It's pretty obvious that the tech crowd right now is so intoxicated by its own groupthink that these attempts to come up with "solutions" are going to have awful results. You don't even know what the problem really is.
"I fear that many decentralised web projects are designed for censorship resistance not so much because they deliberately want to become hubs for neo-nazis, but rather out of a kind of naive utopian belief that more speech is always better. But I think we have learnt in the last decade that this is not the case."
What you should have learned in the last decade is that social networks designed around virality, engagement and "influencing" are awful for the society in the long run. But somehow now the conversation has turned away from that and towards "better moderation".
Engage your brain. Read Marshall McLuhan. The design of a medium is far more important than how it is moderated.
"What you should have learned in the last decade is that social networks designed around virality, engagement and "influencing" are awful for the society in the long run."
Yes, and don't forget the 24 hour news cycle with its focus on getting outrage and attention through fear. I did not know who Marshall McLuhan was until now- thanks for the tip!
> Yes, and don't forget the 24 hour news cycle with its focus on getting outrage and attention through fear.
Yeah, social media is just one in a series of possibly misguided techno-social "innovations," and it probably won't be the last.
My understanding is that groups like the Amish don't reject technology outright, but adopt it selectively based on its effects on their society (and will even roll back things they've adopted if they're not working out). Wider society probably would benefit from a dose of that kind of wisdom right now, after decades of decades of "because we can"-driven "innovation."
They also force all 17-year-olds to go live with and as ‘the English’ for two years and then decide whether they want to go back, and what things should be brought back with them.
> My understanding is that groups like the Amish don't reject technology outright, but adopt it selectively based on its effects on their society
I can see how this would work for new things invented outside the Amish community. How does this work for new Amish inventions? How do they judge an effect a thing will have on society while they are still building that thing?
Edited to add a concrete example: here [1] is a pneumatic ceiling fan. Before the first one was built, what strategy did they use to determine it's okay?
> I can see how this would work for new things invented outside the Amish community. How does this work for new Amish inventions? How do they judge an effect a thing will have on society while they are still building that thing?
I'm no expert, but I believe they have walked back decisions to allow certain technologies, or allow things for trial periods before making a final decision.
Also, it's not like the non-Amish haven't rejected technologies because they came to dislike their effects on society, stuff like lead paint, asbestos, and chemical weapons come to mind as examples.
Also, their decisions aren't arbitrary, but respect certain principles and customs, so I would assume an Amish inventor would take those into account.
> The design of a medium is far more important than how it is moderated
IMO this is a great point. Social medias as they exist today are broken because they have been engineered on the assumption to make money on ads. Making money on ads works by engineering around virality, engagement and influencing.
Another thing that McLuhan teaches though is that actually the (social) media is the message. And ultimately this lead to a Viking dude standing in the US capitol.
Now, that whole situation was awful. But it was also hilarious.
In social media, this was barely a meme that lived on for a few hours. Whereas within the ancient system of democracy, an intrusion into the parlament is breaking some sacret rules. And there, surely the incident will cast long winding consequences.
To cut to the chase: Social media outcomes have to be viewed wearing a social media hat. Same for real-life. In this case, gladly. Another great case were this was true was Kony 2012, where essentially all the Slacktivism lead to nothing.
Solidly agree on all points, just wanted to plug a podcast favorite of mine, Philosophize This!, for a less daunting introduction to McLuhan's ideas [1] than "go read a couple hundred pages of fairly dense media theory books."*
* Of course, I enjoyed the podcast episode so much that I did end up going on to read The Gutenberg Galaxy and The Medium Is the Massage [sic], and wholeheartedly recommend both.
Philosophize this is great. If you were a fan of McLuhan, you should read L.M. Sarcasas. His blog (https://thefrailestthing.com/) was how I was introduced to McLuhan, Postman, and other philosophers of media and technology. He has unfortunately shuttered that blog, but he has a substack newsletter thing that talks about similar things: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/people/1810437-l-m-...
It can be both. It seems obvious that a thing like Twitter ought to exist. The social system details, I'd agree, are full of unforced errors that lead to terrible outcomes. But the centralization is a real problem too. We can try to fix both.
It’s not obvious to me. I have a fantasy that people will return to thoughtful, long-form blogging and stop trying to impale each other on witty 280 character tweets.
The essential element of twitter is asymmetric following + broadcast at global scale and penetration. Beyond that, I think the social system details are wide open.
Engagement is still roughly "our" problem, because ad-driven ~media are externalizing the costs of engagement on society. This is where the Upton Sinclair quote fits.
Moderation is still roughly the platform's problem because it comes with liabilities they can't readily externalize. Engagement certainly overlaps with this, but most of these liabilities exist regardless of engagement.
Engagement _is_ moderation! When FB chooses what to show you, it's already moderating things but simply using a different value system. The're a pushback on "censorship" today but censorship has been happening for years.
Mechanisms that optimize for increased engagement via dynamic suggestions for a user's feed or ~related content are not moderation (unless, perhaps, the algorithmic petting zoo is the only way to use the service).
This is exactly why I'm drawing a distinction.
Many of a platform's legal and civil liabilities for user-submitted content are poorly correlated with how many people see it and whether it is promoted by The Algorithm (though the chance it gets noticed probably correlates). This is ~compliance work.
Their reputational liabilities are a little more correlated with whether or not anyone is actually encountering the content (and more about how the content is affecting people, than its legality). This is ~PR work.
I would add that, broadly speaking, any online system that tries to engage and involve everybody will always become toxic. Forums like those of HN work, in part, because they're not trying to attract everybody, only those who will contribute thoughtfully and meaningfully.
Aside from vitality, which in part is achieved by recommending content that users already like, I think that we are not well equipped to handle our own views being consistently reinforced. I believe this locks us into world views that are closed off from debate and scrutiny, and unless we intentionally try to question our own beliefs we’ll just be fed the content we already like and the opinions we already agree with / have.
I think you make a very interesting point about the impact of vitality over the long term, and I would like to read some of your thoughts about where we are headed, what can be done about it and why. I haven’t heard of Marshall McLuhan before.
Thanks for hitting the nail on the head. The problems we have are manufactured by the structure of the medium (BigCorp social media optimizing engagement at scale) that we cling to.
For those looking for a relatively accessible introduction to McLuhan’s ideas, check out his book “The medium is the message/massage”. It’s fairly short, and with illustrations, quite readable. I think it has more concrete examples than “Understanding media” which is a more abstract & denser read.
Exactly. Shifting the blame from trending pages to posters is just a way to blame users for opinions instead of platforms that spread them as fact. These websites want to be the problem and the solution.
I'm active with Mastodon and absolutely love its moderation model. In a nutshell:
- It's made up of a bunch of independent servers, or "instances". The common analogy here is to email systems.
- If you want to join the federation, stand up an instance and start using it. Voila! Now you're part of it.
- My instance has a lot of users, and I don't want to run them off, so it's in my own interest to moderate my own instance in a way that my community likes. Allow too much in without doing anything? They leave. Tighten it so that it starts losing its value? They leave. There's a feedback mechanism that guides me to the middle road.
- But my users can leave for greener pastures if they think I'm doing a bad job and think another instance is better. They're not stuck with me.
The end result is that there are thousands of instances with widely varied moderation policies. There are some "safe spaces" where people who've been sexually assaulted hang out and that have zero tolerance for harassment or trolling. There are others that are very laissez faire. There's a marketplace of styles to choose from, and no one server has to try to be a perfect fit for everyone.
I realize that this is not helpful information for someone who wants to run a single large service. I bring it up just to point out that there's more than one way to skin that cat.
(That final idiom would probably get me banned on some servers. And that's great! More power to that community for being willing and able to set policies, even if I wouldn't agree with them.)
I've been thinking hard about decentralized content moderation, especially around chatrooms, for years. More specifically because I'm building a large, chatroom-like service for TV.
I think it's evident from Facebook, Twitter, et al that human moderation of very dynamic situations is incredibly hard, maybe even impossible.
I've been brewing up strategies of letting the community itself moderate because a machine really cannot "see" what content is good or bad, re: context.
While I think that community moderation will inevitably lead to bubbles, it's a better and more organic tradeoff than letting a centralized service dictate what is and isn't "good".
The problem is obviously that people very often do not want what they say they want.
When a man says he supports freedom of speech, he isn't thinking about the speech that he wishes to limit as he finds it so abhorrent, and where that line lies differs from one man to the other.
Such initiatives fail, as even when men come together and admit they allow for the most abhorrent of opinions to be censored, they seldom realize that each and every one of them has a very different idea of what that is.
Case in point, alt-left communities who champion "free speech" like Hacker News often shadowban people who express opinions they disagree with, especially if it's said in the wrong 'tone' of voice--direct aggression rather than passive aggressiveness, which is the preferred atmosphere here.
I'm always suspicious when specifically “left” or “right” or any other specific political colors are mentioned as such with regards to censorship — it reeks of not being objective.
It is a problem of all mankind, not any particular political color; the only color above it are of course specifically the free speech advocates.
I'm sure you understand both how subsets work and what I intended to convey, no matter how much you dislike how the English language descriptively works.
That is the usage of the word “man”, so noted in every dictionary, and backed up by millennia of descriptive usage.
I'm quite sure you know that too, to be honest. It is something that every English speaker knows, but some act as if they not, because they do not like the actual descriptive, and historical usage of that word.
From Merriam-Webster:
(1): an individual human
especially : an adult male human
IIRC and AFAIK it comes from old norse, madr which used to mean human.
They had separate words for female madr and male madr.
Lately it has been a popular conspiracy that this is because "patriarchy" but the real reason is probably as mundane as simplifications over centuries.
Further analysis upward is more tentative: hypothetically, the word could share a common ancestry with the Latin stem “ment-” for “mind” which would make the semantic origin of *“mann-” to be quite obvious. It is likely related to the Sanskrit stem “manu-” which indeed means either “thinking” when used adjectivially, and “human” when used substantively.
Old English certainly did not loan it from Old Norse and the Old English form of the word “mann”, reflects what would be expected if it descended directly from common Germanic.
The Old English words for “male” and “female” were “wer” and “wīf” respectively; Old English “wīfmann”, as in “female human” is what gave rise to modern English “woman”, and “wer” almost completely died out and only survives in “werewolf” and “world”, the latter a simplification of *“wer-old”, as in “a male's lifetime”, undergoing significant semantic shift. “wīf” is of course also the origin of modern English “wife”, but had no implication of marriage in Old English.
Obviously the evolution of the english language is so long-running and complex that no group could have conspired to implement a deliberate change such as this for whatever reason.
With that said, please consider this:
What type of societal structure would be likely to merge the words for "human" and "male" while leaving the word for "female" separate?
> What type of societal structure would be likely to merge the words for "human" and "male" while leaving the word for "female" separate?
The origin of the secondarily developed semantic meaning of “man” as a “male adult human" is simply because when a man be anything other than an adult male, speakers are statistically more likely to emphatically note it in some way.
Exactly what you did by asking “what of the women?” when it is quite clear from context to anyone what “man” means in this context. “woman” is an overtly marked phrase compared to “man" that arises from a need felt by some speakers to explicitly mark it when a person be female, but not when it be a male.
A similar situation is that white U.S.A. residents are often called “Americans” but for other colors overtly marked phrases such as “African-American” or “Asian-American” are common in parlance, which, due to this behavior, eventually gives further currency to the term “American" as developing a secondary meaning of “specifically white American”.
My relationship with historical linguistics, and linguistics in general is that I consider it both interesting and pseudoscientific — I will also admit that my dislike for the discipline might be colored by my negative experiences in conversing with linguists on a personal level. My interest is otherwise nonprofessional though I minored in it in university.
Especially linguistic psychology is to be taken with a grain of salt — what I said about how unmarked forms of words acquire secondary meanings is certainly the consensus in that field, but it is not as if it were ever established empirically, nor could it; it is simply an idea that appeals to the intuition and there is nothing obviously wrong with it.
"men" in the OG post above meant: all humans. As in "it is the nature of man". As "mankind". Man/men can be used as for two meanings. One is Males and the other is All Humans
It, as many words can, can be used for more than that. From the top of my head alone:
- a member of the Homo sapiens species.
- a member of the Homo genus
- a male member of any of the two above
- a male adult member of any of the two above
- a brave member of any of the two above
- a soldier
- a commoner
- any vaguely humanoidly shaped being
The word is certainly not special in that regard; I could give a similar list of “Russia” or “chess” for instance — but seemingly this word sometimes faces objection when the meaning the objector desires not be the one used, and I find that it is invariably a difference of gender lines in meaning if that be the case, and that it is rooted in gender politics.
I have never seen such wilfull denial of descriptive usage of the word “chess” and objections when it is used to, for instance, mean the entire family of games that descend from a common ancestor, or when it is used by metaphor for any exercise in great tactical planning.
The original meaning of the word “man” was the first I gave, all others arose by narrowing or widening it by analogy, much as what happened with “chess”.
'Bubbles' are a pejorative way of just saying 'local communities.' Perhaps as a nation we do not benefit from having an international and transparent global community that is always on and always blaring propaganda and manipulation at people.
Yup, people have been brainwashed into thinking "bubbles" are a problem when they've been the solution to that problem from the start.
I've suggested that idea a million time, it's all yours for the taking for those who want to implement it:
Build a social network where there is a per-user karma/reputation graph, with a recursive mechanism to propagate reputation (with decay): I like a post, that boosts the signal/reputation from whoever posted, and from people who liked it, and decreases signal from people who downvoted it.
There can be arbitrarily more sophisticated propagation algorithms to jumpstart new users by weighing their first few votes more highly and "absorb" existing user reputation graphs (some Bayesian updating of some kind).
Allow basic things like blocking/muting/etc with similar effects.
This alone would help people curate their information way more efficiently. There are people who post things I know for a fact I never want to read again. That's fine, let me create my own bubble.
The TrustNet/Freechains concepts seem adjacent and it's the first time I come across them — looks interesting.
If it includes a recommendation system, then something to mix them up a bit so that people can see things that are different to what they have holed themselves into one view/subject by their own karma curation. The idea is that each recommendation has a chance to be anything, more likely something suggested by karma, but has the tiny chance to be the thing that karma suggests I least like. I like the idea of seeing a subject that I didn't know I was interested in or posts I would find objectionable some of the time.
Yeah, you could introduce a random element of serendipity where you sometimes push a bit further out of the graph to discover things out of your usual purview.
Honestly after seeing the state of most subreddits (aka they become echo-chamber of whatever the main moderators find "worth of value" and very toxic about whatever is against their idea), community self-moderation seems a total failure.
Most people are stupid. Therefore I would expect most communities to be moderated horribly. How could it be otherwise if they are moderated by stupid people elected by other stupid people? The good part is that people who are better than average can create their own community which will be better than average. How much better, that only depends on those people.
The alternative is having some kind of elite moderators that moderate all communities. It sets a lower bar on their quality. Unfortunately, it also sets an upper bar on their quality. Everything will be as good as the appointed elite likes it, neither better nor worse.
From the perspective of what the average person sees, the latter is probably better. From the perspective that I am an individual who can choose a community or two to participate in, and I don't care about the rest, the latter is better.
Reddit still relies on human moderators, admins, etc. What I'm talking about is a purely community driven moderation scheme where, through various algorithms, the community dictates what is and isn't acceptable.
Wouldn't that just be essentially upvoting and downvoting and deleting downvoted posts?
That was originally the intent of reddit, that people would downvote unconstructive comments, but that quickly turns into the community "moderating" away anything they disagree with, and enforcing an echochamber.
I don't think communities can have enough objectivity to effectively moderate themselves.
That's a great idea, if those people were vetted for being objective. If I posted the communist manifesto, would that be blocked, would I be kicked out?
> I've been brewing up strategies of letting the community itself moderate because a machine really cannot "see" what content is good or bad, re: context.
There's a ton of material on that subject, thankfully; look at news groups, HN itself (flagging), Stack Overflow, Joel Spolsky's blogs on Discourse, etc etc etc. My girlfriend is active on Twitter and frequently joins in mass reporting of certain content, which is both a strong signal, and easily influenced by mobs.
The problem with scaling upward is how incredibly soul-rending the job is. At some level you're basically guaranteeing that some number of people are going to be traumatized.
Maybe at some point the better strategy is to limit public exposure and favor segmenting some groups out into their own space that requires extremely explicit opt-in measures? Hard to say, and tucking it away into its own corner of the web seems rife with its own problems.
As another commenter expressed on some other topic, this is a long-running problem with many incarnations: Usenet, IRC, BBSs, etc. It's become especially salient with the explosion of social media platforms that include everyone from Grandma to Grandson.
Bottom line... my heart goes out to moderators of these kind of platforms.
>> a centralized service dictate what is and isn't "good".
This isn't movie reviews. Good and bad are not the standards. The standard is whether or not something is illegal. When the feds come knocking on your door because your servers are full of highly illegal content, "we let them moderate themselves" will be no defense.
"Legal" is both local and can change over time. America has been in an unusual situation because it allows far more speech, especially speech right up to the boundary of "incitement to violence".
However, the police have far too much to do, so in practice millions of blatently illegal death threats get sent every day and do not receive any police response. Hence the demand for a non-police response that can far more cheaply remove the death threats or threateners.
How do you deal with the problem that the content the current community promotes isn't necessarily the content that is best for your product in the long run (what if they are very dismissive of new members, hampering growth?), or even legal?
Per TV show, it's not one big chat room, however there is a default "general" room that is use to that effect. It's very much like Slack/Discord channels. Users are able to essentially create topic rooms within a show.
Think of each TV show as it's own Discord server and within the show are user-generated topic rooms.
My hope is that users basically self-silo into topic rooms that interest them in regards to whatever show their watching.
For example: the Yankees are playing the Marlins. Users can create a #yankees room, a #marlins room, a #umpire room, etc to create chat rooms around a given topic in regards to whatever they're watching. In each room, a user has the ability to block, filter words, etc...so they can tailor their chat experience in whatever way they want while watching any given show.
A news and celebrity pundit industry that operates in a capitalist fashion has companies that employ people. They have a profit motive and face market competition. This shapes their behavior. News organizations that tell both sides of a story do not provoke the sensationalism and outrage that news organizations which tell only one side. So they don’t get shared as much.
The market literally selects for more one sided clickbaity outrage articles.
Meanwhile social networks compete for your attention and “engagement” for clicks on ads so their algorithms will show you the stories that are the most outrageous and put you in an echo chamber.
It’s not some accident. It’s by design.
If we were ok with slowing down the news and running it like Wikipedia with a talk page, peer review, byzantine consensus, whatever you want to call it — concentric circles where people digest what happens and the public gets a balanced view that is based on collaboration rather than competition with a profit motive - our society would be less divided and more informed.
Also, Apple and Google should start charging for notifications, with an exception for real-time calls and self-selected priority channels/contacts signing the notification payload. The practically free notifications creates a tragedy of the commons and ruins our dinners!
Make a cogent and non-authoritarian case for even having a "decentralized content moderation" which doesn't pass the "is this an oxymoron?" smell test.
> I'm building a large, chatroom-like service for TV.
So the profit motive is likely the motivation for applying a "central" doctrine of acceptable discourse using a decentralized mechanism.
> While I think that community moderation will inevitably lead to bubbles
Which allows for e.g. an athiest community to have content that rips religion x's scripture to shred (and why not?) in the same planet that also has a religion-x community that has content that takes a bat to over-reaching rationalism. Oh the horror! Diversity of thought. "We simply can not permit this."
I find it pretty interesting that Martin does not mention the kind of community member-driven up/downvote mechanism found on this site (and elsewhere) as an example of decentralised content moderation.
Edit: now I see Slashdot and Reddit mentioned at the end in the updates section (I don't remember seeing them on my first read, but that might just be me).
"We vote on values, we bet on beliefs" - Robin Hanson.
Voting tells us what we value but that doesn't mean what is good for us. It also treats all content as somewhat equivalent, which isn't true. A call to (maybe violent) action isn't the same thing as sharing a cute cat video.
How would up/down votes work on a decentralized platform? Wouldn't it be easy to game by standing up your own server and wishing up a legion of sockpuppets?
There's a whole Moonshot of spam resistance that's going to need to happen in Mastodon/Matrix/Whatever.
Decentralized networks need trust, and trust is not a Boolean value.
With a centralized service, trust is simple: how much you trust the single entity that represents the service.
In a distributed network, nodes need to build trust to each other. In the best-known federated network, email, domain reputation is a thing. Various blacklists and graylists pass around trust values in bulk.
So a node with a ton of sock puppets trying to spam votes (or content) is going to lose the trust of its peers fast, so the spam from it will end up marked as such. A well-run node will gain considerable trust with time.
This, of course, while helpful, does not guarantee "fairness" of any kind. If technology and people's values clash, the values prevail. You cannot alter values with technology alone (even weapon technology).
FTA: "even though such filtering saves you from having to see things you don’t like, it doesn’t stop the objectionable content from existing". He doesn't want upvoting/downvoting, he wants complete eradication (of whatever the majority happens to objects to right now).
> of whatever the majority happens to objects to right now
I don't see that Martin Kleppmann is using 'democracy' to mean 'majoritarianism' here. He makes considered points about how to form and implement policies against harmful content, and appears to talk about agreement by consensus.
Democracy and majoritarianism are (in general) quite different things. This might be more apparent in European democracies.
He plays a little trick by saying "ultimately it should be the users themselves who decide what is acceptable or not". This has two meanings, somewhat contradictory.
The straightforward meaning is that ultimately I decide what is acceptable or not for me, and you decide what is acceptable or not for you. We can, and likely will, have a different opinion on different things.
But the following talk of "governance" and "democratic control" suggest that the one who ultimately decides are not users as individuals, but rather some kind of process that would be called democratic in some sense. Ultimately, someone else will make the decision for you... but you can participate in the process, if you wish... but if your opinions are too unusual, you will probably lose anyway... and then the rest of us will smugly congratulate ourselves for giving you the chance.
> Democracy and majoritarianism are (in general) quite different things.
Sure, a minority can have rights as long as it is popular, rich, well organized, able to make coalitions with other minorities, or too unimportant to attract anyone's attention. But that still means living under the potential threat. I don't see a reason why online communities would have to be built like this, if instead you could create a separate little virtual universe for everyone who wished to be left alone... and then invent good tools for navigating these universes, to make it convenient, from user perspective, to create their places, to invite and be invited, and to exlude those who don't follow the local rules (who in turn can create their own places and compete for popularity).
> The straightforward meaning is that ultimately I decide what is acceptable or not for me, and you decide what is acceptable or not for you.
I disagree that this is straightforward in meaning. Even if I do have a good idea of what is unacceptable to me, I need someone external to screen for that. If the point is to avoid personally facing the content that I find unacceptable, it's impossible for me to adequately perform this screening on my own behalf.
I can instruct or employ someone (or something) to do this, but then ultimately they will make the decision for me. It's only plausible to do this at scale, unless I'm wealthy enough to employ my own personal cup-bearer who accepts the harm. So, it makes sense to band together with other users with similar requirements.
Your claim seems to be that delegating these decisions is a bad thing that should be avoided, but it is an essential and inevitable part of this service - I have to delegate that decision to someone else, or I won't get that service.
This is not to mention legal restrictions on content in different jurisdictions, which define a minimum standard of moderation and responsibility, that may include additional risk wherever they are not fully defined.
> I can instruct or employ someone (or something) to do this, but then ultimately they will make the decision for me. It's only plausible to do this at scale, unless I'm wealthy enough to employ my own personal food-taster, so it makes sense to band together with other users with similar requirements.
And here we run into the issue that economists and political scientists call "the Principal-Agent problem"[0].
Whether we're talking about the management of a firm acting in the interests of owners, elected officials acting in the interests of voters, or moderators of communication platforms acting in the interest of users, this isn't a solved problem.
And in fact, that last has extra wrinkles since there is not agreement on just whose interests the moderator is supposed to prioritize (there can be similar disagreement regarding company management, but at least the disagreement itself is far better defined).
This is deeply messy, and as hard as it is now, it is only going to get worse with every additional human that is able to access and participate in these systems.
This is the crux of censorship. If anything, it hinges on hubris: the censor assumes to know which content deserves to exist at all.
The need for censoring content still exists because certain kinds of content are deemed illegal, and failure to remove that may end up in serving jail time.
On the other hand, moderation is named very aptly.
That said, I fully support the right of private companies to censor content on their premises as they see fit. If they do a poor job, I can just avoid using their services.
> I fully support the right of private companies to censor content on their premises as they see fit.
Those private companies don't have the right to censor content on their premises 'as they see fit' without giving up protections afforded to them in law as 'platforms'. The question is at what level of moderation and/or bias do they become a 'publisher', not a 'platform'.
> If they do a poor job, I can just avoid using their services.
Issues arise when the poor job spills over outside their service. As an example, The people who live around the US Capitol endangered by pipe bombs in part because of incitement organised on Twitter.
> Those private companies don't have the right to censor content on their premises 'as they see fit' without giving up protections afforded to them in law as 'platforms'.
Not only do they, but there’s no such thing as “protections afforded to them in law as ‘platforms’”: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
> The question is at what level of moderation and/or bias do they become a 'publisher', not a 'platform'.
This idea of “publisher vs. platform” has been entirely made up by people with no understanding of the state of the law. [1] “Bias” doesn’t play into it – they can do what they want, in good faith, on their website. Hacker News (via its moderators) has a bias against low-effort “shitposting” and posts which fan racial flames. It’s so frequent and well-known that it could become a tagline, “Hacker News: Please Don’t Do This Here”. At what level of curation of non-flamey posts does it become a publisher due to this bias?
They don't have the common carrier protections. That is, phone companies are not required to censor hate speech, and ISPs are not required to censor unlawful content that passes their pipes, because they are just, well, pipe, oblivious of the bytes they pass.
Platforms are in the business of making content available, so they are forced to control the availability, and censor unlawful content. They choose to censor any "objectionable content" along the way, without waiting for PR attacks or lawsuits. I can understand that.
(What is harder for me to understand is when these same platforms extoll the freedom of expression. I'd like them be more honest.)
For example, when you moderate a debate you do not silence opinions you disagree with, you simply ensure that people express themselves within 'acceptable' boundaries, which usually means civility.
To me this means that 'decentralised content moderation' is largely an utopia: Whilst the rules may be defined by the community, letting everyone moderate will, in my view, always end up being similar to upvoting/downvoting which is a vote of agreement/disagreement.
On the other hand, decentralised filtering out of objectionable content might go hand-in-hand with replicating and thus preserving the most valuable content. Empirically, 90% of the content in most decentralized systems (e-mail, the Web etc.) is worthless spam that 99.99999% of users or more (a rather extreme majority if there ever was one) will never care about and could be eradicated with no issues whatsoever.
Isn't it just an example of democratic content moderation? We up vote, down vote and flag content. We don't get the ability to do so unless we are a community member of some tenure. It's augmented by centralized moderation by a handful of moderators.
Up/downvote mechanisms always end up as agree/disagree votes.
Moderation is not the same. It is not about agreeing but curating content that is not acceptable (off-topic, illegal, insulting).
Article quote:
"In decentralised social media, I believe that ultimately it should be the users themselves who decide what is acceptable or not"
In my view that is only workable if that means users define the rules because, as said above, I think 'voting' on individual piece of content always leads to echo chambers and to censoring dissenting views.
Of course this may be fine if within an online community focus on one topic or interest, but probably not if you want to foster open discussions and a plurality of views and opinions.
We can observe this right here on HN. On submissions that are prone to trigger strong opinions downvotes and flagging explode.
You can cut off a large part of abuse by just creating a financial based incentive. Pay to gain access, and access can be revoked at which point you need to repay (perhaps on a progressive scale - ie the more you are banned, the harder it is to get back in.) Your identity confers a reputation level that influences filters so what you post is seen more often, so there is value in your account and you don't want to lose it. The SA forums did this and it helped immensely with keeping out spam (though not a silver bullet.)
Any system where any rando can post any random thing with no gates is going to be much more of a slog to moderate than one where there are several gates that imply the person is acting in good faith.
It's worth remembering that content moderation is an activity which causes people mental illness right now, because it's so unrelentingly awful. Attempts to decentralize this are going to be met with the problem that people don't want to be exposed to a stream of pedophilia, animal abuse, murderous racism and terrorist content and asked to score it for awfulness.
This point should be upvoted more. Decentralized moderation means decentralized pain. You can run standard philosophic thought experiments about "utility monsters" but at the end of the day a lot of online content causes real harm, not just to the direct victims but to the spectators. We'd need something like decentralized therapy in tandem with this type of moderation for it to even be considered remotely ethical, and even then I'm very skeptical.
I agree, I think people underestimate the need to incentivize moderators. This is why I think some kind of cryptocurrency based solution to moderation is necessary.
Moderators don't just need incentives. They need therapy and support and monitoring and breaks and ideally, pre-vetting for strong mental health and no pre-existing bees in their bonnet.
I worry that just making it a way to earn bitcoins risks it becoming one more way for poor people to scrape together pennies at the cost of giving themselves PTSD.
> Censorship resistance means that anybody can say anything, without suffering consequences.
I can't even get to the heart of the poster's argument. That's because the shitty state of all current social media software defines "anybody" as:
* a single user making statements in earnest
* a contractor tacitly working on behalf of some company
* an employee or contractor working on behalf of a nation state
* a botnet controlled by a company or nation state
It's so bad that you can witness the failure in realtime on, say, Reddit. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has skimmed comments and thought, "Gee, that's a surprisingly reaction from lots of respondents." Then go back even 30 minutes later and the overwhelming reaction is now the opposite, with many comments in the interim about new or suspicious accounts and lots of moderation of the initial astroturfing effort.
Those of us who have some idea of the scope of the problem (hopefully) become skeptical enough to resist rabbit-holes. But if you have no idea of the scope (or even the problem itself), you can easily get caught in a vicious cycle of being fed a diet of propaganda that is perhaps 80% outright fake news.
As long as the state of the art remains this shitty (and there are plenty of monetary incentives for it to remain this way), what's the point of smearing that mendacity across a federated system?
My suggestion is to not indulge in any content moderation which is not illegal. Only take down content which is required by a court order. Limit use of automated content moderation only for easy to solve cases like child pornography.
Why?
It is fairly clear at this point that content moderation at internet scale is not possible. Why? A. Using other users to flag dangerous content is not working. Which users do you trust to bestow this power with? How do remove this power from them? How do you control it becoming a digital lynch mob? Can you have users across political, gender, other dimensions All mostly not solvable problems.
B. Is it possible to use machine learning? To some extent. But any machine learning algorithm will have inherent bias, because test data will also be produced by biased individuals. Also people will eventually figure out how to get around those algorithms as well.
The causality between content published on the internet and action in real world is not immediate. It is not like someone is sitting in a crowded place and shouting fire causing a stampede. As there is a sufficient delay between speech and action, we can say that the medium the speech is published in is not the primary cause of the action, even if there is link. Chances of direct linkage are fairly rare and police/law should be able to deal with those.
Content moderation, at least the way Twitter has been trying to do, has not been effective, created lot of ways for mobs to enforce censorship, and there is absolutely no real word positive impact of this censorship is. Only use of this moderation and censorship has been for right to claim victimhood and gain more viewer/readership to be honest.
You realize that the approach you suggest pushes out a different set of people, right?
For example, a soldier with PTSD may want an environment that moderates content. Or a journalist with epilepsy may want a platform where people don't spam her with gifs designed to trigger epilepsy when she says something critical of a game release.
Doesn't that require the active cooperation of bad actors? Sure, you can create a filter to hide all posts tagged with "epilepsy-trigger", but that doesn't help if the poster deliberately omits that tag. Allowing users to tag other people's posts patches this issue, but opens up the system for abuse by incorrect tagging. (E.g. Queer-friendly posters being flagged and demonetized after being maliciously tagged as "sexual content".)
At some point, there needs to be trusted moderation.
I’d point out that child sexual abuse content is not an “easy to solve case”. The extent to which Facebook, Google, and more recently, Zoom look the other way on this issue is horrifying and it seems to be a very hard problem due to the laws surrounding the handling of such material. I’m not faulting the laws, I just think this is an inherently hard issue to crack down on. Gabriel Dance and Michael Keller at the NYT did some very high quality reporting on this whole issue in 2019 (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...).
That link is pay/auth-walled for me, but I do get your point. Perhaps easy to solve was underestimate the technical problem as I was more thinking in terms of political problems. From that perspective no one, other than pedophiles themselves, disagrees with removing that kind of content. But completely agree on tech side of it.
I am only commenting on this in the context of community standards and user generated content and should not be extrapolated to all content in all other contexts.
That is a fair question/comment. In my original comment "Limit use of automated content moderation only for easy to solve cases like child pornography." . It is reasonable to extent that list beyond just child pornography. I did not intend to give impression than this list is exhaustive.
In case of spam - Emails do show you spam emails, just hide them behind a spam folder. So instead of outright removal, it is possible to use similar techniques. And let users decide whether they ever want to see spam comments.
Since I'm using libp2p in Go for a side project, may I take this opportunity to ask how this could work in principle for a decentralized network? The way I see it, this seems to be impossible but maybe I'm missing something.
For example, in my network, anyone can start a node and the user has full control over it. So how would you censor this node? The following ideas don't seem to work:
1. Voting or another social choice consensus mechanism. Problems:
- Allows a colluding majority to mount DOS attacks against anyone.
- Can easily be circumvented by changing host keys / creating a new identity.
2. The equivalent of a killfile: Users decide to blacklist a node, dropping all connections to it. Problems:
- Easy to circumvent by creating new host keys / creating a new identity.
3. Karma system: This is just the same as voting / social choice aggregation and has the same problems.
4. IP banning by distributing the blocked IPs with the binaries in frequent updates. Problem:
- Does not work well with dynamic IPs and VPNs.
Basically, I can't see a way to prevent users from creating new identities / key pairs for themselves whenever the old one has been banned. Other than security by obscurity nonsense ("rootkit" on the user's machine, hidden keys embedded in binaries, etc.) or a centralized server as a gateway, how would you solve that problem?
I've thought about this a lot. Currently, my preferred solution to the problem of Sybil attacks in decentralized social networks is a reputation system based on a meritocratic web of trust.
Basically it would work something like this: By default, clients hide content (comments, submissions, votes, etc) created by new identities, treating it as untrusted (possible spam/abusive/malicious content) unless another identity with a good reputation vouches for it. (Either by vouching for the content directly, or vouching for the identity that submitted it.) Upvoting a piece of content vouches for it, and increases your identity's trust in the content's submitter. Flagging a piece of content distrusts it and decreases your identity's trust in the content's submitter (possibly by a large amount depending on the flag type), and in other identities that vouched for that content. Previously unseen identities are assigned a reputation based on how much other identities you trust (and they identities they trust, etc.) trust or distrust that unseen identity.
The advantage of this system is that it not only prevents sibyl attacks, but also doubles as a form of fully decentralized community-driven moderation.
That's the general idea anyway. The exact details of how a system like that would work probably need a lot of fleshing out and real-world testing in order to make them work effectively.
> I can't see a way to prevent users from creating new identities / key pairs for themselves whenever the old one has been banned.
You could prevent banned users from returning with a new identity by disallowing the creation of new identities. E.g. many Mastodon instances disable their signup pages and new users can only be added by the admins.
If you don't want to put restrictions on new identities, you could still treat them as suspect by default. E.g. apply a kind of rate limiting where content created by new users is shown at most once per day and the limit rises slowly as the user's content is viewed more and more without requiring moderation. (This is a half-baked idea I had just now, so I'm sure there are many drawbacks. But it might be worth a shot.)
The way it works in Mastodon is that (1) not everyone runs a node, but there are many nodes, and they each have their own policies and can kick users off, and (2) nodes can blacklist other nodes they federate content from.
This two level split allows node operators to think of most other users at the node level, which means dealing with far fewer entities. It provides users with a choice of hosts, but means that their choice has consequences.
Good piece. This line articulates the problem well: "without objectivity and consistency, moderation can easily degenerate into a situation where one group of people forces their opinions on everyone else, like them or not." And it gets to the core of the problem. Objectivity and consistency are extremely difficult to scale and maintain over time. They require constant reinforcement from environment, context, and culture.
The central problem here is in what circumstances free people should give up the right to decide what information they can consume. This is not a question that can be answered easily but without first accepting it as the central issue we are not going to make meaningful progress.
That’s part of it. The other part is that free people say they don’t want to see illegal content (child exploitation imagery, terrorism, scams, sale of opioids etc). The platform needs to moderate to remove that. Then the same users also say they don’t want to see legal but distasteful (in their opinion) content like pornography, spam and so on. The platform then has to remove that as well.
For most part platforms take decisions that will suit the majority of users.
I don't want to see "legal but distasteful" content (and I would also add: annoying, boring, stupid, etc.)... and what I mean is that I don't want it to be shown to me... but I am okay if other people show it to each other.
So instead of some global moderator (whether it be one person, or some complicated "democratic" process) deciding globally what is okay and what is not, I want many bubbles that can enforce their own rules, and the option to choose the bubbles I like. Then I will only be concerned about how to make the user interface as convenient as possible, so that the options are not only hypothetically there, but actually easy to use also by non-tech users.
That approach would not address the, in my opinion, valid concerns about speech that is harmful to society overall. There is a real problem here with disinformation and incitement to violence. I do not know that letting the self-virtuous tech sector decide what is or not allowed is the answer, but the problem is real.
Well, that should be solvable by giving people much better tools to manage their personal information intake. The crux of the problem is figuring out when it is OK to decide for them what they can or cannot see.
Having been part of the email ecosystem where well established spam filtering and reputation management systems have been in place for years, I've found it interesting how close these more recent conversations are to those we've had around email messaging abuse.
> Thus, as soon as a censorship-resistant social network becomes sufficiently popular, I expect that it will be filled with messages from spammers, neo-nazis, and child pornographers (or any other type of content that you consider despicable).
Unfortunately, I agree this is likely the case, and also agree with many of the other points where there's unlikely to be an agreed upon approach at scale.
I feel the two most important aspects of any moderation are transparency and consistency. I'd always like to know what community I'm joining.
We'll likely see more niche communities continue to pop up on centralized and decentralized networks where the moderation, content and community can be more tailored to their own expectations.
Obviously upvoting and downvoting is not enough for adequate moderation. There's still the aspect of people trolling and generally posting horrible things online. There's a reason Facebook had to pay $52 million to content moderators for the trauma/ptsd they suffered.
Let's take one step back. Just like in the Title I vs Title II debate, let's go one step earlier. WHY do we have these issues in the first place?
It's because our entire society is permeated with ideas about capitalism and competition being the best way to organize something, almost part of the moral fabric of the country. Someone "built it", now they ought to "own" the platform. Then they get all this responsibility to moderate, not moderate, or whatever.
Compare with science, wikipedia, open source projects, etc. where things are peer reviewed before the wider public sees them, and there is collaboration instead of competition. People contribute to a growing snowball. There is no profit motive or market competition. There is no private ownership of ideas. There are no celebrities, no heroes. No one can tweet to 5 million people at 3 am.
Somehow, this has mistakenly become a “freedom of speech” issue instead of an issue of capitalism and private ownership of the means of distribution. In this perverse sense, "freedom of speech" even means corporations should have a right to buy local news stations and tell news anchors the exact talking points to say, word for word, or replacing the human mouthpieces if they don't...
Really this is just capitalism, where capital consists of audience/followers instead of money/dollars. Top down control by a corporation is normal in capitalism. You just see a landlord (Parler) crying about higher landlord ... ironically crying to the even higher landlord, the US government - to use force and “punish” Facebook.
Going further, it means corporations (considered by some to have the same rights as people) using their infrastructure and distribution agreements to push messages and agendas crafted by a small group of people to millions. Celebrity culture is the result. Ashton Kutcher was the first to 1 million Twitter followers because kingmakers in the movie industry chose him earlier on to star in movies, and so on down the line.
Many companies themselves employ social media managers to regularly moderate their own Facebook Pages and comments, deleting even off-topic comments. Why should they have an inalienable right to be on a platform? So inside their own website and page these private companies can moderate and choose not to partner with someone but private companies Facebook and Twitter should be prevented from making decisions about content on THEIR own platform.
You want a platform that can’t kick you off? It’s called open source software, and decentralized networks. You know what they don’t have?
Private ownership of the whole network. “But I built it so I get to own it” is the capitalist attitude that leads to exactly this situation. The only way we will get there is if people build it and then DON’T own the whole platform. Think about it!
I fear that many decentralised web projects are designed for censorship resistance not so much because they deliberately want to become hubs for neo-nazis, but rather out of a kind of naive utopian belief that more speech is always better. But I think we have learnt in the last decade that this is not the case. If we want technologies to help build the type of society that we want to live in, then certain abusive types of behaviour must be restricted. Thus, content moderation is needed.
Let's unpack this:
Axiom: a kind of naive utopian belief [exists that asserts] that more speech is always better. But I think we have learnt in the last decade that this is not the case.
False premise. The "naive belief", based on the empirical evidence of history, is that prioritizing the supression of speech to address social issues is the hallmark of authoritarian systems.
Martin also claims "we have learned" something that he is simply asserting as fact. My lesson from the last 3 decades has been that it was a huge mistake to let media ownership be concentrated in the hands of a few. We used to have laws against this in the 90s.
Axiom: By "we" as in "we want", Martin means the community of likeminded people, aka the dreaded "filter bubble" or "community value system".
Who is this "we", Martin?
Theorem: If we want technologies to help build the type of society that we want to live in, then certain abusive types of behaviour must be restricted.
We already see that the "we" of Martin is a restricted subset of "we the Humanity". There are "we" communities that disagree with Martin's on issues ranging from: the fundamental necessity for freedom of thougth and conscience; the positive value of diversity of thoughts; the positive value of unorthodox ("radical") thought; the fundamental identity of the concept of "community" with "shared values"; etc.
Q.E.D.: Thus, content moderation is needed.
Give the man a PhD.
--
So here is a parable of a man named Donald Knuth. This Donald, while a highly respected and productive contributing member of the 'Community of Computer Scientists of America' [ACM, etc.], also sadly entertains irrational beliefs that "we" "know" to be superstitious non-sense.
The reason that this otherwise sane man entertains this nonsensical thoughts is because of the "filter bubble" of the community he was raised in.
Of course, to this day, Donald Knuth has never tried to force his views in the ACM on other ACM members, many of whom are devout athiests. And should Donald Knuth ever try to preach his religion in ACM, we would expect respectful but firm "community filter bubble" action of ACM telling Mr. Knuth to keep his religious views for his religious community.
But, "[i]f we want technologies to help build the type of society that we want to live in" -- and my fellow "we", do "we" not agree that there is no room for Donald Knuth's religious nonsense in "our type of society"? -- would it not be wise to ensure that the tragedy that befell the otherwise thoughtful and rational Donald Knuth could happen to other poor unsuspecting people who happen to be born and raised in some "fringe" community?
There is absolutely no difficulty, if you don't want censorship, just have a button that hides content you personally don't want and leave that decision to all individual users. What others wish to see or not is not your decision to make, and if some of them are illegal that should be a job for the police not some ego-triping janny.
Totally agree. Why should someone else I've never met decide what I can and can't see? Leave that decision up to the individual user, and they can tailor their own experience as they desire. Allow them to filter out particular words, phrases, other users and so on.
"I fear that many decentralised web projects are designed for censorship resistance not so much because they deliberately want to become hubs for neo-nazis, but rather out of a kind of naive utopian belief that more speech is always better. But I think we have learnt in the last decade that this is not the case."
What you should have learned in the last decade is that social networks designed around virality, engagement and "influencing" are awful for the society in the long run. But somehow now the conversation has turned away from that and towards "better moderation".
Engage your brain. Read Marshall McLuhan. The design of a medium is far more important than how it is moderated.