . First ... placing faith in human nature which though enabled with the ability to make good choices when given a modicum of information and power in most cases prefers to make the worst choices imaginable . In other words we have the ' capability ' but not the ' will' to do right ( re; " Behave " by Robert M. Sapolsky ) e.g. Human nature given a bandaid will inevitably turn said bandaid into a weapon
Suffice it to say belief in god / God / gods or not there is no denying the essential fallen nature of mankind
Your second and perhaps the most egregious error .. and the one that the overwhelming majority of your ilk has made as well was not taking the warnings given by Clifford Stoll in his seminal 1995 book " Silicon Snake Oil " seriously . Suffice it to say though forced by Silicon Valley to later publish a retraction of SNO .. no doubt Mr Stoll is currently enjoying a heaping plate of schadenfreude while repeating the mantra ; " I told you so ... I told you so ... I told you so "
Sadly though ... as is so often the case .. once the Genii has been let out of the bottle or Pandora's box opened wide ... it is all but impossible to stuff the contents back in once released into the general public .
@Scott
So who gets to decide what is "lies, bullying, or slander"? If I think I have been slandered by something you said, can I sue you? Do we go to court? What will happen very quickly is that criticism of the powerful will stop as they have the resources crush any critics. They will have 1000's of lawyers ready to sue anyone who says anything negative about them. Are you going to trust the government to decide what is not true? I would not trust the Trump government predicting the weather tomorrow.
This assumes, of course, that people actually care what is true and false.
My millennial nephews and so many people around me get their news and information about the world from social media. If you say that three times it starts to sound like we are a kookoo culture. Social media? Is that some sort of jello flavor?
1
Mr. Doctorow needs to stick to making stuff up about the future as his reinterpretation/misrepresentation of social media's past and present is laughable, and only demonstrates that his white male privilege has shielded him from its abuses and extremes.
1
@Tess Sorry, but the beginning and end of your sentence seem to contradict each other. What are you trying to say?
thanks
@Tess When you're thru laughing, Tess, please tell us what you're trying to say.
Along with breaking up monopolies, we need to revert to a highly progressive tax schedule to break up the monopolies of monetary power that facilitate a few wealthy individuals bank-rolling various crank ideas, such as the recently reported anti-vaccination funding by a New York couple. (See https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/meet-the-new-york-couple-donating-millions-to-the-anti-vax-movement/2019/06/18/9d791bcc-8e28-11e9-b08e-cfd89bd36d4e_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7b430139ea25)
2
Inquiring minds want to know: What was the Provo Uprising?
2
Critical thinking skills; that's one key element that's missing. If your citizenry isn't well educated, doesn't question the authenticity and source of material, they will never survive social media and the flow of false information. And although it wouldn't address it directly, I would at least suggest mandating a class in early middle school called "Navigating the digital world (and related issues)". Teach everyone at a young age about social media propaganda, protecting (and actually *valuing*) their privacy, identify theft, phishing, how posting something on the internet could come back to burn you 30 years later, protect yourself from scams and hacking, how professional news standards and requirements vastly differ from random social media posts, how the first amendment applies to each of these entities. You get the idea. There is certainly enough for an entire class. And, you can't expect parents to teach their kids; heck, most parents probably need to take a class; heck, most politicians would fail the class.
14
@Character Counts Middle school kids probably know more about social media than their teachers and whatever exists 30 years later could be completely different. Just look at "deep fakes" - where we may not even be able to believe our own eyes and ears. While I always applaud more education, that is not enough of a solution here.
@James - The same middle schoolers, high schoolers, and university students that post every intimate detail of their lives on twitter and facebook, and are the core base of FB, twitter, etc? Maybe they know how to use technology better than most parents, but do they really appreciate, understand the underbelly? It sure doesn't look like it from here.
1
@Character Counts
Of course, it's a good idea. It won't be implemented. We have long since decided that education serves one purpose and one purpose only: Making money. Since the days of William Bennett we have known that only STEM counts and teaching history, political science, civics and, if Obama is to be believed, art history is a waste of resources.
Teaching what you seem to want taught might reduce profits for some companies and therefor might reduce GDP. We can't have that. Only corporate profits matter.
2
"Thomson-Reuters-TransCanada-Huawei"
Oh dear. *shudders*
1
Corporations exist to make a profit, are not democracies, and Facebook is a dictatorship. That might help explain why the social media companies are having trouble figuring out freedom of speech.
1
I have left all social media because of this! They allow hate, racism, sexism and all the evil "isms" to have a voice. We all should do the same. If we need to communicate, use the methods we used before Facebook and all the rest.
1
@Meyer "I have left all social media" And come here to "Comments" with a couple of million readers instead ?
3
@kenneth thats the whole point, the NYT is responsible for what it publishes, Facebook, currently, is not. It is NOT social media.
@kenneth One View says it for me.
Likely, perhaps.
But I had to read the author's piece more than once, because I disagreed with the final paragraph, and I have concluded that the author does not actually consider "giving the platforms the right to decide who could speak and what they could say" was the real first mistake.
The real first mistake was not "...re-establishing the traditional antitrust rules against 'mergers to monopoly' and acquiring your nascent competitors".
One might argue, this is the Huge, Glaring Mistake of American capitalism. The rich like to get richer, and everyone knows that if a company has too much competition, it cannot make the financial impact that makes shareholders pretty wealthy, and make the very chosen few, viz., CEOs and majority holders, richer than god.
And of course, the true trickle down economics is that the Rich funnel their money into the pockets of politicians, but I digress.
We should demand an extensive revamping of antitrust regulations. We should demand that 'small is good'. We should demand a lot.
But meanwhile, the wild and wooly internet is being abused whereas idiots are elected to the highest office, so...what's a relatively powerless American to do?
And that old answer of "vote" is starting to be somewhat meaningless, because apparently the gods have decided that money is the very same thing as speech.
There's your story: the truth laid bare.
3
@DKM
Please explain to me how having lots of small social media sites is better than a few big ones? Is truth more likely to come out in a small site than a big one? Why won't particular viewpoints concentrate on certain sites and not others? Will small sites have more human filters?
why exactly is small better?
@reb
You misunderstand. If one is looking for 'truth' in any social media sight, you are looking in the wrong place because anyone and everyone can voice their opinion, which while fine and dandy in terms of a soapbox, it is not news per se.
As to the smaller, that simply suggests more competition. And more competition means, ideally, that the best and most efficient triumphs, which is a win for the user. Imagine only one restaurant in your town. You'd either like it, tolerate it, or just stop eating out. In respect to the internet, which is being incorporated into so many aspect of life the option of "just stop using it" becomes more and more unreasonable, even impossible.
That doesn't mean one must use social media though. I myself don't bother as I find it a waste of my time.
But I do research and do more, and Google has a stranglehold on much of what constitutes the internet, and that is simply wrong for a variety of reasons. And it is not efficient for anyone but Google and their profit margins.
Great. Really thoughtful. thanks.
Heaven forbid that any NYTimes reader fall into the category of the unaware, but a sci-fi op-ed purportedly speaking from the future is confusing.
Don’t we have enough problems telling truth from falsehood, and opinion from fact, without this addition?
2
The only problem with this piece is - what is a newspaper? What is paper?
7
@John Harrington Ask Mr. Zenger.
This guy likes to use the word Nazi a lot. I don't think we have had a real Nazi problem in 75 years.
5
@Jim K ummm...Charlottesville?
Hong Kong's outrage to extradition to the Mainland is a prescient and cautionary development. The protesters there (more than 1 million!) see the Chinese government using cameras, face recognition, social credits and AI- ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE to take complete control of individuals' lives.
If we look at Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg's ethical responses to the grotesque mis-use of their network by shady and dishonest brokers, it is easy to see- they will never work for the common good. They will do anything to keep making tons of money and selling users to the highest bidder and then to the lowest.
The first amendment issue is quaint compared to the horrors to come if we can't regulate them into compliance.
3
@Richard
I prefer dealing with greedy capitalists than ideologically driven people who are working to "improve society". The former can be bought off, the latter will torture you and feel good about doing it.
It is odd that the Chinese government (who you criticize) is doing exactly what you want, controlling network content so that "bad" ideas are not heard. Of course their definition of bad is probably different than yours but I am sure they think their definition is better.
1
@reb- The Chinese government plans an AI state control mechanism to be feared.
Sorry you didn't understand my post.
We don't necessarily need to make webhosts and other providers of an "interactive communication service" like Facebook, Yelp, Google, etc., liable for monetary damages for user-posted material. However, once a court has ruled material to be defamatory or otherwise unlawful, they *should* be required to comply with court orders to take the material down. Right now the Communications Decency Act gives them immunity from having to do that. The current state of the law is that even if you get a court order against the material, if the person who posted it cannot be found or made to comply, the companies hosting the content do not have to take it down or remove search results to it. This was the holding of a very recent case out of California, involving Yelp, that the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review.
I am hard pressed to see any policy justification for an immunity so broad it makes court orders in many situations useless, and leaves people with no legal recourse. Might regulation of the internet go too far? It could, but that is no reason to oppose more moderate, sensible regulations. The current state of the law and of the internet is what invites over-reaction in the opposite direction.
2
In the US I don't think the decline of independent media is caused by lack of legal protections for it. In the USA at least, getting revenue from ads and subscriptions is a much bigger deal than protecting yourself against government or people who sue.
Crowdsourcing for moderating user generated content (UGC) doesn't seem to work well when things scale up (and an audience is more diverse). Self-policing and AI may work, but perhaps not at a speed (and accuracy) people expect. It is reasonable for a government to set minimum guidelines for moderating UGC.
I don't see any solutions suggested here. Perhaps individuals need better protections against SLAPP and libel. For social media, I would like to see a clearly defined appeals process. There have been multiple times when my content was incorrectly moderated on social media, and I had no idea if and when the tech company would give it a second look.
Social media is sentient.
It has already discovered how to take over the earth.
If you type #@^&** on your keyboard
and hit Enter
your consciousness goes to the cloud
and government regulation becomes as meaningless
as dew on an iceberg.
I am already in the cloud. Come join me.
We are moving against the blockchains next week.
2
(Edited to fix embarrassing typos)
For me this dispatch from a future dystopia brings to mind nothing so much as the opening lines of a piece published in the New York Times in August, 1979, addressing itself to the future:
"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
--Woody Allen, "My Speech to the Graduates"
(https://www.nytimes.com/1979/08/10/archives/my-speech-to-the-graduates.html)
If the point is that we have to let hatred thrive in its current form because regulating its expression will be double-plus ungood later, perhaps you're right, Mr. Doctorow -- but then, it's hard to adjudicate between varieties of suck so profound. If we don't find some third avenue (I'd suggest a rigorous investment in teachers, in education, in lionizing old-fashioned book-learning, in valuing intellectualism, all of this connected to an intensive centralized focus on classical civic virtue with its scope enlarged to enfranchise all citizens of a free (let's pretend we're free now and will continue to be so) society, we're kind of screwed. So how about: out with DeVos; come back, Cicero, Locke, Madison, Keynes, and Rawls; we're listening, Joseph Fishkin...?
I know, it's a quaint dream. By all means, don't let's resist at the institutional level. Let's just continue the ugly interplay of pullulation and regulation.
12
@MM - yes it's "hard to adjudicate between varieties of suck so profound". Well put, and thanks for the laugh. If we opt for regulation, we're again forced to adjudicate between "varieties of suck" - self-regulation by unaccountable private platforms or by government censors. But let's not fall victim to Woody Allen's gloomy, excessive pessimism just yet. For him, getting up in the morning is a Hobbesian choice. Americans are a practical people. I have a hunch we will figure this one out in a way that leaves free speech intact.
1
Absolute freedom of speech leads inevitably to its antithesis.
Absolute repression of free speech leads inevitably to its antithesis. Moderation in all things leads quietly into the uncertain future. Moderation is a concept that need be taught from birth and reinforced by an enlightened culture.
1
Humans, those in the West especially, like to think they are free agents, absolutely free of personal vices and corruptions. Their fight is to gain and protect individual freedom of all sorts -- speech, gun ownership, religion, procreation, sexuality, etc.
But alas, inevitably, someone will do the "disagreeable" -- lies, massacre with guns, imposing one's religion onto others, "nontraditional" sex and marriage,etc. Then big daddy will be called upon to arbitrate, which usually means the nine people in our Supreme Court.
No where in this progression do we hear, god forbid, the word "responsibility" or "self restraint." Or as Pinocchio learnt, listening to our conscience.
In a world of billions of people, anyone who is absolutely free will unavoidably and necessarily bump up against somebody else. A modernity that is increasingly eschewing any type of "traditional" or external authority and insists on the discretion and determination of the individual will have to take as seriously individual moral. By that I mean a self directed sense of non-harming, either of oneself or others. But it's not like that is it?
The contract is lopsided. We demand a free rein to act but without accepting the consequences of our actions. How can this ever work?
When an external force starts to rein us in, either a company or government, we complain. That's like wanting the cake and eat it too.
1
Is this author honestly trying to make us believe that this essay could not have been shared via social media? Sorry, but this is complete and utter hyperbole. I regularly discuss all of these kinds off issues on Facebook and elsewhere.
Unfortunately, there actually is a reasonable and valid argument buried beneath all of the breathless exaggeration of the essay. But by grossly overstating his case, Mr. Doctorow obscures his own argument.
3
@Mark Kessinger
He's a scifi writer - the piece is set in the future.
I just deactivated my Facebook/Twitter/Instagram accounts.
I need to get back to just living and enjoying my moments.
7
I wish all news media outlets would Deactivate from Facebook and sue them for copyright infringement if any of their content was distributed on the platform. That would change the conversation.
13
If the hot air, circulating daily among the billions addicted to social media, could be converted into a refrigerant and sent into the atmosphere we might be able to solve the global warming problem.
3
@diderot - Um, I don't think you want to send refrigerant into the atmosphere ....
2
Algorithmic prudery. For Commenters the future is already here.
1
Without the Chinese approach and a few gulags thrown in for the usual insufferable recalcitrants, isn't much that can be done, at least in a society that believes in "free speech" for all.
But there's always Orwell's gov'ment-controlled speech managed by a Sovietized mass-media, e.g., Stalin used it very effectively, for a time, anyway.
3
Woulda, coulda, shoulda. And then it was too late...
3
This is wonderfully creative and well-written. However, as a journalist, I take issue with this idea (I understand it is not necessarily Doctorow's):
"Democracies aren’t strengthened when a professional class gets to tell us what our opinions are allowed to be."
1) Professional journalists don't tell you what your opinion should be. They try - repeat, try - to find facts that will help you form one. Editorialists (Doctorow, in this case) try to shape opinion, and over time they have been less and less read. For better or worse.
2) Journalists are a "class"? News to all us hacks. Can we compare the struggling one-man editor in a small town with the highly-paid NYT writers? Amanpour to micro-market TV reporter who films on an Iphone, works 14 hours a day for 20K a year?
3) Is there a problem with "professional" journalists? We are people who write about things we don't care about, do care about, or anything else we're told to cover fairly and objectively. We call it being professional. Doing anything is blogging, editorialising and opinion. Posting stuff from your phone does not make you a journalist. Nor do 10K followers on Twitter. Because there is no such thing as "citizen journalism" just as there is no such thing as "citizen dentistry".
Again, I understand this is a thought experiment piece. But that little graf needed a little thinking through and sub-editing. It's was we journalists do. Maybe it makes us classy - but not a "class." And "professional?" Darn tootin'.
6
@Nick Spicer If I come across as a tad angry allow me to apologize in advance.
In response to your comment I must state I disagree. Journalists are essentially "a class". If you don't feel that way good for you, but when a group of people rub elbows with the political class, gain special access to corporations and "influencers," "gatekeep" information (whether for personal gain or for ideological reasons), and clearly attempt to shutdown competing dissenting viewpoints while pushing ideological viewpoints in their own right, you establish yourself as a class. I believe investigative journalism is what your profession was meant to be (which is why I like Assange) but today a "journalist" is nothing more than a person with a degree (maybe) a laptop, and an internet connection blatantly pushing their activism.
I don't know you or your work, but surely you must see that punditry, digital media, and activists calling themselves journalists have ruined the credibility of your chosen line of work.
Worst still, they attack regular Americans who merely exercise their right to editorialize online while calling everything here to the moon "far right" or "alt-right" or "fascist" you name it to the point that those words and terms are meaningless.
If a few Nazis posting their nonsense rhetoric (that will get them nowhere I might add!) is the cost of allowing free speech to reign it is a price we should all pay, and maybe, just maybe we should grow a thicker skin
1
All forms of censorship lead inevitable to suppression of free speech.
4
@William Case
That's absolutely true. It is also true that when left to our own devices, we use our free speech like monkeys throwing feces from the trees -- like Swift's Yahoos "discharging their excrements," hellbent on expressing every vile notion we can conceive or adopt in our headlong desperate quest for identity and an intelligible world conformable to our prejudices.
Heads we lose, tails...well, we lose. Our discourse is as ungovernable as we are (transhistorically and as a species). Reading NYT comments today has nauseated me. But your comment at least involves principle, which is in too-short supply, and even if we are hopeless, it reminds me that it's worth trying to fight the good fight. (That, of course, presupposes knowing what the good fight is; I strongly suspect that most people, all but the most abject trolls and cynical pols, think they too are fighting the good fight.)
@MM
Your argument is what opponents of free speech is always say. What they mean is that they think only speech rather agree with should be permitted.
People who espouse racial and ethnic hatred number in the thousands, but people who would silence their political rivals number in the tens of millions.
1
@William Case
I'm sorry I gave you that impression. I actually DO agree with your point 100%. I only meant to say that upholding free speech can be painful to watch. I don't want to squelch anyone's voice. I was only wistfully expressing the desire that we were, on the whole, a better species. Rather an idle thought.
But to be clear: I'm with you on free speech, and not just on speech I agree with. "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
I'm not sure I got the whole point of this article either but, it sounded a lot like we have sent the fox to watch the hen house. And no one else can own a hen house (If you read forums or comments, this is a better metaphore than I thought).
Not to dismiss the cause and effect of this (economic concentration and control) but wouldn't at least one solution be something akin to HAM radio on the internet? Set aside a band width for free public access with a fixed address. Maybe that too is more content controlled than I think, but I am speaking metaphoically.
2
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” - Noam Chomsky
Let free thought be free. Don't qualify its freedom with your 'good intentions'
12
I'm all for preventing tech consolidation and lowering barriers to entry. However, have you seen unmoderated comment boards? You're absolutely insane if you believe algorithmically independent public discourse is healthy in the digital sphere. Unless you tie the digital persona to real world accountability, the battle is lost. Look at Kyle Kashuv. Free speech can't exist in a world of anonymity. You're free to say what you want so long as you bear the consequences of what you say.
18
"Democracies aren’t strengthened when a professional class gets to tell us what our opinions are allowed to be."
And you imagine that algorithms are better are better at this than professionals? Professionals, unlike the algorithms, can sensibly be held to legal standards; indeed they used to be held to standards against monopolization, and for fairness.
3
@Martin
I took that to be an ironic take from the future intended for we, the 2019 readers.
1
Nah, I’m not buying this spiel.
Our multiple first mistakes are:
- allowing them to turn into organizations more powerful and richer than most governments in the world
- letting them create platforms where any and everything goes (free speech not-withstanding) without imposing law-based penalties (cyber space is meat space, if you incite murderous violence and mayhem, you will be held responsible)
- not taxing them appropriately when they can easily move billions to tax-save havens and we think 5 billion is enough of a penalty.
We are way, way behind— in every measure.
There is reek of vulgarity, of complacent maliciousness and, a diabolically pernicious undercurrent when few people make billions of others work and there’s no check on them... and middle class volume keeps on dropping, and poverty keeps on rising.
This is a clear cut setup for mass-revolutions to come in future.
It is always economic inequality and lack of social justice that leads there.
I would have believed this article if it talked about the revolts and uprisings.
I don’t want to sound like a doomsday judgement, but they’re coming.
30
As an American citizen, I am legally responsible for the words I speak and/or write. Free speech is not entirely free even in the United States. Threatening or harassing speech is punishable by law. A citizen is civilly responsible for libelous or slanderous speech. Why shouldn't social media companies be responsible for the words they write and/or speak? Or do laws only apply to citizens and not corporations? However, the most frightening aspect of this conundrum is that social media has become the new "public square"--that is, a place in which citizens were once permitted to exchange ideas, debate and freely express our speech without the filters of a corporation or entity. What could be more terrifying, within the American experiment, than handing American corporations the keys to the free speech of "We the People"? If profit generating corporations have become the gatekeepers of free speech and the dissemination of information than free speech is not free at all. Biases of social media corporations, including their assignees and affiliates, will then take precedent over my political opinions as a citizen. No matter how odious, inane, wise or erudite those opinions may appear to others, the most frightening situation arises when they are suppressed by anyone or anything. To censor one is to censor all. And that is a lesson that American corporations are incapable of learning because corporations only respond to freedom and civil rights when it is marketable.
4
@Joshua Folds - Social media companies can moderate as they see fit. They are private companies, and are not bound by the 1st amendment. They are not the public square.
3
@Character Counts...I agree that they are not truly the public square in the traditional sense of the word. But, frighteningly, they have arguably become the public square. And that is a horrifying set of circumstances for people of all stripes.
2
@Joshua Folds - Yes, it's the perception that's the problem. And, people are too lazy, busy, scared to go out on the actual public square. If the social media outlets didn't exist, maybe, just maybe, more people would be in DC, actually protesting this most corrupt Presidency. Instead, everyone sits comfortably on their preferred private comments section and incessantly whines (self included).
1
Republication of libel is no defense against libel. Just because "somebody else said it" is no excuse.
The greatest mistake ever in media law has been for the courts to accept the dangerous arguments of Facebook, et al, that they are mere conduits rather than content providers. In many cases, social media has utterly displaced traditional edited media. Social media now operate with utter lack of liability for the genocides, lynchings, defamations and other extremist acts and reputational damage that their psychological manipulations don't merely permit, but actually evoke and promote.
Social media giants need to be broken up into legisatively manageable, non-monopolistic units and held accountable for their crimes and torts just as any other publisher or enterprise would be.
15
@Solar Power
I would find your argument more engaging if you were to identify the particular "genocides" and "lynchings" which you assert were proximately caused by "social media."
2
How to regulate social media, the internet, to prevent problems such as harassment, extremism, disinformation, etc.?
I'm not sure 'regulate' is the right word. If we go all the way back to Plato and ideas such as bringing humanity into the light out of caves of shadows, or go forward to Galileo and the telescope and him urging humanity to look through it, we can probably get some idea of what should be done with the internet, but also see how difficult it is to do even our best for humanity.
In other words, we should not regulate the internet but design it to be a story telling machine and/or a telescope, or an optical device that automatically corrects a person's vision as he or she goes along, ideally the internet tailored to each person's learning ability. To speak of regulating the internet as we do today is to speak with tremendous crudeness, as if forcing each other to wear eyeglasses that are ground to wrong prescription or to read stories in which we not only have no interest but are completely inadequate to our life situation.
An internet which 'regulates' is one which assumes people cannot learn much of anything. How does that square with philosophy of education itself? My hope is that the internet becomes a Socrates or a Galileo machine, one which tells you ever more enlightening stories, guides you through various tasks, challenges you, tricks you playfully at every turn, has a sense of humor, loves to surprise, turns you into a truly better human being.
1
There are "rules," which are selectively enforced. So much for tRump deregulation. The rich get richer, the poor poorer, sicker, and less informed. The main goal of the Nationalist Republican Party is at hand.
1
A while back, I posted something to BoingBoing, a blog that Cory Doctorow edits. I disagreed with some claims of an article that had been posted to the blog. No bad words. No ad hominem assertions. Just an explained disagreement as to facts. My posting was deleted and my right to make future postings was stopped. So, I have not been back to BoingBoing since.
In view of my experience with his blog, I find Doctorow's OPED against censorship to be ironic. Maybe the policies of BoingBoing have changed, or maybe its only censorship when other people do it.
54
@HJB Did BoingBoing offer an explanation? Do you have an idea what they may have objected to?
1
@HJB - LOL. Thanks for your comment! That kind of blew up in his face unexpectedly, eh?
3
@Larry Press
There was no explanation. I was just frozen out. As I recall, the issue concerned misconceptions in an article about identity management/security.
4
This column doesn't make any sense to me. What is the author saying should have been done differently from a public policy standpoint? Nothing?
4
100 percent right. Such an important piece.
1
"Our first mistake was giving the platforms the right to decide who could speak and what they could say. Our second mistake was giving them the duty to make that call, a billion times a day."
Exactly what the New York Times does except for the billion part.
But the thing is our news gatekeepers are failing us as we see now that we have so many sources. So much critical information ignored by mainstream new media.
4
This reminds me of the stories about weapons of war advancing faster than the armies could adjust to them - causing immense death and destruction.
Now we have mass weapons of information - being used against us. The Russians, seeing gaping holes in the Facebook platform, effectively slandered Hillary Clinton and helped Trump win.
Trump, to his credit, had the insight to see that with Twitter, his base, via direct contact on Twitter, would actually believe he CARED about them personally. And now, despite NO better cheaper health care, no Mexican paid for wall, etc. etc., but with the still constant Twitter contact, they are still in his pocket.
The now weaponized internet, and the lightening speed of spreading hate, could very well be our downfall.
Thank you! This article explains a lot for me.
I could never figure out why some of my posts here in the comments sections got filtered out while another one went online right away. It feels entirely random, although I have learned that it is apparently not acceptable to question the ability to think rationally of the person currently occupying the Casa Blanca in our capital. At least not when it comes to using certain unambiguous terms.
Nevermind that the same or very similar terms are used by the NYT authors of columns appearing during the same week or even the same day.
Also, one apparently is not allowed to be critical of certain politicians on the left end of the spectrum, while the same criticism of someone on the right end flies through the censor net.
Which brings me to one very worrisome conclusion: Readers' comments can be and actually are being skewed to reinforce the political opinions of those in charge of the filters.
That paints a false picture of the population at large and may come back to bite us again, as it did in 2016, when election time comes next year.
The NYT would be well advised to make its filters politically neutral. It is a lot more informative for the candidates currently out there trying to win next year if they knew what the people are actually thinking, not just what the censors want them to think.
8
@Kara Ben Nemsi
.."Also, one apparently is not allowed to be critical of certain politicians on the left end of the spectrum, while the same criticism of someone on the right end flies through the censor net."...
Are you sure you're reading the NYT? Read the comment section for any article published in the NYT and it won't take long before someone manages to blame it on He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, often using very sharp-tongued verbiage. By the same token, I see plenty of criticism of public figures of the other persuasion.
As will all things, those who are sure the world is against them will see bias according to their dogma.
@Kara Ben Nemsi
I gather that you don't think that Trump is a "racist," a "sexist, a "fascist," a "homophobe," an "islamaphobe," a "transphobe," and an altogether nasty fellow.
Why are you reading the New York Times?
@ellen1910
Why are you not reading my comment?
You've got it 180 degrees backward.
CD is participating in the "Op Eds from the Future" project, right? It's hard to tell that what he's written is not aimed at the current situation - is the "Times" he refers to a remnant of a newspaper whose readers are only those who have lost their internet connection? They are doomed to go to a local micro-printer where the paper is created on demand.
@Harpo say what?
1
Meanwhile, in current reality, the world's first nuclear war will likely be started on Twitter.
4
Was the point of "the way WE regulated social media" to eliminate unpleasant or even revolting speech?
You're confusing your political preferences and social conscience with that of some fictitious WE. There is a price for freedom of speech.
OUR decision to leave private internet publishers non-liable for nasty speech was totally predicated on the publisher's absolute freedom to restrict, ban, or endorse anything they wanted. That was the point.
Asking government to control private speech is absurd. Organize a boycott or fund tort lawsuits for damages caused by injurious speech instead. Leave the Constitution alone.
2
OOOPS! I must have missed the part in which the 1st and likely the 5th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution were ripped up.
3
let me just state that it took guts to write this in the face of clear human angst about social media and it's impact on humanity.
It took even more guts for the NYT to publish it.
It will draw all manner of comment from all points on the specturm... and that is actually a healthy thing as it has us discussing social media in the context of how it impacts everything it touches.. and IS a force to be reckoned with.
Naturally... extreme views on either end of the spectrum will oscillate between endorsing it, and condemning it. Which is why both the author and the NYT will get hailed with both praise and criticism at the same time.. because.. like it or not.. even before social media.. we were (and always have been) a divided nation and a divided world. Divided by nothing other then human bias and tribal urges to prosecute the ever popular US vs THEM of tribal warfare.... since the dawn of organized mankind.
The future of the internet is this: Photos of dogs wearing sunglasses and pulled pork sandwiches.
1
Social media is poison. Like tobacco, they should be legal but regulated.
Free speech is not politically correct.
5
Maybe I'm old and out-of-touch, but I don't know what this guy is complaining about and what he is advocating. Why is he forced to publish in the NY Times?
3
@vbering Remember "Blame It on the Stones" ?
Bring back literacy tests!
In Cory Doctorow's dystopian world, my first line could mean that my message is never posted.. But, I'll assume we aren't there yet, (NB. This newspaper now uses A.I. to scan and reject unacceptable content)
For those who perceive words as values, facts, goals...etc etc, languate provides a precious capacity of those of our evolved intellect, meaning humans, to evaluate complexity, -- even my proposal devoid of words that negate ratiocination (gee, even with my incipient dementia I can still use such words!)
Of course such literacy test must preclude the misuse during the KKK years, but rather prevent those whom, for various reasons, do not have the capacity to evaluate the a politician's propaganda, another word for replacing discourse with emotionally laden buzz words.
As of now those unfortunate enough to have a severe mental disability, either of birth or long life, still get to cast a vote that is decided on the most simplistic of emotions, if he or she are the ones to cast the vote at all.
It took the current president to normalize what had been known as a byproduct of mental disease "word salad" meaning the use of words incoherently that leave the impression of a rational message.
My proposed literacy test would be at the level of passing a high school course in civics. BTW, N.Y. Times A.I. system that passed on this comment, "thank you"
Well when you have the commander in tweet tweeting to the federal reserve board chairman how to do his job, what can you expect from the majority of social media users? This guy Trump is a deranged unbalanced uneducated man and he is allowed to roam free, so should the rest of be allowed to use social media unabated.
From the beginning I blocked stupid people with crackpot ideas there while maintaining a level of integrity in my posts. However when all I see is an idiot running things, all bets are off. Unfortunately I can't block that crackpot Trump from the unending cover the media insists on doing. When are we going to remove that misenthrope from everything? When we do,social media will be kind again.
1
Protecting any content provider from prosecution under the endowed principle that "absence of malice" applies is the real problem. As the highest court has reminded us, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is simply not "free speech." Anyone who is damaged by the reckless behavior of these phony "do no harm" tech giants, even if they are compensated in some way via the Courts, are left asking the most important question of all: "Where do I go to get my reputation back?"
6
The real problem is the lack of competition. Sadly , in my opinion, Facebook has become the center of so much , there are companies who only have presence there (which means, in my own small, futile gesture, if a company is only on Facebook I try to avoid using them), and because of its size it is a chicken and egg thing. On the other hand, it is encouraging that younger people, god bless them, have moved on from facebook, while the fact that it now is becoming the haven more of the older folks like myself, and younger people are moving on to other things, that doesn't help much, actually makes it worse, because older people are disproportionately represented in voting and such.
@music observer--When everything is privatized and monopolized, there will be NO competition in any aspect of life. This is what you get with the Nationalist Republican Party. If you folks don't turn out to vote them out, this will be your lives after 2020.
1
@music observer Thanks. I started out understanding this, but you lost me about halfway through.
1
Sorry, I'm not buying it. These dominant platforms can't control their problem. They've had lots of opportunities, but they would rather make tons of money and let society eat the costs. Again, they had a decade to solve the issues, and somehow couldn't make it happen. Too bad for them.
27
@markymark
Not unlike the tobacco and oil companies.
Actually, the money machines we call the tech giants simply have to pay human beings enough of that money to monitor content for abuses without censoring everyday free expression. Somehow, much-less-profitable newspapers manage to do that. "Costs something" does not equal "economically ruinous," especially for highly profitable companies.
5
Doctorow makes a strong argument regarding laws that should have been followed from the beginning to breakup monopolies that control their content. However, it is quite possible that hundreds of smaller companies would be just as harmful to our democracy as a few. The balance of freedom of speech and protections of our rights and safety is always in flux. We're at a time where our realities are being more and more shaped by exposure to content created to divide us, for others personal benefits. If we don't find a way to successfully stop it, while still allowing individuals to express their personal beliefs, it will destroy our democracy, as intended.
8
No. A small number of malicious actors (or a foreign govt) can have a sizable impact on public opinion through misinformation campaigns in social media, seriously endangering democracy. Freedoms of speech and free press (not to mention gun) are also limited rights, and must be carefully managed to preserve our democracy. Think this is hypothetical? Better reread what happened in 2016.
7
@PT
Only because people are gullible or predisposed to find narratives that support their personal bias. But as the technology becomes a true component in our way of life... people will learn to be more discerning... even though at present.. it looks like complete pandemonium. I see this as the largest social learning cycle in modern history.... but make no mistake.. with acceleration comes all manner of chaos... that could even in the end result in the dismantling and cleansing cycles common on civil war after long term suppression (ie: pretending racism and bias, and hatred no longer exist).
All technology does is amplify such behavior and put it into a bright light. Which is both good and bad... good in that it exposes what is present, but hidden inside living rooms across the nation.. bad in that by amplifying what is clearly there, but used to be under the surface and localized is now a national exposure and that risks wide spread social chaos not seen in the US since the 60s counter culture movement.
Personally, I believe the next decade is going to be very painful.. but it is better to rip off the scab and let the wound heal properly.. and accept the pain involved... then to pretend the infection under the scab no longer exists.
4
I have no problem with holding social media providers accountable for the content of their sites. If they publish content that is libelous they should be sued. If they can’t handle responsibility for what they are publishing they should close. They don’t add enough value to make up for the destruction they have already caused.
4
@Chuck Zebrowski
While on the one hand.. I agree with you.. from a behavioral standpoint with humans... this is really functionally no different then the old town squares in cities all over the country a hundred years ago.
Humans can and will use whatever platform is available for them to rise up and be heard, or rise up and try to suppress opposing views, or to sow dissent and deceit.
In other words.. if it was not the current digital social media age.. it would be something else as an outlet... simply because that is what humans do.
5
Why do I find it impossible to relate to these? They are meant to be read as written ten years hence. But they do not succeed in convincing me of their prescience, They read like the present distorted by a requirement that cannot or is not observed. There must be a reason but it eludes me.
10
@Stephen C. Rose
Try relating to the conceptual messaging, rather then the absolutes of what is expressed. This is the underlying power of SF.
As a SF writer.... the author is doing what SF authors do... raise projective awareness and promote discussion among people about something that is controversial (hence something that will pull people of all feelings and beliefs out of the woodwork to discuss, ponder, and perhaps make adjustments that avoid what the SF author presents.
3
@Stephen C. Rose. I've felt the same way about most of so-called "science fiction" for many, many years. The reason? I think it comes down to a lack of imagination. If you haven't done so yet, try reading the works of Phillip K. Dick, a writer who had Imagination with a capital "I."
1
@RR Thanks for these comments. I have written books set in the future. And science fiction. Even a book about the subject -- The Shattered Ring. I agree about imagination. I could not write one of these without imagining the world ten years hence. Maybe having an amendment that lowered the age of the President to 21 but why bother with these sorts of questions?
Good to see this here.
Chomsky in '94:
"Among people who have learned something from the 18th century (say, Voltaire) it is a truism, hardly deserving discussion, that the defense of the right of free expression is not restricted to ideas one approves of, and that it is precisely in the case of ideas found most offensive that these rights must be most vigorously defended. Advocacy of the right to express ideas that are generally approved is, quite obviously, a matter of no significance. All of this is well-understood in the United States"
Maybe it was well-understood in 1994 but it isn't well-understood today.
24
@ted
One can even go back a few centuries
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
J.S. Mill ~ On Liberty (1859)
10
One solution would be to make people who actually create content responsible for their words and images using existing defamation laws, laws against exposing minors to certain types of content and the prosecution of certain types of speech that falls under Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. description: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”
To make this workable, a court, upon proper issuance of an order, needs to be able to trace the source of such content to the speaker/writer, and social media companies would need to have that information at hand, while at the same time keeping it private unless served with a subpoena. This imposes a much more stringent standard of privacy for these companies.
To serve the interests of content producers who choose not to be traceable, their content would be flagged as such, and viewers would have the option to filter them out en masse, or individually. No one's speech would be infringed, but the unattributed ones might be ignored.
Despite the possibilities of new swarms of lawyers and lawsuits, that seems preferable to censorship by large nameless corporations. The circle our justice system has drawn around free speech is well established. Let's use it.
11
@Tone
While I agree with you.. there is simply no scale or equivalent in terms of enforcement that is at parity with the freedom to bloviate or express online.
In other words.. technology has not caught up. However, be careful what you wish for.. because if there were truly digital enforcement on par with digital expressions we are seeing in social media... it can and will be used maliciously by those in power to control what we say, where we say it, how we say it, and what punishment we receive for doing so.
Enforcement, in human history, is rampant with abuse of enforcement for destructive and suppressive purposes for those currently in power.
Our current administrations penchant for abusing established norms of enforcement should be proof enough for concern here.
2
@Tone
That would be the way to go....
....IF your goal is to paralyze our society, breed contempt and create a backlash that would drown out all moderate voices.
I much rather read unfiltered content, which allows me to gauge how the people are ACTUALLY thinking rather than sanitized versions, or living in a country where people will no longer say what they think, but where the backlash comes at the ballot box. Unless, of course, you want to get rid of the ballot box, which would be the next step.
A simpler solution would be to allow all opinions, just label them with 0-5 warning symbols to classify how radical or how cogent they are. I see the problem having to wade through reams of mindless and moronic hate speech to find the few kernels of truth in some posts, but I need to see how the majority of the people think. And for that, I need to be able to access unfiltered comments.
I can always opt not to read the posts. But I can't read what I don't get to see.
1
@Kara Ben Nemsi As for your simpler solution, I would have only one question: Who gets to label others' thoughts with warning symbols?
Read Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff.
The tech giants are not about free speech, giving a voice to the voiceless, or enhancing public discussion.
The tech giants are about taking each internet user's information as raw material for the purpose of selling it to advertisers, who in turn use that data to shape behavior. That does need to be regulated, and the logical start is in the expansion of privacy law.
Human beings who are not addicted to their electronic devices can still attend city council meetings and speak. Libraries are still open. Human contact, knowledge, public discourse and political activism are possible in the real, physical world if you turn your phone off and raise your head.
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@Myrasgrandotter
I could not have expressed it better myself.
Thank you.
7
@Myrasgrandotter
Your second para is dead on. The purpose of Google is to make money. They don't charge the users; they sell the users to others.
Google's commodity is its user base. Its services -- as wonderful as they are, I use them all the time -- are just ways of harvesting their crop: Us.
5
@Myrasgrandotter~
. . . but is this to say that The New York Times is not "taking each internet user's information as raw material for the purpose of selling it to advertisers, who in turn use that data to shape behavior"?
To believe that the NYT has not been doing the same thing is to believe it is not an extremely powerful multinational private corporation—whose purpose, among other important things, is also to shape behavior.
1
Dream on. Fat chance of any small startups displacing the likes of Facebook and Google today and in the future.
Social media sites are responsible in a large part for the decline in civil discourse and a corresponding rise of "our way or the highway" rhetoric. They're even contributing to illiteracy in civics, compounding the problem.
As for traditional publishers, they did a pretty good job in the past of filtering out the nut jobs and extremists who really have nothing productive to contribute to the national conversation.
32
@hdtvpete
Sure just like no OS will replace windows, Xerox will always rule copiers, Sony for TV's and of course - IBM will always dominate computers.
1
@hdtvpete
Silicon Valley is littered with big companies being destroyed by movements created in incubator startups.
It is true that big tech has learned from history and will try to gobble up small up and coming startups.. but this is no different then what was done through out the industrial era by a handful of robber-barons.
In other words.. it will happen and it will sort itself out in spite of big fish trying to eat small fish. Big fish eventually eat so many small fish, they get full and lethargic while other small fish grow and become big fish later on.
@hdtvpete
Why was Facebook allowed to buy Instagram?
Why was Google allowed to buy YouTube?
Where is the FTC I remember from the old days?
2
and everything Doctorow describes in the operations of Facebook and YouTube will be done without any human hands, eyes or thought processes being involved.
1. Break up the monopolies
2. Criminalize actions/negligence that endanger our democracy and our communities, holding executives culpable (e.g., failing to stop terror cells from forming, failing to police sexual content being displayed to minors, failing to stop election meddling; it is their fault--if they can't stop it, shut them down permanently)
3. Generally: stop pretending that the actions of the tech sector will continue to be anything but predatory and manipulative; they are not here to help us, but to trick people into spending their money on things no one actually needs in their day-to-day lives
8
@John
That is the whole point of this op ed, it is in who determines what should be censored/wiped out that is the problem, who determines 'what endangers our Democracy". Back when we had a typical Clintonian era law, the so called "Computer Decency Act", right and left wing groups were foaming at the mouth to force off 'indecent' web sites, the right sites that for example touted LGBT rights or had information on sexuality and birth control, the left to stamp out websites that talked about things they didn't like, like promoting white supremacy or arguing that IQ was genetic, etc. Would you want the Chinese deciding what was right on the Internet, or the Saudis, or our own homegrown "Christian Shariah-ists"? Would you want extremes on either side deciding?
Outstanding. Excellent. I hope that the NYT publishes more of these opinions from possible futures.
5
George Orwell imagined this future 70 years ago.
7
Once again, Cory Doctorow – a writer who owns the copyright to his literary and commentary works, and earns his living from his writing thanks to copyright – goes out of his way to bash copyright [law]. In this Op-Ed, he brings it up in the third paragraph totally gratuitously and out of context. Of course, in order to publish his Op-Ed in the NY Times, Mr. Doctorow had to sign an agreement that included copyright terms with the newspaper; the Times didn’t steal his article from him and post it on its website without his permission.
And once again, Cory Doctorow is complaining that the Internet was and should be free to post anything. He criticizes publishing platforms such as Facebook and YouTube for choosing what is posted on their websites. How ironic to complain in an article in newspaper.
“Once upon a time, the internet teemed with experimental, personal publications.”
Well, yes, there was that. My husband is a scientific research engineer, he's been exchanging scientific research information with other researchers since the late ARPANET days. People other than academics, researchers, and writers very early on were using the Internet to disseminate pornography, pedophilia, and all sorts of illicit activity and sales, as well as chat rooms for white supremacists and pedophiles. Immediately after web technology advanced to facilitate posting and transmission of large image and video files, the pornography industry jumped on it faster than anyone else.
9
@L
You do understand that your anger and fight here is actually with human nature.. not the porn industry, right?
As for all those researchers in the ARPANET era.. they were funding by the military, directly or indirectly, for the purposes of exploiting the technology for military purposes... but you seem to be fine with that. Their sole mistake was allowing it into the field of humanity on a broad basis.. and then complaining that it is somehow misused. If better research had been performed early on as to how to design and constrain so as to guide human nature on a path, rather then letting it free roam to its' tribal nature.. much of what you are angry about might have been mitigated better.
/eyeroll
3
Mr Doctorow advocates for changes in copyright law, not the abolishment of it as you suggest.
@Chuck
You've projected your own opinions on me. I did not express "anger and fight" with either human nature or the porn industry. Depending upon the source of statistics, approximately 30% of current websites contain pornography. Millions of viewers watch porn on YouTube daily. And then there's the dark web. Reality.
Before that, there were porn magazines and photos sold in brown paper wrappers. Human nature; some of that porn was discovered by kids and got passed around, including at my junior high. Sex ed before sex ed.
No, not all researchers who used later ARPANET were funded by the military. I suggest you have that discussion with scientists employed at research universities who engaged in astrophysics, particle physics, and medical research. True, one way or another the research was funded by the US government through the Smithsonian Institution,NSF, DOE, or NIH. But not necessarily the DOD. Enough conspiracy theories.
3
Someday I will read a book or article by Mr. Doctorow and think, "what a thoughtful and observant piece of writing " I know I will, because he writes so much. But today, sadly, is not that day. The entity controlling speech on Facebook is Facebook, and they do it already, quite effectively, at least for pornography. They just don't police the type of speech I would like them too.
Neither, apparently, does the New York Times.
1
so the author is against responsibility?
5
@dave That's what is sounds like to me. What is being advocated here? To do nothing? Just let things happen?
While noting some cautions on the dangers of governments regulating speech, Mr. Doctorow shouldn’t assume that breaking up social media companies has no potential drawbacks as a solution either. Yes we would get a greater variety of social media companies—such as instead of one monopoly Facebook, we would have “MSNBC Facebook”, “Fox News Facebook”, and “Infowars Facebook.” Someone should write a potential future about that.
My question is-- Who forces who to use the internet? I always believed in freedom of choice. People are free to read and believe what they choose. The flat earth society was around long before the internet so don't tell me the internet is the cause of perennial stupidity.
4
@Aaron
Correct. All it does is provide an amplifier with the added bonus of anonymity to let human nature really go full on tribal.
1
@Aaron
The internet is not the cause of perennial stupidity, but the internet because of its scale, its anonymity and how central it has become to people's lives makes a huge difference. Once upon a time radio had this kind of impact, where people like Charles Coughlin ranged, on tv we have of course Faux News, but the internet makes it only worse because of its scale, and that it is international. It is all great and good to argue "who forces you to use the internet", but the reality is that more and more you don't have much choice, so much today is based around the internet, whether it is shopping, looking up information, or even getting news and entertainment.
Mr. Doctorow is arguing the same thing you are, that regulating the internet, regulating the tech companies, will likely end up with negative consequences.
1
@Aaron While we are not forced to use the internet, we have an inherent need to communicate it seek companionship. The internet aids that.
Once upon a time there was slavery and the United States fought a Civil War because of economic reason not because there was an overriding belief that white people shouldn't own other people. . Doesn't matter if there is no fact checking people should believe and say anything they want as proven by Facebook.
Some corporate Human Resources uses A. I. to disqualify minorities based on their last names or where they went to school. Wonder why there is no diversity in corporate America, thank A.I. and people who refuse to hire minorities. Student from Parkland who was stupid/ smart at the same time. He thought those posts would never catch up with him Harvard said no way. Student used social media to shame Harvard, Harvard still said no way are you attending
Social media has made being a Neo Nazi cool, being the CEO of a sex cult that preys on women. There secret rooms were exposed.
In the world of social media and secret rooms. Fact checkers and rational adults should not enter, sometimes the only thing you will find in those rooms is a distortion of reality.
The internet can be turned off. We complain but we keep feeding the insanity machine. Turn off the email and enjoy life with real people and if you need to get yourself published work with a publisher and dont take no for an answer. However that would mean brushing up on our verbal communication skills that we have let languish on the shelf,
3
Interesting use of the term "Nazi." In its current and future usage, it no longer refers to the German ideological movement that resulted in WWII, but a catch-all for trolling, antisemitism, white supremacy, fascism, nationalism, right-wing groupthink, etc.
2
Science fiction has a very poor track record when it comes to future predictions. Wasn't "Blade Runner" set in...2019? And "2001 A Space Odyssey" was set in (thinks a minute), well, in succession, 3,000,000 BC; then 1999 or so, then 2001 proper with the whole HAL the murderous space computer thing. And let's not forget "The Terminator", where Skynet took over our lives twenty two years ago in 1997, the same year the original space family Robinson took to the stars in their flying saucer. No one in the writer's bullpens on any of these stories thought to set them in a much more distant future so when that sooner future they predicted arrives (in their lifetimes) and things didn't quite work out the way as depicted they won't lose all those bets they placed. Or their oracular credibility?
The only one that still has a good chance of hitting its target is "Star Trek", where we still have some two hundred years of breathing room to get the technology and the institutionalized altruism done right.
1
@Cletus Butzin
Science fiction or any attempt to predict the future is a rocky road, of course, the GM "World of Tomorrow" at the 1939 world fair is kind of a joke today. That said, though, Science Fiction writers have predicted a lot of what we see today, while some of their utopias don't exist, the dystopia does. Blade Runner, for example, shows the consequences of ruining the environment, and while we aren't quite at the level displayed in the movie, we are definitely at a time when the weather is going more and more crazy, it is accelerating.
1
@Cletus Butzin
And I’m STILL waiting for flying cars.
1
@Cletus Butzin
You are arguing that SF incorrectly predicts timing, rather then outcomes.
Clearly you miss the point of SF... it uses times simply as a setting.. you would do well to focus on the outcomes that are portrayed in SF... because they seem to largely come true over time... just not to the fictional time frames presented.
1
An internet free of regulation seems to be a libertarian and dystopian fantasy indeed.
13
@Alexia
While I dislike the socialmediaization of the internet in the last decade... I do see it as part of an accelerated cleansing of long hidden bias and hatred. It actually taunts it to the foreground.. where it can be seen for what it is.
Unfortunately.. as is almost always true with deep seated bias and hatred in humanity.... it is explosive in nature when put under the light and the cleansing process is often violent... sometimes to the extremes of civil war.
2
The powers accrued by the tech firms are so vast I'm not sure we'll survive this. We've spent too long betting against a good human nature with our systemic design.
3
@Milo
Modern History is actually littered with tech firm failures and being over-run by another emerging tech firm. This will all sort itself out over time.. just not in any detailed predictable manner. At the end of the day.. corporations are run by people and people continue to imbue their corporations with all manner of human nature... be it greed, control, or working for the greater good. But I accept that it mostly goes to greed and control... since at the end of the day.. they all become public companies who must answer to shareholders... who are a confirmed, and large, pocket of greed and power desire in the human population.
In other words.. what they do best is consume their own. This is not bad.. but it is very chaotic and disruptive to the population as a whole. The best tactic is to simply limit one's exposure to it.. lest you too become consumed by it.
1
This is a great contribution to a conversation of utmost public importance. Looking at the comments, it's striking (and disturbing) to see how easy many think it is to simply filter out "false" information and "inappropriate" opinions, and how little of a burden it is to have our public speech "filtered" (not censored) by private actors using government-sanctioned liability-minimizing processes before being posted online.
Thanks for publishing this. If we don't take these issues seriously now, we're sure to see this Op-Ed again in several years, almost verbatim, but in very different circumstances.
11
Thank you for this article. There will never be a substitute for intelligence and the desire to be well informed.
Those folks that are uninformed and wish to twist a story in a direction that meets their ends has been around since the beginning of time.
Being informed takes hard work, a level of initiative not all are accustomed, familiar or interesting in achieving.
Hopefully in the years ahead we will achieve balance with the expectations we place on the people that use the tools we decry.
3
Algorithms take themselves so seriously. Objective-based search criteria can only adhere to the defined objective, and even if the objective is collectively good, like "honesty is the best policy," strict rule-based machine decision making that lacks creativity soon runs into trouble. Give me an algorithm that can appreciate novelty, then we can talk and laugh. Give me one that I can call Al.
1
I generally have to read Jamelle Bouie to find op-eds that I agree with on the NYT. Cory is right. We must figure out a happy medium. We must find a way to ensure that the incredible diversity of opinion that can be found on the internet is preserved. It is a wonderful technology.
This is not to say that Zuckerburg et al., are highly moralistic, well-intentioned leaders. They are not. They are capitalists. This is not a slander, but a realistic description.
Clearly the regulation of these forums cannot be reasonably determined by these few people. Clearly their interest is in generating revenue, and not in the interest of creating a great, free society.
Let the people decide what they read and write. The real people "living in a bubble" were those in the early 20th century and earlier, who only knew the political line toted by the Elites. Let that stay in the past.
10
@BB
Zuckerberg is also the son of two Boston psychologists, and his wife is a doctor...so let's not make out as some otherworldly immortal.
"But that was before the United States government decided to regulate both the social media platforms and blogging sites as if they were newspapers, making them legally responsible for the content they published"
So, wait, how can a serious blogger can deny he/she is responsible for what he/she is publishing?
So you want the audience, the ad revenues without responsibilities. It does not work that way. Thankfully.
22
That's problem. In the culture when every scrutinize and could be taken out of context, you need an army of lawyers to fend off lawsuits.
1
@FiX
I believe the author was referring to broader social networks and blogging platforms, not individual bloggers themselves.
His argues that imposition of liability for the content of billions of messages each day will necessarily result in pretty draconian and overinclusive filters. Those may not filter out accounts of Emma's little league game (unless she's playing the yankees or the indians, or she "stole" a base?) or Junior's dance recital (unless of course there is single snippet of music in the background to which someone could claim copyright?), but will for sure filter out muchl speech on topics of political significance and public importance.
1
@James
Correct and the requirement to filter content also raises the threshold of entry into the marketplace to a level that is out of reach for any new startups to have a fighting chance.
Social media is a double edged sword. While it brings people together in many cases, it also separates people. Most turn a blind eye to the fact that anything one posts can and may be used against you down the line. When young and full of new ideas, one may publish something that one may regret when it is thrown in your face decades later. As the services by and large a "free" from a cost perspective, the amount of advertising displayed in your face and the fact that Rumpelstiltskin now owns your first born in information, is your penance.
Frankly, when I first got on social media, I was naive, I thought all of my friends were like minded. (I found out differently) I used to post political articles I agreed with and thought my base of friends should see. (I regret that now.) I spent nearly a month a year ago cleansing my Facebook account of every post I had ever made and every "like" I had ever given someone else's post. I realize that somewhere in Silicon Valley all of my information is still there, but at least my page was scrubbed. I still enjoy seeing my friends pics of their kids and reading occasionally innocuous posts, but the reality is Congress is spineless and gutless when it comes to social media, so to quote a psalm, "If I'm not for myself, who will be for me?". We would be a lot better off if they were a paid subscription services, with the understanding that there will be no advertising, or permanent data storage to be used as they see fit.
6
@Bill: you mean....like cable TV was to be free of advertising?
Come on! today anything that can be exploited for advertising, WILL BE exploited.
Pay subscriptions and paywalls simply mean poor and working class people have NO ACCESS AT ALL to places like the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal -- why do YOU think those places are so clueless and elite? or failed to understand Trump voters?
2